Read more about the episode here.
Marie Arana: We differ politically just like every other group differs politically. Nobody asks the same questions of the Irish. Nobody asks the same questions of the German-Americans and the Jewish population, whatever, you know, there’s going to be differences. Political is not the way to judge who we are.
Marie Arana: (MUSIC MAIN THEME)
Maria Hinojosa: From Futuro Media and PRX, it’s Latino USA. I’m Maria Hinojosa. Today, a conversation with author Marie Arana on her latest work. It’s called LatinoLand, a book that helps us understand the past, present, and future of Latinos and Latinas in this country. (THEME MUSIC FADES OUT)
Maria Hinojosa: “¡Hola!”
Marie Arana: “¡Hola! How are you? ¡Qué linda!”
Maria Hinojosa: That’s journalist, editor, and author, Marie Arana.
Marie Arana: “Oh, I haven’t seen you in a long time, chica.”
Maria Hinojosa: She’s Peruvian American, a chaparrita, just like me, and as a fellow Latina journalist, she and I have a natural connection. But the truth is, I haven’t seen her face-to-face in real life for about a decade.
Marie Arana: “I look exactly the same.”
Maria Hinojosa: “Igualita”
Marie Arana: “I feel better. Better than ever.” (MUSIC FADES IN)
Maria Hinojosa: It’s rainy outside today, but we’re cozying up in our warm Futuro Media offices right here in Harlem, New York City. In fact, Marie traveled from her home in Washington, D.C. just to be here with me and my team.
Maria Hinojosa: “You have fans here in this room.”
Marie Arana: “Oh, thank you. So wonderful to meet you guys.”
Glorimar: “I read your book on Simon Bolivar, American Liberator. It was amazing”
Maria Hinojosa: Marie’s work has inspired generations of readers, including myself. She’s written and edited at the Washington Post, worked at publishing houses like Simon & Schuster and she served as the Inaugural Literary Director at the Library of Congress. (MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: Marie has written two fiction books that take place in Peru.
Maria Hinojosa: She’s also written a memoir called ‘American Chica, Two Worlds, One Childhood.’ And she’s written a biography about Simon Bolivar, along with a history of Latin America. (MUSIC) Now Marie has released one of her biggest projects yet. The book is called “LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority.”
Maria Hinojosa: Today, Marie joins me to dig into how complex and wide-ranging Latinx, Latine, Latino, and Latina identities really are across our country. She illuminates some of our political history in the U.S., including some things I bet you didn’t know about. So let’s dive in and first, dear listener, well, yes, we’re going to have to talk some politics.
Maria Hinojosa: Welcome back to Latino USA, Marie Arana. Oh my God.
Marie Arana: It’s such a pleasure. ¡Maria, qué gusto!
Maria Hinojosa: So I’m going to take you back to 2019.
Marie Arana: Yes.
Maria Hinojosa: You wrote a piece and you said that things at that time had never looked bleaker in terms of anti-Latino and Latina sentiment. But then you wrote that you were reminded that hate has always been a part of the United States, right?
Maria Hinojosa: You wrote that 10 years into the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson actually expressed that the United States should snatch up Latin America piece by piece.
Marie Arana: Piece by piece.
Maria Hinojosa: John Adams called Latin Americans ignorant, superstitious people that he didn’t want in the United States. And then here we are moving into 2025 now, and we’re seeing that modern version of this hate, right?
Maria Hinojosa: And obviously, we’re also looking at many Latinos and Latinas who voted for this kind of ideology, this kind of sense. How are you understanding what happened and how we need to move into 2025 with this information?
Marie Arana: This is a very racist country, as we all know.
Marie Arana: We come from countries that are hierarchical. I mean, there is elitism in Mexico, there’s elitism in Peru, but there is this built-in resentment for Latinos that is very present here. The way that I see it is, we’re used to it. We have been used to it for so long. When the United States invaded basically Mexico, when it did the westward whole thing — we’re going to go over there and we’re going to take that land — it was an invasion of another country, there’s no question about it. Starting from there, there’s always been, ‘We don’t exist. We’re invisible.’ This land is nobody’s land. So what we have is a long history of living with racism and living with racism in our own context, wherever we are from, because there’s racism throughout Latin America.
