68 pages • 2 hours read
George J. SanchezBecoming Mexican American
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 4, Chapter 10-ConclusionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Ambivalent Americanism”
Chapter 10 Summary: “Where is Home?: The Dilemma of Repatriation”
The chapter begins with an anecdote illustrating the community’s dire need for public assistance, allowing Sánchez to characterize the era of the Great Depression as one defined by the conflict between the personal choices of Mexican immigrants and the governmental policies set in place to promote mass repatriation campaigns. He points out that, by the close of the Depression era, nearly a third of the Mexican population of Los Angeles had departed. Those who chose to remain in LA, Sánchez argues, became “ambivalent Americans, full of contradictory feelings about their place in American society” (210).
The majority of the chapter is dedicated to exploring the various waves of Mexican repatriation that occurred during the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as how the responses of the American and Mexican governments compounded the community’s already dismal financial situation. Due to the decline in seasonal and agricultural jobs leading up to the 1929 crash, Mexican immigrants were among the first in LA to experience an economic decline. Those who had the means to return to Mexico earlier on, including a wave of repatriates from 1929 to 1930, were more likely to translate their success to their new (or old) homes, as they were able to bring American consumer products with them. The Mexican consulate in LA encouraged Mexicans who had acquired new skills working in the United States to return, in the hope that their experience would jumpstart the country’s ailing economy. The consulate’s efforts were complemented by campaigns in California to repatriate Mexicans, whom they blamed for the lack of available jobs, even going so far as to sponsor “repatriation trains” that would return Mexican immigrants across the border for free.
Sánchez goes on to explain that repatriation proved much more difficult for groups of later returnees, for both economic and cultural reasons. These groups included unskilled people who may have returned involuntarily and were not able to translate their work experience in the US into economic gains in Mexico. Additionally, while those who had spent the least amount of time in the US adjusted to Mexican cultural norms more readily, many skilled workers, women, and children who had become “Americanized” struggled to deal with stricter social mores and limited amenities. By 1933, the Mexican community in LA was largely aware that returning to Mexico would not improve their quality of life, and interest in repatriation declined. However, county officials in southern California continued to encourage repatriation, as the election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the institution of his policies offered new possibilities for direct relief for Mexicans, while also promoting naturalization. While federal programs offered renewed hope for Mexicans in LA, Sánchez notes that the depression and subsequent repatriation campaigns produced a massive generational and demographic shift in the immigrant community. As the presence of the Mexican community dwindled downtown, the influence of second-generation Mexican Americans expanded in east LA, which thereby produced its own “nontraditional” Mexican culture.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Forging a New Politics of Opposition”
Sánchez opens with a recount of the 1933 Dressmakers’ Strike, highlighting the fact that this event captures not only the intersection of race and gender within the industrial unionist movement of the 1930s, but also the demographic swing towards American-born Chicanos in East LA in the aftermath of the repatriation exodus. While the previous generation had relied on their shared connection to Mexico to organize and maintain their cultural integrity through, for example, the Mexican consulate and its community events, younger Americans of Mexican heritage shifted their focus to local, working-class economic issues that would motivate and come to define their political involvement and activism.
Sánchez explains that the increase in labor union activity among Chicanos in the 1930s was linked to “the aspirations of skilled and semi-skilled blue-collar laborers” (229), many of whom were homeowners in East LA and desired greater economic and educational opportunities for their children. However, these Chicanos tended to eschew traditional Mexican American unions linked to the consulate and to participate instead in American labor organizations. These organizations promoted ethnic leadership, encouraged naturalization as a form of job protection, and increased the political strength of the Mexican American community, thereby reshaping its members’ ethnic identity and political orientation to reflect events in the political and social arenas of the United States.
Sánchez demonstrates this ideological evolution by charting the development of Mexican social organizations and their goals from the early 20th century through the 1950s. Beginning with agricultural unions in Southern California, Sánchez observes that earlier unions were largely segregated by ethnicity and thus relied on the intervention of the Mexican consulate to mediate grievances, pitting national identity against large-scale labor organization. It was not until the onset of the Great Depression that working conditions would facilitate solidarity between racially stratified industrial workers in the interest of fair wages. Sánchez points to both the 1933 Dressmakers’ Strike and the formation of Independent Furniture Workers Local 1 in 1933 and 1934 as prominent examples of the shift from ethnically based organizing to the broader pursuit of improving the economic conditions of laborers and their families.
