Becoming Mexican American

“In the United States, new ‘traditions’ had to be invented and older customs discarded or radically transformed at the same time that Mexicans in Mexico were creating ‘traditions’ to cement national identity. The early twentieth century was certainly a period tailor-made for the invention of traditions on both sides of the border.” 

The early 20th century witnessed the rise of nationalism across the world, including in Mexico and the United States. Here, Sánchez observes that traditions are a human invention, dictated by the dominant cultural force in a social group. The traditions invented by the Mexican and US governments were developed to secure cultural hegemony for one group, while older customs were either discarded or transformed to erase or acculturate other cultural groups.

“These efforts reflect attempts by sovereign states to control the ethnic identity of a people in turbulent social and economic times in order to bring cohesion to their respective countries by implementing what one scholar has called the ‘fictive identity’ of the nation-state.” 

In addition to inventing traditions, national governments during the 20th century strove to create a shared national mythos and patriotic qualities that its citizens should embody. These components comprised the “fictive identity” of the nation-state—a narrative, in essence, meant to ideologically unite the population of a political state. Both the Mexican and the US governments relied on the unifying qualities of their respective fictive national identities to limit social unrest during challenging periods like the Great Depression in the 1930s.

“Most scholars who have analyzed this movement north have focused almost exclusively on the socio-economic factors involved in this migration. This chapter will review those issues, but will also put into context the larger cultural questions raised by such a massive movement of people between two nations with unique histories. The railroads not only led to economic growth in Mexico and the American Southwest, they also facilitated the transmission of cultural values and practices between the two countries.” 

Given the recent fraught political relationship between Mexico and the United States, many readers may already be familiar with the socio-economic factors that drove Mexican migrants north, but the history of the cultural exchange between Mexico and the United States is less obvious. Sánchez highlights the railroad as the critical technological development that made this exchange possible. The movement of people was not unidirectional but circular, and elements of Mexican culture were introduced in the United States, in addition to the elements of American culture carried into Mexico. This is an essential component of Sánchez’s arguments throughout his work.

“The Mexican immigrant during this period most often came from these unsettled communities exhibiting both customary modes of thought and behavior and recently arrived examples of machinery and culture.” 

During the late 19th and early 20th century, Mexico was undergoing its own industrial revolution, which spread slowly from the country’s larger cities out into the countryside. While more remote villages experienced limited cultural disruption, the villages that produced the most emigrants were in the process of adapting their traditional beliefs and practices to facilitate the rapid social evolution brought on by new technological and cultural developments. While many American scholars wrote about these communities as being static and traditional, Sánchez argues that they were undergoing dynamic changes that informed residents’ perspectives on migration.

“It does appear that the Mexican family at the turn of the century was undergoing a transformation from a highly patriarchal, stable institution with a strict separation of the sexes to a more adaptive and insecure structure forced to conform to increased geographic mobility and economic dislocation.”

Like the structure of village society itself, the structure of the Mexican family unit adapted to the rapid changes occurring in society and the economy, spurred on by industrial and technological advancements. Because families are the building blocks of the community, examining the function of the family is critical to Sánchez’s analysis of new community trends in Los Angeles. Although roles within the family certainly changed after they immigrated to the United States, Sánchez points out that families were undergoing a significant transformation well before they left Mexico as a result of the geographic mobility of the labor force.

“The international border suggests limitations, boundaries over which American power and might have little or no control. It implies a dual vision, that of two nations looking at each other over a strip of land they hold in common. It acknowledges that at least two distinct peoples meet in this region, neither having the certain destiny of cultural and military superiority, and with conflict being an ever-present historical possibility. While ‘frontier’ evokes and images of expansive potentialities, ‘border’ speaks to what is real and limiting between people and nations.” 

Sánchez addresses the border between the United States and Mexico as an imagined construct, as opposed to the hard line that we have been conditioned to think about today. This imaginary separation between two nations or populations seems predisposed to the establishment of an adversarial relationship between the two—one that will inevitably lead to conflict. Developing an awareness of the implicit meanings associated with a construct like a border, as opposed to a frontier, aids in understanding how and why the United States developed its political and economic approach to the border region with Mexico. This understanding becomes especially significant once the US legislature begins to enact laws that reflect its members’ perception of the border and of Mexican laborers, instead of in response to the actual conditions on the ground.

