“The Mexican Problem”
In the vast library of books and documents about ethnic and minority problems in the United States, one of the largest sections is devoted to “the Mexican Problem.” There is a curious consistency about the documents in this section. For one thing, the singular is always used. Presumably, also, no problem existed, singular or plural, prior to 1920. Readers’ Guide lists fifty-one articles on “the Mexican Problem” from 1920 to 1930 by comparison with nineteen articles on the same subject for the previous decade. When these articles are examined, it will be found that “the problem” apparently consists in the sum total of the voluminous statistics on Mexican delinquency, poor housing, low wages, illiteracy, and rates of disease. In other words, “the Mexican Problem” has been defined in terms of the social consequences of Mexican immigration.
It will also be found that the documents devoted to the problem have been deeply colored by the “social work” approach. With the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, the immigrant social agencies and Americanization institutes simply had to discover a new “problem” and it was the Mexican’s misfortune to appear on the scene, sombrero and all, concurrently with the impending liquidation of these agencies. As a consequence, he was promptly adopted as America’s No. 1 immigrant problem. The whole apparatus of immigrant-aid social work, with its morose preoccupation with consequences rather than causes, was thereupon transferred to Mexican immigration with little realization that this immigration might not be, in all respects, identical with European immigration.
Once assembled and classified, this depressing mass of social data was consistently interpreted in terms of what it revealed about the inadequacies and the weaknesses of the Mexican character. The data “proved” that Mexicans lacked leadership, discipline, and organization; that they segregated themselves; that they were lacking in thrift and enterprise, and so forth. A mountainous collection of masters’ theses “proved” conclusively that Spanish-speaking children were “retarded” because, on the basis of various so-called intelligence tests, they did not measure up to the intellectual caliber of Anglo-American students. Most of this theorizing was heavily weighted with gratuitous assumptions about Mexicans and Indians. Paradoxically, the more sympathetic the writer, the greater seems to have been the implied condescension. All in all, the conclusion is unavoidable that Mexicans have been regarded as the essence of “the Mexican Problem.”
The use of this deceptive, catchall phrase has consistently beclouded the real issues by focusing attention on consequences rather than on causes. Actually the basic issues have always had to do with Anglo-Hispano relations in a particular historical setting as influenced by a specific set of cultural, economic, geographical, and social forces. Once these factors are seen in proper perspective, if only in outline form, the elusive character of “the Mexican Problem” vanishes into thin air.
1. The Structure of the Problem
In unraveling the real issues the first question to be raised is: what kind of a minority is the Mexican minority? Here, at the risk of being repetitious, I want to summarize several points. Unlike most European minorities in America, Mexicans have been rooted in space—in a particular region—over a long period of years. One of the important factors in “the problem” has always been their relation to, and their feeling about the region in which they are concentrated. As Dr. Carolyn Zeleny has pointed out, they are more like the typical minority in Europe than like the typical European minority in the United States. Mexicans were annexed by conquest, along with the territory they occupied, and, in effect, their cultural autonomy was guaranteed by a treaty.
About the closest parallel that can be found in this hemisphere for the Mexican minority is that of the French-Canadians in Quebec. The parallel would be closer, of course, if the Province of Quebec were part of the United States. Then New Mexico could be regarded as the Quebec of the Mexicans and the million or so French-Canadians in the United States might be compared with the Mexican immigrants outside New Mexico. Like the Mexicans, the French-Canadians were “here first”; hence they have shown much the same tenacity about notre langue, notre foi, nos traditions that Mexicans have shown. With French-Canadians in the United States the question of la survivance is as important as the future of la raza is to most Mexicans. Like the French-Canadians in New England, the Spanish-speaking people know that they are Americans. Yet, as Dr. Campa points out, they never speak of themselves in Spanish as nosotros los americanos any more than they say nosotros los españoles.
What a minority is called by others or how it likes to think of itself is less important than the way members of the minority actually speak of themselves in moments of “unbuttoned frankness.” In such moments, Mexican-Americans are likely to say nosotros, nuestra gente, la raza, or nosotros los mexicanos. But, as Dr. Campa carefully emphasizes, by mexicanos they do not mean Mexicans; nor can it be translated as such. Like the French-Canadians, and, I suppose, like all annexed or conquered peoples, the Mexicans have been deeply influenced by discrimination. French culture is indigenous to Quebec in much the same sense that Spanish culture is indigenous in New Mexico. Thus there is a time-factor and a space-factor involved in both situations which is not to be found in the usual European immigrant “problem” in America.1
The spatial relation of Mexico to the Southwest, the proximity of the border, the closeness of the parent group, are all important factors in “the Mexican Problem.” It should also be noted that relations between Anglos and Hispanos have been constantly influenced by the state of relations between the United States and Mexico. The assimilation of Italian immigrants might have assumed a different form, for example, if the United States and Italy had been involved in conflict for a hundred years. In the past, the attitude of Mexican consuls in the Southwest has been much more possessive and paternal than that of Italian consuls toward Italian immigrants. Historically the Southwest was once a part of Mexico—an obvious but all-important factor. Geographically the Southwest is one with the northern portions of Mexico and wars do not alter the facts of geography. Thus a specific set of historical and geographical factors are also very much a part of “the Mexican problem.”
