Mexican-Americans: Racial Discrimination In The US

The Latino/a experience within the racial system in America was similar to that of Indian immigrants from Asia. In the early 1800s, Indians were granted free access to immigrate to America and naturalize as American citizens because they were perceived as whites. However, as social tensions between Indian and Anglo men began competing for jobs, housing, and women, Members of Congress racialized Indians. They justified that Indian men were no longer privileged to be white because Indians left Europe and traveled backwards to the East, making them inferior (Aoki, and Takeda). These examples of racialization are important to understand how Latino/as have been unwanted in the job

In the early 20th century, Simons Brick Company designed a labor village that specifically targeted Mexican immigrants as employees. With incentives like baby bonuses, and lack of skills, immigrants were exploited and unable to pursue higher tier occupations. Taking advantage of their desperation for work, Simons designed their labor forces with the ideology of “more Mexicans meant more workers. More workers meant more bricks. More bricks meant more money” (Deverell, 2005). This was to the extent that “they not only urged brick workers to contact relatives in Mexico about the availability of Simons work” (Deverell, 2005). They kept the cycle of workers continuous so that there could be the appeal of stable labor, but at the same time exert white hierarchy and control over these powerless and uneducated people. Those who were superior to the workers made sure that the discrimination/segregation not only crushed spirits, but that it physically hindered Mexicans, to the extent that kids were illiterate and

African Americans and Mexican Americans were being denied equal membership in U.S society. This race discrimination denied dignity to those who were minorities. For minorities there was everyday discrimination in restaurants, public services, housing and education (Alvarez, p. 18). Both

Valenica (2008) notes that many scholars believe that Independent School District v. Salvatierra (1930) was the first Mexican-American desegregation case, however Romo v. Laird (1920) was the first case of its kind. Since the case was not a class action case it only benefited the Romo family.

Racial segregation in America has long been foretold throughout the generations; however, racial discrimination is not limited between African-Americans and Anglos, racial discrimination also extended its racial barriers to Mexican-Americans. “In 1954, the United States Supreme Court extended constitutional rights to Mexican Americans in the landmark civil rights case Hernandez v. Texas” (Cobb, J. 2015). This case is the beginning front of Mexican-Americans taking a stand to fight for their civil liberties and demand equality and justice. In the case of Hernandez v Texas, Pete Hernandez, was indicted for the murder of a bartender in Jackson County, Texas. This trial presented the cultural disparity in society and quite frankly was an outright discrimination against Mexican-Americans. The

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.

Haney Lopez describes the racialization of Mexicans in terms of ancestry and skin color. Although granted de facto White racial status with the United States conquest of much of Mexico in 1848 and having sometimes been deemed as White by the courts and censuses, Mexican Americans were rarely treated as White (5). Historically and legally, Mexicans have been treated as second-class citizens. Mexicans suffered the degradation accorded members of an inferior race, treatment nearly equivalent to the coinciding conquest of blacks and Native Americans (64). In 1857, for instance, Anglo mobs lynched eleven Mexicans in Los Angeles (67). The demographic and geographic custom of segregation in Los Angeles contributed to the growing cultural isolation and socioeconomic vulnerability of the Mexican community.

The 1950s was probably the most important decade for Mexican-American citizens in Texas. Discrimination has always been a big issue for Mexican-Americans because they have always been treated as invisible white people in Texas. Supposedly they are citizens of our country, but somehow they were not given equal rights. There were occasions in Texas where a white citizen, for no good cause, shot a Mexican-American unexpectedly. Texas restaurants wouldn’t serve Mexican-Americans. They had separate restrooms and schools between white and Mexican-American. In this essay we will be discussing the case Hernandez v. Texas, 1953; the details and the outcome.

