Mexican Americans

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Mexican Americans numbered 21 million, or 58 percent of the 35 million people of Latin American origin in the [Page 465]United States (i.e., Latinos). More recent population estimates suggest that this figure actually is close to 65 percent. Mexican American urban history distills the larger experience of that group. Its uniqueness owes largely to proximity to Mexico, which has allowed a continuous back-and-forth migration over the course of almost five centuries. The group's history begins on the northern frontier of Mexico, concentrated mostly in present-day New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California, where settlements—including sprawling rural land grants and cities—sprang up in the 16th through 18th centuries under Spanish colonial rule.

Small cities—known as pueblos and villas—emerged on sites marking entradas (thrusts, or chains of frontier settlement) in a confluence of Spanish missions, nearby presidios (forts), and adjacent towns, most of them in south central Texas, in Tucson, Arizona, and along the California coast. Beginning in the late 18th century, and particularly in the decades after Mexican independence in 1821, San Antonio, Los Angeles, Santa Fe—among the larger pueblos—received sizable influxes of Anglo-American and European newcomers, which led to displacement of urban Tejanos, Nuevo Mexicanos, and Californios to secondary economic, political, and social positions. These families, nonetheless, provided continuity between eras of Spanish-Mexican and U.S. sovereignty in what has become the greater Southwest.

The outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 brought new waves of emigrants and exiles fleeing from south of the border. Many found work and housing in the growing San Antonio and Los Angeles metropolises, where they formed ethnic mutual aid, neighborhood, and labor organizations. Ethnic and racial obstacles in education, housing, and other areas of urban life, meanwhile, propelled leaders in the 1920s to seek redress for political grievances through the formation and advocacy of civil rights organizations, beginning on a regional scale with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which was established in the Gulf Coast town of Corpus Christi in 1929 and soon developed chapters throughout Texas and the Southwest.

Between 1910 and 1940, Mexicans constituted the latest (and largest) national wave of immigrants. Whereas the 1920s saw the rise of communities throughout the Southwest and into the Midwest, the 1930s proved to be difficult years, yielding unemployment, disruption to fledgling communities, and repatriation to Mexico. In cities, the experience varied. Some, like San Antonio and Chicago, gained population from their hinterlands. Others, like Milwaukee and Detroit, saw a significant decrease of Mexican and Mexican American populations. After 1940, a sustained resumption of northward migration (coupled with the influx from Texas and other points within the United States), as well as the “settling out” of individuals and families from the predominantly rural migrant stream, made for a more U.S.-centered Mexican American experience.

During and after the immediate post–World War II decade, the poor working and housing conditions of braceros (contract laborers) in California's fruitful Central Valley caught the attention of scholar and activist Ernesto Galarza. In the 1960s, other Mexican Americans, notably Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, formed a national movement—with strong urban roots—in support of the right of farmworkers to organize. Other important issues also came to the fore, such as inequality in urban education, de facto segregation, and lack of access to full voting rights.

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