Migration, emergent ethnicity, and the "third space": The shifting politics of nationalism in greater Mexico

Journal of American History

Volumn 86, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 481-517

  Gutiérrez, David G ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 3242764145     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2567042     Document Type: Article

References (203)

1. See Patrick J. McDonnell and Robert J. López, "70,000 March through L.A. against Prop. 187," Los Angeles Times, Oct. 17, 1994, pp. A1, A19.
2. A brief note on nomenclature: although I fully recognize the impossibility of reducing to simple categories the almost infinitely complex amalgams that constitute people's sense of personal and collective identity, for the sake of brevity I use the terms "Mexican" to refer to citizens of the Republic of Mexico (regardless of their ethnic background and/or primary language preference); "Mexican national" to describe citizens of Mexico physically present in the United States; "Mexican American" to refer to United States-born or naturalized American citizens of Mexican descent (however distant that descent may be); "Chicano" to refer to Mexican Americans who use this term as a self-referent; and "ethnic Mexican" as an overarching descriptor of the combined population of Mexican origin or Mexican descent living on both sides of the current border between the United States and Mexico (that is, regardless of their formal nationality). As a matter of convenience, I use the umbrella term "Latino" to describe all other residents of Latin American or Spanish-speaking Caribbean descent. For the same reason, I use the terms "European immigrants" and "white Americans" to refer to non-Hispanic white residents. I hope the text makes clear just how crude and arbitrary I consider each of these terms to be.
3. Grahame L. Jones, "Mexico Is Right at Home in Win," Los Angeles Times, Feb. 16, 1998, p. C1.
4. Grahame L. Jones, "This Is Much Worse than Trash Talking," Los Angeles Times, ibid., p. C7.
5. In this essay, I follow Américo Paredes's example by focusing in particular on the United States-Mexico "borderlands" (defined very roughly as the territory now demarcated as the northern tier of states in Mexico and the southwestern states of the United States), but, as should become clear in the text, my general argument to some extent extends both to Mexico proper and to settlements of ethnic Mexicans in the United States that are located well away from the border. For his explication of the term, see Américo Paredes, Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border (Austin, 1993).
6. Manuel Gamio, Forjando Patria (Mexico City, 1960).
7. See also D. A. Brading, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge, U.K., 1985);
8. and Alan Knight, "Peasants into Patriots: Thoughts on the Making of the Mexican Nation," Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 10 (Winter 1994), 135-62.
9. For suggestive studies exploring the complexities of identity formation and the role of nascent popular nationalisms in the Mexican North, see, for example, David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque, 1982);
10. Ramon A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, 1991);
11. Ana Maria Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico's Northern Frontier (Tucson, 1995);
12. and Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley, 1995).
13. For more recent studies that bring even finer focus to these issues, see Andrés Reséndez, "Caught between Profits and Rituals: Native Contestation in Texas and New Mexico" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1997);
14. Raúl Ramos, "From Norteño to Tejano: The Rise of Borderlands Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Political Identity in Bexar, 1811-1861" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, forthcoming, 1999); and
15. Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez, "Identity on the Texas-Tamaulipas Border: Citizenship, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Nineteenth Century" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, forthcoming, 1999).
16. See David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin, 1987), esp. 34-41, 309-12.
17. For some suggestive initial forays in this direction, see, for example, Deena J. Gonzales, "Las Tules of Image and Reality: Euro-American Attitudes and Legend Formation on a Spanish-Mexican Frontier," in Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, ed. Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera (Berkeley, 1993), 75-90;
18. Gilbert Hinojosa, A Borderlands Town in Transition: Laredo, 1755-1870 (College Station, Tex., 1983);
19. and Leonard Pitt, Decline of the Californias: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 (Berkeley, 1966).
20. The contradictions and social fracturing created by such efforts are discussed in Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, 1994);
21. Leticia Magda Garza-Falcón, Gente Decente: A Borderlands Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance (Austin, 1998);
22. Genaro Padilla, My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison, 1993);
23. and Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities: The Californio "Testimonios" (Minneapolis, 1995).
24. Neil Foley, "Becoming Hispanic: Mexican Americans and the Faustian Pact with Whiteness," in Reflexiones 1997: New Directions in Mexican American Studies, ed. Neil Foley (Austin, 1998), 53-70.
