Mexican Americans

Mexican Americans (Spanish: Mexicano Americano) are Americans of Mexican ancestry. Mexican Americans account for 9% of the country's population: about 28.3 million Americans listed their ancestry as Mexican as of 2006. Mexican Americans form the largest Hispanic group in the United States and also the largest group of White Hispanics.

Mexican Americans trace their ancestry to Mexico, a country located in North America, bounded on the north by the United States; and many different European countries, especially Spain, which was its colonial ruler for over three centuries. Most Mexican American settlement concentrations are found in metropolitan and rural areas across the United States, with the highest concentrations in the Southwest and the Midwest. Los Angeles, Chicago, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Houston, Santa Ana, Dallas, El Paso and San Antonio are particular areas for large Mexican American communities.

Other cities in the Upper Midwest with thriving Mexican American communities are Detroit, Kansas City, Missouri, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Denver, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. There are also isolated concentrations of Mexican Americans in mostly rural areas in the Northwest: Idaho, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming; the Plains: Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas; and the Southeast: Florida, Louisiana and North Carolina.

Growing populations, that consist mostly of recently arrived immigrants from Mexico, are also present in other parts of the rural Southeastern United States, in states such as Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas. A growing population is also present in urban areas such as Washington, D.C., New York City, Miami and Philadelphia.

History of Mexican Americans
Mexican American history is wide-ranging, spanning more than four hundred years and varying from region to region within the United States. In 1900, there were slightly more than 500,000 Latinos living in New Mexico, California and Texas. Most were Mexican Americans who arrived in the Southwest in the mid 1800s while others were descendants of Mexican, Spanish, and other hispanicized European settlers who arrived in the Southwest during Spanish and Mexican colonial times. Approximately ten percent of the current Mexican American population can trace their lineage back to these early colonial settlers.

As early as 1813 the Tejanos who colonized Texas in the Spanish Colonial Period established a government in Texas that looked forward to independence from Mexico. As revealed by the writings of colonial Tejano Texians such as Antonio Menchaca, the Texas Revolution was initially a colonial Tejano cause. By 1831, Anglo settlers outnumbered Tejanos ten to one in Texas. The Mexican government became concerned by their increasing numbers and restricted the number of new Anglo settlers allowed to enter Texas. The Mexican government also banned slavery within the state, which angered Anglo slave owners. The Anglos along with some Tejanos rebelled against the centralized authority of Mexico City and the Santa Anna regime, while others remained loyal to Mexico, and still others were neutral.

Author John P. Schmal wrote of the effect Texas independence had on the Tejano community:

"A native of San Antonio, Juan Seguín is probably the most famous Tejano to be involved in the War of Texas Independence. His story is complex because he joined the Anglo rebels and helped defeat the Mexican forces of Santa Anna. But later on, as Mayor of San Antonio, he and other Tejanos felt the hostile encroachments of the growing Anglo power against them. After receiving a series of death threats, Seguín relocated his family in Mexico, where he was coerced into military service and fought against the US in 1846-1848 Mexican-American War.

Although the events of 1836 led to independence for the people of Texas, the Hispanic population of the state was very quickly disenfranchised to the extent that their political representation in the Texas State Legislature disappeared entirely for several decades."

Californios were Spanish speaking residents of modern day California who were either of Mexican or European descent and Native Americans who became integrated into the society before the California Gold Rush. Relations between Californios and Anglo settlers were relatively good until military officer John C. Fremont arrived in California with a force of 60 men on an exploratory expedition in 1846. Fremont made an agreement with Comandante Castro that he would only stay in the San Joaquin Valley for the winter, then move north to Oregon. However, Fremont remained in the Santa Clara Valley then headed towards Monterey. When Castro demanded that Fremont leave California, Fremont rode to Gavilan Peak, raised a US flag and vowed to fight to the last man to defend it. After three days of tension, Fremont retreated to Oregon without a shot being fired. With relations between Californios and Anglos quickly souring, Fremont rode back into California and encouraged a group of American settlers to seize a group of Castro's soldiers and their horses. Another group, seized the Presidio of Sonoma and captured Mariano Vallejo. William B. Ide was chosen Commander and Chief and on July 5th, he proclaimed the creation of the Bear Flag Republic. On July 9th, US forces reached Sonoma and lowered the Bear Flag Republic's flag then replaced it with a US flag. Californios organized an army to defend themselves from invading American forces after the Mexican army retreated from California. The Californios defeated an American force in Los Angeles on September 30, 1846, but were defeated after the Americans reinforced their forces in Southern California. The arrival of tens of thousands of people during the California Gold Rush meant the end of the Californio's ranching lifestyle. Many Anglo 49ers turned to farming and moved, often illegally, onto the land granted to Californios by the old Mexican government.