“This type of migration had a mushrooming effect, especially on villagers throughout northern and central Mexico. After the first few men went north to work, they returned with knowledge that made it easier for other to follow in their footsteps. Moreover, what began as a primarily border phenomenon was soon transformed into an option for peasants deep in the Mexican interior. By the time of the Mexican Revolution, most villages on the north central plateau had begun the process of circular migration to the north.” 

Prior to the hardening of the border between Mexico and the United States, peoples from both countries could easily travel back and forth. Doing so proved to be beneficial for both US businesses and the Mexican laborers they employed, because Mexicans could easily find opportunities to work for a limited time before earning enough money to return home, and industries like the railroads seemed to have access to an unlimited source of cheap labor. News of an improved quality of life for those families that received remittances from a member working abroad spread quickly, and the growth of the railways made travel increasingly accessible. The result was a circular pattern of migration that brought an increasing number of Mexican laborers into the United States, and their return home to Mexico spurred on the transformation of rural Mexican society and culture.

“The unintended consequences of policies designed to make immigration more difficult were to encourage those already in the country to stay, thus transforming what had been a two-way process into a one-way migration. The result was an increased in the total population of Mexican immigrants in the US.” 

Despite huge demand for Mexican labor in the Southwest, nativist legislators in the United States Congress strove to limit the number of foreign “aliens” present in the country through the enforcement of policies, such as a head tax and literacy tests, that would make crossing the border from Mexico more difficult. Although these efforts did put an end to the previous pattern of circular migration, they also encouraged Mexicans already in the United States to remain there rather than return to Mexico. Such policies became a catalyst for the growth of the Mexican population of the United States, as more people immigrated and fewer returned to Mexico. Once these immigrants settled in the United States, it became possible to establish large, stable communities like the ones Sánchez explores in Los Angeles.

“The stereotype of the ‘lazy Mexican’ was thus reshaped to account for laborers unwilling to take just any offer of work, no matter how underpaid or dangerous. As one frustrated Los Angeles labor recruiter put it: The men fresh from Old Mexico are decidedly better. After they have loafed around here and had charity they won’t stay out at Kingman, Arizona, and they aren’t worth a damn. The man who comes fresh from old Mexico finds that anything he gets in better than what he had. He finds in L.A. he can get free food and he sees Mexicans who are better off than he is. They get spoiled.”

This quote reveals that the origin of the “lazy Mexican” stereotype was not actually a reflection of the collective Mexican work ethic, but was in fact the result of American labor recruiters attempting to malign Mexican workers who refused to accept dangerous or underpaid jobs. Unscrupulous employers and labor recruiters perceived higher wages as a form of charity and argued that Mexican laborers were being “spoiled” by better working conditions. Men arriving directly from Mexico did not possess the necessary knowledge to challenge exploitative employers, but as they grew more familiar with their surroundings and gained more experience, they became increasingly aware of how to work the system to their advantage. However, the discrimination that resulted from negative stereotypes like this one eventually made it more difficult for second-generation Mexican Americans to obtain employment, causing many young Chicano men in particular to feel alienated within the dominant Anglo society of Los Angeles. 

“In a city described as ‘more Anglo-Saxon than the mother country today,’ the alarming housing and health conditions affecting Mexicans and other ethnic working class groups were often trivialized by boosters caught up in promoting economic growth and Anglo-American migration. As [essayist Timothy] Turner described it: ‘Here our chief foreign element is Mexican, but it even is American in the broad sense: it belongs to the soil. It furnishes common labor with a minimum of social complexities, for the Mexican labor ebbs and flows over the border as it is needed here.’ Having been reduced to a slice of nature, the ‘social complexities’ of Mexican immigration and settlement could be ignored.”

This excerpt is an example of the advertising campaigns that Sánchez explores, encouraging northeastern and midwestern Anglo Americans to relocate to Los Angeles. Timothy Turner represents Mexican immigrants as the city’s “chief foreign element,” but because it “belongs to the soil,” he is essentially saying that Mexicans constitute an invisible population. Potential Anglo American newcomers need not worry themselves with the “social complexities” of a foreign population, as Mexican labor is portrayed simply as a force that arises in response to Anglo-American labor requirements. Turner aimed to encourage a sense of safety for potential Anglo-American residents, while discounting the needs of the Mexican immigrant population in Los Angeles.

