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 & 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. 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

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

Mexicans were legally considered 'white' primarily 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.

According to historian Hyman Alterman, however, most Mexican-Americans did not qualify as caucasians because they possessed brown and olive skin.

Economic and social issues

File:Cesar-chavez-USPS.jpg

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 [undocumented immigrants] 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".

Discrimination and Stereotypes

Throughout U.S. history, Mexican Americans have endured negative stereotypes among the American people. Such stereotypes have long circulated in the media. For example, Mexican Americans were called street criminals, field workers and illegal immigrants. These stereotypes appear in news reports, movies, television, comedy (offensive racial jokes), and music parodies. Horse-riding bandits attacked White-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 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.

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. 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", but most victims are native-born citizens. The 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 21 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. 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 growing Mexican American populations. Most of it's large communities are located in California, New Mexico and Texas. 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

• 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)

Further reading

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

See also

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