Marie Arana: But that has been so present here that we, we can look away. I mean, and we do look away. You keep your head down and you keep on moving, and that’s the Latino way. You work. You become a part of the landscape here because you work at it. And you tend to ignore people’s views of you, which belittle you. And I think that’s what’s happened in this political climate.
Marie Arana: It is an ability to sort of, look the other way, keep your head down, keep your work going. And so it has been, the decisions have been really about what is this country doing about the economy, about making me able to raise my children better, able to put food on the table in a more reasonable way and a more affordable way.
Marie Arana: And so I think we’re very pragmatic in certain ways.
Maria Hinojosa: Latinos and Latinas did vote, overwhelmingly — or they voted in their majority for the Democrats, for a Black woman, Kamala Harris. But it was surprising to see, what, about 37 percent of Latino voters, and more Latino men than we have ever seen before voting for Donald Trump. And specifically on the question of Latino men, what are you coming away with?
Marie Arana: I have to say the Democrats did not do their job. They sat on their haunches and they were just not moving on that population until last minute. And I think there’s a perception that the Democratic Party is weak and weak on the economy, soft on giving in to a lot of issues that may not be important. I mean, diversity is much less important to Latinos than you think.
Marie Arana: If you come at them and say, we’re the diversity party, you know, we’re the party that represents you. It’s like, well, wait, what represents me is the economy, is how far I can get in my job, is the real questions of education and security.
Maria Hinojosa: And also, I want to be a real American.
Marie Arana: Right? I want to be a real American and I want to be a tough one.
Marie Arana: (MUSIC FADES IN)
Marie Arana: We don’t like the situation at the border. Also, when you talk about Latino men, when you’re talking about that weakness, when you’re talking about this sort of accepting behavior that isn’t necessarily traditional — this is seen by a lot of Latino men as being a weakness. And I think that sort of machismo streak then kicks in. You want it to be like the old way. You want men to be men and women to be women and that sort of thing. But also, when you see the population moving towards evangelicalism, for instance, and it’s a growing population, it has been tremendously forceful in creating our political selves because the evangelical church is very, very clear. You vote your faith and the faith is conservative and the faith has a man at the head of a household and that’s the way it goes. And talking to someone like Sam Rodríguez, who is the pastor of millions of evangelicals in this country, he said very clearly, “I don’t see myself in the Democratic Party. I don’t see my faith in the Democratic Party.” (MUSIC FADES OUT)
Maria Hinojosa: One of the things that we love about your book, right, is that you are that person that goes wide. Right, so you did over 200 interviews, you travel the country, you talk to Latinos who are Asian, you talk to Afro-Latinos, you talk to those of us who have indigenous roots, as well as those of us who have very clear roots from Spain.
Maria Hinojosa: And speaking of Spain, you know, I was interviewed on “Finding Your Roots” with Henry Louis Gates for public television. And so I learned about this particular ancestor of mine.
Archival tape Fiding Your Roots: “In 1596, he led a small force that founded the city of Monterrey. In the process, he undoubtedly participated in the genocide of Mexico’s native population, forcing Maria to confront an uncomfortable fact. You, my dear, are the 11th great-granddaughter of a conquistador.”
Maria Hinojosa: “And I have to sit with that.”
Maria Hinojosa: After being kind of flabbergasted and having to say, wow, yeah, yeah, part of my family did participate in ugly violence against men and women of indigenous roots.
Marie Arana: No question.
Maria Hinojosa: Then at the end, what Henry Louis Gates told me is, “Well, the thing, Maria, is that your matrilineal line is indigenous.’”
Maria Hinojosa: How do you think we need to process this kind of complicated history?
Marie Arana: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a tremendous thing to absorb. We are part conquistadores and we are part the indigenous victims of the conquistadores and we are part of that ancient race that was here. And this happened to me as well, Maria, because my abuelita said to me: “Why are you asking these questions? You are 100 percent Criolla.’” Well, you know, “Criolla” meaning that you may not have been born in Spain, but you might as well have been born in Spain because you’re so Spanish. Well, no, I mean, I’m at least 40 percent indigenous. And a lot of other things thrown in, too. Who knows? We are a cauldron of backgrounds.
