Mexican Americans

Mexican Americans are citizens of the United States of Mexican descent. Mexican Americans account for 64% of the Hispanic or Latino population of the United States. Settlement concentrations are found all over the United States. However, the highest concentrations can be found in the Southwestern part of the United States and the Upper Midwest. Chicago is a particular area for a large Mexican American community. Other cities in the Upper Midwest with thriving Mexican American communities are Detroit, Kansas City, Missouri, St. Louis, Milwaukee and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. There are also isolated concentrations of Mexican Americans in mostly rural areas in Florida and North Carolina. Growing populations are also present in other parts of the rural Southeastern United States, in states such as Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas. A growing population is also present in urban areas such as New York City, Washington, DC and Philadelphia. However, Mexican American citizens reside throughout the entire United States, and according to the U.S. census, about 26.5 million Americans listed their ancestry as "Mexican".

History of Mexican Americans

See article on History of Mexican Americans.

Racial and ethnic classification of Mexican Americans

Before the United States' borders expanded westward, New World regions dominated by the Spanish Empire in the 16th century held to a complex caste system that classified persons by their fractional racial makeup and geographic origin. See Casta.

As the United States' border expanded, the Census Bureau changed the traditional racial classification methods for Mexican Americans under United States jurisdiction. The Bureau's classification system has evolved significantly from its inception:

• From 1790 to 1850, there was no distinct racial classification of Mexican Americans in the U.S. census. The only racial categories recognized by the Census Bureau were White and Black. The Census Bureau estimates that during this period the number of persons that could not be categorized as white or black did not exceed 0.25% of the total population based on 1860 census data.

• From 1850 through 1920 the Census Bureau expanded its racial categories to include at different times Mulattos, American Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hindu, and Korean, but continued to classify Mexicans and Mexican Americans as White.

• The 1930 U.S. census form asked for "color or race." The 1930 census calculators received these instructions: “write ‘W’ for White; ’Mex’ for Mexican.”

• In the 1940 census, Mexican Americans were re-classified as White. Instructions for enumerators were "Mexicans - Report 'White' (W) for Mexicans unless they are definitely of indigenous or other nonwhite race." During the same census, however, the bureau began to track the White population of Spanish mother tongue. This practice continued through the 1960 census. The 1960 census also used the title "Spanish- surnamed American" in their reporting data of Mexican Americans but included Cuban Americans and Puerto Ricans under the same category.

• In 1970, Mexican Americans classified themselves as White. Hispanic individuals who classified themselves racially as Other were re-classified as White by the bureau. During this census, the bureau attempted to identify all Hispanics by use of the following criteria in sampled sets:

• Spanish speakers and persons belonging to a household where the head of household was a Spanish speaker
• Persons with Spanish heritage by birth location or surname
• Persons who self-identified Spanish origin or descent

• From 1980 on, the Census Bureau has collected data on Hispanic origin on a 100-percent basis. The bureau has noted an increasing number of respondents who mark themselves as Hispanic origin but not of the White race.

Politics of racial classification

The definition of race depends on political climate: “It was not an accident that in the census of 1930, persons of Mexican birth or ancestry were classified as ‘nonwhite’, as census historian Hyman Alterman noted. This was a policy decision, not a mistake... Mexican Americans have held different forms of status at different times throughout the history of the United States, and during most times of the history of the United States, Mexicans have been considered racially non-White." Mexican Americans are often considered non-white today in popular construction, however according to the U.S. Census criteria and other governmental legal constructions they are legally classified as white. This informal American rule would place former Mexican President Fox-Quesada whose parents are from Ireland (father) and from Spain (mother) as non-white even though the parents who were born in Europe would be white.

The 2000 U.S census changed its approach to classification of Hispanics / Latinos by creating an ethnic category separate from racial identification. Respondents of Hispanic / Latino descent could choose that option, while also marking any appropriate race. Approximately half of the Mexican Americans self-checked the box for white (in addition to stating their Hispanic national origin), although it is very possible that some who checked that box also had partial non-white ancestry.

During the Great Depression, one to two million people was deported in a decade-long effort by the government to open jobs for those who were considered “real Americans” and rid county governments of “the problem.” The campaign, called the "Mexican Repatriation", was authorized by President Herbert Hoover and targeted areas with large Hispanic populations, mostly in California, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Illinois and Michigan. Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended federal support of the program when he took office, many state and local governments continued with their efforts. It left festering emotional wounds that for many have not healed. Estimates now indicate that approximately 60 percent of the people deported were children who were born in the United States and others who, while of Mexican descent, were legal citizens. Many of these people returned to the United States during the labor shortages of World War II. However, racial animosity continued to a point racial violence against Mexican Americans took place, as in Los Angeles, June 1943 (see Zoot suit riots).

In other U.S. regions, there was much less social stigma of intermarriage with European Americans, mainly within ethnic communities who shared the immigrant experience when both spouses were in the Roman Catholic church. In California, high rates of intermarriage between Indian American and Arab American spouses were well documented. Until the 1950s, Mexican Americans could not intermarry with Asian Americans due to the state's legal definition that Mexicans, but not Chinese and Japanese, were "white", but were allowed to marry Filipino Americans, Native Americans in the United States, and to some extent, African Americans. Texas, until the 1950s, had large numbers of Mexican Americans that were recorded as “white”. They, however, faced multiple forms of public racial segregation, because white Anglos in Texas claimed they had brown skin, and were therefore “colored”.

Economic and social issues

File:Cesar-chavez-USPS.jpg

Cesar Chavez

The economy has long needed service workers, manufacturing workers, farm laborers, and skilled artisans. Mexican workers have usually met those demands for cheap labor. However, fear of detection and deportation keeps many illegal immigrant workers from taking advantage of social welfare programs as well as interaction with public authorities and makes them highly vulnerable to exploitation by employers. Some employers, however, over the last decade, have developed a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude, indicating a greater comfort with or casual approach toward hiring Mexican nationals who are in the country illegally.