“Yet even Anglo Americans new to the region took it as their mission to integrate foreigners into Southern California. Their own mobility promoted a concern to define better the new culture in which they found themselves. By stressing conformity to the American industrial order, they could try to impose stability on a society in rapid flux […] Ironically because of the peculiar burgeoning character of migration into Los Angeles, these efforts often amount to one newcomer trying to change another while neither was particularly familiar with local conditions or customs.” 

Here, Sánchez observes that the mass migration of Anglo Americans from the Midwest and Northeast led to a reinvention of the dominant culture in Los Angeles. Protestant Anglo Americans from the Midwest in particular traveled to Southern California in the hope of developing their ideal society and attempted to establish a culture to which they expected other residents to conform. This process led to an erasure of certain parts of the city’s culture and history, while other parts, like the Spanish missions, were woven into its backstory to lend a quaint, nonthreatening sense of ethnic flavor. Thus, while Anglo Americans were focused on acculturating the Mexican immigrant community, it was to a culture that they themselves had invented, with little consideration for the area’s previous residents and their practices.

“This shift determined that future Americanization work would center on immigrant women and their children, expressing Americanizers’ hope that the influence of the home would extend to the public sphere. Justification for this modification of earlier plans was quick in in coming: ‘The Americanization of the women is as important a part as that of men. They are harder to reach but are more easily educated […] ‘Go after the women’ should become a slogan among Americanization workers, for after all the greatest good is to be obtained by starting the home off right. The children of these foreigners are the advantages to America, not the naturalized foreigners. These are never 100% Americans, but the second generation may be. ‘Go after the women’ and you may save the second generation for America.’” 

This excerpt demonstrates the increasingly gendered approach that Americanizers took towards acculturating the Mexican immigrant population. It was thought that the influence of mothers, as the moral center of the home, would shape the behavior and beliefs of their children. Women were thought to be more willing to learn than men and would be able to pass on new industrial skills and American values to the next generation. Anglo Americans believed that the immigrants could never be fully American, so their children became the more desirable subjects. This approach, however, did not achieve its intended results, as the second generation came to embrace parts of both their Mexican and American identities instead of becoming “100% Americans.”

“Although the position of the Mexican government toward emigrants had long been ambivalent, during the 1920s the government began to see them as representing an important source of expertise if they could be convinced to return to Mexico. Therefore, a central goal of all programs initiated by the Mexican consulate was the preservation of the cultural integrity of Mexican emigrants through the establishment of institutions to foster Mexican patriotism, with the long-term goal of encouraging return migration.”

This excerpt illustrates the Mexican government’s evolving attitude toward the emigrant population and the ulterior motives behind its efforts to support the immigrant community in Los Angeles. While the majority of migrants were peasants, who were considered uncivilized in the eyes of the Mexican elite, their experience in the United States made them a more desirable industrial labor force that could stimulate the Mexican economy. Initially, the waves of emigrants had not concerned the Mexican government, but now that they could make a meaningful contribution to the wealth of the nation, the state was compelled to protect the emigrant community and strove to secure its allegiance. Their effort to foment Mexican patriotism among Mexicans living in LA, however, was somewhat undercut by their desire for an Americanized workforce.

“Part of the larger effort to institutionalize the Mexican state and legitimize it throughout the population, indigenismo reflected the contradiction of an institutionalized revolution dedicated to constructing a sense of unifying nationalism among a diverse and often unwieldy population.”

Sánchez discusses Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio’s concept of indigenismo, which celebrated the Mexican nation’s roots in “lost” indigenous civilizations while systematically oppressing and disowning the huge population of indigenous people still living throughout the country. Indigenismo sought to establish a sense of national unity through the creation of a series of myths and traditions that could be shared by the entire population. This strategy, however, did not take the extreme regional diversity of the Mexican population into account, particularly with regard to its many different indigenous groups. The Mexican elite’s refusal to acknowledge this diversity highlights the fact that they considered indigenous people to be inherently uncivilized and hoped to force them to abandon their traditions and conform to the nation’s invented Euro-American cultural norms. 