In the open deliberations over the extension of Texas in the 1840s, Anglo government officials alluded frequently to the inadequacy of the "Mexican race," utilizing illustrations of earth, and also the sobriquet "greaser," which likely gets from the work a few Mexicans performed lubing the axles of donkey trucks. Yet amid the years of the Texas Republic, a few Texas Mexicans had the capacity buy and clutch their property by guaranteeing whiteness through unadulterated "Spanish blood." Anglos who wedded Mexican ladies "whitened" their mates by calling them Spanish. Furthermore a hefty portion of the new migrants from Mexico in the years somewhere around 1890 and 1910 had "learned whiteness and "whitening" before going to the United States." In those occasions and numerous others, racial qualifications to some degree followed class and landholding. In Texas, examples of Mexican-white isolation map onto the divisions between "farm areas" where Mexicans kept on being landholders, and "homestead districts" in which business cultivating assumed control in the first many years of the twentieth century, and Mexicans were tenant farmers for white landholders. Basically, where Mexicans held area, they were far more averse to be prohibited from schools and other open lodging, and "Mexican" was less inclined to be a racialized

Becoming Mexican: Mexican American and Whiteness In “Becoming Mexican: Mexican American and Whiteness,” author Neil Foley brings to light historical evidence of Mexican-Americans who attempted to assimilate into the white culture on “the backs of blacks.” The article started off by giving us the history of when the U.S. Bureau of the Census created two new ethnic categories of whites: “Hispanic” and “non-Hispanic.” According to the author the Hispanic category was more of “an ethnic rather than racial label, that comprised of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Panamanians, and other ethnic groups of Latin American descent.” By creating separate ethnic categories Hispanics would no longer be racialized as non-Whites, but were instead able to identify and acknowledge their ethnic heritage without surrendering their “whiteness.”

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).

According to the text The Borderlands refers to the area of common culture along the boarder between the United States of America and Mexico. The story mostly talks about the emergence of maquiladoras on the Mexican side. Maquiladoras are foreign owned factories established just across the boarder in Mexico.

Since the start of American history, immigrants came here and brought their traditions and cultures with them. The United States is a country of immigrants. It is a place where people from all over the world come to build a better life. Some immigrants bring their families. Others come alone with nothing but determination. Racial discrimination against minorities and immigrants is an underlying problem here in America today. Racism is seen in our daily lives when people are discriminated against because of their race and ethnicity. Racism attacks the right to a person’s well-being on the basis of something they have no control over. They cannot change nor should want to change who they are. Racial discrimination is not as bad as it was fifty years ago, but it still a problem here in our country today. Our country has advanced tremendously as far as modernization and technology, but has not improved on the way we treat minorities and immigrants. From African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and Arabs there is a form of discrimination against these group of minorities.

While it is understandable that in this specific system a person would choose to negate their heritage and opt to categorize themselves as white, the problem here being all their doing is feeding the problem that in the end will affect them as well. The inequalities in Mexico become obvious when one is not of the desired European descent, but rather of indigenous appearance. A national academy investigated genome-wide patterns of Native American population structure within and among Hispanic/Latino populations. They observed Mexicans have the highest Native American ancestries with 50.1 to up to 64 percent (Development of a para.18). With such strong evidence pointing to Mexicans being mainly indigenous, there are still some Mexicans that deliberately identify as just European. The repercussions are the never ending chain of prejudice in this society which affects the country as a whole, but especially indigenous people which are more marginalize. Another reason as to why this form of bigotry seems to be tolerated by Mexican citizens can be said was set in motion by the Spanish colonization and its lasting effects on the people of this country. The system that was left ingrained in Mexico, which destroyed the indigenous society’s integrity and still actively limiting the capacity to rebuild and unite the country, was that of putting anything of European descent as superior while continuing to push indigenous culture and heritage as demeaning and therefore unwanted by Mexicans. Mexican people are primarily of native blood, for any person of this descent to try and classify as non-indigenous is absurd and debilitating to the change needed in the country and within the frame of Mexican society. The after math, according to Dr. Gabriel Coronado, “ As an effect of systematic discrimination,

Most cases of racism that occurs in Mexico, as educators shall see from the survey report later are express racism. The survey shows that most cases of experienced discrimination within minority groups are alarming in Mexico . In the US, Brown, L (2006) reports that some health problems like bipolar disorder is highly associated with impersonal discrimination as it leaves victims in fear state of danger. However, this will be in most common forms of racism like in every experience in society students report because of the their experience as a result of his/her color or racial backgrounds. racial discrimination for international students typically refers to discriminatory policies into organizational