25. Foley provides a more extended contextual discussion in Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, 1997);
26. see also Ramón A. Gutiérrez, "Unraveling America's Hispanic Past: Internal Stratification and Class Boundaries," Aztlán, 17 (Spring 1986), 79-102;
27. and David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, 1992), 335-60.
28. For earlier treatments of this phenomenon, see Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 277-96;
29. and Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the Southwest (New York, 1948).
30. See, for example, Jane Dysart, "Mexican Women in San Antonio, 1830-1860: The Assimilation Process," Western Historical Quarterly, 7 (Oct. 1976), 365-77;
31. Darlis A. Miller, "Cross-Cultural Marriages in the Southwest: The New Mexico Experience, 1846-1900," New Mexico Historical Review, 57 (Oct. 1982), 335-59;
32. Sandra L. Myres, "Mexican Americans and Westering Anglos: A Feminine Perspective," New Mexico Historical Review, ibid., 317-33;
33. and Rebecca McDowell Craver, The Impact of Intimacy: Mexican-Anglo Intermarriage in New Mexico, 1821-1846 (El Paso, 1982).
34. Different social theorists have used different inflections of the notion of a third space in their still-evolving efforts to describe and analyze the unsettled situations of colonized or diasporic populations. Drawing from this ongoing work, my use of the term is meant to denote the social spaces where marginalized people have forged new identities in reaction to, and often in opposition to, their marginalization. In short, like the anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, I envision third spaces as the dynamic social sites where people construct senses of community based both on "recognition of cultural similarity or social contiguity" and in reaction to externally imposed processes of "exclusion and constructions of otherness." See Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, "Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era," in Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Durham, 1997), 13.
35. For more general discussions of the relationship of power, place, and identity formation in the interstitial social location of the third space, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, U.K., 1991);
36. John Comaroff, "Humanity, Ethnicity, Nationality: Conceptual Perspectives in the U.S.S.R.," Theory and Society, 20 (1991), 661-87;
37. Homi Bhabha, "The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha," in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London, 1990), 207-21;
38. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994);
39. and Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
40. Albert M. Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), esp. 53-78, 117-20;
41. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850-1890: A Social History (Berkeley, 1979);
42. Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin, 1983).
43. For similar arguments for Texas, see Arnoldo De León, The Tejano Community, 1836-1900 (Albuquerque, 1982);
44. for New Mexico, see Robert J. Rosenbaum, Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest: "The Sacred Right of Self-Preservation" (Austin, 1981).
45. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989), 264.
46. David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley, 1995), 35-36.
47. "Pronunciamento, Rancho del Carmen, 30 September 1859," in Juan Cortina and the Texas-Mexico Frontier, 1859-1877, ed. Jerry D. Thompson (El Paso, 1994), 14, 16, 17, 18. For general discussion of social banditry among Mexican Americans at this time, see
48. Rosenbaum, Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest; and Albert Camarillo and Pedro Castillo, eds., Furia y Muerte: Los Bandidos Chicanos (Fury and death: The Chicano bandits) (Los Angeles, 1973).
49. See excerpts of the Vásquez interview in "Revenge Took Possession of Me," in Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans, ed. David J. Weber (Albuquerque, 1973), 227.
50. Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution (2 vols., Cambridge, Eng., 1986), I, 2. Estimates vary widely, but most demographic historians agree that at least 600,000 and perhaps as many as 1,000,000 Mexicans migrated to the United States between 1900 and 1929. For a brief discussion of population trends during this period, see
51. Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States, 1900-1940 (Westport, 1976), 265-73.
52. On the ambiguities of Americanization programs, see Mark Reisler, "Always the Laborer, Never the Citizen: Anglo Perceptions of the Mexican Immigrant during the 1920s," Pacific Historical Review, 2 (May 1976), 231-54;
53. Gilbert G. González, "Segregation of Mexican Children in a Southern California City: The Legacy of Expansionism and the American Southwest," Western Historical Quarterly, 16 (Jan. 1985), 55-76;
54. Gilbert G. González, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (Philadelphia, 1990);
55. and George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York, 1993), esp. 87-107.