“A successful real estate broker, a light-skinned intermarried Mexican woman, admitted: ‘Although I like my people very much I don’t want to live with them, especially on the East Side, because they are very dirty there, there are many robberies and one can’t live at ease.”

This woman’s statement reflects the class differences that segmented the Mexican population in Los Angeles during the 1920s. Sánchez observes that lighter-skinned Mexican women were more likely to marry Anglo American or Euro-American men and that their pale complexions facilitated their acceptance into the Anglo middle class. Middle-class Mexican immigrants came to internalize some of the Anglo American stereotypes of the Mexican working class, such as the idea that Mexican laborers were dirty or dangerous, because they had not experienced the same degree of systematized discrimination as their poorer, darker countrymen and women.

“Even within a family, certain members could exhibit behavior that others might consider inappropriate or ‘un-Mexican.’ Freedom could be positive or negative depending on one’s position in the family. One Mexican mother, living with her unmarried children west of the Plaza, enjoyed the freedom to go wherever she wanted without restriction. In Mexico, she had felt oppressed by prescriptive social customs. Nevertheless, she did not like the behavior of young women in this country. ‘Liberty,’ she stated, had been ‘contagious’ to her daughters, and this bothered her a great deal.”

This short anecdote reveals the immigrant generation’s conflicting attitudes regarding American social norms. Both men and women enjoyed greater independence than they had in their villages in Mexico, but at the same time they considered it inappropriate for their children to exercise a similar degree of independence because it did not reflect traditional Mexican cultural values. These attitudes also reflected the shifting structure of the Mexican family, as American-born children of the second generation balked at their parents’ conservative beliefs and sought to define a new set of cultural norms within the Mexican family.

“As one immigrant from Zapotlán, Jalisco, made clear, Los Angeles presented Mexicans with a diversity of faiths not found anywhere in their native country. ‘In Los Angeles there are all the religions which one might wish and no one cares whether one is or this or that religion,’ explained Pedro Nazas. ‘It makes no difference whether one belong to one religion or another; one can even be an atheist, no one will say anything.’” 

Here, Sánchez characterizes the lax attitude of most Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles regarding religious identity. Although most Mexicans identified nominally as Catholic, living among people of different ethnicities and faiths in LA made it possible for immigrants to adapt religious practices and beliefs to suit their own needs. Whereas the village communities in rural Mexico from which many immigrants originated were centered around the activities of the Catholic Church, the metropolis of Los Angeles created a kind of anonymity that made religious faith a less significant factor in the formation of ethnic community identity.

“The contempt of Catholic officials for the work of Protestant denominations with Mexican immigrants was, at times, so virulent that it appeared as if nothing less than a holy war for the allegiance of immigrants was at play in the churches of Los Angeles.” 

Sánchez observes that, rather than passively accepting Mexican immigrants simply as potential members of their congregations, representatives of both the Catholic Church and various Protestant denominations enacted competing strategies to secure the allegiance of the immigrant population. Religious and lay officials were not so much interested in the well-being or needs of the Mexican community but sought for them to conform to their Anglo congregations’ sense of civility. By utilizing the charitable resources provided by members of either form of Christian faith, Mexicans were exposed to additional external pressure to acculturate, whether officially or unofficially connected to Americanization programs.

“If as Manuel Peña has claimed, musicians do function as ‘organic intellectuals’ for the working class, challenging American cultural hegemony while expressing the frustrations and hopes of their social group, then the experiences of Los Angeles musicians indicate a complex, if not contradictory, relationship with American cultural values.”

The experience of Mexican musicians captures the complicated relationship that many Mexican Americans fostered with regard to their place in Los Angeles’s Anglo American culture and society. Musicians needed to perform to survive, and many of them relied on the small amount of money they could earn recording individual songs, while the recording companies profited handsomely from the songs’ royalties. Many of these songs, particularly the corridos, expressed the realities and frustrations of the Mexican working class, who, like the musicians themselves, were exploited by Anglo-American companies. The irony lies in the fact that recording companies produced songs that were openly critical of Anglo-American employers, while the Mexican Americans who purchased these records continued to enrich the companies that had exploited the Mexican musicians.

