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.
Themes
The Adaptation of “Traditional” Community Life to an Industrializing Society
Throughout each chapter, Sánchez undermines earlier anthropological arguments that Mexican communities, whether in Mexico or the United States, remained traditional or static in the early 20th century. Mexicans did not abandon their traditional practices altogether, but they adapted these practices and community-held values to reflect the rapid social and economic changes occurring around them. This process began in Mexico at the end of the 19th century, when the Mexican government, under the control of dictator Porfirio Díaz, pursued a policy of intense industrialization to modernize Mexico as a nation. Although Sánchez acknowledges that more remote regions of Mexico were impacted differently, he chooses to focus on the northern states and central plateau, where the majority of those who immigrated to the United States originated. The areas closest to the border with Texas were the first to experience industrialization, but the expansion of the railways connected communities deeper in the Mexican interior to urban centers in the northern states, and to Mexico City.
The industrialization of a previously rural society yields several predictable patterns, including the restructuring of traditional economies and an increase in geographic mobility. The opening chapters of Becoming Mexican American demonstrate the myriad of social changes brought on by evolving economic factors in Mexican villages, but similar adaptations also took place among the Mexican immigrant community of Los Angeles. The restructuring of the family unit is particularly significant, because as women and adolescents became increasingly expected to participate in some form of industrial labor, the family hierarchy was impacted, and parents experienced less control over their children. Within the Mexican immigrant community, neighborhoods became segmented according to the class and occupations of its residents, rather than, for example, their region of origin.
The creation of an ethnic American identity within the barrios of East Los Angeles represented the pinnacle of this process of community adaptation. The residents of these neighborhoods embraced their identity as members of the broader American society, but the “Mexican soul” also continued to exist through community celebrations and everyday practices, such as the consumption of Mexican music or the display of Mexican iconography throughout the home (124). Although Mexican immigrants and their children became accustomed to life in a major industrialized city like Los Angeles, some aspects of village life endured.
The Role of Women in Defining and Defending New Cultural Norms
In the Introduction, Sánchez observes that previous studies of Chicano culture and history have downplayed or ignored the significant contributions women made in the development of new cultural values and practices in the Los Angeles community. (8) Sánchez makes an obvious effort to include Mexican and Chicana women in his study and reveals that often they were the ones driving cultural evolution. Women are not presented separately from men, but in the absence of the men of the family traveling to work elsewhere, women assumed the duties that would traditionally have fallen within the male realm. Women also had to make major decisions in the process of sending family members across the border, as illustrated by the experience of the Astengo family in Chapter 6. Sánchez does not, however, solely focus on the role of women within the home or the structure of the family, but observes their increasing significance within American labor.
Although women in the Mexican immigrant communities of Los Angeles continued to retain some traditional responsibilities, such as childrearing and the observance of familial religious practices, they also contributed financially to the upkeep of the family. Initially, young women pursued employment either to support their family or to strike out on their own. Older women, however, also enjoyed the freedom associated with having their own income. Sánchez notes that, during the Great Depression in the 1930s, daughters who began working in factories would often convince their Mexican-born mothers to join them (232). This intergenerational cooperation contributed to the success of women’s labor campaigns, which produced new labor organizing techniques that expanded the impact of their activities and led to some of the most successful labor campaigns of the century (233). Women were the force behind many cultural evolutions, from marriage practices to fashion and recreational activities, but, as Sánchez demonstrates, they were also responsible for developing the patriotic rhetoric that called for equality and justice across social and racial groups in the southwestern United States.
The Development of Labor Organizing in Southern California
Labor is a significant theme throughout Sánchez’s work, not only because it was demand for labor that drove immigration, but also because the generation of Mexican immigrants that settled in Southern California in the first three decades of the 20th century laid the groundwork for some of the United States’ most influential labor movements after World War II. Various components of the ideology of the Mexican Revolution and of the ensuing civil war contributed to a unique relationship with activism and patriotic discourse in the southwestern United States, and that experience would eventually translate into successful agricultural and industrial labor campaigns. Sánchez points out that Mexicans in the Southwest would have been familiar with the social reform activism of the anarchist Flores Magón brothers, who challenged the Mexican government from exile during the Mexican civil war (110). The involvement of other Mexican political factions residing in the United States gave many Mexican immigrants the opportunity to participate in more radical forms of activism, which informed their approach to labor organizing in the decades afterwards (230).