56. For samplings of recent analyses of various campaigns of national integration between 1900 and 1940, see Ilene V. O'Malley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the Mexican State, 1920-1940 (New York, 1986), esp. 3-17, 113-32;
57. Alan Knight, "Revolutionary Project, Recalcitrant People: Mexico, 1910-1940," in The Revolutionary Process in Mexico: Essays on Political and Social Change, 1880-1940, ed. Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (Los Angeles, 1990), 227-64;
58. Alan Knight, "Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940," Hispanic American Historical Review, 74 (no. 3, 1994), 393-444;
59. Knight, "Peasants into Patriots"; and Mary Kay Vaughan, "The Construction of the Patriotic Festival in Tecamachalco, Puebla, 1900-1946," in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, ed. William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E. French (Wilmington, 1994), 213-46.
60. Sahlins, Boundaries, 145.
61. The phrase is found in Knight, "Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico," 406. For discussion of the activities of the consulates in the United States, see Juan Gómez-Quiñones, "Piedras contra la Luna, México en Aztlán y Aztlán en México: Chicano-Mexican Relations and the Mexican Consulates, 1900-1920," in Contemporary Mexico: Papers of the Fourth International Congress of Mexican History, ed. James W. Wilkie, Michael C. Meyer, and Edna Monzón de Wilkie (Berkeley, 1976), 494-527;
62. Francisco Balderrama, In Defense of La Raza: The Los Angeles Mexican Consulate and the Mexican Community, 1929 to 1936 (Tucson, 1982);
63. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, esp. 108-25;
64. Gilbert G. González, Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950 (Urbana, 1994), esp. 77-84, 135-45, 154-60;
65. and Gilbert G. González, "Company Unions, the Mexican Consulates, and the Imperial Valley Agricultural Strikes, 1928-1934," Western Historical Quarterly, 27 (Spring 1996), 53-73-
66. Vaughan, "The Construction of the Patriotic Festival," 233.
67. Indeed, many went to their graves (in the United States) clinging to this vision of return. For insightful discussions of how this romantic popular nationalism played itself out in two southwestern cities, see F. Arturo Rosales, "Shifting Self-Perceptions and Ethnic Consciousness among Mexicans in Houston 1908-1946," Aztlán, 16 (nos. 1 & 2, 1987), 71-94;
68. and Roberto R. Treviño, "Prensa y patria: The Spanish-Language Press and the Biculturation of the Tejano Middle Class, 1920-1940," Western Historical Quarterly, 22 (Nov. 1991), 451-72.
69. For other discussions of the complicated ideological positionings of the segment of the ethnic Mexican population Richard A. García termed los ricos (the rich ones), see Richard A. García, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class: San Antonio, 1929-1941 (College Station, Tex., 1991);
70. Mario T. García, "La Frontera: The Border as Symbol and Reality in Mexican-American Thought," Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 1 (Summer 1985), 195-225;
71. Treviño, "Prensa y patria";
72. González, Labor and Community, 78-84, 175-77;
73. Garza-Falcón, Gente Decente; Elliott Young, "Deconstructing La Raza: Identifying the Gente Decente of Laredo, 1904-1911," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 98 (Oct. 1994), 227-59;
74. and Elliott Young, "Red Men, Princess Pocahantas, and George Washington: Harmonizing Race Relations in Laredo at the Turn of the Century," Western Historical Quarterly, 29 (Spring 1998), 49-88.
75. For the most recent scholarship on LULAC'S ideology and activities during this critical period, see Mario T. García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930-1960 (New Haven, 1989), esp. 25-61;
76. and Cynthia Orozco, "The Origins of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement in Texas with an Analysis of Women's Political Participation in a Gendered Context, 1910-1929" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1993).
77. For more critical discussion of the racial and class dimensions of LULAC'S early rhetoric and political activities, see Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, esp. 74-89;
78. Benjamin Márquez, LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization (Austin, 1993); and
79. Foley, "Becoming Hispanic."
80. For the most recent analysis of the mass repatriation campaigns of the Great Depression, see Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque, 1995).
81. For provocative preliminary theoretical explorations of what Edward Soja calls "lived space as a strategic [political] location," see Soja, Thirdspace, esp. 67-100. For further theoretical explications of this theme, see, for example,
82. Charles Tilly, ed., Citizenship, Identity, and Social History (Cambridge, U.K., 1996); and
83. James Holston and Arjun Appadurai, eds., "Cities and Citizenship," a special issue of Public Culture, 8 (no. 2, 1996). For recent analyses of these mechanisms at play among ethnic Mexicans in specific locales, see
84. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, generally; and
85. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, esp. 69-116.
