Institutional Discrimination Within The United States Of America And Mexico

Does it matter what we are called: Latino or Hispanic? Does it change who we are as people? To an extent, most people do not know the difference between either. Typically, people group both terms as one singular item. However, Hispanic and Latino racial classifications are more than a broad category for people from Spanish-speaking countries. The words connote and represent a history of colonial terminology that based its success on the failures of innocent, historically peaceful, cultural groups. Hispanic and Latino terminology are political and economic in every sense. This paper will show that colonial leanings to control and govern people’s lives have yet to culminate, even though the era of imperialism ended a century ago. The United States, although far from its heyday as the singular house of power, still manages to achieve control and influence over the imperialized minds of groups of people, specifically Hispanics and Latinos.

The founding fathers of this nation envisioned a dream which granted life and liberty to all citizens with equality and without prejudice. The ideology of democracy is the reason America declared its independence from Spain. However, their vision of a free nation was in the interest of the white class citizens, with the desire of reaching their goal in becoming rich and prosperous farmers, doctors, and all the things people hoped to pursue in life. This is the American Dream people were looking for in the birth of a new nation; evidently, the freedom of being treated fairly and having the same rights would mean segregating the social classes and labeling citizens by color of nationality.

In the first chapter of Anzaldua’s novel, she describes her homeland and what it means to live by the border. “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge” (25). The purpose of this boundary was for the whites and “those who align themselves with whites” to feel safe and secured from the “half-breed” or multicultural people of the south (26). This separation creates this belief that one side is superior to the other. When retelling the history of Mexico’s colonization, Anzaldua recognizes how, “the Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it” (29). The Natives and the Mexicans had control over the area way before the Europeans came but now their land was being taken away. After losing the war to the United States, Mexico was compelled to give roughly half of its territory to them; the area that is currently Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. “Separated from Mexico, the Native Mexican-Texan no longer looked toward Mexico as home; the Southwest became our homeland once more” (29). Once the area was controlled by the U.S., the vast majority of its occupants looked with disarray as they could never again consider Mexico as their home. This new border that the

Racial discrimination commonly refers to unfair or unequal behavior upon on individuals due to their race or ethnicity. Racism has been practiced for decades. Exerting superiority or supremacy over a race of individuals is the attempt of racial dominance. Despite the increasing population in the United States, Hispanic Americans find racial discrimination a reality in their lives. Migration rates have been on a dramatic climb over the past several decades resulting in a significant growth in diversity being experienced. The migration of the various cultural groups, including the Hispanic cultures,

Immigrant discrimination is simply put the discrimination by natives against immigrants from other countries. In this article I am also going to go into some depth on discrimination on transplants from other areas (people who have relocated to another area of the country.) Immigrant discrimination is a major issue in the United States. There is a reason the United States is considered the melting pot of the world. There are people from all walks of life in our country. There are approximately forty six million immigrants in the United States.

Racial discrimination among Hispanics in the United States is on the rise along with stricter immigration laws, inadequate education for ESL classes, as well as they are prey to healthcare disparities. Data shows that many states in the United States are implementing tougher immigration laws for their individual states. Also, due to education cuts and kick-backs, English as a second language classes are becoming fewer in many school districts. Finally, health care disparities among Hispanics are on the rise due to lack of insurance, language barriers, and not enough medical resources to meet their needs.

Despite popular belief that the category of whiteness grants many advantages, that was not the case with Mexican-Americans. There were several Mexican-Americans that had whiteness features, and passed as being white, but the Anglo’s were not fond of Mexican-Americans being labeled as white. This led to forms of racial supremacy through legal exclusions, George A. Martinez in Mexican-Americans and Whiteness writes that “Mexican-Americans were earmarked for exclusive employment in the lowest brackets of employment and paid less than Anglo-Americans for the same jobs.” (Martinez 33). Mexican-Americans were treated unequally just because they were Mexican-Americans and not real Americans, these forms of racial supremacy continued, and as a result they were excluded from receiving their full and equal rights.

The U.S./Mexico borderland became a milieu of displaced Mexican citizens and Native American groups trying to establish themselves as intermediary entities within the border region. Nevertheless, they were faced with an influx of U.S. settlers who sought to develop and industrialize their agrarian landscape. As border regions grew in economic diversity, both the U.S. and Mexico developed a dependency on said agricultural and industrial business. Though tensions remained high in terms of nationalistic greed, both U.S. and Mexican governments were wary of the influx of capital being transferred between developing border regions. Soon a hierarchy began to arise, mechanisms that enacted systematic oppression developed between U.S. settlers and native populations. As both groups competed for jobs in the same economic settings; the privileges of better pay, better treatment, and freedom of movement from job to job were denied repeatedly to minorities groups within the region. Border jobs include work in factories known as maquiladoras that were U.S.

Mexican origin US residents and non- American citizens become the target of immigration policies and endure structural racism at the US-Mexico border. The military law is

The border region has seen “rapid transformation in a short span of time, changing from a cattle ranching and mining area that attracted U.S., Mexican and European capitalists…to the center of a lucrative vice and pleasure-based tourist industry, to a region that …attracted an extraordinary amount of international capital to its manufacturing and services sector”. (Ganster/Lorey 2) Events and years such as the implementation of the railroad, the years before the Mexican Revolution, the land reform in 1936 and 1937, the implementation of the maquiladora program and the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has had a significant impact on the U.S. Mexican Borderlands.

In John Sayles movie “Lone Star” and in Silko’s article “The Border patrol State”, the main idea in both the readings revolve around the racial discrimination and the racism based on the ethnicity on the U.S Borders. Both the readings have the clues and evidences where the authors are challenging the conventional notions of the borders in the U.S. Silko, on one hand, sees the border patrol as a governmental assembly addicted to interrogation, torture, and the murder of those they see fit for whereas in John Sayles “Lone Star” determines the stereotypes prevailing at the borders and the whole film then revolves around the idea of discrimination and the connection between these types of people on borders. Both the

The Chicanos, Indians, Blacks, the queer, and all those who are not white are those who dwell in the borderlands. They struggle enough as it is, but even then, they are seen as transgressors, aliens, sometimes in their own land because they are not white, and they do not align themselves with whites. This makes

In the United States today discrimination is still an issue in society. As a society progress has definitely been made, but it has never fully gone away. Some of the most discriminatory action takes place in the American justice system. Young minority males between the ages of 25-29 are subject to being treated the most unfairly while whites of the same age are still being treated better than any race in this country. African American and Hispanic males are being incarcerated at higher rates than white males in America. Not only are minorities being incarcerated more, but also they are subject to harsher sentencing terms, fall victim to police racial profiling, and have disparities in the war on drugs. Also whites are still the dominant

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of the meaning of Borderlands is that it is a representation of how different each individual is in society. Borderlands can bring alike people together and separates them from the ones that “choose” to be different. These divisions separate neighboring countries, which is ironic since the divisions do not keep the people from coming in and bringing change to other cultures. It makes people strive to want to go to that unknown land and explore new opportunities. The Borderlands test limits to people’s faith and beliefs to see which way they will go. Will they be average just like everyone else or will they be extraordinary and be the difference society needs?

Probably, one of the most frequently cited de nitions of “borderlands” in this new histori- cal school of thought comes from Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 book, Border- lands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, in which she describes these zones as something more than xed areas on maps: they are places where “people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (preface, unnumbered page). Borderlands, in this view, are home to con icting, divergent cultures, as well as people for whom multiple cul- tures could potentially lend order and meaning to the