Furthermore, a unique set of cultural factors has been involved. Three cultures, not two, have fought for supremacy in the Southwest: Anglo, Hispano, and Indian. In fact, the three-sided relationship is so complex, interrelated, and historically interwoven as to defy analysis. Indians were a conquered race despised by Anglo-Americans. Mexicans are related to Indians by race and culture with the Indian part of their cultural and racial inheritance being more important than the Spanish. Mexicans were consistently equated with Indians by the race-conscious Anglo-Americans. Quite apart from the question of how much Indian blood flows in the veins of the Mexican minority, Mexicans are regarded as a racial minority in the Southwest.
In the past, Indians exploited every tension between Anglos and Hispanos and each of the latter groups attempted to use the Indians against the other. This conflict has not died out. Native New Mexicans have continued to accuse the federal government of showing more concern for its treaty obligations with the Pueblo Indians than for its obligations under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—and candor compels the admission that these complaints have been justified. Indians have recovered lost lands or been compensated for their loss and have received heavy financial subsidies from the federal government not granted Spanish-speaking people. But there is still another facet which distinguishes the Mexican problem from what have appeared to be similar issues.
In the United States a minority has long existed within the Mexican minority: the native-born of native-born parents. The census of 1930 estimated the size of this group as 264,338, although it is easily twice this size or larger. The attitude of the buffer group toward the immigrants and of the immigrants toward them has always been highly ambivalent. To the native-born, the immigrant is a cholo or chicamo; to the immigrant, the native-born is a pocho. The immigrant is likely to be “darker,” more Indian, than the native-born. The immigrant stresses his Mexican-Indian background; the native-born boasts of his “Spanish” inheritance in blood and culture. The immigrant is, also, more likely to be illiterate and to know less English. Despite the division between the two groups, however, Anglo-Americans regard them as one—as Mexican—except for ceremonial occasions when elements of the native-born become “Spanish.” On the other hand, the native-born seek to distinguish their status, in the eyes of the Anglo-Americans, by referring to themselves as Spanish-Colonials, Latin-Americans, Spanish-Americans, “native Californians,” and similar terms.
While some of the native-born have “passed” completely into the Anglo-American world, the majority have not been able to do so nor have they always wished to do so. Constant discrimination, which became more pronounced with the arrival of the immigrants, has complicated their existence and stiffened their resistance to absorption. The Anglo-Americans, in fact, have made it impossible for them to dissociate themselves, as a group, from the immigrants. Noting this fact, the immigrants have taunted the native-born with the mockery of their citizenship. Criticizing the native-born as renegades, they have derided their customs, morals, and affectations. Dr. Gamio quotes a popular corrido of the immigrants called “El Renegado”—“The Renegade,” which he translates as follows:
You go along showing off
In a big automobile.
You call me a pauper
And dead with hunger
And what you don’t remember is
That on my farm
You went around almost naked
And without sandals.
This happens to many
That I know here
When they learn a little
American
And dress up like dudes,
But he who denies his race
Is the most miserable creature.
There is nothing in the world
So vile as he
The mean figure of the renegade.
And although far from you,
Dear Fatherland,
Continual revolutions
Have cast me out—
A good Mexican
Never disowns
The dear fatherland
Of his affections.*
(This corrido, incidentally, originated in Los Angeles.)
Paradoxically, however, both groups regard themselves as members of la raza. They often live in the same districts; speak the same language; attend the same church; and frequently intermarry. Yet the distinction,—the cleavage,—remains. In some respects, the native-born occupy somewhat the same relation to the immigrants that “light” middle-class Negroes occupy to the masses of “dark” Negroes. The relationship between the two groups is, also, somewhat similar to that between German Jews and Russian Jews.
It is a truism that the expectations which a dominant group hold forth influence the behavior and attitude of a minority. In this respect, the position of the native-born has been ambiguous. In some circles, they are expected to behave “like Mexicans”; elsewhere this expectation is reversed and the tactful assumption is made that they are “Spanish” or “American.” This ambiguity explains the conflicting attitudes which the native-born have toward “assimilation.” I know a successful young Mexican-American lawyer in Southern California—one of the few in the region—who takes a most extreme view toward “Americanization.” He believes that Mexicans should cut loose entirely from their Mexican background; that they should “mix” more with Anglo-Americans; and that they should, as he says, “quit beefing” about discrimination. But this individual has been highly favored by circumstances, background, and upbringing. It is probably true, as he contends, that he has encountered little discrimination (although he makes this point a little too emphatically); but other Mexican-Americans, “darker” than he is, less favored by circumstance, have encountered consistent discrimination and are much less anxious to “mix” with Anglo-Americans.