Maria Hinojosa: How do you propose that families should have these kinds of complicated conversations at the dinner table where we’re like, “Well, let’s talk about our complicated history.”
Marie Arana: The fact that you can trace these things, the fact that you can see it in concrete ways in your DNA, and at that, you can see the very heartbreaking ways that we have tried to avoid this history.
Marie Arana: Now is the time to actually embrace it because, you know, the eradication of cultures in Latin America was huge. When you think of Argentina, and Chile, and Uruguay, and Paraguay with all the tremendous effort to get rid of the Indigenous population, and not just, you know, to kill them by starvation or by working them to death, but really to kill them, period. (MUSIC) It’s a terrible history, and I think we have to face it, and I think that we don’t need to fool ourselves.
Marie Arana: (MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: Coming up on Latino USA, we continue my conversation with Marie Arana. We talk about what it was like in the early days when Marie was one of the few Latinas in literary spaces. And we talk about how history may be repeating itself as threats of mass deportation take rise. It’s not the first time our community has gone through this.
Maria Hinojosa: Stay with us, ¡No te vayas!
Maria Hinojosa: (MUSIC FADES OUT) (MUSIC FADES IN)
Maria Hinojosa: Hey, we’re back. And today I’m talking to journalist and author Marie Arana about her latest book. It’s called “LatinoLand, A Portrait of America’s Largest And Least Understood Minority”. And part of our conversation is about what it’s like to make your mark as a Latino person in this country, something that Marie knows about all too well.
Maria Hinojosa: So now let’s jump back into my conversation with Marie. (MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: “American Chica” was such an important book for me. You were writing about being from Latin America, but being in the United States — and very similar, you, Peru, me, Mexico. It was one of the first books that really, for me, dealt with kind of identity, Latina identity. The way it was written felt very welcoming.
Maria Hinojosa: And then of course, I find out that you, I think at the same time that you were writing the book, you were at the Washington Post as a book critic. And I just was like, who is this Latina who’s at the Washington Post as a book critic? And so I’m wondering a little bit about if you can take me back to those moments in the earlier part of your career when you were at the Washington Post, one of very few Latinas. You’re writing this book about Latina identity. What do you remember about those times?
Marie Arana: Well, thank you so much for bringing up “American Chica”. It was transformative for me. By then, I had worked in several publishing houses and I was always erasing who I was, and I would bring projects to the publishing house that I was working for.
Marie Arana: And I remember very clearly the editorial meetings. I would suggest some sort of Latino or Hispanic story, and it would be, well, why would you wanna publish this? Hispanics don’t read. Latinos don’t read. So there was an element of burying who I was, when I’m just trying to prove that I could publish a book by Daniel Patrick Moynihan just as easily as I could publish anything else.
Marie Arana: And it was —
Maria Hinojosa: That would be Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. (LAUGHS)
Marie Arana: Right. Who I did publish and did edit. So it was this effort to squash any sort of Latino on the part of the publishing house. It had a huge effect on me. It was like, let’s erase us, let’s erase me, because that’s not going to work in this context.
Marie Arana: And then I went to the Washington Post, and the first question that I was asked on my first day at the Washington Post was: ‘”Oh, you were born in Lima, Peru? Do you speak Spanish? Would you be willing to, aside from your book critic duties, go out and do stories, a Latino population, which is burgeoning in Washington, DC, the capital of this country. Would you be willing to do that?” And I said: “Well, yes, sure, I’ll do that.” I went out and I interviewed, aside from my day job, interviewed populations of tomato growers and poultry factory workers and whatnot, and I realized that I had buried that little ten-year-old girl in order to make do in the American corporate structure and university structure and academic structure.
Marie Arana: And I realized going around and speaking Spanish to these people who were just arriving and making work their goal of their lives and transforming themselves into Americans — I realized that I had buried and made that little girl invisible. And I wanted to bring her back. And that’s when I decided to write “American Chica”, which was basically a story about, not about coming to America, but about being a bridge.
Marie Arana: Being a bridge to these two cultures and not knowing which I belong to at the time, and trying to negotiate these two cultures that were very, very different to me.