These events also reflect Mexican and Chicano interest in Communist unions, which advocated for racial and gender equality and provided a platform for the careers of many female and Chicano union and civil rights leaders, such as Luisa Moreno, who, in 1938, organized El Congreso de Pueblos que Hablan Español (the National Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples). The goals of El Congreso reflected those of other ethnic organizations, as well as what was regarded as a Communist strategy to “encourage ethnic minorities in the United States to join them in a fight against racial and class oppression” (245). Furthermore, in addition to its commitment to end gender discrimination, El Congreso called for naturalization and participation in American elections, reflecting the attitudes of Chicana laborers and New Deal organizers who developed a civil rights agenda based on what they argued were their rights as American citizens. Sánchez concludes the chapter by observing that this “Americanism” was the product of an attempt by the children of Mexican immigrants to integrate themselves into American society, which translated into the emergence of a Chicano activism characterized by the pursuit of civil and labor rights.
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Rise of the Second Generation”
The opening anecdote of the final chapter features the court case of a Mexican American youth named Alfred Barela, who was arrested for disturbing the peace in Venice in May of 1943. While the judge dismissed the charges against Barela and his friends, Sánchez cites a letter Barela wrote in the aftermath of the case, detailing his resentment and anger regarding Anglo Americans’ harassment of Mexican American youth. Barela’s letter captures the anti-Mexican attitude in Los Angeles during the early 1940s, as the number of young adults who had either emigrated from Mexico as children or were born to Mexican parents in the United States grew. Sánchez argues that, even prior to World War II, Chicano adolescents tended to think of themselves as American while embracing their Mexican heritage within their homes and family units. However, in the face of staunch social discrimination outside the home, many Mexican American youths were unsure of the extent to which they could embrace or reject their ethnic identities.
Sánchez explores the dilemma of “the balance between what was ‘Mexican’ in one’s past with what was ‘American’ in one’s present” through the lens of a student youth organization formed in 1934 called the Mexican American Movement (MAM; 255). In particular, he relies on articles published in the Mexican Voice, a newspaper written and published by members of MAM starting in 1938, to illustrate how the second generation of Mexican Americans had formed their cultural identity prior to World War II. MAM’s members espoused a philosophy of individual improvement, largely based on a personal dedication to education. Sánchez describes the biographies of MAM’s leaders, which were published in the Voice in an effort to provide role models for Mexican American youth. The emphasis on staying in school, however, did not reflect the reality of the segregated and poor educational conditions of the LA school system. To Sánchez, MAM signifies the sense of naïve optimism held by some Chicano students, who believed that any individual could overcome discrimination through hard work and perseverance.
At the same time, however, as the population of Latino teenagers and young adults became increasingly visible in LA, they became the targets of Anglo-American suspicion and distain. Many Chicano teenagers were forced to drop out of high school or junior high school in East LA to work and contribute to their family income. Sánchez notes that many young Chicano men chose to visually express their estrangement from middle-class Anglo-American culture through fashion by wearing oversized “zoot suits.” Additionally, they formed Mexican American social groups, such as MAM and the 38th Street Club, which were primarily recreational but misperceived as potential criminal gangs by outsiders. Sánchez explains how two highly publicized events—the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial in 1942 and the Zoot Suit Riots in 1943—captured the “Anglo-American cultural intolerance of racial and cultural differences” that branded Mexican American youth as dangerous and led to mass violence against and incarceration of many young Chicano men in particular (167). He closes with the words of Mexican writer Octavio Paz, whose description of adolescent Chicanos “symbolized the suspension between cultures of the Mexican American” while overlooking the younger generation’s unique skill of cultural adaptability (269).
Conclusion Summary
Sánchez concludes his work by pivoting to the 1980s, imploring the reader to imagine the scene at the transnational terminal of the LA International Airport the week before Christmas. He notes that modern conveniences like telephones and air travel have “altered the nature of immigrant adjustment” (271). However, analyzing the cultural adaptation of Mexican immigrants in the early 20th century, he argues, provides us with a better understanding of the “broader implications of acculturation and ethnicity in late twentieth-century American society” (272). Although subtle changes occurred in the immigrant generation, it was their children who experienced a much more profound cultural adaptation, as they bridged two cultures and formed a new zone for cultural revival and reinvention in East LA. These transformations mainly took place within the context of working-class families, who adopted different strategies of cultural assimilation and resistance.
