Mexican Americans

Historical Overview

The historical legacy of Mexican Americans begins with the history of the Spanish conquest of the New World. With colonization, the Spanish intermixed with the native population and produced a Mestizaje, the blending of races, cultures, and society between Spaniards and the indigenous groups of the Western Hemisphere. Like other parts of Spanish America, Mexico established its independence from Spain in 1825 with a national territory that reached into what is now the American Southwest. The U.S. doctrine of [Page 895]manifest destiny culminated in the Mexican American War of 1846–1848. With Mexico's defeat, the United States annexed the Southwest and, in so doing, gained nearly 80,000 Mexican Americans. Their descendants and future waves of Mexican immigrants, particularly during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, changed the social fabric of American society.

Throughout the 20th century, the Mexican American population has confronted serious obstacles that have jeopardized their rights as U.S. citizens. During the Great Depression, the U.S. government engaged in widespread deportation of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans who were mistaken for foreign-born Mexicans. The belief that Mexicans were taking jobs away from U.S. citizens combined with hostile and xenophobic public sentiments against Mexican Americans. The U.S. government implemented the policy of repatriation of almost a half million of the estimated 3 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in the United States between 1929 and 1939. For Mexican Americans, as native-born citizens, this policy represented a violation of their civil rights.

Despite the mass deportations, Mexican Americans engaged in several important strikes in the Southwest. The San Joaquin, California, cotton strike of 1933 (considered a precursor to the workers' strike against the grape industry led by labor activist Cesar Chavez in the early 1960s) began as a response to low wages and poor working and living conditions. Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans joined together and walked off their work in the cotton fields. A series of violent confrontations involving the owners and the police eventually led to mediation and the end of the strike, but tensions between cotton workers, the owners, and the police continued for years. In San Antonio, Texas, pecan shellers, mostly women, went on strike in 1938 to protest their low wages and the conditions on the shelling assembly lines. With the help of organizers such as Emma Tenayuca, approximately 12,000 workers joined together in the Texas Pecan Shelling Workers Union. The strike broke out in violence and resulted in the arrest of 6,000 union members. The settlement of the strike brought few benefits for the workers, who were gradually displaced with the mechanization of the industry. Labor activism continues to the present date.

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