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Conclusion The Shifting Nature of Latinidad Felix Padilla, whose 1985 work, Latino Ethnic Consciousness, is still arguably the defining optimistic statement on the possibilities for Latino coalitions across lines of national origin, elevates as his model the Spanish Coalition for Jobs in the Chicago of the 1970s. As Padilla explains, this coalition of both Mexican American and Puerto Rican community organizations was formulated in response to frustration over discriminatory hiring practices (89). The coalition was able to negotiate agreements with Illinois Bell Telephone Company and with Jewel Tea Company regarding promised hires of a certain number of Latino employees (96–97, 101). But, subsequently, the coalition “went on to become another community organization providing direct services to the residents of the Pilsen community. As a result, the efforts of the coalition were transferred from citywide Latino concerns to community-oriented ones, servicing primarily the Mexican American residents of that area” (115). (As Padilla points out, Pilsen was known as a Mexican American neighborhood, while Westtown was considered the Puerto Rican neighborhood.) The end of the story would seem to provide a bleak view of the possibilities for panethnicity, suggesting that, perhaps inevitably, the interests of one or another national-origin group will take precedence over coalition. As David Rodriguez notes in Latino National Political Coalitions (2002), Latinos tend to “prefer organizations that are based on their own groups. This makes it very difficult for Latino coalitions to develop and maintain multi-group organizations since Latino identity and organizational experience is single-group oriented” (63). Martha Gimenez argues that this trend signals the failure of Latino politics: “as long as Latino politics remains local, situational, and at most regional in nature, it will remain weak, its success linked to some degree to its failure to be more than factional identity politics” (“Latino Politics” 178). Let me present, however, an alternative understanding of latinidad—one which takes its cue from the story of a different coalition. Whatever happened to the Sanctuary movement? As Hilary Cunningham notes in “Sanctuary and Sovereignty,” by the summer of 1993, this coalition too was “clearly on its ‘last legs’” (384), thanks to recent developments in both the United States and El Salvador. The 1990 breakthroughs in court (the American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh decision) and Congress (the TPS, or “temporary protected status,” 214 On Latinidad law) had made it easier for political refugees from Central America to stay in the United States; concurrently, the 1992 peace accords in El Salvador had to some degree stabilized the situation there (see Cunningham, “Ethnography” 594; J. Gonzalez 142–43; Stephen 808). That is to say, the group identity of the Sanctuary movement was strategic and provisional, organized (to use Sollors’s term) in “defiance” of a particular set of policies. When those policies relaxed, the group identity weakened. Yet, for some individual members involved in the movement, activism did not cease; it merely took new forms. For instance, Cunningham reports, many former Sanctuary participants now became involved in “Friendshipments to Cuba”—caravans which carried medical equipment and supplies, including computers, across the U.S.-Mexican border, where the shipments were then taken by truck to the Tijuana airport and loaded onto a Cuban plane.1 The caravans , organized by the Inter-Religious Foundation for Community Organization /Pastors for Peace, were repeatedly confronted by U.S. Customs officials at the border in the 1990s over the terms of the Cuban embargo and the necessity of a license. As Cunningham reports, Pastors for Peace “took a critical posture toward U.S. policies in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. [. . .] Significantly , the Cuba Caravans movement explicitly utilized the U.S. Mexican border as an important symbolic arena in which to challenge state authority” (“Sanctuary” 385). The border that had become such a contested site in the case of the Sanctuary movement—and that figures so prominently in Demetria Martínez’s novel—was now deployed for its symbolic value in a case that would at first seem to have very little to do with the U.S.-Mexican land border, since Cuba and the United States are divided from each other by ninety miles of an ocean “border.” What emerges from this history of shifting activist concerns is the degree to which commonalities could be perceived by activists—despite significant differences—between Salvadoran refugees and Cuban nationals, between U.S. policies regarding El Salvador (as well as Salvadoran immigrants) and the U.SCuban embargo, and between all of these and the situation of...

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