Sánchez observes that, despite their best efforts, neither the Mexican nor the American governments succeeded in their attempts at enforcing programs of cultural adaptation, yielding instead to the cultural, social, and economic forces that shaped Mexican American identity in the early 20th century. He closes with a final anecdote regarding Zeferino Ramírez, who remained in East LA for the rest of his life, and whose influence is immortalized in a monument at the entrance to Belvedere that memorializes the lives of those Mexican Americans who died during World War II.
Part 4, Chapter 10-Conclusion Analysis
Part 4 explores the concept of “ambivalent Americanism,” which was first featured in Zeferino Ramírez’s unwillingness to claim naturalized American citizenship, despite the threat to his community. Chapter 10 examines the impact of the Great Depression and the subsequent repatriation campaigns on the cultural development of the Mexican American community in Los Angeles. When faced with the decision of whether to return to Mexico or endure racism and financial hardship in the United States, most Mexican immigrants were unsure of how to proceed. Chapters 11 and 12 detail the experience of the second generation of the Mexican American community, who became increasingly involved in the organized labor and civil rights movements. Refusing to content themselves with second-class citizenship, Chicanos actively pursued their right to equal treatment and opportunity as American citizens.
Chapter 10 begins amid the Great Depression, which disproportionately affected Mexican laborers, leaving them to rely on charity and public services for survival. Agriculture was among the first industries to experience a decline almost immediately after the stock market crash of 1929, with wages falling from 35 cents an hour in 1928 to only 14 cents in 1933. Industrial work in the city was also difficult to find, particularly after the passage of the Alien Labor Act in 1931, which made it illegal for employers involved in government-sponsored projects to employ “aliens.” Both businesses and charities discriminated against Mexican families as a way to preserve jobs and public resources for “American” families. Local government officials utilized the Mexican immigrant population as a scapegoat for the city’s financial difficulties. These policies reflected the federal approach to the economic crisis. President Herbert Hoover identified Mexicans as one of the main causes of the depression because “they took jobs away from American citizens” (213), and he took steps to deport them. Among other factors, deportation and repatriation contributed to a sharp drop in the Mexican population of Los Angeles, of as much as 30%, between 1930 and 1935.
Rather than focus on the experience of repatriation, Sánchez examines the effects that repatriation campaigns and the depopulation of Mexican Los Angeles had on the cultural development of its members and communities. Repatriation occurred in three distinct stages. Early attempts at deportation and repatriation in 1930 and 1931 relied more on fear than on actual enforcement. Local officials coordinated with federal representatives of the Department of Labor to advertise city-wide raids, which promised to lead to mass deportations of anyone who could not prove American citizenship. Many Mexican laborers, particularly men who had recently immigrated, voluntarily returned to Mexico rather than face deportation. In spite of their public threats, city officials arrested and deported far fewer individuals than they cared to admit. The second round of repatriation efforts removed significantly more of the Mexican population, primarily as a result of collaboration between the US and Mexican governments, facilitated by the Mexican consulate.
In January of 1931, Los Angeles County officials approached Consul Rafael de la Colina with a plan to offer one-way train fares to Mexican residents receiving public relief. The consulate had been offering reduced-rate fares over the course of the previous winter to Mexican residents who lacked the funds to return to Mexico as an extension of the Mexican federal government’s existing repatriation efforts. By the end of 1931, the Bureau of County Welfare estimated that between 3,000 and 5,000 unemployed blue-collar workers had requested assistance with transport from Los Angeles to Mexico, and the consulate’s additional funding made it possible for the county to pack repatriation trains (216). Unlike those who had chosen to leave prior to the institution of the official repatriation campaigns, the destitute working-class Mexicans who availed of the county’s programs hoped that their return home would end the misery they had experienced in Los Angeles, but few actually experienced a change in their economic status. Most returned to their villages of origin, where they could reunite with family and neighbors rather than settle in the agricultural colonies the state had attempted to establish, or travel to urban areas that might offer more employment opportunities (217).
Repatriation slowed significantly after the first year, partially due to increasingly frequent reports of even worse living conditions in Mexico. Repatriates faced a number of difficulties readjusting to life outside of the United States. Those who had only immigrated a short time before their return fared best, but migrants who arrived with few resources or connections found it difficult to secure employment or land for farming. Families whose members had become accustomed to American sensibilities encountered a variety of challenges, ranging from more restrictive mores for young women to a general lack of modern kitchen and bathroom facilities. Children who had not grown up in Mexico also struggled in school, usually due to a lack of fluency in Spanish (218). Angered by the Mexican government’s lack of material support, repatriates called for agrarian reform and a halt to the repatriation campaigns, until the government was ready to fulfill its “thousand promises of improvement and aid to all Mexican who returns to their native country” (219).
