Mexican American

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Mexican American
Notable Mexican Americans: Alberto Gonzales, Selena Quintanilla Pérez, Ricardo Sánchez, Lupe Velez, Ellen Ochoa, Romualdo Pacheco, Loretta Sanchez, Frankie J, Oscar de la Hoya, Constance Marie, César E. Chávez and Linda Carter.
Total population
26.5 million 9% of the U.S. population
Regions with significant populations
Southwest Midwest
Languages
American English and Spanish
Religions
Roman Catholic and Protestant
Related ethnic groups
Mexicans, other Hispanics, Latinos, Amerindians, Spaniards

Part of a series of articles on Latinos and Hispanics in the United States
Groups
Colombian Americans Cuban Americans · Dominican Americans Mexican Americans · Spanish Americans Peruvian Americans · Puerto Ricans
History
History of Mexican-Americans Pan-Americanism
Religions
Hispanics and religion · Christian Latinos Latino Jews · Latino Muslims
Political movements
Hispanics and politics · Chicano Movement
Organizations
Association of Hispanic Arts Congressional Hispanic Caucus LULAC · NALFO · SHPE National Council of La Raza NALEO · MEChA · UFW
Culture
Hispanic culture Literature · Studies · Art  · Music
Languages
Spanish · Spanish in the U.S. French · Frespañol English · Spanglish Portuguese · Portuñol · Portinglês Hebrew · Ladino language
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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. About 26.8 million Americans listed their ancestry as "Mexican".^[1] Settlement concentrations are found in metropolitan and rural areas across the United States, with the highest concentrations in the Southwest and the Midwest. Chicago and Los Angeles are particular areas for large Mexican American communities. 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 Washington, DC, New York City, Miami and Philadelphia.

[edit] History of Mexican Americans

See article on History of Mexican Americans.

[edit] 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.^[2][3] 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.^[4]

• 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.^[4]

• 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.” ^[5]

• 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.^[4] 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: ^[4]

• 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.^[4]

[edit] Politics of racial classification

Throughout U.S. history, many Mexican Americans have been socially classified as 'non-white' by the American people, despite Census criteria and legal constructions classifying them as white.^[6]

However, in times when Mexicans were uniformly allotted white status, they were permitted to intermarry with what today are termed non-Hispanic whites (unlike blacks and Asians). They were allowed to acquire U.S. citizenship upon arrival; served in all-white units during the World War II; could vote and hold elected office in places such as Texas, especially San Antonio; ran the state politics and constituted most of the elite of New Mexico since colonial times; and went to integrated schools in Central Texas and Los Angeles. Additionally, Asians were barred from marrying Mexican Americans because of their legal white status.

Mexicans were legally considered 'white' because of early treaty obligations to Spaniards and Mexicans for citizenship status at a time when white-ness was considered a prerequisite for U.S. citizenship.^[7][8] Historically, however, most Mexican immigrants have been racially mestizo or Amerindian.

[edit] Economic and social issues

César Chávez-founder of the United Farm Workers, a labor union of migrant farm laborers, and civil rights activist in the 1960's and 1970's called for organization of employees' rights groups and expanded political representation of Mexican Americans.

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 Aliens] 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. This is a major political controversy in the US in the late 20th century and in May 2006, millions of illegal immigrants, Mexicans and other nationalities, walked out of their jobs across the country to demonstrate for changes in immigration status laws, in hopes for amnesty to become naturalized citizens like similar acts in 1986 granted citizenship to Mexican nationals living and working illegally in the US.

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 blue-collar occupations: they are restaurant workers, janitors, truck drivers, gardeners, construction laborers, material moving workers, or perform other types of 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, and African-American workers claimed the Mexican laborers are advancing further than native-born blacks, this caused some racial tensions between black and Mexicans in the Southwest US. It was recently noticed that the Mexican immigrants are slowly climbing the socioeconomic ladder, but this was the case in the past by previous Mexican immigrants who came (legally or not) and worked hard their way in the ladder for the "American dream".