86. For insightful recent discussions of the evolution and links between the mutualistas and subsequent political and quasi-political local mobilizations, see, for example, Juan Gómez-Quinoñes, "The First Steps: Chicano Labor Conflict and Organizing, 1900-1920," Aztlán, 3 (Spring 1972), 13-49;
87. José Amaro Hernández, Mutual Aid for Survival: The Case of the Mexican Americans (Malabar, Fla., 1983);
88. Julie L. Pycior, "La Raza Organizes: Mexican American Life in San Antonio, 1915-1930, as Reflected in Mutualista Activities" (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1979);
89. Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (College Station, Tex., 1993), esp. 86-109;
90. and Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley, 1994), esp. 57-78.
91. Stuart Jamieson, Labor Unionism in American Agriculture (Washington, 1945);
92. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge, U.K., 1990), esp. 324-25, 338-39;
93. Douglas Monroy, "Mexicanos in Los Angeles 1930-1941: An Ethnic Group in Relation to Class Forces" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1978);
94. Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque, 1987);
95. Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1998), esp. 72-98.
96. The significance of El Congreso de Pueblos que Hablan Español is discussed in Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in California: A History of Mexican Americans in California (San Francisco, 1984), 58-64;
97. García, Mexican Americans, 145-74;
98. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 110-16;
99. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 244-52;
100. and Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows, 94-98. For a suggestive comparative analysis of the emergence of similar political perspectives in Europe in about the same period, see
101. Geoff Eley, "Legacies of Antifascism: Constructing Democracy in Postwar Europe," New German Critique, 67 (Winter 1996), 73-100.
102. These integrative trends are discussed in Cohen, Making a New Deal, 361-66;
103. Raul Morín, Among the Valiant: Mexican Americans in World War II and Korea (Alhambra, 1966);
104. García, Mexican Americans, esp. 1-22;
105. and Vicki Ruiz, "'And Miles to Go . . .': Mexican Women and Work, 1930-1985," in Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives, ed. Lillian Schlissel, Vicki Ruiz, and Janice Monk (Albuquerque, 1988), 117-36.
106. This is not to argue that ethnic Mexicans suddenly closed the educational or income gap separating them from non-Hispanic white Americans. On the contrary, although ethnic Mexicans' material conditions clearly improved in the period in question, the gap between them and the majority population closed much more slowly. Still, for the first time, large numbers of both United States-born and foreign-born ethnic Mexicans saw real improvement in their standards of living. For discussion of these general economic trends, see Vernon M. Briggs Jr., Walter Fogel, and Fred H. Schmidt, The Chicano Worker (Austin, 1979);
107. Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame, 1979); and
108. Frank D. Bean and Marta Tienda, The Hispanic Population of the United States (New York, 1987), 17-22, 280-337.
109. For some suggestive preliminary studies on intermarriage at this time, see Leo Grebler, Joan Moore, and Ralph Guzmán, The Mexican American People: The Nation's Second Largest Minority (New York, 1970), 405-19;
110. Edward Murguia, Chicano Intermarriage: A Theoretical and Empirical Study (San Antonio, 1982);
111. and Brian Gratton, F. Arturo Rosales, and Hans DeBano, "A Sample of the Mexican-American Population in 1940," Historical Methods, 21 (Spring 1988), 80-87.
112. These trends are discussed in Garcia, Mexican Americans; Guadalupe San Miguel,
113. "Let All of Them Take Heed": Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910-1981 (Austin, 1987), esp. 9-163;
114. and S. Dale McLemore and Ricardo Romo, "The Origins and Development of the Mexican American People," in The Mexican American Experience: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. Rodolfo O. de la Garza et al. (Austin, 1985), 3-32.
115. As Raymond Grew has described similar dynamics in Europe, ordinary working-class people increasingly recognized that "there were practical [political] benefits . . . that could be achieved through increased social mobility within a national community, broader participation with its implications of democracy, and stronger ties between local interests and national affairs. In return for proper behavior, the citizen gained the right to make new claims on the state." See Raymond Grew, "The Construction of National Identity," in Concepts of National Identity: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. Peter Boerner (Baden-Baden, 1986), 36.