Maria Hinojosa: So, Marie, you open your book, “LatinoLand”, with this very specific memory that you have when you and your family arrive in Miami. Your dad was born in Peru, he was a civil engineer. Your mom from… Wyoming?
Marie Arana: Her family was in Wyoming, yeah.
Maria Hinojosa: And so you’re making this journey from Miami to Wyoming by bus. And then there’s this moment that happens at the public bathroom. Take us there.
Marie Arana: (MUSIC FADES IN) My mother decides that the youngest one, that’s me, needs to take care of business. And so we go towards the restrooms and I see these signs. And one sign says colored, and one says whites only, and so I go for the colored. I’ve never imagined such a concept as colored and white in, in the world that I had come from. We are all colors, all part of one family, and surprises often come in a Latin American family, what color you are.
Marie Arana: But here to be told to go one way or another, and I instinctively went to the colored. My mother pulled my arm and dragged me into the white. And that was a real sort of epiphany for me. It’s like, what color am I? Where do I fit in? I’m not her color, not my mother’s color. I don’t have blue eyes. I don’t have blonde hair.
Marie Arana: And where is my dad gonna go? (MUSIC FADE OUT)
Maria Hinojosa: And I remember talking about this many, many, many, many years later with my dad, who had a hard time kind of expressing this, but it was almost like it was then when his distrust of the United States was kind of born. Because it was like a sense of, can we trust this advanced industrial country with a great democracy, but, but their issues on race take them backwards.
Marie Arana: Yeah, yeah. And you know, when Mexico gave up that land that went all the way up to Colorado and then went west all the way from California to Kansas, when finally Mexico understood that it was going to go to war for this land. And it lost. And it left a lot of Mexicans behind on the land that the United States basically invaded.
Marie Arana: They were smart enough to say if these people stay on their land, our Mexicans stay on the land that they’ve owned for, you know, at that point, hundreds of years. You have to treat them as whites.
Maria Hinojosa: Yeah, so when Mexico lost the Mexican-American War in 1848, they surrendered with the condition that Mexicans on land now claimed by the United States that they would be offered full U.S. citizenship, as well as full access to civil rights in the United States.
Marie Arana: So Mexicans were called white on the U.S. census, it was automatically white so that you could vote, but then treated the same as Blacks. So it was a sort of an astounding moment.
Maria Hinojosa: So part of your book, you talk about this history related in particular to Republican presidents. You brought up President Nixon and President Reagan and how they both played historic roles in reaching Latinos and Latinas. And you know for those of you who don’t remember, right, Nixon, as controversial as he was, he was the one who kind of said, “Hmm, y’all who speak Spanish and kind of — there’s something that we need to do here around politics and bringing you in as voters.”
Maria Hinojosa: What, what did President Nixon do?
Marie Arana: Well, he was appalled by the fact that when he ran for president the first time, he didn’t really capture the vote of, at that point, Mexicans, and he was kind of appalled at that because he was Californian, his father was a grocer. Nixon would go out as a boy to the agricultural fields, where the Mexicans were, and help them load their vegetables and their fruits and whatever onto the trucks of his father, who sold these things.
Marie Arana: And so he said, “You know, I know these people, I’ve worked shoulder to shoulder with, why didn’t they vote for me? I’m very attached to them.” I think he spoke a little Spanish himself. So he brought in an advisor and he said, you know, “What do I have to do?” And the advisor said, basically said, “Well, you know, you’ve got to put Latino generals in the army. You’ve got to put Latinos in the White House. You’ve got to put Latinos in your cabinet. And that’s what you’ve got to do.” And Nixon did all of that. So, Nixon was very, very aware of the Latino population, and very much wanted to engage them. And by golly, he did all these things and he increased his vote from the Mexicans of California and Arizona and Texas.
Marie Arana: So that was a very strategic move on Nixon’s part. He was very passionate about it. Very passionate about it.
Maria Hinojosa: It’s so funny because I was a little girl and, um, in my family we did not like Richard Nixon because he was supporting the war in Vietnam and I didn’t want any war. And I remember hearing about this term Hispanic and that Nixon was the one who was behind this notion of Hispanic and I was like, “Why does he want to take away my Mexicanness, you know?”
