Hostname: page-component-5447f9dfdb-lr6j9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-07-31T03:27:22.005Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

INTERNAL COLONIALISM: An American Theory of Race

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2004

Ramón A. Gutiérrez
Ramón A. Gutiérrez
Affiliation:
Ethnic Studies Department, University of California, San Diego
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay explores the historical genealogy of Internal Colonialism as an American theory of race from approximately 1950 to the early 1990s. Internal Colonialism as an idea originated in Latin America as part of a larger Marxist critique of development ideologies and was specifically elaborated by dependency theorists to explain the racial effects of poverty and isolation on indigenous communities. Black and Chicano radicals fascinated by the Cuban Revolution learned about the theory by reading Ernesto “Che” Guevara, by participating in the Venceremos Brigades harvesting Cuban sugar cane, and by the larger diffusion of Latin American dependency theory in the United States. Black nationalists and Chicano radicals embraced, transformed, and further elaborated on the idea of Internal Colonialism to explain their own subordinate status in the United States, which was the product of forced enslavement and military occupation. As a colonized population in the United States, Blacks and Chicanos suffered the effects of racism, were dominated by outsiders, much as colonial subjects in the Third World, and had seen their indigenous values and ways of life destroyed. As a theory that explained the effects of racism, it had its greatest popularity during the radicalization of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s when nationalism and separatist ideas were in vogue. By the 1980s the theory had been abandoned in favor of more accommodationist politics and ideas.

Keywords

RaceChicanos/asBlacksDependencyLatin America

Information

Type
STATE OF THE ART
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , September 2004 , pp. 281 - 295
Copyright
© 2004 W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Acuña, Rodolfo (1972). Occupied America: The Chicano's Struggle toward Liberation. San Francisco: Canfield Press.
Almaguer, Tomás (1971) Toward the Study of Chicano Colonialism. Aztlán, 2: 7–21.Google Scholar
Almaguer, Tomás (1974) Historical Notes on Chicano Oppression: The Dialectics of Race and Class Domination in North America. Aztlán, 5: 27–56.Google Scholar
Almaguer, Tomás. (1975) Class, Race, and Chicano Oppression. Socialist Revolution, 25: 71–99.Google Scholar
Almaguer, Tomás (1989) Ideological Distortions in Recent Chicano Historiography. Aztlán, 18: 7–27.Google Scholar
Almaguer, Tomás (1994). Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Almaguer, Tomás (2003). Personal Interview, December 15.
Anzaldúa, Gloria (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/ Aunt Lute.
Baldwin, James (1964). The Fire Next Time. New York: Dell.
Barrera, Mario (1979). Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press.
Barrera, Mario, Carlos Muñoz, and Carlos Ornelas (1972) The barrio as internal colony. Urban Affairs Annual Reviews, 6: 465–498.Google Scholar
Blauner, Robert (1969) Internal colonialism and ghetto revolt. Social Problems, 16: 393–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blauner, Robert (1972). Racial Oppression in America. New York: Harper & Row.
Blauner, Robert (2001). Still Big News: Racial Oppression in America. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Brown, Elaine (1992). A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story. New York: Pantheon Books.
Camarillo, Albert (1979). Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Carmichael, Stokely and Charles V. Hamilton (1967). Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage Books.
Chaturvedi, Vinayak (Ed.) (2000). Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. London: Verso.
Clark, Kenneth (1965). Dark Ghetto. New York: Harper & Row.
Cotler, Julio (1968). Organizaciones Campesinas en el Peru. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
Cotler, Julio (1970). The mechanics of internal domination and social change in Peru. In Irving Louis Horowitz (Ed.), Masses in Latin America, pp. 407–444. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cruse, Harold (1968). Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American. In Rebellion or Revolution?, pp. 73–91. New York: William Morrow & Co.
Frank, André Gunder (1966) The development of underdevelopment. Monthly Review, 18: 17–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frank, André Gunder (1972). Economic dependence, class structure, and underdevelopment policy. In James D. Cockcroft, André Gunder Frank, and Dale L. Johnson (Eds.), Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America's Political Economy, pp. 19–45. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
Frank, André Gunder (1969). Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Franklin, John Hope and Alfred A. Moss, Jr. (1988). From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. New York: Knopf.
García, Ignacio M. (1989). United We Win: The Rise and Fall of La Raza Unida Party. Tucson, AZ: Mexican American Studies Research Center, University of Arizona.
Gonzales, Rodolfo (2001). Message to Aztlán: Selected Writings. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press.
González Casanova, Pablo (1963) Sociedad plural, colonialismo interno y desarrollo. América Latina, 6: 15–32.Google Scholar
Griswold del Castillo, Richard (1979). The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850–1890: A Social History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Gutiérrez, Gustavo (1984). Teología de la Liberación: Perspectivas. Lima, Peru: Cep.
Gutiérrez, José Angel (1998). The Making of a Chicano Militant: Lessons from Cristal. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Gutiérrez, Ramón A. (1976). Mexican Migration to the United States, 1880–1930: The Chicano and Internal Colonialism. MA Thesis, University of Wisconsin.
Harlem Youth Opportunites Unlimited. (1964). Youth in the Ghetto: A Study of the Consequences of Powerlessness and a Blueprint for Change. New York: Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited.
Huerta, Jorge A. (1982). Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press.
Johnson, Thomas A. (1966). “Harlem likened to a new nation, head of mayor's task force cites similar problems.” New York Times, December 11, p. 74.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1968). Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
López Tijerina, Reies (2000). They Called Me “King Tiger”: My Struggle for the Land and Our Rights. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press.
McCandlish, Phillips (1966). Civil rights chairman relishes new powers to deal with challenge ahead. New York Times, March 27.
Moore, Joan (1970) Colonialism: The case of Mexican Americans, Social Problems, 17: 463–472.Google Scholar
Moraga, Cherríe (1983). Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Navarro, Armando (2000). La Raza Unida Party: A Chicano Challenge to the U.S. Two-Party Dictatorship. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Prebisch, Raúl (1950). The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems. New York: United Nations.
Rodney, Walter (1972). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications.
Rodriguez, Richard (1983). Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: Bantam Books.
Rosales, F. Arturo (2000). Testimonio: A Documentary History of the Mexican American Struggle for Civil Rights. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press.
Rostow, Walt W. (1960). The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. London: Cambridge University Press.
Stavenhagen, Rodolfo (1970). Class, colonialism, and acculturation. In Irving L. Horowitz (Ed.), Masses in Latin America, pp. 235–288. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stone, I. F. (1966). “People without a country; The Negro American, ed. by Talcott Parsons and Kenneth B. Clark.” New York Review of Books, August 18, pp. 8–12.
Valdez, Luis and Roberto Rubalcava (1972). Venceremos!: Mexican American statement on travel to Cuba. In Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner (Eds.), Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature, pp. 215–216. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Van Deburg, William L. (1992). New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Vigil, Ernesto B. (1999). The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government's War on Dissent. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Wallace, Michele (1990). Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. London: Verso.