“Consideration of the emotional, psychological, and cultural rewards of homeownership, however, is lost in these discussions […] Furthermore, employers in the United States spoke with disdain of Mexicans as ‘homing pigeons,’ willing to forgo stability in order to follow the seasonal crops across the agricultural landscape or repair railroad track wherever it was needed. They believed only Mexican were willing to tolerate the migratory nature of such labor and were willing to return dutifully to Mexico when the season was over. Within the context of the social and economic roles delineated for Mexican immigrants, buying one’s own home was an act of defiance and a form of self-assertion.” 

The purchase of a home in Los Angeles signaled a Mexican immigrant family’s intent to settle permanently in the city. Although Mexicans were inherently at a disadvantage in the Anglo-controlled real estate market, the building of Mexican American communities was an act of survival, as well as a refusal to conform to Anglo American stereotypes. Anglo-American employers had always portrayed Mexican laborers as docile drones, programmed to migrate and incapable of settling anywhere but Mexico. Mexican immigrant communities in Los Angeles not only defied this characterization but also provided strength and support to one another to thrive in spite of Anglo American cultural hegemony.

“The maltreatment of Chicanos on relief, particularly the pressure put on residents by county officials to repatriate, deeply affected those Mexicans who stayed in the city. Many Chicanos recall vivid memories of the Great Depression. Antonio Soto, for example, interviewed during the 1970s, remembered that Mexicans in the 1930s were indiscriminately picked up and sent back to Mexico. ‘Even if they were citizens they had no rights and were treated like animals and put in cattle cars.’” 

Sánchez’s discussion of the repatriation campaigns and discrimination against Mexican Americans during the Depression era emphasizes the psychological trauma that remained within the community for decades after the fact. Mexican Americans were stripped of their humanity and used as scapegoats for the economic suffering of the Anglo-American working-class population. The constant fear of violence or deportation, regardless of citizenship status, amplified the Mexican American community’s distrust and alienation of the broader Anglo-American society, and set the scene for even greater animosity in the ensuing decades.

“Along with the male Mexican American labor leaders emerging in Los Angeles in this same period, Chicana laborers combined a tradition of resistance emanating from the Mexican Revolution with a newfound belief in the rights of citizenship bestowed on them by virtue of their birth in the United States. This kind of 1930s ‘Americanism’ was present among other ethnic labor activists of the period and took political form in its strong support for FDR and the Democratic party’s labor agenda. Unlike the middle-class Mexican expatriate vision of ‘Mexicanos de afuera,’ which looked to a return to Mexico as an ultimate goals, their mind-set was rooted in a belief in the socio-economic advancement of Chicano families in the United State through labor and political organization.”

Sánchez points out the irony in the fact that, despite Anglo Americans’ years-long efforts at Americanizing the Mexican immigrant population during the 1920s, it was the political and economic turmoil of the 1930s that caused American-born Chicanos and Chicanas to more fully embrace their American identity, but on their own terms. Chicana workers were particularly invested in weaponizing their rights as Americans to improve their families’ economic condition. They combined the revolutionary rhetoric of the Mexican Revolution with the political ideology of the Democratic Party and the New Deal to define their political and labor agenda, creating a unique ethnic approach to labor organizing that reflected the particular needs of their community.

“Some writers, however, saw some prejudice against Mexicans as understandable given the lack of resolve they themselves perceived in their people. To illustrate, May Martinez, a young social activist from the ‘Utah Flats’ area of Los Angeles, recalled that she had ‘wanted to fight and fight that terrible prejudice against our people’ ever since she could remember, but acknowledged—without going into any detail—that ‘some of it is well-founded.’ These sentiments were certainly products of youthful frustration with Mexicans who were perceived as unwilling to work to improve their condition or unable to advance educationally or economically. Moreover, they speak to the pressures exerted by assimilation ideology and the internalization by some Chicanos of stereotypes and prejudices held by whites.”

Sánchez demonstrates that alienation existed in multiple forms within the Mexican American community. While members of the Mexican American Movement were considered successful students and workers according to Anglo American standards, they struggled to identify with other members of their community, who seemed to lack their sense of personal drive. Despite their desire to fight against prejudice, these young people failed to understand the extent to which this prejudice had been internalized by disadvantaged Mexican Americans, constantly pressured to conform to Anglo Americans’ expectations of them as members of an inferior race.