Content area
Full Text
Since the late eighteenth century when thinkers first began elaborating complex theories about the nature, organization, and functions of society, those theories have been largely the products of European facts or inspired by European presence or observations in other parts of the globe. Theories of European immigrant assimilation in the United States are an excellent example of this pattern. Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, postmodernism, to name but a few theories, all were products of experiences and thought generated in Europe, and only after the fact inflected by the particularities of life in other places. As far as I can ascertain, only three exceptions to this pattern exist. Internal colonialism, a theory of racial domination and subordination elaborated by African American and Chicano activists in the United States during the mid-1960s and 1970s, Liberation Theology, which hailed from Latin America in the 1980s (Gutiérrez 1984), and much more recently Subaltern Studies theorized by Indian scholars (Chaturvedi 2000).
The goal of this essay is to provide an historical genealogy for the theory of internal colonialism that Blacks and Chicanos first articulated in the United States, exploring its origins in Latin American theories of dependency and underdevelopment, and finally its extension, diffusion, and transformation among African Americans and Chicanos.
The belief that there were "domestic" or "internal" forms of colonialism operant within nation-states was a idea that initially emerged among Latin American development economists eager to understand the unequal terms of trade between the Third World and the First, and between dominant and subordinate groups in these societies. Racial minorities in the United States found these theoretical formulations particularly compelling and quickly adapted them to their own particular needs. Internal colonialism offered minorities an explanation for their territorial concentration, spatial segregation, external administration, the disparity between their legal citizenship and de facto second-class standing, their brutalization by the police, and the toxic effects of racism in their lives.
Internal colonialism represented a radical break in thinking about race in the United States after the Second World War. Far from seeking an understanding of racism in psychic structures, in an irrational fear of the "Other," or in the putative course of race relations cycles, Blacks and Chicanos reasoned that their oppression was not only personal, but structural, not only individual,...