To some extent the two groups are separated by a “third” culture—that of the native-born. “The cultural contacts of the Mexican immigrants in the United States,” writes Dr. Gamio, “are complicated by the fact that besides the modern American civilization there is another and different Mexican-American culture, that of the Americans of Mexican origin. This civilization is American nominally, and exhibits the principal material aspects of modern American civilization, but intellectually and emotionally it lives in local Mexican traditions. This element [the American-born] can be said to constitute a peculiar nationality, within the United States. To the immigrant it is a sort of go-between, since these Mexican-Americans do not feel racial prejudice against them. Though a struggle occurs between the purely Mexican culture and this semi-Mexican, in the end it often absorbs the Mexican immigrant. With it there can occur a closer fusion than with the purely American culture, for with the latter it already shares many traits, while the great difference between the purely American and the purely Mexican, together with the fact of race prejudice, makes an intellectual, emotional, and traditional disparity too great to be bridged rapidly and perhaps never completely.”
3. The Conflict in Cultures
The central plateau region of Mexico has fed immigrants to Texas; the northern mesa and northwestern coastal sections to California. Immigrants from these sections have had certain distinct handicaps. Most of them have been illiterate; a great many were peons in Mexico; and they have been extremely poor (actually undernourished, according to Dr. Gamio). In the main, also, they have come from a society which, prior to 1910, was calculated to rob individuals of a sense of enterprise, thrift, and initiative.
Most Mexican immigrants have come to the United States from a folk culture. A folk culture, writes Dr. Robert Redfield,2 is a small, isolated, nonliterate, homogeneous society. Intimate communication among the members of the society is matched by a lack of communication with the exterior world. It is a society in which people have little access to the thought and experience of the past and in which “oral tradition has no check or competitor.” The people are much alike and have a strong sense of belonging together and the ways by which recurrent problems are solved have been conventionalized. Economically the folk society is independent of other societies: the people produce what they consume and consume what they produce. There is not much division of labor—one person doing what another does. The tools of production are few and simple. There are no tools to make tools; no rapid, multiple machine manufacture; little use of natural power. “Life,” writes Dr. Redfield, “for the member of the folk society, is not one activity and then another and different one; it is one large activity out of which one part may not be separated without affecting the rest.” Since behavior is strongly influenced by convention, there is little disposition to reflect upon traditional acts or to consider them objectively and critically. Behavior is personal, with even nature, the animals, and the environment being personalized and invested with human attributes. Obviously the members of such a society are not prepared for a rapid transition to a society which, at nearly every point, negates the values of their folk culture.
In many areas of Mexico, the folk culture centered in the feudalistic hacienda which provided no opportunity for change in status. Ideas of justice were personalized, based on the whims and fancies of the haciendado. Money was meaningless; trade was limited; and the division of labor was simple. Superimposed on this folk society, the ceremonial aspect of the Catholic Church was emphasized somewhat to the detriment of its ethical teachings. Native folk practices were interwoven with church ritual and a “magical mentality” attributed illnesses to los aires or evil spirits. Dr. Gamio gives a long list of herbs which he found on sale in a Chicago drugstore that catered to Mexican immigrants; and one can still see a weird variety of herbs, leeches, and patent medicines on sale in the Mexican drugstores in Los Angeles. Slight wonder, then, that the Mexican peon faltered and became confused and often demoralized when he came in close contact with a highly industrialized, urban society.
Uniformly his culturally conditioned traits have been interpreted in the Southwest as racial or biological. The Mexican was “lawless” and “violent” because he had Indian blood; he was “shiftless and improvident” because such was his nature; his excellence as a stoop-laborer consisted precisely in the fact that he did not aspire to land ownership. Point by point, his cultural traits reinforced the earlier stereotype of “the Mexican.”
In the Southwest, the immigrant faced a set of formidable handicaps. A strong prejudice had existed in the region against Mexicans for many years; the tradition of dominance was interwoven into the fabric of the community; generations had been steeped in the Mexican stereotype. Almost by instinct, Anglo-Americans equated Mexicans with Indians. The language handicap would have been much less formidable had the immigrant been literate; but learning to read and write in English involved first learning to read and write in Spanish. Unskilled, in the American sense, the immigrant had little acquaintance with trade-unionism. Even his religion, in such muscularly Protestant states as Texas, served to set him apart.
But his greatest handicap consisted in the migratory character of his employment. “One assimilates a new culture,” writes Dr. Norman Humphrey, “as one did the old one, largely through perception and imitation of examples.” Traveling over a wide territory, usually in the company of other Spanish-speaking workers, bossed by a Mexican foreman, living in a Mexican labor camp or shacktown, the immigrant had few chances to learn Anglo-American ways by example or imitation. The presence of a large buffer group of native-born Mexicans also retarded assimilation. The Mexican, moreover, was a late immigrant; “the last man in.”
