Becoming Mexican American

In Part 2, Sánchez reveals the power of the two cultural poles between which Mexican immigrants were pulled while living in Los Angeles. His discussion of theories of immigrant cultural development indicates that many historians and anthropologists previously presented immigrant acculturation as a zero-sum game: An individual or community either conformed to the culture of their new geographic location or maintained the practices of their culture of origin. Sánchez’s entire work complicates this narrative by demonstrating how the Chicano community merged aspects of both American and Mexican ideologies and practices to produce a unique culture of their own. Part 2 in particular explores the manipulation of American and Mexican culture by external forces through the lens of Americanization and Mexicanization programs and suggests that they were actually enacted in the interest of labor and class politics, rather than out of a simple sense of patriotism.

Chapter 4, which focuses on Americanization campaigns, opens with the notion that the culture of Southern California was in itself an invention of white, middle-class Protestants from the midwestern and northeastern United States, who flocked to the West Coast beginning in the 1890s. Sánchez suggests that this population’s “search for order” was symptomatic of “Victorian tradition in transition” (93). While there was great enthusiasm for newness, such as the development of motion pictures and motorcars, there was also a strong desire to adhere to tradition. This clash of values manifested in the expansion of suburbia, which satisfied anti-urban sentiments by creating physical distance from industrial expansion but also allowed new Anglo-American settlers to access and control the city’s politics and public culture. The Americanization campaigns they fostered are evidence of their attempt to impose a kind of stability on a changing society by erasing the “problem” of the immigrant while maintaining their own superior social and moral status.

Similarly, Sánchez points out that the political generation that came to power in the wake of the Mexican Revolution had many of the same ideological tenets as American Progressive activists and academics. Just as advocates of the “Social Gospel” in the United States, such as Jane Addams and Frances Kellor, argued for “assimilation, education, and advancement” of immigrants (94), Mexican intellectual leaders like anthropologist Manuel Gamio expressed a “desire to impose urban middle-class standards of propriety on rural communities, which were often viewed as backward, primal, and savage” (119). Like their Porfirian predecessors, Gamio and his peers lauded the United States as the ideal modern, civilized nation. Gamio theorized that the country’s success as a nation was a result of its racial homogeneity and cultural unity, which he wished to emulate in Mexico by assimilating the country’s rural, indigenous population (121).

Gamio’s approach, known as indigenismo, exalted Mexico’s “lost” indigenous civilization as a unifying source of national heritage, while simultaneously erasing contemporary indigenous groups by destroying their land base and invalidating their “backwards” traditional practices in favor of a cohesive, Euro-American culture (120). In Mexico as in the United States, middle-class social reformers wished to civilize Mexican peasants in order to transform them into productive citizens of the modern industrial state, and representatives of both nations fought to control the significant labor pool made up of Mexican immigrants living in the southwestern United States. Despite attempts by representatives of both nations at leveraging a sense of patriotism to influence Mexican immigrant workers, neither side engaged with the specific needs of the working class, choosing instead to enforce their own elite version of an ideal citizen.

Initial attempts at Americanizing Mexican immigrant workers in Los Angeles emerged as a strategy to tackle labor issues during and after World War I. Businesses that employed large numbers of immigrant workers participated in the “100 Per Cent American” movement, which sought to minimize radicalism in the workforce by encouraging a sense of “superpatriotism.” This outpouring of patriotic spirit was also meant to combat nativist calls for restrictions on Mexican immigration, as well as arguments from organized labor leaders that Mexican immigrants were simply a cheap alternative to “American” workers. Because Mexicans proved to be as adaptable as European immigrants, employers argued, there was nothing to indicate that they would not eventually assimilate seamlessly into American society, as suggested by their alleged enthusiasm to engage in displays of patriotism at work. Furthermore, Mexican workers were necessary for filling labor shortages in the mining, agricultural, and railway sectors of the Southwest’s economy.

In addition to this economic approach, employers also defended unrestricted immigration from a cultural perspective by claiming that Mexican immigrants had no interest in intermingling with Anglo Americans and would “invariably” return to Mexico when their labor was no longer required. In the wake of the First World War, Mexicans became the primary focus of Americanization efforts in order to secure the allegiance of the entire workforce.