Mexican laborers first became involved in agricultural labor campaigns, such as the Oxnard sugar beet strike in 1903 (230). Throughout the following years, Communist organizers sought to unify the 200,000 agricultural workers present in California, 75% of whom were of Mexican origin. Their efforts came to fruition in the 1930s, when Mexican agricultural laborers experienced the worst effects of the nationwide depression (235). Sánchez highlights the 1933 El Monte Berry Strike as being particularly influential for future campaigns, as Communist organizers pushed forward with a plan for transforming “the radical tradition Mexican laborers derived from the Mexican Revolution in to a new ‘American’ form of radicalism” (237). Mexican women involved in the 1933 Dressmakers’ Strike adopted their nationalist rhetoric, arguing that “Americanism” meant equity for all ethnic workers, while also demanding the same material aid from the Mexican consulate that had been provided to the striking male agricultural workers earlier in the year (238-39). This patriotic form of activism became characteristic of Mexican American labor organizers, who developed close ties with the American Communist Party as one of the only organizations that emphasized unity across racial lines in the pursuit of justice for the working class.
The Rise of Nationalism in the 20th Century
The rise of ethnic nationalism is one of the defining characteristics of 20th-century history, and it is deeply ingrained in the cultural factors that Sánchez chose to study. Porfirio Díaz first tried to unite the Mexican nation under his rule through the introduction of industry and “modern” economic and social values. Although he succeeded in connecting parts of the country through the railway system, many Mexicans remained uninterested in events on the national level, particularly if their communities were located at a distance from an industrial hub or railway line. The Mexican Revolution stoked nationalist sentiment and rhetoric, as many different factions fought to overthrow the dictatorship and establish a national government that was truly “Mexican.” The progressives who won out attempted to rewrite the history of the Mexican nation, emphasizing its Spanish roots and creating a pantheon of heroes that included warriors from the “lost” indigenous civilizations that pre-dated its founding. At the same time, the United States was in the process of defining its own national identity as a civilizing force in the world.
The “Americanization” and “Mexicanization” programs that Sánchez examines in Chapters 4 and 5 are a direct result of the nationalistic fervor that gripped both countries. Americanization was not just an invention of midwestern Protestants searching for order, but also an implicit indication of the fact that their culture and values were the definition of what it meant to be “American.” In reality, the idealized version of American values presented to Mexican immigrants was unattainable. Americanizers considered Mexican culture to be naturally inferior, but they also considered Mexican immigrants incapable of becoming 100% American. Thus, Americanization programs were predicated on Mexican immigrants’ abandonment of their inferior culture, while simultaneously accepting their role as second-class citizens, destined to do the work that Anglo Americans would not do (105).
Mexicanization was not much different. The Mexican government touted the same “modern” values as its American counterparts but attached them to a different national myth. All Mexicans were meant to embody the values of the Mexican Revolution and glorify the Mexican nation. In attempting to convince Mexican immigrants to return to Mexico, the government hoped to secure a large, well trained industrial workforce made up of peasants that the state had previously discounted because of their indigenous heritage. The Mexican elite also perceived Mexican emigrants as inherently inferior and assumed that they would accept second-class citizenship in Mexico as fulfilling their responsibility to the nation. Upon returning to Mexico, however, these repatriates discovered that the conditions were much worse than they had been led to believe, resulting in social unrest and labor disputes.
Nationalist competition played out through the Mexican population in Los Angeles because it was thought that members of the immigrant community could and should only be loyal to one nation, not both. Issues of national allegiance became particularly problematic during World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, as Mexicans were treated with suspicion and used as scapegoats for economic and social strife. However, the second generation of American-born Mexicans quickly learned to utilize nationalist rhetoric to argue for justice and equal rights on behalf of their community as American citizens. Although Sánchez never focuses specifically on the subject of 20th-century nationalism, the inherent problems it created are present throughout almost every element of his study.