“Near the center of a culture,” writes Dr. Humphrey, “are the layers of meaning identified as values”; while, at the periphery, are the utilitarian symbols. When two sharply contrasting cultures come in contact the utilitarian symbols of each are brought into immediate juxtaposition: “utilitarian meaning competes with utilitarian meaning and, in the long run, the meaning having the greater utility supplants that which has the less.” Universally, Mexican immigrants, supposedly “incapable of assimilation,” have rapidly assimilated the utilitarian phases of Anglo-American culture. High on the list of items which 2,104 immigrants brought back to Mexico from the United States, according to Dr. Gamio, were such items as bathtubs; wooden and metal toilets; refrigerators; metal kitchen utensils; washing machines; metal stoves; sewing machines; and automobiles (thirty-seven percent returned with cars).
But where the values of the two cultures have been in juxtaposition, the immigrant has been less willing to abandon or to modify the imported cultural pattern. “Spanish speech is retained,” writes Dr. Humphrey, “and la raza is esteemed.” Similarly Dr. Gamio has found that the intellectual culture of Mexico has continued to exert a great influence among Mexican-Americans; that, where values are concerned, they prefer to remain Mexicans. It should be noted, however, that these conclusions were based on studies made in the Southwest. Throughout the Southwest immigrants have been drawn within the folds of existing colonies and opportunities to learn “by perception and imitation,” on an individual basis, have been minimized. Immigrants are more limited in their choice of residence, employment, and associations than in the northern industrial communities where a different pattern of acculturation prevails. Persistent discrimination has repelled the immigrant from the value-side of Anglo-American culture.
4. The Pattern of Employment
The basic factor retarding the assimilation of the Mexican immigrant, at all levels, has been the pattern of his employment. A very large proportion of Mexican immigrants were imported, often under contract, by particular employers, for employment in particular industries at particular tasks. With few exceptions, only a particular class of employers has employed Mexican labor in the Southwest: large-scale industrial enterprises; railroads; smelters; copper mines; sugar-beet refineries; farm-factories; large fruit and vegetable exchanges. These concerns have employed many Mexicans, in gangs, crews, and by families as in the sugar-beet industry. It is not the individual who has been employed but the group. If a concern employs Mexicans, it will usually be found that they dominate or are used exclusively in specific types of employment rather than being scattered through the plant. The universality of this pattern was clearly established in a study made in California in 1930.
In this same study it was found that the jobs for which Mexicans were employed en masse had certain basic characteristics: they were undesirable by location (as section-hand jobs on the desert sections of the rail lines or unskilled labor in desert mines and cement plants); they were often dead-end types of employment; and the employment was often seasonal or casual. Between 1914 and 1919 the number of Mexicans in the citrus industry in California increased from 2,317 to 7,004 (thirty percent of the total); today some 22,000 Mexicans are employed. In effect, Mexicans work, not for individual citrus growers, but for the California Fruit Growers Exchange. The exchange bears about the same relationship to “farming” that the typical industrial plant in which Mexicans are employed bears to “business”: it is highly organized; it represents an enormous capital investment; and it is an enterprise which provides no ladder of advancement for field and packing-house employees. One could count on the fingers of one hand the number of Mexicans who have become owners of citrus groves or who have risen to managerial positions in the exchange.
To keep Mexicans earmarked for exclusive employment in a few large-scale industries in the lowest brackets of employment, their employers have set them apart from other employees in separate camps, in company towns, and in segregated colonias. Traditionally, Mexicans have been paid less than Anglo-Americans for the same jobs. These invidious distinctions have reinforced the Mexican stereotype and placed a premium on prejudice. By employing large numbers of Mexicans for particular types of work, employers have arbitrarily limited the immigrants’ chance for the type of acculturation that comes from association with other workers on the job. The pattern of employment has, in turn, dictated the type and location of residence. Segregated residential areas have resulted in segregated schools; segregated schools have reinforced the stereotype and limited opportunities for acculturation. In setting this merry-go-round in motion, the pattern of employment has been of crucial importance for it has stamped the Mexican as “inferior” and invested the stereotype with an appearance of reality. “There are people,” writes Bogardus, “who insist on thinking that the Mexican is unable to rise above an unskilled labor level. They cannot visualize a Mexican immigrant on any other plane.”
The pattern of employment has consistently fostered prejudice by jeopardizing or appearing to threaten, the standards of the trade-unions. Always opposed to Mexican immigration, the American Federation of Labor has permitted many of its affiliates to bar Mexicans from membership. Exclusion from trade unions has, of course, closed another avenue of escape from the merry-go-round and provided a further sanction for the stereotype. By keeping Mexicans segregated occupationally, employers have created a situation in which the skilled labor groups have naturally regarded Mexicans as group competitors rather than as individual employees. The nature of the situation has thus inclined such groups as the AFL to take a narrow, particularistic view of Mexican immigration and to regard Mexican labor as “cheap labor.”