Americanization programs first approached Mexican immigrants by identifying them through their employer, meaning that working men were their initial subjects. It soon became clear, however, that the average Mexican worker did not need to speak English, because he was surrounded by other Spanish-speaking men at work, as well as by the Mexican immigrant community at home, and only needed to possess a few key phrases to navigate the broader environment in Los Angeles. This was particularly true for agricultural workers, whose transient labor patterns made sustained language instruction impossible. As mastery of the English language was considered essential for assimilation, reformers pivoted to focus their efforts on the wives and children of married men, with the hope that changes in home life would alter behavior in the public sphere. The role of mothers in transferring social values to their children suggested that they were fundamental in “shaping the citizenry of the Republic”; as one reformer urged, “‘Go after the women’ and you may save the second generation for America” (98-99).

Despite reformers’ use of patriotic and republican discourse in explaining the need for Americanization, Sánchez’s analysis of their programs and materials confirms that their ultimate goals remained rooted in issues of labor and class. Reformers criticized the “traditional” and “unprogressive” patriarchal structure of the Mexican family as a way to encourage Mexican women to engage in work outside of the home. Classes for women were held in the evenings at public schools and emphasized homemaking skills, an approach that was thought to solve two problems simultaneously: “a happy and efficient mother would create an environment suitable for molding workers to the industrial order, and her newfound homemaking skills could be utilized in the cheap labor market outside the home” (100). The growth of the middle-class Anglo-American population of Los Angeles had created an increased demand for seamstresses, laundresses, and domestic and service workers, roles that Mexican women trained in “feminine household skills” could undoubtably meet (101). However, these programs also served as a form of social control, as they forced Mexican immigrants to abandon their “inherently inferior” culture and adopt practices that favored the comfort, and assuaged the fears, of Anglo Americans.

Sánchez explains that the domestic science movement, of which feminine Americanization programs were a part, was developed based on the assertion that “scientific homemaking” practices would result in the “moral regeneration” of the immigrant household. Reformers strove to specifically address habits associated with diet and health, which they assumed would resolve inherent flaws in the Mexican character. Mexicans’ alleged lack of hygiene, poor diet, and high rate of reproduction were attributed to traditional peasant cultural values rather than being seen as a reflection of the disparity of wealth in Los Angeles or of the community’s overall lack of food or resources. Similarly, limiting family size not only limited the growth of the Mexican American population and its threat to Anglo-American hegemony, but also encouraged women to pursue employment outside the home. Women’s engagement in hard work that benefitted the local society and economy would then serve as an example of discipline and self-control for their children in order to continue “curing” the “lazy Mexican” stereotype (103).

It was hoped that the success of these efforts would lead to an increase in the rate of naturalization of Mexican immigrants, but when that proved not to be the case, Americanization programs were rehoused within the realm of public school education. As such, they would induct the Mexican American children of immigrants into the value system of the 20th-century United States, where they were considered second-class citizens, destined to populate the bottom segment of the workforce (107).

Mexicanization programs developed in a manner similar to Americanization but did not take off in earnest until the 1920s. During the Mexican Revolution, consulates in the southwestern United States had been used to spy on exiled political factions working in opposition to the government in power outside the boundaries of the Mexican state. When the dust finally settled in 1920, organizations affiliated with the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles became a dominant force in the public life of the Mexican immigrant community, pitting the interests of the Mexican government against those of the immigrant and Mexican American population. Like employers in the southwestern United States, Mexican political leaders recognized the strength of the Mexican immigrant workforce, as well as its potential contribution to large-scale economic prosperity. They also agreed with many of the moralistic points addressed in Americanization programs but were at an advantage, in a sense, because it was thought that migrants would have naturally developed these civilized attributes through their experience working in the United States. Therefore, it was in the interest of the Mexican state to have this large segment of the population return home, where they could stimulate the Mexican national economy and civilize their fellow peasants.

