How Mexican-Americans assimilate into U.S. culture

How Mexican-Americans assimilate into U.S. culture

http://www.trbimg.com/img-5836390d/t...to/750/750x422
Anti-Donald Trump protesters march on the Las Vegas Strip on November 12, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The
election of Trump as president has sparked protests in cities across the country. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

November 23, 2016

Donald Trump’s election has unleashed a flood of animus against Mexican-Americans.

Within 24 hours of the election, Mexican-Americans across the nation (along with many other racial, ethnic, religious, and LGBTQ groups) were being verbally and even physically attacked. A novelist friend of mine tweeted a criticism of Trump and a stranger threatened him with deportation. Similarly sad, demeaning and terrifying stories are erupting all over social media.

The hostility percolates down to the most intimate levels. A lovely man joked that my son was not patriotic enough to use equipment emblazoned with an American flag but not to worry, they would not deport him.

At a friend’s school, 8-year-olds teased their Mexican-American classmates that they could be deported. Parents said it was just “kids being kids.” Many perpetrators don’t think they are racist or insist they are just joking. But the message is clear: “You don’t belong here.”

What we are seeing is the reanimation of longstanding stereotypes — what I call “racial scripts” — that present Mexicans as unassimilable, criminal, even diseased.

We like to describe ourselves as a melting pot nation. Immigrants, we say, can learn our language, appreciate our culture, and adopt our values and ultimately “become” American. This has been the script for white ethnic immigrants, even those who faced discrimination, such as the Irish, Italians, and Jews.

But Mexicans have had citizenship available to them for nearly 170 years. So why aren’t they seen as fully assimilated into U.S. culture? Why can Donald Trump still call them “bad hombres,” rapists, criminals, and disease carriers?

Presumably much of this animus derives from concerns about the estimated 11.2 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., about half of whom are Mexican (Pew Foundation). But we can’t characterize all immigrants as lawless marauders simply because they’re undocumented. Those with criminal records are already being deported.

Many argue that being undocumented alone qualifies migrants as criminals—they are “illegal.” But the history of who gets to be “legal” in our country is complex. European immigrants who came to the US in the 19th and early 20th centuries faced few restrictions. And even when immigrants broke the rules, short statutes of limitation meant they were rarely deported.

When laws changed in 1924, the federal government took steps to help make European immigrants “legal” and pave the way for their eventual assimilation. Deportations were suspended, and immigrants could pay a small fee to register when they arrived in the United States.

Mexican immigrants enjoyed no such opportunities. Instead, they faced increasing regulation through the Border Patrol, established in 1924. Health screenings at the border used race, not symptoms, as the organizing principle. Other forms of control worked outside the law. Like African-Americans, thousands of

Mexicans were the victims of lynch mobs well into the 1900s, a legacy documented in community and archival records.

In the 1920s, like now, employers opposed immigration quotas because they limited the availability of low-wage labor. But even this supposed openness to Mexicans nonetheless cast them as alien workers, not as immigrants arriving to the American melting pot. And during the Great Depression, when Mexican labor was no longer needed, the U.S. sent an estimated 1 million Mexicans back to Mexico, including some U.S. citizens of Mexican descent.

All these practices entrenched the “racial scripts” that characterized Mexicans as unassimilable, “illegal” and diseased.

These scripts persisted even as Mexican-Americans became a permanent and visible part of U.S. society. After the mid-1940s, U.S.-born Mexican-Americans outnumbered immigrants.

Yet these American citizens were segregated from mainstream America. They were shunted into neighborhoods by racial covenants and discriminatory government lending practices.

Their children attended “Mexican” schools and were only allowed to swim in public pools the day before the water was drained. They sat in the segregated section of movie theaters, were barred from restaurants (along with “Negroes” and dogs), and were buried — even veterans — in segregated cemeteries.

We don’t have to look far to see that these racial scripts are still extended to all Mexicans, regardless of citizenship status, generations in the United States, educational level, income, language ability or even skin color.

We saw the script at work when Trump declared that a U.S. district judge, born in Indiana to Mexican immigrant parents, had an “inherent conflict of interest” and could not be trusted to render a fair verdict.

And we see it in a would-be role model’s “joke” that my fourth-generation American son doesn’t deserve to carry American flag-decorated gear. We all agree that right thoughts lead to right words lead to right action. We must ask ourselves what scripts we are acting out and what they will lead to, regardless of our intent.
Molina is a professor of history, urban studies, Latino/a studies, immigration, gender and public health at UC San Diego. She is a third-generation Mexican-American and the author of two award-winning books: “How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts” and “Fit to be Citizens: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939.”

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/...123-story.html