In some areas, as in west Texas, it is also apparent that the use which has been made of Mexican labor has tended to drive out Anglo-American small farmers and tenants. With the labor of the small farmer and tenant being necessarily in competition with the paid labor of the large-scale farm, cheap agricultural wage rates have been a powerful factor working toward concentration in farm ownership and production. In the various congressional hearings on Mexican immigration, small farmers were invariably lined up with organized labor in opposition to Mexican immigration. While the conflict has always been economic, it has consistently been rationalized as racial or cultural in character.
The far-reaching ramifications of the pattern of employment can scarcely be overemphasized. In the citrus belt communities, the California Fruit Growers Exchange has long exercised a decisive influence on local affairs. It has been in a position to influence—and has not hesitated to influence—local school-board policies and to affect the attitude of the police, the courts, and the townspeople. When Mexican workers have gone on strike, the townspeople have generally been arrayed against them. Therefore it is patently nonsensical to regard segregated schools for Mexicans as a more or less “natural” outgrowth of “differences,” racial or cultural in character, between Anglos and Hispanos. A copper town is dominated by the mine ownership and management; a sugar-beet town reflects the attitude and policies of the sugar-beet refineries, etc.
5. The Colonia Complex
Scattered throughout Southern California outside Los Angeles are, perhaps, 150,000 or 200,000 Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, for the most part immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants. Approximately thirty percent of the total is made up of “aliens” but the alien element is rapidly diminishing. Most of these people—perhaps eighty percent of them—live in “colonies” or colonias which vary in size from a cluster of small homes or shacks to communities of four, five, six, eight, and ten thousand people.3
The history of these settlements is almost uniformly the same. They came into existence some twenty or thirty years ago when the first immigrants began to arrive. Most of them are located in unincorporated areas adjacent to a town or city but invariably on “the other side” of something: a railroad track, a bridge, a river, or a highway. Site location has been determined by a combination of factors: low wages, cheap rents, low land values, prejudice, closeness to employment, undesirability of the site, etc. None of the colonies was laid out or planned as a community, although a few are located on the sites of abandoned “boom towns.” Some are outgrowths of labor camps; others have been grafted on a pre-1900 barrio; while a few have come into existence more or less accidentally. For example, the settlement known as Hick’s Camp came into existence thirty-three years ago when a river-bottom camp was washed out by a flood. The health authorities and the Red Cross moved the families to the river bank where a squatter camp grew up because the land was cheap. Nowadays completely surrounded, the colonia in San Gabriel is located near the old Mission—one of the few cases where a Mexican settlement is to be found at the center of an Anglo-American community.
North Town, a community near Upland, is a fairly typical colonia. Located on the site of an abandoned subdivision, it is within fifteen minutes’ driving radius of the wineries, packing houses, truck farms, and citrus groves where most of the residents are employed. Here a few Mexican families lived before the great wave of migration began and to these residents the immigrants attached themselves. Today some 1,500 Mexicans live in the six square blocks of North Town surrounded, on all sides, by agricultural land. North Town has a small grocery store; a pool hall; and a motion picture theater. Most of the residents, however, make their purchases in Upland. Two or three blocks from the village is an elementary school in which the enrollment is ninety-five percent Mexican.
With as many as three shacks to a lot, the structures are unpainted, weatherbeaten, and dilapidated. The average house consists of two or three rooms and was built of scrap lumber, boxes, and discarded odds-and-ends of material. Ten, twenty, and thirty years old, the houses are extremely clean and neat on the inside and much effort has obviously gone into an effort to give them an attractive appearance. Virtually all the homes lack inside toilets and baths and a large number are without electricity. Almost every family owns an automobile, a radio, and any number of American-made household gadgets of one kind or another. Being unincorporated, almost all forms of municipal service are lacking. Water is purchased from a private owner at rates higher than those paid by the conspicuously successful residents of Upland. North Town is one of dozens of similar colonias scattered all the way from Santa Barbara to San Diego. Occasionally the colonia is part of an incorporated town or city with the Mexican population comprising from twelve to twenty-five percent or more of the total population.
It would be misleading, however, to convey the impression that the location of the colonias was accidental or that it has been determined by the natural play of social forces. On the contrary, there is a sense in which it would be accurate to say that the location of the colonias has been carefully planned. Located at just sufficiently inconvenient distances from the parent community, it naturally became most convenient to establish separate schools and to minimize civic conveniences in the satellite colonia. “Plainly,” writes Fred W. Ross, “it was never intended that the colonias were to be a part of the wider community; rather, it was meant that they were to be apart from it in every way; colonia residents were to live apart, work apart, play apart, worship apart, and unfortunately trade, in some cases, apart.”
