UCR political scientist Armando Navarro examines possibilities for a ‘brown century’ of progress and change.
A new book by UC Riverside political scientist Armando Navarro examines the current state of Latino and Mexicano politics in the United States, and outlines models for change that would alter U.S. boundaries and empower a population he contends is politically and economically powerless.
Navarro, who teaches in the UCR Department of Ethnic Studies, has authored six other books. His latest book, “Mexicano and Latino Politics and the Quest for Self-determination: What Needs to be Done” (Lexington Books, 2015), argues that:
Mexicano and Latino politics have failed to represent, empower and foster social change for a large and rapidly growing segment of the population in the U.S., particularly in the Southwest, because of leadership, organizational, ideological and strategic crises.
The United States is no longer a representative democracy, rather, it has evolved into a “corpocracy” controlled by corporations and the wealthiest individuals.
Liberal capitalism as a political and economic system is in decline because of pervasive gridlock in both Congress and the presidency, and an economy that did not fully recover from the Great Recession of 2007. Many Americans today live in what Navarro calls the “Second Great Depression (2009-2015).”
Latinos and Mexicanos in the Southwest, particularly the region Mexico lost to the United States in 1848 – a region Navarro calls Aztlán – are “an occupied and internally colonized people,” regarded as less important and, therefore, neglected by those in power.
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