A Promising Problem: Latina/o, Chicana/o Voters

In just over thirty weeks, Americans will elect the 45th President of the United States. The campaign trail is contentious and many of the issues the candidates are debating pertain to Latinas/os and Chicanas/os, a coveted demographic for both Republicans and Democrats. Against a backdrop of deportations and voter suppression targeting Latinos, a new edited volume, A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History, presents the optimistic voices of scholars who call for sophisticated solutions while embracing transnationalism and the reality of multiple,

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overlapping identities. Although the political landscape is fraught with closed-off rhetoric, A Promising Problem encourages diversity of thought and opens the possibilities of historical imagination. We asked a few contributors to the book to comment on how their research has informed their views on the 2016 presidential election, providing new perspectives on America’s culture wars.

The Chicana/o and Latina/o vote is much debated this presidential election year. Does the history you uncover point to new realities or future directions for Chicana/o or Latina/o communities that are of importance for the 2016 election cycle?

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Carlos Kevin Blanton, March 7th

Having just watched one “Super” Tuesday in early March with additional such Tuesdays to go as well as some scattered “Super” Saturdays and Sundays thrown in for good measure, I am struck at what a contradictory role Chicanas/os and Latinas/os play in this 2016 presidential election. Chicanas/os and Latinas/os are simultaneously celebrated and vilified, normalized and exoticized, and reflect both “promise” and “problem.”

As I write this, Cuban Americans named Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio remain credible Republican candidates running for President; another Republican candidate, Donald Trump, has jingoistically called for harsh deportations against Mexican immigrants as well as the construction of a massive wall on the U.S.-Mexico border for which he intends to force Mexico to pay, a claim former President of Mexico Vicente Fox has pugnaciously repudiated; and two Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, are vying for the support of Latina/o voters in states all over the country as a key demographic group for the success of their party. “Problem” and “Promise,” it seems, define this 2016 election cycle for Chicana/o and Latina/o communities. 

Suffice to say, I am very appreciative that I titled this new edited collection A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History. The word construction of “a promising problem” in the title, while it perhaps seems overly ironic, was one of the best ways I could concisely describe the very precarious balance we practitioners of Chicana/o history feel about working in a rich, growing, diverse, and intellectually promising field that, simultaneously, is the target of very public attacks and anti-Latina/o hysteria in the political sphere. As this 2016 election cycle continues, Chicana/o and Latina/o peoples and their issues will be front and center of the public debate as desired partners in electoral and governing success and also as being perceived as problems to be solved.

The essays in A Promising Problem add new insight into the Chicana/o past, present, and future. Transnationalism, civil rights activism, inter-Latina/o relations, the role of religion, the role of place and region such as the Nuevo South and the Midwest, and the production of culture and identity, are all important to understanding Chicana/o-Latina/o communities today in a very interdisciplinary sense. The history of these topics and more are intelligently explored in this collection. While A Promising Problem may not help anyone predict the next meaningful evening of voting, it will help readers understand Chicana/o-Latina/o people at the center of this presidential election and their pasts in fresh and insightful ways.

From Marianao to Mayberry

The first episode of The Andy Griffith Show aired fifty-four years ago this Friday. We asked noted writer and scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat (one of Newsweek's “100 Americans to watch for in the 21st century”) to reflect on what the show meant to him as a Cuban exile and immigrant to the United States. His new book, A Cuban in Mayberry: Looking Back at America's Hometown, wrestles with the "irreplaceable intimacy between person and place" and explores how his addiction to reruns of The Andy Griffith Show provided an illusion of belonging to a community in which he never would have felt accepted.

We hope you enjoy this fascinating and touching tribute to a classic American cultural product from a very unique perspective.


From Marianao to Mayberry

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By Gustavo Pérez Firmat

The Andy Griffith Show (TAGS to aficionados) premiered on CBS on Monday October 3, 1960. Exactly three weeks later, on Monday October 24, I left Cuba with my parents, my two brothers and my sister on an overnight ferry to Key West called, of all things, The City of Havana. I was eleven years old. My parents were in their late thirties. That evening, as the City of Havana was crossing the Florida straits, CBS broadcast the fourth episode of TAGS, which has to do with the arrival in Mayberry of Ellie Walker, the first of Andy’s several girlfriends. As Ellie was beginning a new life in Mayberry, the Pérez family was beginning a new life in America. Ours would take me from Marianao, the Havana neighborhood where I was born, to Miami, where I grew up, to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I’ve lived most of my adult life, and from there to Mayberry, the fictional town where The Andy Griffith Show takes place.

A Cuban in Mayberry tells the story of how I became an undocumented Mayberrian, the town’s resident alien, the lone Cuban coot in a flock of Southern geezers. If our work should be the praise of what we love, as John Ruskin believed, this is the story of my late-blooming love affair with an imaginary town and its citizens—call it a Mayberry-December romance.