The physical isolation of the colonias has naturally bred a social and psychological isolation. As more and more barriers were erected, the walls began to grow higher, to thicken, and finally to coalesce on all sides. The building of the walls, as Mr. Ross puts it, “went on concomitantly from without and from within the colonia, layer by layer, tier by tier.” While the walls may have the appearance of being natural growths, they are really man-made. For the relationship that finally emerged between parent and satellite community is the civic counterpart of the relationship between the California Fruit Growers Exchange and its Mexican employees.
Living in ramshackle homes in cluttered-up, rundown shacktowns, set apart from their neighbors, denied even the minimum civic services, the residents of the colonia have come to resent the fenced-in character of their existence. They are perfectly well aware of the fact that they are not wanted, for their segregation is enforced by law as well as by custom and opinion. That the colonias lack swimming pools might be explained in terms of the ignorance or indifference of the Anglo-Americans were it not for the revealing circumstance that Mexicans are also denied access to municipal plunges in the parent community. Hence the ostracism of the Mexicans cannot be accounted for in the facile terms in which it is ordinarily rationalized.
When public-spirited citizens in the parent community have sought “to do something about the Mexican Problem,” they have generally sought to impose a pattern on the colonia from without. Establishing a clinic or reading-room or social center in the colonia has no doubt been helpful; but it has not changed, in the slightest degree, the relationship between parent and satellite community. In the face of this reality, it is indeed annoying to hear Anglo-Americans expatiate about the Mexicans’ “inferiority complex” and to charge them with being clannish and withdrawn. Friendly, warm-hearted, and generous to a fault, it would be difficult to find a people more readily disposed to mingle with other groups than the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest. Their “inferiority complex” is really a misnomer for a defeatist attitude arising from their frustration at being unable to break out of the colonia.
Resenting the implication of inferiority that attaches to segregated schools and being well aware of economic discrimination, a majority of the youngsters have not bothered to transfer from the segregated elementary school to the usually nonsegregated high school. Dropping out of school at the eighth grade level, they have been unable to compete successfully with Anglo-Americans for the more desirable jobs and have fallen back on those for which their fathers were imported. According to the census of 1930, only 5,400 Mexicans were to be found in clerical jobs; 1,092 were teachers; 93 were lawyers and judges; and 165 were physicians and surgeons—this in a population of close to three million people. Once the cycle of employment has been repeated in the second and third generation, writes Mr. Ross, “the insidious process, which began so long ago with low wages and relatively low, dominant group hostility, almost swings full circle.” By the time this has happened, the hostility of the dominant group is fully reciprocated.”4
Hedged in by group hostility, the immigrants long ago lost interest in citizenship. Lack of funds, the language difficulty, and illiteracy were important factors but not nearly as influential as segregation and discrimination. Mexicans have never been encouraged, by prevailing community attitudes, to become citizens. Bogardus, who studied the problem years ago, concluded that in both rural and urban areas segregation was primarily responsible for the lack of interest in citizenship. For the last twenty years, the number of Mexicans who have been naturalized has averaged about a hundred a year. In a Mexican community of fifty thousand in California, Bogardus found only 250 registered voters in 1928, not all of whom were of Mexican descent. In the same year, Charles A. Thompson reported that only two or three naturalization petitions a year were filed in El Paso with a Mexican population of fifty thousand. To some extent, of course, this reluctance to seek naturalization may be traced to the fact that so many Mexican immigrants are in the United States illegally; but this, too, has been a secondary factor. Voluntary disenfranchisement, whatever the cause, has perpetuated the caste-like social structure in which Mexicans are encased.
The second generation, however, has begun to show a lively interest in the ballot. Residents of a few citrus belt settlements have, in recent years, elected Mexican-Americans to school boards and city councils and have begun to exercise a measure of their great potential political strength. Wherever they have “come of age” politically, an immediate change has been noted in the attitude of the Anglo-Americans. Anglo-American politicians cannot afford to ignore the needs of Mexican-American communities if the residents will assert their political rights. Acting in liaison with the well-organized Negro community in Los Angeles, Mexicans could easily become a balance-of-power group.
While a few political victories have been won, it requires no special insight to foresee that a point will soon be reached when a serious struggle will develop between Anglos and Hispanos. The average Anglo-American community will accept, if somewhat reluctantly, one Mexican-American on the city council or the school board; but there are communities in which Mexican-Americans could elect a majority of the officeholders. In these communities, resistances will stiffen for the stakes are high. Once this has happened, Mexican-Americans will have to seek out allies in those segments of the Anglo-American community which are now disposed to cooperate with them, namely, in the liberal-labor-progressive groups. By comparison with Negroes, Mexicans are still novices in the tactics and strategy of minority-group action and politics.