Despite county officials continuing to promote repatriation, by April of 1933 most Mexicans had eliminated returning to Mexico as a solution to their economic struggle. News of repatriates attempting to immigrate to the United States once more stalled interest, particularly after the Mexican consul publicly admitted that the Mexican government was under no obligation to help repatriates who had returned voluntarily. By the summer of 1933 it seemed that anyone considering leaving for Mexico had already gone. These individuals comprised almost one third of the Mexican population of Los Angeles, who left families and property owners behind in a community transformed (221). Racism and harassment spurred on the final phase of repatriation, in which police and welfare officials manipulated public relief systems and pressured Chicanos to return to Mexico regardless of the length of time they had lived in the United States. Discrimination and mistreatment deeply affected the Chicano community during the Great Depression, as most Mexicans who remained in Los Angeles lived in fear of unlawful deportation (223-24).
Repatriation produced several major demographic consequences within the Mexican community of Los Angeles. Many of the repatriates were single men who had defined life in the area of the central Plaza, leaving the Plaza to be “restored” by middle-class Anglo Americans. The families that remained in the city were further concentrated in East LA, and, since a majority of white-collar workers returned to Mexico, their communities became increasingly linked to the blue-collar working class. Repatriation decimated the foreign-born immigrant community, meaning that Mexican communities in LA experienced a major shift toward “second-generation domination” (225). The transition to the new generation redefined the political and cultural attitudes of the Chicano community and produced new trends in ethnic leadership and expressions of cultural identity. Although repatriation, discrimination, and segregation made the Mexican immigrant community in Los Angeles much less visible, this generation of American-born Chicanos, who came of age during the Great Depression, were much more vocal in pursuing their community’s interests than their parents could have imagined.
The onset of the Great Depression fomented a new sense of political activism in the Chicano community. The inauguration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signaled economic relief for many Mexicans, who were motivated to apply for naturalization to gain access to work relief programs. The community also identified strongly with the president’s message of national unity during a time of crisis. This sense of optimism was challenged by the discrimination that Mexican Americans faced from both relief officials and exploitative employers. Many entered the workforce at a time when industrial unions were taking off in power, leading working-class youth to invest their energy in labor organizing and in the creation of a political and social discourse that reflected their identity as American citizens.
Although Mexican laborers had previously participated in agricultural union efforts and radical activism in the first decades of the 20th century, it was not until the 1930s that blue-collar Mexican and Mexican Americans became a significant force in labor union activity. Furthermore, as men lost their white-collar jobs during the Depression, women came to constitute a majority of the industrial workforce. Many young women pursued employment to provide extra financial support for their families and would convince their mothers to join them in the factory, creating a natural overlap of intergenerational interests. Mexican women were among the most active in strike activities and were able to utilize a number of new organizing strategies, including bilingual advertising and information-sharing over the radio (233). Because the ultimate goal of union efforts was ostensibly the improvement of the family’s economic condition, labor politics represented a legitimate, culturally acceptable approach for women to pursue further involvement in the American political scene. Informed by the ideological tradition of the Mexican Revolution, as well as by their own identity as American citizens, Chicanas were able to fight for social and economic improvements for their community utilizing the rhetoric of justice, equity, and the American dream (239).
During the 1930s, Mexican workers frequently experienced a clash between their role in labor organization and their national identity. The patriotic rhetoric encouraged by the language of the New Deal led many individuals to reconsider the definition of Americanism to emphasize the cooperation among Americans of different ethnic backgrounds. Few organizations, however, were as vocal on the theme of racial equality as the American Communist Party. In 1935 the Party began to pursue a “Popular Front” strategy by focusing its efforts on the support of new industrial and ethnic organizations across the country. A few years later, in 1938, Latinos in the Southwest founded the National Congress of Spanish Speaking Peoples (El Congreso de Pueblos que Hablan Español) and organized the first national civil rights conference for Spanish-speaking people. Modeled on the National Negro Conference, which had previously been founded by members of the American Communist Party in 1935, El Congreso sought to appeal to all Latinos and centered their organizing strategy around union activity. Part of El Congreso’s plan to eliminate discrimination against Spanish-speaking people relied on the implementation of public education programs to “denounce theories of racial supremacy” and increase awareness of the historical and cultural contributions of Latinos in the United States (247). El Congreso also advocated for naturalization and the implementation of change through participation in elections.
