Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity.

Existing research inadequately addresses the variation in Mexican Americans’ patterns of ethnic identification. Drawing on 78 interviews, I address this question by exploring how conceptions of ancestry and nationality shape ethnic identification among New Mexico’s long-standing Mexican American population, Nuevomexicanos. I find that Nuevomexicanos emphasized their ties to Spanish heritage within the history of New Mexico to explain their ethnicity and to construct their identity in opposition to Mexican immigrants. Although Nuevomexicanos varied in their claims to Mexican ancestry, they generally prioritized their roots in the original Spanish settlement of New Mexico to emphasize distinctions in ancestry, nationality, and regionality from Mexican immigrants. Moreover, despite Nuevomexicanos’ persistent claims to Spanish ancestry, they did not perceive themselves as racially White. Instead, Spanish ancestry was integral to Nuevomexicano identity because it enabled them to highlight their regional ties to New Mexico and long-time American identities. Thus, I argue that Nuevomexicanos’ enduring claims to Spanish ancestry represent a defensive strategy to enact dissociation from stigmatized Mexican immigrants. Overall, these findings show that Mexican Americans’ dissociation strategies are contingent on how they define themselves as members of an ethnic and national community. These findings also indicate that “Mexican American” as an identity term is a loosely maintained membership category among “Mexican Americans” because of their intragroup heterogeneity.

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Review: Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement, by Lori A. Flores

California History ◽

10.1525/ch.2021.98.2.140 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 98 (2) ◽

pp. 140-142

Author(s):

Patricia Zavella

Keyword(s):

Mexican Americans ◽

Mexican Immigrants

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Latina/o Immigration before 1965

The Latina/o Midwest Reader ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252041211.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Lilia Fernández

Keyword(s):

Latin America ◽

Immigration Policy ◽

Mexican Americans ◽

Mexican Immigrants ◽

Puerto Ricans ◽

Critical Role ◽

The City ◽

The U.S

This essay examines the migration of Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans to Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, long before the more widely recognized post-1965 immigration to the U.S. from Latin America. It argues that this pre-1965 migration to the Midwest was significant and played a critical role in establishing communities that would receive later migrants. In fact, by 1970, the city of Chicago officially counted nearly a quarter of a million Hispanics or Latinos in that year’s census. The essay examines how these populations became racialized as “non-white” in employment, housing, and the local enforcement and perceptions surrounding immigration policy.

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Attitudes About Immigration

Durable Ethnicity ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190221492.003.0005 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 146-177

Author(s):

Edward Telles ◽

Christina A. Sue

Keyword(s):

Ethnic Group ◽

Mexican Americans ◽

Mexican American ◽

Mexican Immigrants ◽

American Identity ◽

American Population ◽

Attitudes Toward Immigrants ◽

Small Minority ◽

Mexican Heritage ◽

The Media

This chapter addresses Mexican Americans’ attitudes about Mexican immigrants in the context of mass immigration. In addition to the boundary that exists between persons of Mexican heritage and non-Latinos, there is another important social boundary operating that highlights Mexican Americans’ understandings of their own ethnicity and American identity—the boundary between Mexican immigrants and themselves. Study respondents displayed a broad range of attitudes toward immigrants, illustrating the internal diversity of the Mexican American population, which runs contrary to their treatment in the media as a homogeneous ethnic group in terms of attitudes, politics, and voting. This chapter also demonstrates the underlying ideologies, philosophies, and rationales that respondents used to justify their immigration positions: whereas many framed their views based on American ideals, only a small minority framed them in terms of their ethnicity, basing their perceptions in an understanding of Mexican immigrants as co-ethnics.

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