6. The Northern Settlements
In the Middle Western industrial centers, Mexicans have been brought into much sharper and fuller contact with Anglo-American culture than in the Southwest. Here the colony is strikingly similar to that of the typical “foreign” settlement. Much less mobile than their compatriots in the Southwest, Mexicans in Chicago and Detroit work with members of other nationality groups in highly mechanized industries. The boundaries of the colonia are not sharply defined and, in some cases, have already disappeared. Since nearly one-third of the “northern” Mexicans have been solos or single men, the rate of intermarriage has been higher than in the Southwest. Originally concentrated in packing plants, tanneries, steel mills, foundries, and railroad yards, Mexican labor is today more widely and more typically distributed. Generally speaking, Mexicans are less sharply set apart in the Midwest industrial centers than in the Southwest. In Chicago and Detroit, Mexicans are merely another immigrant group; in the Southwest they are an indigenous people.
The tendency to regard Mexicans as a “racial minority” is much less pronounced in the Midwest and there is less discrimination. As might be expected, therefore, a much higher proportion have applied for citizenship and English tends to be substituted for Spanish as the language of the home. The lack of cohesion and unity in these colonies is reflected in many ways. For example, Archbishop Mooney in Detroit has strongly discouraged the development of group-consciousness among his Mexican parishioners. Priests have been forbidden to give any encouragement to the idea of a church especially for Mexicans and have been warned that no racial or nationality distinctions, so far as Mexicans are concerned, will be tolerated. Perhaps no one detail points up the contrast between these communities and those in the Southwest more sharply than Dr. Humphrey’s comment that in Detroit Mexicans refer to themselves simply as “Mexicans” and show little sensitivity to the term.
The story of the Lorain, Ohio, colony is quite typical of the Midwest settlements which nowadays total around 75,000 Mexicans. In 1923 the National Tube Company, an affiliate of United States Steel Corporation, imported 1,500 Mexicans from Texas to replace an equal number of Negroes (throughout the Midwest, Mexicans have been used to “dilute” or “thin out” Negro labor). From time to time, the colony was augmented by new recruits and by replacements drawn to Lorain from the beet fields of the Midwest. At first most of the Mexicans lived in the boxcars in which they had traveled north but most of them have since moved into small homes and apartments. Originally employed by National Tube or the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, many of them have now secured jobs in restaurants, dry-cleaning shops, trucking firms, and other miscellaneous occupations.
The homes in Lorain reflect a striking mixture of the two cultures. “American radios,” writes Robert O. O’Brien, “are covered with zarapes and bits of Indian pottery. Stone metates grind out corn which is cooked on gas and even on electric stoves. American phonographs play South American tangos and Mexican marches. Mexican trunks contain a mixture of objects from Gringo Sunday clothes to old country sombreros. Corona typewriters in vivid colors compete for space with bits of cactus from the Southwest. Bottles of medicine from Lorain doctors vie with patent medicines or Mexican ‘teas’ for position on the bathroom shelf. … American ‘canned’ food is supplemented by enchiladas, chili verde, and tamales.” A Lorain merchant sold thirty-six typewriters to Mexican residents in a year, all but two of them being equipped with a Spanish language keyboard. Here the second generation is already far removed from the first and the parents are vainly seeking to arrest the process by attempting to “Mexicanize” their children. It is a foregone conclusion that the northern Mexican settlements will have largely vanished in another generation.
7. Que Maravilla!
The oldest settlers in Los Angeles, Mexicans were pushed aside and swept under by the extraordinary velocity and volume of Anglo-American migration after the first great “land booms” in the eighties. Isabel Sherrick, a Middle Western journalist, reported in the 1880s that the Mexicans “little by little are being crowded out and one by one the adobes are falling into ruins or giving way to the thrifty homes of Americans.” Some of the sections in which Mexicans formerly lived are today occupied by factories, terminal facilities, and office buildings.
The typical residence of Mexicans in early-day Los Angeles was the “house court” derived from the Mexican vecindad: a sort of tenement made up of a number of one- and two-room dwellings built around a court with a common water supply and outdoor toilets. This same type of settlement, similar to the plaza, is still quite common in Los Angeles, San Antonio, and El Paso. House-courts multiplied in Los Angeles as the demand for Mexican housing became acute with high land costs and rising rents. In 1916 the city had 1,202 house-courts, occupied by 16,000 people with 298 house-courts being occupied exclusively by Mexicans.5 In some respects, the house-court was not unlike the “bungalow courts” of a later period. The house-court areas quickly became slums as the city pushed westward from its original center in the old Plaza section. One of the first studies of Mexican housing conditions indicated that some twenty or thirty thousand Mexicans were living in the courts of Old Sonoratown, near the Plaza, in the shacks and houses of Chavez Ravine, and similar areas, and in the railroad labor camps. The houses and courts had dirt floors; wood was used for fuel; there were no bathing facilities; and the outdoor hydrant and toilet, used by a group of families, were universal. Made in 1912, this survey is still up-to-the-minute so far as Mexican housing is concerned, for little improvement has occurred in the last thirty-five years.