Maria Hinojosa: (LAUGHS) The things that you remember as a little kid. Now, Ronald Reagan, another Republican, actually signs the Immigration Reform and Control Act into law, and therefore actually legalizes about 3 million formerly undocumented people.
Marie Arana: Right.
Maria Hinojosa: Both things that the Republicans did. Was it as strategic as you say, that they really were planting these seeds with the thought of. “And then in 2024, we’re going to win big with Latinos and Latinas, even though we’re telling them that we don’t really like their people?”
Marie Arana: No, no, no. Latinos were once pretty uniformly Republican before Franklin Roosevelt. It was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that made all the people in the lower classes, shall we say, or in the more modest classes, suddenly switch over to the Democratic Party. That was not necessarily a strategic move on Roosevelt’s part.
Marie Arana: Roosevelt didn’t necessarily want the Hispanics who joined the Republican Party, but it happened because of the New Deal and because of the new opportunities and because of what he did. And so Republicans uniformly switched over to the Democratic Party. But yeah, it was Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon who were doing these things. And no, I don’t think they had an eye to 2024. I think actually because of their roots in California, they were very predisposed to helping the Latino population in some way on the world stage.
Maria Hinojosa: So, to stick with politics for a moment, and because of your vast experience of Latinos and Latinas across the country — it does feel like those of us like you and I who have been covering Latinos and Latinas, not for years, but for decades, absolutely feels like there’s been a shift.
Marie Arana: Yeah.
Maria Hinojosa: The narrative is different. I’m wondering how you’re sitting with this. Te digo, in my worst days, and I try not to have many of them, right? But it’s like, “Pa qué valió mi carrera? What was it all worth, this career, dedicated to journalism writ large, but specifically educating about Latinos and Latinas? Pa qué valió?” So, how do you sit with this moment and what do you see as the next kind of turn for Latinos and Latinas writ large in the United States?
Marie Arana: The answer is in the numbers. I mean, this is a young population, a burgeoning population. It is in many ways moving the country’s economy. If we are going to be deported by the ton, the economy is actually going to suffer.
Marie Arana: It’s going to suffer in majorly dramatic ways. If you would take the Latino population as a nation in this country. We have the fifth-largest gross domestic product in the world. In the world. We are supporting the economy of this country. When you know that as a Latino, and you know that you’re contributing to the country, you’re going to work for the advancement of that economy.
Marie Arana: We were some of the most hard-working people in this country. The largest growth of small businesses in this country is among Latinos. We produce so much. Imagine the phenomenal work that we do to keep corporations afloat in this country, even though we have such little representation in the leadership.
Marie Arana: This is the thing that kills me, is that all of this contribution to the economy and on boardrooms of the United States. It’s bound to happen that people recognize us more and more. This election was really interesting in a way because it was, for the first time, it was, “What are Latinos going to do?” This is a population that we need to pay attention to, even if it is a splintered population in so many ways.
Marie Arana: In other ways, it coheres in the economic contributions that it gives to this country. It coheres in a very big way. We differ politically just like every other group differs politically. Nobody asks the same questions of the Irish. Nobody asks the same questions of the German-Americans and the Jewish population, whatever, you know, there’s going to be differences.
Marie Arana: Political is not the way to judge who we are.
Maria Hinojosa: So, as we wrap up, Marie, there is the specter, right? The, the threat, the amenaza of mass deportations.
Donald Trump’s interview: “Well, I think you have to do it. And it’s a, it’s a very tough thing to do. It’s um, but you have to have, you know, you have rules, regulations, laws, they came in illegally.”
Donald Trump’s interview: “Let me ask you about another group of people, the estimated 4 million families in America who have mixed immigration status.”
Donald Trump’s interview: “I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.”
Maria Hinojosa: People are getting ready for what this looks like. (MUSIC FADES IN)
Maria Hinojosa: We have actually been here before. We have lived through this, both in the previous Trump administration and in the Obama administration.
Marie Arana: Clinton administration.
Maria Hinojosa: And the Clinton administration, who actually started building the first wall, right? It was Clinton who signed that. And mass deportations have existed historically. A hundred years ago, there was what is called in the history books the Great Repatriation.
