On Mexicans and Mexican-Americans: Becoming Mexican American by George Sanchez

This week we read Becoming Mexican American by George Sanchez, a book I had heard about through previous immigration history courses though never actually picked up.  After finishing it, I realized why it has remained a staple of such courses nearly twenty-five years after its initial publication – Sanchez provides a thorough and thoughtful examination of immigrant culture as it forms within the United States.

Sanchez explores the development of Mexican American culture in Los Angeles by using a variety of sources that provide him with immigrants’ personal perspectives (for a copy of my notes, see here).  His source base includes the naturalization applications for Mexican immigrants seeking to become American citizens – he notes that these applications are unique in capturing the feelings of immigrants who feel a sense of permanence in the United States and describe their lives in greater detail than many other sources.  He also relies on government papers from both the United States and Mexico, as well as personal, church, and community organizations’ records.  Using these sources, Sanchez argues that during the first decades of the twentieth century Mexican immigrants borrowed from both their Mexican roots and American surroundings to form a distinctive Mexican American culture that defied the identity reformers from both countries hoped to force on them.

Sanchez begins his history by studying Mexico in the early twentieth century. He observes that it was a nation in transition; railway construction at the end of the nineteenth century brought new ideas and products that uprooted traditional politics, labor patterns, and even family structure.  Most of the immigrants to the United States came from regions heavily affected by these changes and were distrustful of central authority, relying on personal networks rather than government services to stabilize their lives.  After they arrived in the United States, both American and Mexican reformers tried to frame immigrants’ experiences according to their respective ideologies.  In the early twentieth century, Progressives in California developed Americanization programs for European and Mexican immigrants alike; while they felt Mexicans could actually adapt better to American culture than Central and Eastern European immigrants, they still demanded substantial change.  These reformers expected Mexican immigrants to learn English (a process rooted in the home, so they expected mothers to leave the home and improve the entire family’s use of their new language), embrace smaller family sizes and birth control, change their personal hygiene practices, and shake their allegedly lazy habits to become an idealized workforce of low-paid wage laborers.  The Mexican consulate in Los Angeles supported programs they hoped would inspire loyalty to the new Mexican state – as both Ngai and Hernandez discussed previously, the Mexican government wanted immigrants to travel to the United States and learn valuable skills they could contribute to Mexican society on their (presumed) eventual return.  However, this line of thinking lead the Mexican government to enthusiastically embrace the deportation of Mexican immigrants from the United States during the Great Depression, a policy that largely severed the immigrant community’s connection to the Mexican consulate since immigrants themselves were not supportive of these deportations.

While governments claimed to know what was best for Mexican immigrants, the immigrants themselves forged a separate path that borrowed from both Mexican and American cultures. During the 1920s, when immigrants began to think of their move as permanent and brought their families to the United States, they preserved some elements of Mexican culture such as a preference for women to stay at home and relatively low ages for marriage. However, they also reworked their Catholic religious life by focusing less on the core tenants of the faith and instead framed it as a tool for preserving their ethnic community.  Mass culture furthered the construction of a hybrid identity, as movies the immigrants watched included imports from Mexico that connected them to their roots, as well as silent movies made in America that had few language barriers and allowed immigrants to consume the ideas of their new country. Recorded music allowed the preservation of traditional Mexican folk music, as well as the opportunity for national companies to market towards a newly defined Mexican demographic for their products. Immigrant families purchased homes across Los Angles, a sign that they embraced their new lives and their stable economic prospects. However, women increasingly began to work outside the home in temporary jobs. As a second generation of immigrants rose, their economic standing in America rarely improved beyond the working class, yet change continued. Mexican Americans embraced labor unions as a tool to redefine their identity, borrowing their allegiances from both the legacy of the Mexican revolution and the benefits of citizenship in the United States. Although the Mexican consulate often worked to undermine cross-racial union organizing by encouraging Mexican laborers to settle with employers, Mexican American workers embraced industrial unionism as well as the call to become American citizens and vote in elections.

Sanchez’s portrait of an immigrant community is very narrowly focused to a small geographic and ethnic community in a relatively short time frame, yet his findings suggest other immigrant communities could share similar patterns.  For example, it seems likely that many immigrants borrowed from their home countries and their new home in the United States regardless of whatever time period they moved, understanding their lives as a multiplicity of identities.  However, there are other factors that likely make this group unique; as Ngai and Hernandez demonstrated, race played an increasingly important factor structuring Mexican immigration to the United States at the same moment when it began declining as a factor for immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe. Sanchez’s history does not deny the impact of race, but instead focuses on individuals working within its constraints to improve their own lives as best as they could.

Although Sanchez’s history ends at World War II, it offers us important lessons for today.  Immigration from Mexico has exploded in recent decades, yet in many respects reformers still believe they can force identities onto new immigrants.  Recent White House proposals have stressed that immigrants must be able to “assimilate” if they hope to be admitted to the country.  In many ways, the presumption seems to be that something is wrong with Mexico and its immigrants, and both positions echo ideas American reformers promoted over 100 years ago.  However, as history has shown us, immigrants embrace the United States on their own terms and form complicated identities in relationship to both their home and new countries, a reality that seems to continue to this day. Rather than expecting or demanding immigrants change to conform to American standards, perhaps a better policy would both include an appreciation for this multiplicity of identities that illustrates immigrants ARE embracing elements of American culture and eliminate the racism that prevents immigrants from feeling belong within our national community.