Post #11, Comments on Becoming Mexican American (for 14 Nov seminar)
Post #11, Comments on Becoming Mexican American (for 14 Nov seminar)
I also commented on Dave's site .
This book offers an alternative to the traditional study of the immigrant experience in America. Instead of the traditional story of European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island and then settling in either the industrial Northeast or the agrarian Old Northwest, Sanchez challenges us to consider the story of Mexican immigrants entering the United States between 1900-1945, and their subsequent settling in Los Angeles. While this book does an impressive job explaining how religion, family, music, labor relations and education were integral parts of the immigrant experience, I was fascinated by the parallels between the book’s sections on assimilation and the current events in France.
If history is, at least in part, intended to explain how events helped shape life in the past as a way of helping us understand the same relationship today, this book served that purpose in spades. Sanchez offers “important alternative theoretical approaches such as internal colonialism, the process of barrioization, or the dual labor market theory to explain the constraints on assimiliation.” (p. 7) He also explains the cultural, governmental (both American and Mexican) and social brakes applied to the process, but asserts that despite all that, the process went on anyway. Once a person had arrived from Mexico, either directly or following a sojourn elsewhere in America, Sanchez contends that chances were good the person would either assimilate, return to Mexico, or (rarely) lodge in an enclave resisting either preceding alternative. It is that last category, the resistant enclave dweller, that gave me pause.
Drawing parallels to current events is never a precise or intrinsically fair process. Nevertheless, the current firestorm (literally and figuraitively) in France merits comparison. In the latter case, large numbers of obviously non-native peoples have settled in a strongly nationalistic (these people regulate unwanted additions to their language) state that has largely ignored their presence. (for a more detailed analysis, see Eugene Robinson’s column “Where France Failed” on the OpEd page of Saturday’s Washington Post) The immigrants in question have been awarded sustenance and shelter, but no offer of inclusion. Thus, without potential of ever becoming truly one of the whole, this group had chosen to remain apart, and thus allowed the seeds of bitterness, anger and radicalism to sprout.
Taking Sanchez’s portrait of similar process regarding Mexican Americans in comparison, he states “ironically, it was not the search for Mexican nationalism which engendered political radicalism for large numbers of Mexican and Mexican Americans in the 1930s, but the forging of a new identity as ethnic Americans.” (p. 12) While there were cases of violence, (Sanchez offers the Sleepy Lagoon murder, labor organization, and the Zoot Suit Riots as cases in counterpoint) the Mexican American experience was largely marked by frustration with bigotry and a large hiatus in progress as the Great Depression stalled the forward momentum, the Mexican American adjustment to life in Los Angeles was by and large an incremental process of small steps toward a larger goal. By Mexican Americans downplaying consequences of obvious differences, Sanchez believed that whites were “more apt to see Japanese and Chinese immigrants as “unassimiliable,” these reformers considered the Mexican immigrant as similar to the European in adaptability.” (p. 95)
While there are plenty of injustices yet to work out, Mexican Americans have largely succeeded in carving out a new ethnic identity. One of the slogans of the Mexican American Movement is illuminating: “Experience reveals that Equality, like its companion, Freedom, exists in four modes—
The equality which God gives,
The equality which the State gives,
The equality which a man wins for himself,
The equality which one bestows on another.”
By concentrating on the third, and allowing progress in that area to positively affect the others, Mexican Americans have succeeded in ways that continue to allude immigrants living in enclaves without any assimilation at all. Sanchez’s book is history done well, and has resonance in the present as well as the past.
I also commented on Dave's site .
This book offers an alternative to the traditional study of the immigrant experience in America. Instead of the traditional story of European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island and then settling in either the industrial Northeast or the agrarian Old Northwest, Sanchez challenges us to consider the story of Mexican immigrants entering the United States between 1900-1945, and their subsequent settling in Los Angeles. While this book does an impressive job explaining how religion, family, music, labor relations and education were integral parts of the immigrant experience, I was fascinated by the parallels between the book’s sections on assimilation and the current events in France.