116. Although by 1950 large numbers of ethnic Mexicans had moved out of entry-level, low-skilled, low-wage occupations into higher-wage, higher-status, skilled blue-collar jobs, a significant proportion of both the citizen and alien population remained mired at the bottom of the economy. Among Mexican American men, fully 43% were still working as unskilled workers or farm laborers in 1950. The gap had closed by 1960, but one-third of Mexican American men continued in these jobs. Nearly 56% of Mexican American women worked in low-paying operative or service occupations in 1950; by 1960, 51% were found in these same occupational categories. See Barerra, Race and Class in the Southwest, 131.
117. Renewed several times under various guises after the war, the bracero program was in place for more than twenty years. By the time the labor importation scheme was terminated by Congress in 1964, more than 5 million foreign workers - the overwhelming majority of whom were Mexican - had been contracted to work in the United States.
118. Apprehensions of unauthorized Mexican migrants climbed steadily during the first twelve years of the program. By 1947, nearly 200,000 apprehensions were reported, and the number grew to nearly 900,000 in 1953. Apprehensions peaked in 1954 when the Immigration and Naturalization Service claimed to have repatriated more than 1.1 million Mexican nationals under its infamous Operation Wetback. For discussion, see Julian Samora, Los Mojados: The Wetback Story (Notre Dame, 1971), 44-46.
119. Elliott Barkan, And Still They Come: Immigrants and American Society, 1920s to the 1990s (Wheeling, Ill., 1996), appendix, tables 7.2a and 7.3, pp. 202-3.
120. David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 106. Indeed, Mexican American civil rights organizations such as LULAC, the American G.I. Forum, and the cso and prominent political activists such as Manuel Ruiz Jr., Ernesto Galarza, and George I. Sánchez all recognized this trend and demanded that the bracero program be terminated. Sánchez summarized this position in an interview with a New York Times correspondent in 1951, arguing that, "from a cultural standpoint, the influx of a million or more wetbacks a year transforms the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest from an ethnic group which might be assimilated with reasonable facility into what I call a culturally indigestible peninsula of Mexico. The [illegal] migration tends to nullify processes of social integration going back 300 or 350 years, and I would say at the present time has set the whole assimilation process back at least twenty years."
121. Gladwyn Hill, "Peons in West Lowering Culture," New York Times, March 27, 1951, pp. 31, 33. Most Mexican American civil rights activists agreed until they reconsidered the issue during the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
122. See Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 152-205.
123. For discussion of naturalization rates during this period, see Grebler, Moore, and Guzmán, Mexican American People, 557-60;
124. and Barkan, And Still They Come, 42, 67, 106, 173.
125. Harry P. Pachón, "Political Mobilization in the Mexican-American Community," in Mexican Americans in Comparative Perspective, ed. Walker Connor (Washington, 1985), 243-56;
126. Rodolfo O. de la Garza and Louis DiSipio, "Save the Baby, Change the Bathwater, and Scrub the Tub: Latino Electoral Participation after Seventeen Years of Voting Rights Act Coverage," Texas Law Review, 71 (June 1993), 1479-1539.
127. For insightful discussions of how the process of cultural mingling and exchange influenced interethnic and intraethnic relations in Greater Mexico between the late 1920s and the late 1960s, see, for example, Maria Herrera-Sobek, The Bracero Program: Elitelore versus Folklore (Los Angeles, 1979);
128. Maria Herrera-Sobek, Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song (Bloomington, 1993);
129. Manuel Peña, The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music (Austin, 1985);
130. Vicki Ruiz, "'Star-Struck': Acculturation, Adolescence, and the Mexican-American Woman," in Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States, ed. David G. Gutiérrez (Wilmington, 1996), 125-47;
131. and Alex M. Saragoza, "Cinematic Orphans: Mexican Immigrants in the United States since the 1950s," in Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, ed. Chon Noriega (Minneapolis, 1992), 114-26. For useful comparisons of this type of interplay in different contexts, see, for example,
132. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, 1979);
133. George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (London, 1994);
134. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, 1996); and
135. José E. Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston, 1998).
136. Mexican employment statistics provide the most graphic evidence of the depth of the crisis. Between 1980 and 1996, when more than 17 million Mexicans entered the work force for the first time, it is estimated that only 2 million jobs were created in Mexico. For discussion of the many long-term implications of this sobering fact, see Enrique Dussel Peters, "Recent Structural Change in Mexico's Economy: A Preliminary Analysis of Some Sources of Mexican Migration to the United States," in Crossings: Mexican Immigration in Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Marcelo Suárez-Orozco (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 55-74.
