Hegemonic Hypocrisy: A Victim of Social Scriptorium

For Perez, Chicana/o history is not resolvable and must continually be debated and comprehended as multiple and unstable. Perez, like other Chicana theorists, initiates an added dimension that recognizes that woman’s voices and their stories have become subordinated to a colonist racial mentality and to a male consciousness. Perez argues that the quintessential historical accounts. Women become appendages to men’s history, the interstitial ‘and’ tacked on as an afterthought’ (12). Nevertheless, Perez also suggests that even though some stories have not been told, does not define their existences, asserting, “Chicana, Mexican, India, Mestiza actions, words spoken and unspoken, survive and persist whether they are acknowledged or not” (7). The task of locating the voices of the Chicana are often discharged or lowered by the dominant groups.

David G Gutiérrez’s Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity discuss the deep and complex understudied relationship between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. This relationship was a natural consequence of the mass illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States that had constantly been increasing the population of “ethnic Mexicans” and along with it brought tensions between those who were Americans of Mexican descent and had been living here for generations and those who had freshly arrived to the United States and as such did whatever they had to do to make a living.

Throughout our history as a nation, we have earned a reputation of undermining the relationships we have had with minorities and of largely neglecting their needs. Our almost hostile nature towards minorities in the United States can largely be seen in the treatment of Mexicans and Mexican American citizens in the times surrounding World War Two. Such hostilities are reflected in our treatment of Mexican Americans in the late 19th after the Civil War and early 20th centuries, the Sleepy Lagoon murder responses, and the Zoot Suit riots. My primary source reveals a feeling of inferiority in the United States by the Mexican American youth due discrimination that they faced, which can be better understood by analyzing the cultural contexts.

In my speech I will explain the social construction of race and the Black/White paradigm, followed by focusing on why and how Mexican Americans fought for the white label during the Civil Rights era, and finally analyzing how this choice affected the relationship between Mexican Americans and African Americans

The formation of segregated barrios and the development of a wealth of community-provided services showed that Mexican-Americans were not content to be marginalized by the United States. Instead, they were embracing an empowering new sense of self-determination and referring to themselves as “Mexicanos or as members of a larger, pan-Hispanic community of La Raza.” At this time La Raza referenced individuals of the Mexican “race”, whether they were in Mexico or in the United States, and was particularly important in the United States, where race was more important than citizenship. In the late 19th and early 20th century United States, race was determined by purity of blood, and there were only two races—white and black. White meant the individual had “pure blood” (European blood); black meant that the individual’s blood included indigenous or African influences. Being white meant being able to exercise one’s constitutional rights and being treated as a normal member of society’s dominant group. Being black meant that, regardless of whether he or she was a citizen, the individual would face discrimination similar to that which I described earlier. When the Spanish conquerors mixed with the people of Latin America, forming the mestizo, or mixed race, population that now composes most of the region, they removed themselves from a “white” classification in the United States. Thus, by engaging with the concept of La Raza, which connotes a mestizo race and population, Mexican-Americans rejected the binary nature of race in the United States and embraced what made them different—their indigenous-mixed blood and the cultural heritage that accompanied it. While the abuse directed towards Mexican-Americans may have

In Pearsall, Texas, the Anglo and Mexican communities were divided to contribute to Elva’s confusion and frustrations of being alone. The immigrant society was lumped together as their own “class” of people:

Although I can’t specifically relate to Gloria Anzaldúa’s struggle between her languages in “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” I can relate to her “kind of dual identity” in which she identifies with neither Anglo-American cultural values nor Mexican cultural values (1566). Being half white, half Chinese, I struggle identifying as either identity, especially because my mom (who is Chinese) never learned Cantonese and largely became Americanized in her childhood. It’s an uncomfortable position to be in when racial and ethnic identity are so significant in America and when I must interact with the world as part of both the majority and the marginalized. Considering my own struggle and the conflict Anzaldúa describes, it became clearer to me the way race relations in American not only marginalize people of color but train our consciousnesses to damage ourselves. Before I turn back to Anzaldúa, a novel I’ve recently read, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams has also been on my mind, particularly in Godwin’s portrayal of how police surveillance transforms us into agents of our own oppression. Although Caleb is a white man, he also experiences a split consciousness as his values and characteristics are whittled away by the paranoia of constant surveillance.