The United States first came into conflict with Mexico in the 1830s, as the westward spread of Anglo settlements and of slavery brought significant numbers of new settlers into the region known as Tejas (modern-day Texas), then part of Mexico. The Mexican-American War, followed by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848 and the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, extended U.S. control over a wide range of territory once held by Mexico, including the present day borders of Texas and the states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California.

Although the treaty promised that the landowners in this newly acquired territory would enjoy full enjoyment and protection of their property as if they were citizens of the United States, many former citizens of Mexico lost their land in lawsuits before state and federal courts or as a result of legislation passed after the treaty. Even those statutes intended to protect the owners of property at the time of the extension of the United States' borders, such as the 1851 California Land Act, had the effect of dispossessing Californio owners ruined by the cost of maintaining litigation over land titles for years.

While Mexican Americans were once concentrated in the states that formerly belonged to Mexico — principally, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas — they began creating communities in St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and other steel producing regions when they obtained employment during World War I. More recently, Mexican immigrants have increasingly become a large part of the workforce in industries such as meat packing throughout the Midwest, in agriculture in the southeastern United States, and in the construction, landscaping, restaurant, hotel and other service industries throughout the country.

Mexican American identity has also changed markedly throughout these years. Over the past hundred years Mexican Americans have campaigned for voting rights, stood against educational and employment discrimination and stood for economic and social advancement. At the same time many Mexican Americans have struggled with defining and maintaining their community's identity. In the 1960s and 1970s, some Latino and Hispanic student groups flirted with nationalism and differences over the proper name for members of the community — Chicano/Chicana, Latino/Latina, Mexican Americans, or Hispanics became tied up with deeper disagreements over whether to integrate into or remain separate from mainstream American society, as well as divisions between those Mexican Americans whose families had lived in the United States for two or more generations and more recent immigrants.

Racial and ethnic classification of Mexican Americans
Although the majority of Mexican Americans are mestizos, there are also those of full-blooded White ancestry and those of full-blooded Amerindian ancestry. There may also be Mexican Americans of mulatto, zambo, or full-blooded African ancestry as well as Mexican Americans of Asian descent. In the 2000 census, White Mexican Americans were the largest White Hispanic group.

Before the United States' borders expanded westward, New World regions dominated by the Spanish Empire in the 16th century held to a complex caste system that classified persons by their fractional racial makeup and geographic origin. See Casta.

As the United States' border expanded, the Census Bureau changed the traditional racial classification methods for Mexican Americans under United States jurisdiction. The Bureau's classification system has evolved significantly from its inception:


 * From 1790 to 1850, there was no distinct racial classification of Mexican Americans in the U.S. census. The only racial categories recognized by the Census Bureau were White and Black. The Census Bureau estimates that during this period the number of persons that could not be categorized as white or black did not exceed 0.25% of the total population based on 1860 census data.


 * From 1850 through 1920 the Census Bureau expanded its racial categories to include all different races including Mestizos,  Mulattos, Amerindians and Asians, but continued to classify Mexicans and Mexican Americans as White.


 * The 1930 U.S. census form asked for "color or race." The 1930 census calculators received these instructions: “write ‘W’ for White; ’Mex’ for Mexican.”


 * In the 1940 census, Mexican Americans were re-classified as White, due to widespread protests by the Mexican American community and the World War II-era Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration's policies of promoting national, "patriotic" unity by reorganizing racial categories to make all ethnic groups "white" and or "Americans" if not white. Instructions for enumerators were "Mexicans - Report 'White' (W) for Mexicans unless they are definitely of indigenous or other nonwhite race." During the same census, however, the bureau began to track the White population of Spanish mother tongue. This practice continued through the 1960 census. The 1960 census also used the title "Spanish-surnamed American" in their reporting data of Mexican Americans, which included Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans and others under the same category.