137. For example, between 1940 and 1990, the cities of Tijuana and Mexicali in Baja California grew from populations of 16,486 and 18,775 to 742,686 and 602,390, respectively. In Sonora, the city of Nogales grew from 13,866 to more than 107,000 over the same period. In Chihuahua, Ciudad Juárez grew from 48,881 to 797,679; and in Tamaulipas, the border metropolitan areas of Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Matamoros grew from populations of 28,872, 9,412, and 15,699 in 1940 to 217,912, 281,618, and 303,392, respectively, in 1990. For population trends in northern Mexico, see Daniel D. Arreola and James R. Curtis, The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Autonomy and Place Personality (Tucson, 1993), 24-29;
138. and Roberto Ham-Chande and John R. Weeks, "A Demographic Perspective on the U.S.-Mexico Border," in Demographic Dynamics of the U.S.-Mexico Border, ed. John R. Weeks and Roberto Ham-Chande (El Paso, 1992), 1-27.
139. For demographic shifts in southwestern cities, see Hispanic Databank of U.S. Cities and Counties (Milpitas, Calif., 1994);
140. and "Top Ten Metropolitan Areas in Terms of Percentage Hispanic by 2015," American Demographics, 16 (Aug. 1994), 16.
141. For overall population trends, see U.S. Bureau of the Census, Hispanic Americans Today, Current Population Reports no. P23-183 (Washington, 1993).
142. For discussions of the current transformation of social space in Greater Mexico, see, for example, Ricardo C. Ainslie, "Cultural Mourning, Immigration, and Engagement: Vignettes from the Mexican Experience," in Crossings, ed. Suárez-Orozco, 283-300;
143. and David G. Gutiérrez, "Ethnic Mexicans and the Transformation of 'American' Social Space: Reflections on Recent History," Crossings, ibid., 307-35.
144. Jorge Chapa, "Trends in Educational and Occupational Attainment of Mexican Americans," Journal of Hispanic Policy, 4 (1990), 3-18;
145. and Elaine M. Allensworth, "Earnings Mobility of First and '1.5' Generation Mexican-Origin Women and Men: A Comparison with U.S.-Born Mexican Americans and Non-Hispanic Whites," International Migration Review, 31 (Summer 1997), 386-410.
146. The sociologist Jorge Chapa estimates that the gap between ethnic Mexicans' and non-Hispanic whites' earnings was closest in 1973 and has gradually widened since. Despite the obvious growth of a Mexican American middle class, ethnic Mexicans (including second- and third-generation United States-born cohorts) remain significantly overrepresented in the occupational category of operators, fabricators, and laborers and underrepresented in the managerial and professional occupations associated with middle-class status. Given these overall trends, it is not surprising that the poverty rate for children in 1990 had climbed to 30% for United States-born children and an astounding 42% for children who had been born in Mexico. For discussion of the development of these trends, see Chapa, "Trends in Educational and Occupational Attainment of Mexican Americans";
147. Sonia M. Pérez and Denise De La Rosa Salazar, "Economic, Labor Force, and Social Implications of Latino Educational and Population Trends," Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 15 (May 1993), 188-229;
148. and William P. O'Hare, "Race/Ethnicity and Child Poverty: A Closer Look," Population Today, 23 (March 1995), 4-5. Of course, similar, albeit less severe, trends have also affected the general working-class American population. For discussion of the larger context, see
149. Lawrence Mishel and Jared Bernstein, The State of Working America, 1992-93 (New York, 1993); and
150. Jeffrey Madrick, The End of Affluence: The Causes and Consequences of America's Economic Decline (New York, 1995).
151. On segmented assimilation, see Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, "The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (no. 530, Nov. 1993), 74-96;
152. Ruben Rumbaut, "The Crucible Within: Ethnic Identity, Self-Esteem, and Segmented Assimilation among Children of Immigrants," International Migration Review, 28 (Winter 1994), 748-96;
153. Ruben Rumbaut, "Assimilation and Its Discontents: Between Rhetoric and Reality," International Migration Review, 31 (Winter 1997), 923-60;
154. and Min Zhou, "Segmented Assimilation: Issues, Controversies, and Recent Research on the New Second Generation," International Migration Review, ibid., 975-1008.