     The author of Mexican Lives, Judith Adler Hellman, grapples with the United States’ economic relationship with their neighbors to the south, Mexico. It also considers, through many interviews, the affairs of one nation. It is a work held to high esteem by many critics, who view this work as an essential part in truly understanding and capturing Mexico’s history. In Mexican Lives, Hellman presents us with a cast from all walks of life. This enables a reader to get more than one perspective, which tends to be bias. It also gives a more inclusive view of the nation of Mexico as a whole. Dealing with rebel activity, free trade, assassinations and their transition into the modern age, it justly

Gloria Anzaldúa writes of a Utopic frame of mind, the borderlands created in and lived in by the new mestiza. She describes the preexisting natures of the Anglos, Mexicanos, and Chicanos as seen around the southwest U.S. / Mexican border, indicative of the nations at large. She also probes the borders of language, sexuality, psychology and spirituality. Anzaldúa presents this information in various identifiable ways including the autobiography, historical/informative essay, and poetry. What is unique to Anzaldúa is her ability to weave a ‘perfect’ kind of compromised state of mind that melds together the preexisting cultures while simultaneously formulating a fusion of genres that stretches previously

During the Mexican-American War the border moved, but the people didn’t. History has shown us that no matter how thick the border might be Latino Americans have a strong connection to their culture and roots; instead of assimilating, Mexicans live between two worlds. The film, Ballad of Gregorio Cortez gave us a perspective of two cultures; “Two cultures- the Anglo and the Mexican- lived side by side in state of tension and fear” . Cortez is running for his life as he heads north, while the Anglo believe that because of his Mexican ethnicity, he would travel south to Mexico. Throughout the film there were cultural tensions and misunderstandings; language plays an important part of someone’s identity, and for many Latino Americans Spanish is their first language. The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez also shows us that language plays an important role, and can cause confusion between two different groups. For example, Anglos refer to a male

The story illustrates the overlapping influences of women’s status and roles in Mexican culture, and the social institutions of family, religion, economics, education, and politics. In addition, issues of physical and mental/emotional health, social deviance and crime, and social and personal identity are

As Sanchez notes, “The plunder of the Southwest is allegorized … in the Yankees’ appropriation of the Mexican girl’s gold and jewels” (xxii), which is symbolically expanded exponentially to “create new millionaires back on the East coast” (xxiii). A Latina author writing this type of veiled social criticism of U.S. policy and political prerogatives is, like her subtle interweaving of feminist themes, quite progressive and unparalleled for her

The racist connotation that Miss Jimenez associates with who she thinks would “fit in” society’s box is a definite reflection of the hardships Valdez witnessed in his community. For example, the Zoot Suit Riots that occurred in 1944 was rooted by a reaction by young Mexican-American males against a culture that did not want them to be a part of it. Stuart Cosgrove examines this issue when he states, "In the most obvious ways they had been stripped of their customs, beliefs and language.” (*Vargas 317) These youths were going through an identity crisis because they did not know which culture they could identify with. Miss Jimenez is a character that embodies that repression Valdez explains in “Los Vendidos.”

In the reading of “Borderlands/ La Frontera” by Gloria Anzaladúa we explore the idea of breaking down our own physical borders as well as invisible borders within as we connect with the narrator and her experiences. We can draw many parallels between the reading of Borderlands and “A Different Mirror” by Ronald Takaki. Both readings allow immerse you in the life of being the Other in society, through stories they share, emotions expressed through their writings and by using evidence of dominance between races. In Takaki we see the Other as a race, whereas in Borderlands, we see it as more than just race, it is an identity. In Borderlands we see a prime example of this when she says “As a lesbian I have no race…I am all races because there is a queer of me in all races” (Page 181 “Borderlands/ La Frontera” by Gloria Anzaladúa). Takaki describes Other as “different, inferior, and unassimilable” (Page 4 “A Different Mirror” by Ronald Takaki). As the readings develop, we are given the opportunity to put ourselves in the Others shoes allowing you to sympathize with those who may be “different.” It is as if the authors do this on purpose, especially for the white cultures who in the Others eyes like to put themselves on a pedestal. Though many may argue with this idea of the Other, it is something that people of all races should think about so that we can effectively work together to break down the borders we have built between cultures, sexualities, spiritualities and

The prevailing attitude of white supremacy was the justification Americans used to “rescue the wilderness from backwardness, indolence, and disorder”(De Leon 65). Mexico in its earliest days was primarily Indian, but the infusion of both Spanish and black blood made it harder to define Mexicans. White Anglo-Americans believed “their contrast to ‘white’ and salient kindred to ‘black’ and ‘red’ made Mexicans subject to treatment commensurate with the odious connotations whites attached to colors, races, and cultures dissimilar to their own” (De Leon 6).