 * In 1970, Mexican Americans classified themselves as White. Hispanic individuals who classified themselves racially as Other were re-classified as White by the bureau. During this census, the bureau attempted to identify all Hispanics by use of the following criteria in sampled sets:
 * Spanish speakers and persons belonging to a household where the head of household was a Spanish speaker
 * Persons with Spanish heritage by birth location or surname
 * Persons who self-identified Spanish origin or descent


 * From 1980 on, the Census Bureau has collected data on Hispanic origin on a 100-percent basis. The bureau has noted an increasing number of respondents who mark themselves as Hispanic origin but not of the White race. This is perhaps due to an increase of non-white Latino immigrants into the country.

For certain purposes, respondents who wrote in "Chicano" or "Mexican" (or indeed, almost all Hispanic origin groups) in the "Some other race" category are automatically re-classified into the white race group.

Politics and debate of racial classification
Throughout U.S. history, Mexican Americans have been socially classified as "White" and "Amerindian" by United States people. Census criteria and legal constructions generally classify them as "White" or "Indigenous".

In times when Mexicans were uniformly allotted white status, they were permitted to intermarry with what today are termed "non-Hispanic whites", however, registrars often informally denied marriage licenses to Mexicans who they believed looked too dark to marry an Anglo.

Mexican Americans could vote and hold elected office in places such as Texas, especially San Antonio. They ran the state politics and constituted most of the elite of New Mexico since colonial times. However, property requirements and English literacy requirements were imposed in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas in order to prevent Mexican Americans from voting. Some eligible voters were intimidated with the threat of violence if they attempted to exercise their right to vote.

They were also allowed to serve in all-white units during World War II. However, many Mexican American war veterans were discriminated against and even denied medical services by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs when they arrived home.

All Mexicans were legally considered "white" because of early treaty obligations to Spaniards and Mexicans for citizenship status at a time when white-ness was considered a prerequisite for U.S. citizenship.

Although Mexican Americans were legally classified as "White" or "Amerindian", many organizations, businesses, and homeowners associations had official policies to exclude Mexican Americans.

Today, Mexican Americans are divided. Most recently arrived Mexican Americans consider themselves as mestizos.

Illegal immigration issues
Illegal Mexican immigrants have long met a significant portion of the demand for cheap labor in the United States. Fear of deportation keeps many illegal immigrant workers from taking advantage of social welfare programs as well as interaction with public authorities and makes them highly vulnerable to exploitation by employers. Many employers, however, have developed a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude, indicating a greater comfort with or casual approach toward hiring illegal Mexican nationals. In May 2006, millions of illegal immigrants, Mexicans and other nationalities, walked out of their jobs across the country in protest to proposed changes in immigration laws (also in hopes for amnesty to become naturalized citizens like similar the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted citizenship to Mexican nationals living and working illegally in the US).

In the United States, in states where Mexican Americans make up a large percentage of the population, such as California and Texas, illegal as well as legal immigrants from Mexico and Central America in addition to Mexican Americans combined often make up a large majority of workers in many blue-collar occupations: the majority of the employed men are restaurant workers, janitors, truck drivers, gardeners, construction laborers, material moving workers, or perform other types of manual or other blue collar labor (Source, U.S. Census Bureau, American community survey data.). Many women also work in low wage service and retail occupations. In many of these places with large Latino populations, many types of blue-collar workers are often assumed to be Mexican American or Mexican or other Latino immigrants (Although a large minority are actually not. -Source, U.S. Census Bureau, American community survey data.) because of their frequent dominance in those occupations and stereotyping. Occasionally, tensions have risen between Mexican immigrants and other ethnic groups because of increasing concerns over the availability of working-class jobs to Americans and immigrants from other ethnic groups. However, tensions have also risen among Hispanic American laborers who have been displaced because of both cheap Mexican labor and ethnic profiling, and African American workers claimed the Mexican laborers are advancing further than native-born blacks, which has caused some racial tensions between black and Mexicans in the Southwest US. Even legal immigrants to the United States, both from Mexico and elsewhere, have spoken out against illegal immigration. However, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in June 2007, 63% of Americans would support an immigration policy that would put illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship if they "pass background checks, pay fines and have jobs", while 30% would oppose such a plan. The survey also found that if this program was instead labeled "amnesty", 54% would support it, while 39% would oppose. It has been recently noted that many Mexican immigrants are climbing the socioeconomic ladder, but this was also the case in the past by many previous Mexican immigrants who came (legally or not) and worked hard towards their way up the ladder for the "American dream".

Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has said that immigration is necessary in order to slow the problem of a growing working-age population. According to Greenspan, by 2030, the growth of the US workforce will slow from 1 percent to 1/2 percent, while the percentage of the population over 65 years will rise from 13 percent to 20 percent. Greenspan has also stated that the current immigration problem could be solved with a "stroke of the pen", referring to the 2007 immigration reform bill which would have strengthened border security, created a guest worker program, and put illegal immigrants currently residing in the US on a path to citizenship if they met certain conditions.

Discrimination and stereotypes
Throughout U.S. history, Mexican Americans have and continue to endure various types of negative stereotypes which have long circulated in media and popular culture. Mexican Americans have also faced discrimination based on ethnicity, race, culture, and use of the Spanish language.

Mexican Americans have found themselves targeted by hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan It is estimated that at least 597 Mexicans and Mexican Americans were lynched between 1848 and 1928 in the Southwest. Mexican Americans were lynched at a rate of 27.4 per 100,000 of population between 1880 and 1930. This statistic is second only to that of the African American community during that period, which suffered an average of 37.1 per 100,000 of population. Between 1848 to 1879, Mexicans were lynched at an unprecedented rate of 473 per 100,000 of population. More problematic still is the fact that, despite the recent flourishing of academic literature on lynching, scholars also persistently overlook anti-Mexican violence.

Since the majority of illegal immigrants in the U.S. have traditionally been from Latin America, the Mexican American community has been the subject of widespread immigration raids. During The Great Depression, the United States government sponsored a Mexican Repatriation program which was intended to encourage people to voluntarily move to Mexico, but thousands were deported against their will. More than 500,000 individuals were deported, approximately 60 percent of which were actually United States citizens. In the post-war McCarthy era, the Justice Department launched Operation Wetback.

In the 1940s, imagery in newspapers and crime novels portrayed Mexican American Zoot suiters as disloyal foreigners or murderers attacking White-Anglo police officers and servicemen. Anti-zoot suiter sentiment sparked a series of attacks on young Mexican American males in Los Angeles which became known as the Zoot Suit Riots. The worst of the rioting occurred on June 9, during which 5,000 servicemen and civilians gathered in downtown Los Angeles and attacked Mexican-American zoot suiters and non-zoot suiters alike. The rioting eventually spread to the predominantly African American neighborhood of Watts.

During World War II, more than 300,000 Mexican Americans served in the US armed forces. Mexican Americans were generally integrated into regular military units, however, many Mexican American war veterans were discriminated against and even denied medical services by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs when they arrived home. In 1948, war veteran Dr Hector P. Garcia founded the American GI Forum to address the concerns of Mexican American veterans who were being discriminated against. The AGIF's first campaign was on the behalf of Felix Longoria, a Mexican American private who was killed in the Philippines while in the line of duty. Upon the return of his body to his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas, he was denied funeral services because of his race.

Mexican American school children, especially those of mestizo and mulatto descent, were subject to racial segregation in the public school system. They were forced to attend "Mexican schools" throughout the Southwestern United States. . In 1947, the Mendez v. Westminster ruling declared that segregating children of "Mexican and Latin descent" in Orange County and the state of California was unconstitutional. This ruling helped lay the foundation for the landmark Brown v Board of Education case which ended racial segregation in the public school system.

Mexican Americans were not selected as jurors in court cases which involved a Mexican American defendant in many counties in the Southwestern United States. In 1954, Pete Hernandez, an agricultural worker, was indicted of murder by an all-Anglo jury in Jackson County, Texas. Hernandez believed that the jury could not be impartial unless members of other races were allowed on the jury-selecting committees, seeing that a Mexican American had not been on a jury for more than 25 years in that particular county. Hernandez and his lawyers decided to take the case to the Supreme Court. The Hernandez v. Texas Supreme Court ruling declared that Mexican Americans and other racial groups in the United States were entitled to equal protection under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

In many areas across the Southwest, Mexican Americans lived in separate residential areas, due to laws and real estate company policies. This group of laws and policies, known as redlining, lasted until the 1950s, and fall under the concept of official segregation. In many other instances, it was more of a general social understanding among Anglos that Mexicans should be excluded. For instance, signs with the phrase "No Dogs or Mexicans" were posted in small businesses and public pools throughout the Southwest well into the 60's.