The new form of ethnic “Americanism” that arose as a result of Chicano political and labor involvement informs many of the cultural issues addressed in Chapter 12, “The Rise of the Second Generation.” The youth that came of age in the 1930s and 1940s were forced to navigate new forms of cultural adjustment that were very different from those previously experienced by their parents. Sánchez identifies three institutions that shaped the lives of Chicano adolescents and young adults: the family, the school, and the workplace (255). The different values and expectations that Chicano youth encountered in these arenas produced considerable internal conflict regarding the balance of the “Mexican” and “American” manifestations of their identity. These conflicts also emerged in the founding of new organizations meant to address issues of Mexican American identity.
Sánchez chooses to focus his analysis on the development of the Mexican American Movement (MAM), a Chicano student organization that was borne out of Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) clubs in 1934 to discover how Chicano youth perceived themselves and their environment in the years prior to World War II. Sánchez argues that, while other historians have identified the period after World War II as a watershed moment in the formation of Chicano culture and identity, much of the second generation’s cultural identity had already formed before the war (256). MAM’s members insisted that Mexican Americans could only improve their economic and social position through education, despite the dismal educational conditions and high drop-out rate for Chicano students. Rather than address any of the psychological or social repercussions of discrimination aimed at Mexican American youth, MAM utilized its newspaper, the Mexican Voice, to publish profiles of Mexican students whom the organization considered role models. Most of the featured individuals had supported themselves through high school and college to achieve a degree and had gone on to use their personal success to uplift their communities. MAM’s members also made it clear that, while they cherished their Mexican heritage, they were committed to their role as American citizens and as active contributors to American society.
Sánchez contrasts the optimism and confidence of MAM’s members with the public portrayal of Chicano youth in the 1940s, who “were increasingly viewed as a threat to the stability of Los Angeles by a large proportion of the Anglo-American population” (267). Segregation in schools and discrimination at the hands of police and other public authorities had led Chicano working-class youth to become estranged from a Los Angeles society controlled by Anglo Americans. Young men, in particular, expressed their opposition to these alienating social norms through fashion. The zoot suit, consisting of a long jacket, draped trousers, and a broad-brimmed hat, became an emblem of Chicano working-class youth, primarily because it did not conform to the War Production Board’s regulations for the manufacture of suits with minimal fabric (265). Newspapers increasingly identified the “zoot suiter menace” with alleged Chicano “gang” activity and identified Chicano youth as “the enemy within” (267). Racial tensions came to a boil in June of 1943, when US servicemen and civilians hunted and attacked Mexican American youth across Los Angeles over the course of ten days, in what newspapers coined the “Zoot Suit Riots.”
Amid this external opposition, young Mexican American adults also had to navigate intergenerational misunderstandings with their parents, a challenge that both disenchanted working-class youths and members of organizations like MAM faced. Despite the overt threats to their communities, Mexican-born immigrants still hesitated to apply for naturalization. Rebecca Muñoz, a MAM member from Tempe, Arizona, characterized her frustration with politically absent Mexicans in writing that they were “sadly lacking the desire to make the best of these opportunities…partly due to a certain indifference to anything that may happen here, since they prefer to live in their memories of the old country” (262). American-born youth were also more openly critical of the Mexican government since they held no allegiance to the Mexican state. Most adolescents and young adults struggled to balance the expectations of their parents within the home with the cultural realities of society outside the home. In the end, however, members of this second generation argued that the development of a dual identity actually honored the sacrifices their parents had made, since their participation in Los Angeles society presented opportunities for both personal and community elevation (263).
Sánchez closes with an excerpt from Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude in which Paz describes the Chicanos he encountered in Los Angeles as “persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger’s look because it could strip them and leave them stark naked” (268). Paz perceives Chicanos as Mexicans disguised as Americans, who have adapted their behavior and ideology to the point that they are neither fully one nor the other. Sánchez disagrees, writing “Most [Mexican Americans] had no difficulty seeing themselves as both Mexican and American. They knew that they had become cultural bridges between two lands; in fact, they had created a new borderlands in the east-side barrios in which cultural revival and re-creation were ever-present” (272). Studying the formation of these cultural bridges through gradual adaptation not only informs our understanding of the past, but also of present and future cultural and political trends within the Chicano community.