In the United States, where Mexican Americans make up a significant percentage of the population, such as California and Texas, illegal aliens and Mexican Americans almost exclusively occupy most blue-collar occupations, such as restaurant workers, janitors, truck drivers, gardeners, construction laborers, material moving workers, and other manual labor. In many of these places with large Latino populations, blue-collar workers are often considered Mexican Americans because of their dominance in those occupations. Occasionally, tensions have risen between Mexican immigrants and other ethnic groups because of increasing concerns over the availability of working-class jobs to non-Hispanic ethnic groups. However, tensions have also risen among American Hispanic laborers who have been displaced because of both cheap Mexican labor and ethnic profiling.

Discrimination and Stereotypes

Mexican Americans endured quite an amount of negative stereotypes that defamed and insulted the group. Stereotypes about Mexican Americans had long circulated in the media. For example, Mexican Americans were called street criminals, poor drifters, “lazy peons”, field workers, or illegal “alien” immigrants. These stereotypes appear in news reports, movies, television, comedy (offensive racial jokes), and music parodies. Horse-riding bandits attacked Anglo gulches in western films, and most Mexican Americans are portrayed in film as backward people.

Racial stereotypes have amounted to discrimination against Mexican Americans through much of the 20th century. Mexican Americans in the past had difficulties in obtaining employment, education, and financial loans. Even private clubs attempted to restrict entry and membership of Mexican Americans the same manner as blacks and Jews. Until the 1950s across the Southwest states, Mexican Americans lived in separate residential areas by laws or by policies by real estate companies, a policy known as redlining. This falls under the concept of official segregation.

However, famous Mexican Americans like Chicano folk musician Lalo Guerrero spoofed these stereotypes in songs of a comical light, such as "Yes, There are No Tortillas" , "No Chicanos on TV" and "Pancho Sanchez" sang in the tune of Disney's 1950s song "Davy Crockett, man of the wild frontier". However, these stereotypes produced violent reactions and Mexican Americans paid the price in police brutality, physical harassment and run-ins with immigration officials, when often the suspect was an US citizen or a legal immigrant.

Mexican Americans found themselves targeted by hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, which had a major influence in Texas. In the 1940s, viciously racist imagery in newspapers and crime novels portrayed Mexican zoot suiters as disloyal "foreigners" or murderers attacking Anglo police officers and as "savages" having "non-white" Aztec Indian blood.

Neo-Nazis in the 1990s attacked several Latino individuals for looking "Mexican" or "illegal alien", but most victims are native-born citizens. The news media does not focus much on the impact of hate crimes against Mexican Americans, unlike the amount of attention given to hate crimes on other minority groups.

Social mobility

The U.S. Census finds increases in average personal and household incomes for Mexican Americans in the early 2000s. U.S. born Mexican Americans earn more and are represented more in the middle- and upper-class segments more than recently arriving Mexican immigrants. It should be noted, however, that Mexican Americans are not well represented in the professions. Some have argued that this precipitates the need for affirmative action for Hispanics in general and Mexicans in particular.

Mexican American neighborhoods and communities

Main article: List of Mexican American communities

Neighborhoods in many cities across America have developed significant and/or growing Mexican American populations. Southern California, esp. Los Angeles was called the largest Mexican city outside Mexico, the region has the nation's largest Mexican American population , and 40 percent of Los Angeles county residents are Latinos, with Mexican descent as the largest ethnic group.

References

• Chavez, Linda. Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation Basic Books, (1991)
• De La Garza, Rodolfo O., Martha Menchaca, Louis DeSipio. Barrio Ballots: Latino Politics in the 1990 Elections (1994)
• De la Garza, Rodolfo O. Awash in the Mainstream: Latino Politics in the 1996 Elections (1999) * De la Garza, Rodolfo O., and Louis Desipio. Ethnic Ironies: Latino Politics in the 1992 Elections (1996)
• De la Garza, Rodolfo O. Et al. Latino Voices: Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban Perspectives on American Politics (1992)
• Arnoldo De León, Mexican Americans in Texas: A Brief History, 2nd ed. (1999)
• Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, David R. Maciel, editors, The Contested Homeland: A Chicano History of New Mexico 2000, ISBN 0-8263-2199-2
• Nancie L. González; The Spanish-Americans of New Mexico: A Heritage of Pride (1969)
• Hero, Rodney E. Latinos and the U.S. Political System: Two-Tiered Pluralism. (1992)
• Garcia, F. Chris. Latinos and the Political System. (1988)
• David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (1987)

• Nericcio, William Anthony. Tex(t)-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America; and the Chicana/o | Mexican |Mexican-American Tex(t)-Mex galleryblog

• Pachon, Harry and Louis Desipio. New Americans by Choice: Political Perspectives of Latino Immigrants. (1994)
• Rosales, Francisco A., Chicano!: The history of the Mexican American civil rights movement. (1997). ISBN 1-55885-201-8
• Smith, Robert Courtney. Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants (2005), links with old village, based on interviews
• Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M. And Mariela M. Páez. Latinos: Remaking America. (2002)
• Villarreal, Roberto E., and Norma G. Hernandez. Latinos and Political Coalitions: Political Empowerment for the 1990s (1991)

See also

• Aztlán
• Casta
• Chicano
• Hispanic
• History of Mexican-Americans
• Latino
• La Raza
• List of Mexican Americans
• Mexico
• Pocho
• United States

External links

• Chicano Literature - Pluma Fronteriza

- -

-

- - - - -