The efforts of the Mexican government, carried out by the consulate and its affiliates, were largely met with ambivalence and even increased tension among the Mexican immigrant community in Los Angeles. This reaction was partially due to distrust of the Mexican state on the part of those who had fled Mexico due to economic destitution or religious persecution, and it was also a reflection of the fact that, although it was the responsibility of the consulate to protect Mexican nationals in the United States, it did not intervene to address the abuses of US employers. Mexican officials attempted to combat this mistrust through the formation of Honorary Commissions made of up community leaders and spokespeople of the immigrant population of Los Angeles. Like the officials of the Mexican government itself, however, the members of the Honorary Commissions were almost exclusively middle-class professionals and business owners, who viewed themselves as conduits between the working-class population and the Anglo-American leadership of the city and shared the Anglo Protestants’ conservative worldview. Through these political surrogates and institutions, the Mexican government expanded its efforts at fostering a national identity within Mexico to include the preservation of cultural integrity and the promotion of patriotism in “Mexicanos de afuera” (114).

Although Mexicanization programs began with tactics similar to those of Americanization campaigns in terms of fomenting a sense of national loyalty and patriotism, their approach developed a more significant reliance on community involvement. Members of the Honorary Commissions and institutions like the League of Mexican Culture established Spanish-language libraries in Southern California, with books donated by the Mexican government and local Mexican booksellers, as well as newspapers that focused on social and political developments in Mexico and Latin America as opposed to the US. They also sponsored patriotic festivities, such as the event Sánchez cites in the introduction to Chapter 5, to celebrate Mexican national holidays. Due to the limited success of these efforts to inspire a sense of patriotism in the working class, by the late 1920s Mexicanization efforts shifted to address the children of Mexican immigrants through the establishment of Spanish language schools.

To evaluate the impact of schools like La Escuela México, established in Belvedere in 1926, Sánchez draws heavily on the work of historian Mary Kay Vaughn, who analyzed the content of Mexican textbooks to reconstruct the nationalist narratives conveyed to Mexican and Mexican American schoolchildren in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. As Sánchez notes, public education in Mexico was employed “as a mechanism for legitimizing the new state” (119), and the federal government’s involvement extended to Mexican schools in LA. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Vaughn determined that, despite the use of revolutionary rhetoric, the lessons contained in Mexican textbooks continued to reflect the Porfirian ideals of law, order, obedience, and discipline, while emphasizing the nation’s European history and condemning indigenous peasant cultures as uncivilized (117). Although schools like La Escuela México were sponsored by community leaders like Zeferino Ramírez, the lack of support from the state of California and from both the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and the city’s independent Mexican Chamber of Commerce meant that most Mexican schools quickly fell into financial trouble and were forced to close.

The onset of the Great Depression in 1930 signaled the end for both Mexicanization and Americanization programs, with groups on both sides of the border opting to redirect their efforts in favor of repatriation campaigns. For Mexican officials, repatriation represented the culmination of a decade’s worth of efforts to secure the loyalty of Mexican citizens living abroad. They, like Manuel Gamio, hoped that the returning migrants’ experience in the “modern civilization” of the United States had imbued them with a unique form of expertise that would manifest not only in terms of new skills, but also within each individual’s amplified sense of discipline, productivity, and refinement. In Los Angeles, repatriation signified the end of the reign of Mexican progressives, as well as the influence of the Mexican consulate, within the Chicano community. Their withdrawal made way for a new generation of Chicano leaders, who identified with the struggle of working-class labor and civil rights, due in part to their exposure to both Americanization and Mexicanization.

Sánchez’s overall argument in Part 2 is that neither the leaders of Americanization campaigns, nor those of Mexicanization campaigns, achieved their desired results, and instead producing a unique ethnic American population that adopted practices from both cultures. Within this argument, however, is the recognition that a majority of the cultural issues that both campaigns sought to address were rooted in assumptions about class and labor. Both the Mexican government and American businesses were interested in securing the loyalty of a huge source of labor but refused to recognize the problems that faced most working-class Mexicans. Similarly, those tasked with designing the cultural programs approached their subjects from the elite perspective, making their expectations for “civilizing” working-class Mexicans either unattainable or completely unreasonable in the face of racial and class boundaries.

The generation of young, Mexican-born migrants and Mexican American citizens that emerged in the wake of these cultural projects possessed a new sense of identity based in their everyday experience of life in the United States, combined with their sense of ethnic pride in their families’ Mexican origins. Unlike their parents, however, these Chicanos’ shared sense of community identity and class consciousness would make them a significant political force in Los Angeles in the decades following the Great Depression.