In Defense of la Raza, the Los Angeles Mexican Consulate, and the Mexican Community, 1929 to 1936

In Defense of la Raza, the Los Angeles Mexican Consulate, and the Mexican Community, 1929 to 1936
Author: Francisco E. Balderrama
Publisher:
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1982
Genre: History
ISBN:

Examines the involvement of the Mexican consular office in assisting the Mexican and Chicano community in Southern California during the first years of the Great Depression, focusing on the consulate's work with Mexican American leaders to confront the problems of repatriation, school segregation, church-state conflict, and farm labor organizing.

Decade of Betrayal

Decade of Betrayal
Author: Francisco E. Balderrama
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2006-05-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780826339737

Examines the social and economic effects on the migrant Mexican families subjected to forced relocation by the United States during the 1930s.

Redeeming La Raza

Redeeming La Raza
Author: Gabriela González
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2018-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 019991415X

The transborder modernization of Mexico and the American Southwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the lives of ethnic Mexicans across the political divide. While industrialization, urbanization, technology, privatization, and wealth concentration benefitted some, many more experienced dislocation, exploitative work relations, and discrimination based on race, gender, and class. The Mexican Revolution brought these issues to the fore within Mexican society, igniting a diaspora to el norte. Within the United States, similar economic and social power dynamics plagued Tejanos and awaited the war refugees. Political activism spearheaded by individuals and organizations such as the Idars, Leonor Villegas' de Magnón's White Cross, the Magonista movement, the Munguias, Emma Tenayuca, and LULAC emerged in the borderlands to address the needs of ethnic Mexicans whose lives were shaped by racism, patriarchy, and poverty. As Gabriela Gonzalez shows in this book, economic modernization relied on social hierarchies that were used to justify economic inequities. Redeeming la raza was about saving ethnic Mexicans in Texas from a social hierarchy premised on false notions of white supremacy and Mexican inferiority. Activists used privileges of class, education, networks, and organizational skills to confront the many injustices that racism bred, but they used different strategies. Thus, the anarcho-syndicalist approach of Magónistas stands in contrast to the social and cultural redemption politics of the Idars who used the press to challenge a Jaime Crow world. Also, the family promoted the intellectual, material, and cultural uplift of la raza, working to combat negative stereotypes of ethnic Mexicans. Similar contrasts can be drawn between the labor activism of Emma Tenayuca and the Munguias, whose struggle for rights employed a politics of respectability that encouraged ethnic pride and unity. Finally, maternal feminist approaches and the politics of citizenship serve as reminders that gendered and nationalist rhetoric and practices foment hierarchies within civil and human rights organizations. Redeeming La Raza examines efforts of activists to create a dignified place for ethnic Mexicans in American society by challenging white supremacy and the segregated world it spawned.

Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century

Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century
Author: José Angel Hernández
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2012-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107378753

This study is a reinterpretation of nineteenth-century Mexican American history, examining Mexico's struggle to secure its northern border with repatriates from the United States, following a war that resulted in the loss of half Mexico's territory. Responding to past interpretations, Jose Angel Hernández suggests that these resettlement schemes centred on developments within the frontier region, the modernisation of the country with loyal Mexican American settlers, and blocking the tide of migrations to the United States to prevent the depopulation of its fractured northern border. Through an examination of Mexico's immigration and colonisation policies as they developed in the nineteenth century, this book focuses primarily on the population of Mexican citizens who were 'lost' after the end of the Mexican American War of 1846–8 until the end of the century.

Transborder Los Angeles

Transborder Los Angeles
Author: Yu Tokunaga
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2022-10-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520976932

Focusing on Los Angeles farmland during the years between the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Japanese Internment in 1942, Transborder Los Angeles weaves together the narratives of Mexican and Japanese immigrants into a single transpacific history. In this book, Yu Tokunaga moves from international relations between Japan, Mexico, and the US to the Southern California farmland, where ethnic Japanese and Mexicans played a significant role in developing local agriculture, one of the major industries of LA County before World War II. Japanese, Mexicans, and white Americans developed a unique triracial hierarchy in farmland that generated both conflict and interethnic accommodation by bringing together local issues and international concerns beyond the Pacific Ocean and the US-Mexico border. Viewing these experiences in a single narrative form, Tokunaga breaks new ground, demonstrating the close relationships between the ban on Japanese immigration, Mexican farmworkers' strikes, wartime Japanese removal, and the Bracero Program.