In modern times, organizations such as neo-nazis, white supremacist groups, American nationalist and nativist groups have all been known and continue to intimidate, harass and advocate the use of violence towards Mexican Americans and other ethnic Latinos in the population. Other organizations seeking to apprehend immigrants that have crossed into the United States illegally have also been accused of discrimination. It has recently been reported that members of Neo-Nazi organizations have indeed participated in demonstrations by the Minuteman Project and other anti-illegal-immigration organizations. In 2006, it was revealed that Laine Lawless, former Minuteman Project member and founder of Border Guardians (believed to be a nativist anti-immigration organization), sent emails to leaders of the National Socialist Movement (a neo nazi organization) in which she encouraged violence against "illegal immigrants" and Spanish speaking individuals.

In 2006, Time Magazine reported that the number of hate groups in the United States increased by 33 percent since 2000, primarily due to anti-illegal immigrant and anti-Mexican sentiment.

According to FBI statistics, the number of anti-Latino hate crimes increased by 35 percent since 2003. In California, the state with the largest Mexican American population, the number of hate crimes committed against Latinos has almost doubled.

Social status and assimilation
Barrow (2005) finds increases in average personal and household incomes for Mexican Americans in the 21st century. U.S. born Mexican Americans earn more and are represented more in the middle- and upper-class segments more than recently arriving Mexican immigrants. It should be noted, however, that Mexican Americans are not well represented in the professions. Most of the immigrants from Mexico come from the lower classes with lineage of family employed in lower skilled jobs. Thus, the kind of Mexican that arrives in the United States doesn't have a history of being involved in professions. Recently, some professionals from Mexico have been migrating, but to make the transition from one country to another it involves a lot of re-training and re-adjusting to conform to US standards--i.e. professional licensing is required. According to James P. Smith of the Research and Development Corporation, the children and grandchildren of Latino immigrants come very close to closing educational and income gaps with native whites. Immigrant Latino men make about half of what native whites do, while second generation US-born Latinos make about 78 percent of the salaries of their native white counterparts.

Huntington (2005) argues that the sheer number, concentration, linguistic homogeneity, and other characteristics of Latin American immigrants will erode the dominance of English as a nationally unifying language, weaken the country's dominant cultural values, and promote ethnic allegiances over a primary identification as an American. Testing these hypotheses with data from the U.S. Census and national and Los Angeles opinion surveys, Citrin et al. (2007) show that Hispanics acquire English and lose Spanish rapidly beginning with the second generation, and appear to be no more or less religious or committed to the work ethic than native-born non-Mexican American whites. Moreover, a clear majority of Hispanics reject a purely ethnic identification and patriotism grows from one generation to the next.

South et al. (2005) examine Hispanic spatial assimilation and inter-neighborhood geographic mobility. Their longitudinal analysis of seven hundred Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban immigrants followed from 1990 to 1995 finds broad support for hypotheses derived from the classical account of assimilation into American society. High income, English-language use, and embeddedness in American social contexts increased Latin American immigrants' geographic mobility into multi-ethnic neighborhoods. US citizenship and years spent in the United States were positively associated with geographic mobility into different neighborhoods, and coethnic contact was inversely associated with this form of mobility, but these associations operated largely through other predictors. Prior experiences of ethnic discrimination increased and residence in public housing decreased the likelihood that Latino immigrants would move from their original neighborhoods, while residing in metropolitan areas with large Latino populations led to geographic moves into "less Anglo" census tracts.

However, Mexican and Hispanic communities are said to be more solid or separated than ever by an increase of "enclavism" in the late 20th century, a new form of self-segregation among non-Anglo groups, esp. in urban centers and older suburbs at the same time. It's been said that Anglo and Mexican American communities throughout the history of the Southwestern states were like "separate worlds" as the U.S. and Mexico are separate countries, especially before the 1960s since residential segregation and discrimination became illegal.