When the great wave of Mexican immigration reached Los Angeles, an unincorporated section on the “east side” known as Belvedere became the principal area of “first settlement” for most of the immigrant families. “Que Maravilla!” the immigrants exclaimed when they first arrived in Los Angeles: what a marvel! what a wonderful city! Maravilla was their name for Belvedere and Maravilla it still is to thousands of Mexicans. With a Mexican population of fifty thousand in the middle twenties, the Belvedere section has a population today, mostly Mexican, of around 180,000. A city this large in size, it is still governed by remote control as an unincorporated area.
Aside from Maravilla, Mexicans are nowadays scattered in “pockets” of settlement in Los Angeles. While they are not segregated as rigidly as Negroes, the various pocket-settlements are almost exclusively Mexican and are, if anything, more severely isolated than the colonias of the outlying sections. The “pockets” are all similar in character—Chavez Ravine, Happy Valley, El Hoyo (The Hollow), and the rest. Chavez Ravine, located in the hills between Elysian Park and North Broadway, is an old Mexican settlement. Shacks cling precariously to the hillsides and are bunched in clusters in the bottom of the ravine. For forty years or more, the section has been without most of the ordinary municipal services. At various points in the ravine, one can still see large boards on which are tacked the rural mailboxes of the residents—as though they were living, not in the heart of a great city, but in some small rural village in the Southwest. Goats, staked out on picket lines, can be seen on the hillsides; and most of the homes have chicken pens and fences. The streets are unpaved; really trails packed hard by years of travel. Garbage is usually collected from a central point, when it is collected, and the service is not equal to that which can be obtained in Anglo districts bordering the ravine. The houses are old shacks, unpainted and weather-beaten. Ancient automobile bodies clutter up the landscape and various “dumps” are scattered about. The atmosphere of the ravine, as of El Hoyo and the other pocket-settlements, is ancient, antiquated, a survival—something pushed backward in time and subordinated.
One can make a swift turn off the heavy traffic of North Figueroa or North Broadway and be in Chavez Ravine in a minute’s time. In this socially regressive dead-end, goats bleat and roosters crow and children play in the dirt roads. Were it not for the faraway hum of traffic, a visitor might well imagine that he was in some remote village in New Mexico or Arizona.
From the City Hall to Chavez Ravine is a five-minute drive by modern traffic-time; sociologically, the two points are separated by a time-span of between fifty and seventy-five years. Today a great modern highway span is being built over the Hollow. Bulldozers have moved in and houses have been jacked-up and lifted out of the way. The shacks not directly in the way of the juggernaut mechanical progress of the city are now left perched on the sides of the Hollow, thirty years old, still badly in need of paint, gradually falling apart. Thousands of motorists will rush over the new span every hour, traveling so fast that they will probably not even notice that they are passing over the remains of what was once a small Mexican village.
At 720 San Vicente Boulevard, near the intersection of San Vincente and Santa Monica—on the “west side” of Los Angeles—is an ironic little island of Mexicans completely surrounded by middle-class residences many of which have been built in the so-called “Spanish-Colonial” style with white stucco walls, patios, and red-tiled roofs. This “island” is a thirty-year-old Pacific Electric labor camp where forty Mexican families live as they might live in a village in Jalisco. The company has generously provided four “outside” showers for 120 residents. It has even provided them with “hot water” on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays! The only facilities for washing clothes or dishes consist of outside sinks, detached from the shacks in the court, and used by all the families. Probably not one percent of the people who live in the surrounding areas know or have ever heard of the camp’s existence.
What the Mexican immigrants probably think of Maravilla today is suggested by one of their best-known corridos—El Enganchado* (literally, “the hooked-one”—the labor contractor):
I came under contract from Morelia
To earn dollars was my dream,
I bought shoes and I bought a hat
And even put on trousers.
For they told me that here the dollars
Were scattered about in heaps;
That there were girls and theaters
And there here everything was good fun.
And now I’m overwhelmed—
I am a shoemaker by trade
And good only for pick and shovel.
What good is it to know my trade
If there are manufacturers by the score,
And while I make two little shoes
They turn out more than a million.
Many Mexicans don’t care to speak
The language their mothers taught them
And go about saying they are Spanish
And deny their country’s flag.
Some are darker than chapote**
But they pretend to be Saxon;
They go about powdered to the back of the neck
And wear skirts for trousers.
The girls go about almost naked
And call la tienda “estor”
They go around with dirt-streaked legs
But with those stockings of chiffon.
Even my old woman has changed on me—
She wears a bob-tailed dress of silk,
Goes about painted like a piñata**
And goes at night to the dancing hall.
My kids speak perfect English
And have no use for our Spanish
They call me “fader” and don’t work
And are crazy about the Charleston.
I’m tired of all this nonsense
I’m going back to Michoacan;
As a parting memory I leave the old woman
To see if someone else wants to burden himself.
* Manuel Gamio, “El Renegado” (The Renegade)” From Mexican Immigration to the United States, University of Chicago Press, 1930. Used by permission of University of Chicago Press.
* Quoted from Mexican Labor in the United States by Dr. Paul S. Taylor.
** chapote— black tar; piñata—a gaily-colored container.