Between Two Worlds

Between Two Worlds
Author: David Gregory Gutiérrez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 306
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780842024747

Although immigrants enter the United States from virtually every nation, Mexico has long been identified in the public imagination as one of the primary sources of the economic, social, and political problems associated with mass migration. Between Two Worlds explores the controversial issues surrounding the influx of Mexicans to America. The eleven essays in this anthology provide an overview of some of the most important interpretations of the historical and contemporary dimensions of the Mexican diaspora.

Boyle Heights

Boyle Heights
Author: George J. Sánchez
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2022-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520391640

The radical history of a dynamic, multiracial American neighborhood. “When I think of the future of the United States, and the history that matters in this country, I often think of Boyle Heights.”—George J. Sánchez The vision for America’s cross-cultural future lies beyond the multicultural myth of the "great melting pot." That idea of diversity often imagined ethnically distinct urban districts—the Little Italys, Koreatowns, and Jewish quarters of American cities—built up over generations and occupying spaces that excluded one another. But the neighborhood of Boyle Heights shows us something altogether different: a dynamic, multiracial community that has forged solidarity through a history of social and political upheaval. Boyle Heights is an in-depth history of the Los Angeles neighborhood, showcasing the potent experiences of its residents, from early contact between Spanish colonizers and native Californians to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the hunt for hidden Communists among the Jewish population, negotiating citizenship and belonging among Latino migrants and Mexican American residents, and beyond. Through each period and every struggle, the residents of Boyle Heights have maintained remarkable solidarity across racial and ethnic lines, acting as a unified polyglot community even as their tribulations have become more explicitly racial in nature. Boyle Heights is immigrant America embodied, and it can serve as the true beacon on a hill toward which the country can strive in a time when racial solidarity and civic resistance have never been in greater need.

The Girls' History and Culture Reader

The Girls' History and Culture Reader
Author: Miriam Forman-Brunell
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0252077687

This work provides scholars, instructors, and students with influential essays that have defined the field of American girls' history and culture. Covering girlhood and the relationships between girls and women, the volume tackles pivotal themes such as education, work, play, sexuality, consumption, and the body.

Pobre Raza!

Pobre Raza!
Author: F. Arturo Rosales
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 029277463X

Fleeing the social and political turmoil spawned by the Mexican Revolution, massive numbers of Mexican immigrants entered the southwestern United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. But instead of finding refuge, many encountered harsh, anti-Mexican attitudes and violence from an Anglo population frightened by the influx of foreigners and angered by anti-American sentiments in Mexico. This book examines the response of Mexican immigrants to Anglo American prejudice and violence early in the twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources from both sides of the border, Arturo Rosales traces the rise of "México Lindo" nationalism and the efforts of Mexican consuls to help poor Mexican immigrants defend themselves against abuses and flagrant civil rights violations by Anglo citizens, police, and the U.S. judicial system. This research illuminates a dark era in which civilian and police brutality, prejudice in the courtroom, and disproportionate arrest, conviction, and capital punishment rates too often characterized justice for Mexican Americans.

Leaders of the Mexican American Generation

Leaders of the Mexican American Generation
Author: Anthony Quiroz
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1607323370

Leaders of the Mexican American Generation explores the lives of a wide range of influential members of the US Mexican American community between 1920 and 1965 who paved the way for major changes in their social, political, and economic status within the United States. Including feminist Alice Dickerson Montemayor, to San Antonio attorney Gus García, and labor activist and scholar Ernesto Galarza, the subjects of these biographies include some of the most prominent idealists and actors of the time. Whether debating in a court of law, writing for a major newspaper, producing reports for governmental agencies, organizing workers, holding public office, or otherwise shaping space for the Mexican American identity in the United States, these subjects embody the core values and diversity of their generation. More than a chronicle of personalities who left their mark on Mexican American history, Leaders of the Mexican American Generation cements these individuals as major players in the history of activism and civil rights in the United States. It is a rich collection of historical biographies that will enlighten and enliven our understanding of Mexican American history.