Latino Homicide: More to come?
Kevin J. Mullen
A recent press report claims that Latino homicide in San Francisco increased by 50 percent in 2005 over 2004. If immigration from Mexico continues unabated, and if history is any judge, we haven’t seen anything yet.
Most studies over the years have shown that immigrant newcomer groups are less violent than native-born Americans, that is if you exclude their American born children from the equation. Criminality by the children of newcomers, however, forms a large part of the story of urban crime from the mid-nineteenth century down to the present.
The theory propounded to explain this phenomenon is that the children of immigrants find themselves caught between the old-world values of their immigrant parents and those of the new community to which they are not yet fully assimilated. Out of this tension, some children of immigrants turn to crime and violence. Sociologist Alejandro Portes ascribes the phenomenon to discrimination by the host society and the fact that many newcomers are forced to live in neighborhoods imbued with criminal pathologies which hold out attractions to their children.
The same phenomenon helps to explain why the children of immigrants frequently find a “home” in the gang life. It was the children of immigrants from rural Ireland, cast adrift in nineteenth century urban American who formed the “Hoodlum” gangs in San Francisco in the 1870s, thus providing a most useful term to the American criminal lexicon. It was the largely American born sons of Italian immigrants, like Al Capone, who provided an apt ethnic metaphor for Prohibition Era gangsterdom.
And it was the sons of the second “Great Migration” African American newcomers who came seeking work in World War II defense plants in the North and West who contributed so much to the high rates of violence in the last quarter of the twentieth century. More recently, the eruptions of fiery violence visited on the suburbs of major cities in France have been attributed to the youthful male progeny of immigrants from North Africa.
There is now a very large generation of children of Mexican descent --born here or brought as small children from the old country--who are coming of age in the U.S. Most are doubtless doing just fine. But if the pattern of earlier immigrant groups asserts itself – hardworking parents and children with a foot in two worlds – some are bound to turn to violence. On that count alone we can expect to see increasing violence.
There is another dimension to the problem of immigrant violence as well, however, which involves the immigration generation itself. While most studies do indeed show that immigrant groups are less violent than native-born Americans, there are exceptions. The standard explanation for violence by marginalized groups traces the behavior to mistreatment by the host society. Fair enough, but there is another explanation as well.
As espoused by sociologist Marvin Wolfgang and others, some groups are imbued with what he calls a “subculture of violence” and when those groups emigrate they take those behaviors with them to the new country. Pre-famine Irish were notably violent, so much so that serious assaults and homicides were sometimes referred to as “melancholy accidents.”
When immigrant Irish arrived in admittedly hostile eastern American cities in the early and mid-nineteenth century, those traits were put in play. According to urban historian Eric Monkkonen, homicide in disproportionately Irish New York City in the 1850s was largely an “immigrant problem.” Some researchers claim that Irish homicide rates in some cities were two and a half times their representation in the population.
It has long been noticed by violence researchers that southern Italy has had much higher rates of homicide than the North, or just about any other place in Europe for that matter. In turn-of-the-twentieth century Philadelphia, immigrants from southern Italy, used by Wolfgang to develop his subculture of violence theory, had a homicide rate three times that of the community at large and twice that of African-Americans.
Nowadays, Mexico, the source of the vast majority of recent immigrants to America, has the sixth highest homicide rate in the world – three times that of the United States -- and that is not counting the “dissappeareds.” Is it unreasonable to expect that some of the violent behaviors which created that rate would come north with the immigrants?
We are not doomed to repeat history; neither should we ignore its lessons. The descendents of other groups with high rates of violence are now indistinguishable from other groups of Americans. Part of that has to do with their assimilation into the larger society. So maybe it’s time to start talking again about the “stew” of assimilation and less about the “salad” of cultural identity. Or we can let things take their natural course and maybe they will just work their way out. Maybe.