Book Review: Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” by Héctor Tobar

On Saturday, Sept. 16, Héctor Tobar will talk about his most recent book, Our Migrant Souls, and sign copies at Indy Fringe Indy Eleven Theatre, from 6 p.m. - 8 p.m. Tobar is the author of six other books, including the New York Times bestseller Deep Down Dark. The event is sponsored by Tomorrow Bookstore and the Immigrant Welcome Center.

In this kaleidoscopic new book, Héctor Tobar’s notes that the word “Latino” can refer to Puerto Ricans. Mexicans, and Cuban Americans alike. It’s an expansive term. Along with the alternative terms “Latinx” and “Hispanic,” it indicates a common ethnicity and common cultural background. But in practice, Tobar says, such terms are often imprecisely employed as racial categories.

This is  no small matter for Tobar, whose parents emigrated from Guatemala, and who wants his own children to grow up with a precise sense of their own ethnic background. He also wants them to know how, at least in certain instances, the deck is stacked against them. He recounts a story of bringing his children to the border fence cutting between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California which he likens to the Death Star from Star Wars. He interrogates their reaction to it and wonders if he should give his kids “the talk” in the manner of Black parents talking to their kids about how to behave in front of the police. 

Along with describing his own family background, he employs a wide-angle lens, as it were, to investigate the macrocosm of US immigration policy. In one of the more polemical passages in the book, he draws attention to US officials forcing immigrants to cross in remote and hostile desert areas where the chances of dying are significantly higher than in urban areas. The goal, he says, in so many words, is to preserve the white ethnic majority in the US. 

“If you were to try to invent a perfect American slaughter for the media age, it would happen in this way,” he writes.  That is, if an atrocity isn’t captured on video, it doesn’t exist in the popular imagination. And in this way, he forces a comparison between the American desert and the Nazi death camps, where killing was done remotely, without German citizens having to stare genocide in the face. It’s a powerful argument, and it’s not without some justification. But it also risks invoking Godwin’s Law which states that any comparison to the Nazi regime will instantly shut down any argument you are trying to make.   

It’s partly for this reason that I find his interviews with individuals who’ve suffered the consequences of US immigration policy more compelling than his polemics. (Tobar, a journalist for the Los Angeles Times for many years, was one of the reporters on the scene covering the L.A. riots in 1992.)  He uses his journalist’s skills to great effect. Take, for example, his interview with LA resident Gisel Villagomez about her own fraught experience trying to obtain an Employment Authorization card under the Obama Administration’s DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. She succeeds, but not before seeing ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement Immigration and Customs Enforcement) deport her mother and sister to Mexico.

Such enforcement actions, based on an outdated and punitive immigration policy, are, in essence, paradoxical, he argues. He makes the point that “the Latino people are, in reality, working to keep the order and efficiency of American middle- and upper-class life running smoothly.”  That is, the systems that bring foodstuffs from the farm to the supermarkets, are hugely dependent on the labor of Latinos—many of whom are undocumented. The same could be said for the construction, hospitality, and retail industries.

Curiously, he encounters Latinos who support such enforcement actions, who buy into various anti-Latino conspiracy theories. This is another paradox, Tobar notes, as if the price of the American Dream is the denial of one’s own heritage. But if Fox News is your only news source, you too might be convinced that the so-called American Dream is an exclusively white thing.

But then, as a Fox News consumer, you wouldn’t be all that inclined to read this book. Which would be too bad, as it is serves as a corrective to a growing body of disinformation and hate speech in right-wing echo chambers. It also serves as a great introduction to Tobar’s other work.