If history is, at least in part, intended to explain how events helped shape life in the past as a way of helping us understand the same relationship today, this book served that purpose in spades. Sanchez offers “important alternative theoretical approaches such as internal colonialism, the process of barrioization, or the dual labor market theory to explain the constraints on assimiliation.” (p. 7) He also explains the cultural, governmental (both American and Mexican) and social brakes applied to the process, but asserts that despite all that, the process went on anyway. Once a person had arrived from Mexico, either directly or following a sojourn elsewhere in America, Sanchez contends that chances were good the person would either assimilate, return to Mexico, or (rarely) lodge in an enclave resisting either preceding alternative. It is that last category, the resistant enclave dweller, that gave me pause.
Drawing parallels to current events is never a precise or intrinsically fair process. Nevertheless, the current firestorm (literally and figuraitively) in France merits comparison. In the latter case, large numbers of obviously non-native peoples have settled in a strongly nationalistic (these people regulate unwanted additions to their language) state that has largely ignored their presence. (for a more detailed analysis, see Eugene Robinson’s column “Where France Failed” on the OpEd page of Saturday’s Washington Post) The immigrants in question have been awarded sustenance and shelter, but no offer of inclusion. Thus, without potential of ever becoming truly one of the whole, this group had chosen to remain apart, and thus allowed the seeds of bitterness, anger and radicalism to sprout.
Taking Sanchez’s portrait of similar process regarding Mexican Americans in comparison, he states “ironically, it was not the search for Mexican nationalism which engendered political radicalism for large numbers of Mexican and Mexican Americans in the 1930s, but the forging of a new identity as ethnic Americans.” (p. 12) While there were cases of violence, (Sanchez offers the Sleepy Lagoon murder, labor organization, and the Zoot Suit Riots as cases in counterpoint) the Mexican American experience was largely marked by frustration with bigotry and a large hiatus in progress as the Great Depression stalled the forward momentum, the Mexican American adjustment to life in Los Angeles was by and large an incremental process of small steps toward a larger goal. By Mexican Americans downplaying consequences of obvious differences, Sanchez believed that whites were “more apt to see Japanese and Chinese immigrants as “unassimiliable,” these reformers considered the Mexican immigrant as similar to the European in adaptability.” (p. 95)
While there are plenty of injustices yet to work out, Mexican Americans have largely succeeded in carving out a new ethnic identity. One of the slogans of the Mexican American Movement is illuminating: “Experience reveals that Equality, like its companion, Freedom, exists in four modes—
The equality which God gives,
The equality which the State gives,
The equality which a man wins for himself,
The equality which one bestows on another.”
By concentrating on the third, and allowing progress in that area to positively affect the others, Mexican Americans have succeeded in ways that continue to allude immigrants living in enclaves without any assimilation at all. Sanchez’s book is history done well, and has resonance in the present as well as the past.
posted by john | 6:35 PM
1 Comments:
John,
I had some of the same thougts, only not about France, but about assimilation of Mexicans here in the U.S. I did a bit of a comparison to European immigrants. I also looked at the problem of illegal immigration today, including new waves of Mexican immigrants. I'm not sure if assimilation has worked, or is working any better here than it is in France. We just happen to be a bit wealthier. We've had our share of riots and social unrest because we would not consider equal rights, let alone assimilation.
Another interesting point I noted came from my experience in the 610 class. We spoke about films and the power of stereotypes that films reinforced and the ones the films tried to cope with. I always liked film-making from WWII. This weekend I stopped to watch some of them that were on the air because of Veterans' Day. One of the neat things done was the typical squad that had a mixed ethnic makeup (not racial, of course). Two stick oput because of their inclusion of Mexican Americans -- Guadalcanal Diary, which cast Anthony Quinn as a Mexican-American and Battleground, which cast Ricardo Montalban as the Mexican-American. Both had very prominent roles and were depicted in a very positive light.
Thanks for the blog. Interesting stuff!
Ray
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