[edit] Discrimination and Stereotypes

Throughout U.S. history, Mexican Americans have endured negative stereotypes among the American people.^[9] Such stereotypes have long circulated in the media. For example, Mexican Americans are called street criminals, field workers and illegal immigrants. These stereotypes appear in movies, television, music and news reports. Most Mexican Americans are portrayed in films as second class citizens and 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 loans. Private clubs excluded Mexican Americans along with blacks and Jews. Across the Southwest states, Mexican Americans lived in separate residential areas, due to laws and real estate company policies. This group of laws and policies, known as redlining, lasted until the 1950s, and fall under the concept of official segregation.^{[citation needed]}

However, famous Mexican Americans like Chicano folk musician Lalo Guerrero spoofed these stereotypes in musical comedy, in songs titled, "Yes, There are No Tortillas" , "No Chicanos on TV" and "Pancho Sánchez" sang in the tune of Disney's 1950s song "Davy Crockett, Man of the Wild Frontier".

Mexican Americans also found themselves targeted by hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, which had a major influence in Texas^{[citation needed]}. In the 1940s, viciously racist imagery in newspapers and crime novels portrayed Mexican zoot suiters as disloyal "foreigners" or murderers attacking White-Anglo police officers.

Neo-Nazis in the 1990s attacked several Latino individuals for looking "Mexican" or "illegal alien".

[edit] Social status and assimilatiion

Barrow (2005) finds increases in average personal and household incomes for Mexican Americans in the 21st century. 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.

Huntington (2005) argues that the sheer number, concentration, linguistic homogeneity, and other characteristic of Hispanic immigrants will erode the dominance of English as a nationally unifying language, weaken the country's dominant cultural values, and promote ethnic allegiances over a primary identification as an American. Testing these hypotheses with data from the U.S. Census and national and Los Angeles opinion surveys, Citrin (2007) shows that Hispanics acquire English and lose Spanish rapidly beginning with the second generation, and appear to be no more or less religious or committed to the work ethic than native-born whites. Moreover, a clear majority of Hispanics reject a purely ethnic identification and patriotism grows from one generation to the next. At present, a traditional pattern of political assimilation appears to prevail. ^[10]

South et al (2005) examines Hispanic spatial assimilation and inter-neighborhood geographic mobility. Their longitudinal analysis of seven hundred Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban immigrants followed from 1990 to 1995 finds broad support for hypotheses derived from the classical account of minority assimilation. High income, English-language use, and embeddedness in Anglo social contexts increased Latino immigrants' geographic mobility into Anglo neighborhoods. US citizenship and years spent in the United States were positively associated with geographic mobility into more Anglo neighborhoods, and coethnic contact was inversely associated with this form of mobility, but these associations operated largely through other predictors. Prior experiences of ethnic discrimination increased and residence in public housing decreased the likelihood that Latino immigrants would move from their origin neighborhoods, while residing in metropolitan areas with large Latino populations led to geographic moves into "less Anglo" census tracts.^[11]

See also List of Mexican American communities

[edit] References

• Barrow, Lisa and Rouse, Cecilia Elena. "Do Returns to Schooling Differ by Race and Ethnicity?" American Economic Review 2005 95(2): 83-87. Issn: 0002-8282 Fulltext: in Ingenta and Ebsco
• Jack Citrin, Amy Lerman, Michael Murakami and Kathryn Pearson, "Testing Huntington: Is Hispanic Immigration a Threat to American Identity?" Perspectives on Politics, Volume 5, Issue 01, February 2007, pp 31-48
• 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-
• 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)
• Samuel P. Huntington. Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity (2005)
• Kenski, Kate and Tisinger, Russell. "Hispanic Voters in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential General Elections." Presidential Studies Quarterly 2006 36(2): 189-202. Issn: 0360-4918 Fulltext: in Swetswise and Ingenta
• David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (1987)
• 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
• South, Scott J.; Crowder, Kyle; and Chavez, Erick. "Geographic Mobility and Spatial Assimilation among U.S. Latino Immigrants." International Migration Review 2005 39(3): 577-607. Issn: 0197-9183
• 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)

[edit] Further reading

Martha Menchaca (2002). Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans. University of Texas Press, 19–21. ISBN 0292752547. 

William A. Nericcio (2007). "Tex(t)-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the 'Mexican' in America"; utpress book; book galleryblog

[edit] Notes

[edit] See also

• Brown people
• Casta
• Chicano
• Chicano Movement (Aztlán)
• Hispanic
• History of Mexican-Americans
• Latino
• La Raza
• List of Mexican Americans
• Mexico
• Pocho
• United States
• White American
• White Hispanic