Archival tape: “By some estimates, almost 2 million individuals were deported from the United States in the 1930s. Some estimate that almost 60 percent of those that were deported were United States citizens.”
Maria Hinojosa: As if repatriating to Mexico. No, it was forced deportation, forced exodus. And then again, operation, to use that slur, Operation Wetback.
Archival tape: “In May 1954, the U.S. Border Patrol announced Operation Wetback, a campaign to deport Mexican workers who were in the country illegally. The program succeeded in rounding up over a million people, most of them men. This new policy marked the beginning of modern deportation raids. And the militarization of the border that we are familiar with today.” (MUSIC FADES OUT)
Maria Hinojosa: So what are you preparing for? How do you think we need to prepare for this moment and process what’s happening? And already, Donald Trump is kind of walking some of this back.
Marie Arana: Yes.
Maria Hinojosa: So it’s like he wants it both ways, right? But there is a reality that we will live through what is being called, right, the moment of mass deportation of 2025.
Marie Arana: Yeah. I don’t want to borrow trouble and actually believe that it’s going to happen. Because if it is true, then anybody who is not U.S. born is going to be a candidate for deportation.
Maria Hinojosa: You and I.
Marie Arana: You and me would be very much there.
Maria Hinojosa: I mean, you’ve thought about the fact that they could challenge your U.S. citizenship, obviously.
Marie Arana: They could.
Maria Hinojosa: I’ve thought about it. If you and I, you know, people who are at the highest level of our professions have thought, “Hmm, well, they could challenge my U.S. citizenship.”
Marie Arana: Right, right.
Maria Hinojosa: We have to think about people who don’t have anywhere near our privilege and that kind of panic and fear they are experiencing.
Marie Arana: And it has happened, as you say, very clearly. It has happened before, and it has happened in very ugly ways, where people with Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts have been deported and then asked to come back to serve again, you know, in the most ludicrous way. (MUSIC FADES IN) My hope is that it is, as so much has been, just verbiage that’s thrown around, that’s hate language that is meant to turn us against one another and scare us. I mean, really, the classic method of a strongman, of an autocrat, is to threaten and to scare people. But, you know, um, who knows? Who knows? Uglier things have happened here before. (MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: The reality is that for Latinos and Latinas in the United States starting in 2025, there is going to be a kind of reckoning with who we are and how we move and how we understand our privilege and what we do for those who are less privileged. And a moment of, of resistance, as it were. We’re being forced to act.
Marie Arana: Yeah, yeah. And we should, we should act. We should definitely act. Because now you’ve got to stand up and you’ve got to protest when these things do happen. I think it’s very, very important that we make ourselves known. That we have a voice. Don’t back down. Don’t back down. (MUSIC)
Maria Hinojosa: Marie Arana, thank you so much for joining us on Latino USA. Thank you for all of your work for all of us.
Marie Arana: Thank you so much for having me, Maria. Such a pleasure. (MUSIC FADES OUT)
Marie Arana: That was journalist and author Marie Arana. Her latest book, “LatinoLand: A Portrait Of America’s Largest And Least Understood Minority”, is out now. (MUSIC FADES OUT) (LUSA THEME MUSIC)
Marie Arana: This episode was produced by Reynaldo Leaños Jr. and edited by Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by J.J. Querubin. The Latino USA team also includes Roxana Aguirre, Julia Caruso, Fernanda Echavarri, Jessica Ellis, Victoria Estrada, Dominique Hinestrosa, Stephanie Lebow, Andrea López-Cruzado, Luis Luna, Marta Martínez, Tasha Sandoval, Nour Saudi, and Nancy Trujillo.
Marie Arana: Peniley Ramírez, Marlon Bishop, Maria Garcia, and myself are your co-executive producers, and I’m your host, Maria Hinojosa. Join us again on our next episode. Dear listener, in the meantime, remember to find us on all of your social media. I’ll see you on Instagram. Y acuérdate, ¡No te vayas!
Stephanie Lebow: Latino USA is made possible in part by the Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide, the John Dee and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Huizing-Simons Foundation, unlocking knowledge, opportunity, and possibilities. More at hsfoundation. org. (MUSIC)
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