155. For discussion of the crisis in education for ethnic Mexicans and other Latinos, see Jorge Chapa and Richard R. Valencia, "Latino Population Growth, Demographic Characteristics, and Educational Stagnation: An Examination of Recent Trends," Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 15 (May 1993), 172-73;
156. Guadalupe Valdes, Con Respeto: Bridging the Distances between Culturally Diverse Families and Schools, an Ethnographic Portrait (New York, 1996);
157. James Diego Vigil, Personas Mexicanas: Chicano High Schoolers in a Changing Los Angeles (Fort Worth, 1997); and
158. Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. and Richard R. Valencia, "From the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to Hopwood: The Educational Plight and Struggle of Mexican Americans in the Southwest," Harvard Educational Review, 68 (Fall 1998), 353-412.
159. M. E. Matute-Bianchi, "Situational Ethnicity and Patterns of School Performance among Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Mexican-Descent Students," in Minority Status and Schooling: A Comparative Study of Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities, ed. Margaret A. Gibson and John U. Ogbu (New York, 1991), 205-47;
160. Carola Suárez-Orozco and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, Transformations: Migration, Family Life, and Achievement Motivation among Latino Adolescents (Stanford, 1995);
161. Laurie Olson, Made in America: Immigrant Students in Our Public Schools (New York, 1997).
162. Hebdige, Subculture.
163. Stuart Hall, "Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities," in Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis, 1997), 41-68.
164. For recent discussions of this streak of social conservatism among some middle-class Mexican Americans, see, for example, Linda Chávez, Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation (New York, 1991);
165. and Peter Skerry, Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority (New York, 1993).
166. For recent works that explore new political and aesthetic possibilities among ethnic Mexicans and other Latinos, see, for example, Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, 1987);
167. Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York, 1995);
168. Guillermo Gómez-Peña, The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century (San Francisco, 1996);
169. Rubén Martínez, The Other Side: Fault Lines, Guerrilla Saints, and the True Heart of Rock and Roll (London, 1993);
170. José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley, 1997); and
171. Ilan Stavans, The Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Identity in America (New York, 1995).
172. Greg Krikorian and Amy Wallace, "Prop. 187 Rises as Key Theme in Top Two Races," Los Angeles Times, Oct. 25, 1994, p. A22.
173. Gutiérrez, "Introduction," in Between Two Worlds, ed. Gutiérrez, xi-xxvii.
174. Indeed, some border scholars are now insisting that transnational migratory labor circuits linking destinations in the United States to towns and cities deep in Mexico have been in place for so long that this kind of cyclical, multigenerational migration should be considered a largely "autonomous" social phenomenon. As the sociologist Nestór Rodríguez, a prominent proponent of this line of thought, has argued: "Autonomous migration means that working-class communities in peripheral countries have developed their own policies of international employment independent of interstate planning. As such, autonomous international migration can be considered state-free migration, i.e., a process that decenters the state as the regulator of human movements across international boundaries. Through autonomous migration undocumented workers themselves have created a guest-worker program, which many U.S. employers have supported." Thus, one of the many ironies of the ongoing militarization of the border is that it has made it that much more difficult for cyclical migrants to return to Mexico. These border enforcement efforts thus paradoxically may be contributing to the growth of the permanent ethnic Mexican population of the United States. See Nestór Rodríguez, "The Battle for the Border: Notes on Autonomous Migration, Transnational Communities, and the State," Social Justice, 25 (Fall 1996), 23. For further elaboration of this argument, see
175. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York, 1998), 5-30.
176. Michael Kearney, "Borders and Boundaries of State at the End of Empire," Journal of Historical Sociology, 4 (March 1991), 52-74.
177. For similar arguments, see Roger Rouse, "Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism," Diaspora, 1 (Spring 1991), 8-23;
178. and Daniel Mato, "On the Making of Transnational Identities in the Age of Globalization: The U.S. Latina/o-'Latin' American Case," Cultural Studies, 12 (Oct. 1998), 598-620.
179. The immigration sociologist Ruben Rumbaut notes that several national surveys conducted in Mexico in the 1980s indicated that fully half of the Mexican population were related to someone living in the United States. See Rumbaut, "Assimilation and Its Discontents," 948.
180. I am indebted to Lori Buchsbaum of the Border Health Initiative, Project Concern International, a binational nonprofit public health organization, for information on current cooperative transnational health initiatives on the California-Mexico border. Contextual analysis of increasing United States-Mexico cooperation on environmental issues can be found in Marla Cone, "Good News for Beach-Goers - With a Caveat," Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1999, p. A1. For a summary of recent trends in transnational labor organizing and other innovative cross-border ties, see
181. Gutiérrez, "Ethnic Mexicans and the Transformation of 'American' Social Space," 324-27;
182. and S. Pincetl, "Challenges to Citizenship: Latino Immigrants and Political Organizing in the Los Angeles Area," Environment and Planning A, 26 (June 1994), 895-914.
183. Although it is probably much too early to determine what the long-term implications recent changes to the nationality provisions of the Mexican Constitution will be, I find it significant that as of late 1998, only 3,000 expatriate Mexican nationals had applied for dual nationality status. See "Mexico and Central America," Migration News (Nov. 1998), [http://migration.ucdavis.edu].
184. For provocative examples of this process for migrants originating in Mexico, see, for example, Kearney, "Borders and Boundaries of State at the End of Empire"; Carole Nagengast and Michael Kearney, "Mixtec Ethnicity: Social Identity, Political Consciousness, and Political Activism," Latin American Research Review, 25 (no. 2, 1990), 61-91;
185. Leo Chávez, Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society (Ft. Worth, 1992);
186. and the excellent book by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration (Berkeley, 1994).
187. For explications on the theme of social alienation in Mexico, see Claudio Lomnitz, "Decadence in Times of Globalization," Cultural Anthropology, 9 (May 1994), 257-67;
188. Claudio Lomnitz, "Fissures in Contemporary Mexican Nationalism," Public Culture, 9 (Fall 1996), 55-68;
189. and the brilliant and deeply disturbing detective novels of Paco Ignacio Taibo. For useful comparative discussions of similar trends in other diasporic populations, see, for example, Luis E. Guarnizo, "Los Dominicanyorks: The Making of a Binational Society," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (no. 533, May 1994), 70-87;
190. Jacqueline M. Hagan, Deciding to Be Legal: A Maya Community in Houston (Philadelphia, 1994); and
191. Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Christine Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Basel, 1994).
192. "Voter Turnout," Los Angeles Times, Nov. 5, 1998, p. A8.
193. On the evolution and social significance of ethnic Mexican gangs, see Joan W. Moore, Homeboys: Gangs, Drugs, and Prison in the Barrios of Los Angeles (Philadelphia, 1978);
194. James D. Vigil, Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California (Austin, 1988);
195. James D. Vigil, "Cholos and Gangs: Culture Change and Street Youth in Los Angeles," in Gangs in America: Diffusion, Diversity, and Public Policy, ed. C. Ronald Huff (Beverly Hills, 1990); and
196. Joan W. Moore, James D. Vigil, and J. Levy, "Huisas of the Street: Chicana Gang Members," Latino Studies Journal, 6 (Jan. 1995), 27-48.
197. For recent research in this area, see Matute-Bianchi, "Situational Ethnicity and Patterns of School Performance";
198. Rumbaut, "Crucible Within";
199. Rumbaut, "Assimilation and Its Discontents"; and
200. Vigil, Personas Mexicanas. For a fine journalistic account of the ongoing formation of a rising number of antagonistic youth subcultures, see
201. William Finnegan, Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country (New York, 1998), esp. 209-68.
202. For a provocative and sensitive recent discussion of this question, see Kevin R. Johnson, "'Melting Pot' or 'Ring of Fire'?: Assimilation and the Mexican-American Experience," California Law Review, 85 (Oct. 1997), 1259-1314.
203. I am indebted to Luis Alvarez, Toni Nelson Herrera, Manuel "Monolo" Callahan, and other students at the University of Texas, Austin, for providing me with a wide-ranging introduction to this provocative concept during my visit to their borderlands seminar in spring 1997.