Raza Sí, Migra No

Author(s):  
Jimmy Patiño

As immigration from Mexico to the United States grew through the 1970s and 1980s, the Border Patrol, police, and other state agents exerted increasing violence against ethnic Mexicans in San Diego’s volatile border region. In response, many San Diego activists rallied around the leadership of the small-scale print shop owner Herman Baca in the Chicano movement to empower Mexican Americans through Chicano self-determination. The combination of increasing repression and Chicano activism gradually produced a new conception of ethnic and racial community that included both established Mexican Americans and new Mexican immigrants. Here, Jimmy Patiño narrates the rise of this Chicano/Mexicano consciousness and the dawning awareness that Mexican Americans and Mexicans would have to work together to fight border enforcement policies that subjected Latinos of all statuses to legal violence. By placing the Chicano and Latino civil rights struggle on explicitly transnational terrain, Patiño fundamentally reorients the understanding of the Chicano movement. Ultimately, Patiño tells the story of how Chicano/Mexicano politics articulated an “abolitionist” position on immigration--going beyond the agreed upon assumptions shared by liberals and conservatives alike that deportations are inherent to any solutions to the still burgeoning immigration debate.

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-275
Author(s):  
Lisa Cacari Stone ◽  
Magdalena Avila ◽  
Bonnie Duran

Purpose. Historical trauma has been widely applied to American Indian/Alaska Native and other Indigenous populations and includes dimensions of language, sociocultural, and land losses and associated physical and mental disorders, as well as economic hardships. Insufficient evidence remains on the experiences of historical trauma due to waves of colonization for mixed-race Mexican people with indigenous ancestry (el pueblo mestizo). Research Question. Drawing from our critical lenses and epistemic advantages as indigenous feminist scholars, we ask, “How can historical trauma be understood through present-day discourse of two mestizo communities? What are public health practice and policy implications for healing historical trauma among mestizo populations?” Methodology and Approach. We analyzed the discourse from two community projects: focus groups and ethnographic field notes from a study in the U.S.–Mexico border region (2012–2014) and field notes and digital stories from a service-learning course in northern New Mexico (2016–2018). Findings. Our analysis describes the social and historical experiences of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Chicanas/os, and Nuevo Mexicano peoples in the southwestern border region of the United States. We found four salient themes as manifestations of “soul-wound”: (1) violence/fear, (2) discrimination/shame, (3) loss, and (4) deep sorrow. Themes mitigating the trauma were community resiliency rooted in “querencia” (deep connection to land/home/people) and “conscientizacion” (critical consciousness). Conclusion. Historical trauma experienced by mestizo Latinx communities is rooted in local cultural and intergenerational narratives that link traumatic events in the historic past to contemporary local experiences. Future public health interventions should draw on culturally centered strength-based resilience approaches for healing trauma and advancing health equity.


Author(s):  
Natalie Mendoza

Abstract This article argues that historical narrative has held a significant role in Mexican American identity formation and civil rights activism by examining the way Mexican Americans in the 1930s and 1940s used history to claim full citizenship status in Texas. In particular, it centers on how George I. Sánchez (1906–1972), a scholar of Latin American education, revised historical narrative by weaving history and foreign policy together through a pragmatic lens. To educators and federal officials, Sánchez used this revisionist history to advocate for Mexican Americans, insisting that the Good Neighbor policy presented the United States with the chance to translate into reality the democratic ideals long professed in the American historical imagination. The example of Sánchez also prompts us to reexamine the historiography in our present day: How do we define the tradition and trajectory of Mexican American intellectual thought in U.S. history? This article posits that when Sánchez and other Mexican Americans thought about their community’s collective identity and civil rights issues through history, they were contributing to a longer conversation driven by questions about identity formation and equality that first emerged at the end of the U.S. War with Mexico in 1848. These questions remain salient in the present, indicating the need for a historiographic examination that will change how we imagine the tradition of intellectual thought in the United States.


Troublemakers ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Kathryn Schumaker

The introductionexplains how and why student protest became common in the United States in the late 1960s and places these protests in the context of shifts in the history of education and in broader social movements, including the civil rights movement, the Chicano Movement, and black power activism. The introduction also situates students’ rights within the context of children’s rights more broadly, explaining the legal principles that justified age discrimination and excluded children and students from the basic protections of American constitutional law. The introduction identifies the two decades between the 1960s and 1980s as a constitutional moment that revolutionized the relationship of students to the state. It also connects students’ rights litigation to the issue of school desegregation and the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education.


Author(s):  
Jimmy Patiño

Chapter 2 explores the process in which some Chicano Movement activists in San Diego began to identify immigration as central to their struggles for self-determination and Mexican immigrants as part of their broadening notions of Chicano/a community. Furthermore, it highlights how this process beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s was greatly influenced by different forms of violence emanating from the U.S. Border Patrol, Customs’ agents and local law enforcement in the San Diego Border region. By focusing on the perspective of undocumented and Mexican-American women who spoke out against Border Patrol and Custom Agent’s perpetration of sexual violence, unauthorized strip searches and other cases of harassment and brutality the chapter outlines how race, legal status and gender organized both border policing activities and Chicano Movement activist’s formulations of a transnational, “Raza Sí, Migra No” identity and politics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
A Martinez-Donate ◽  
J Tellez Lieberman ◽  
L Bakely ◽  
C Correa ◽  
C Valdez ◽  
...  

Abstract Background In the United States (U.S.), over 4 million citizen children live with an unauthorized immigrant parent who is at risk of deportation. Children of Mexican immigrants are disproportionately represented among this population, as 1 out of 3 deported immigrants are from Mexico. Parental deportation can have profound and long-lasting consequences for children, yet research on this topic is sparse. We present preliminary findings from an ongoing, longitudinal study examining changes in health, well-being, behavior, and environmental factors among U.S. citizen children of recently deported Mexican immigrants. Methods Forty-eight deported Mexican parents were recruited from deportation processing stations on the Mexican border region. We completed phone interviews with one of their U.S.-based, citizen children and an adult caregiver, collecting retrospective information on health, health behavior, household, academics, and socio-ecological health determinants from a year earlier, as well as shortly after deportation of their parent. Pre-post analyses of caregivers' survey data were conducted to assess changes in outcomes associated with parental deportation. Results Following deportation of their parents, children were reported to have more frequent health problems (p=.008), including mental health problems (p=.002), externalizing (p=.040) and internalizing (p=.011) behaviors, school absences (p=.092), and experiences of food insecurity (p=.007) than a year before. Academic expectations were also significantly worse (p=.006) than those prior to parental deportation. Conclusions Children are the unintended victims of indiscriminate immigration enforcement. Deportation of parents is associated with significant deterioration of physical and mental health, behavior, academics, and home environment for their U.S. citizen children. Our results call for immigration policy reform and interventions to support families affected by the deportation of a parent. Key messages Immigration policies that separate families can have significant detrimental impacts on the health and well-being of U.S. citizen children. Policies must be revised to keep families together and protect children in mixed-legal status families.


Author(s):  
Michael Innis-Jiménez

By recognizing and not underestimating the significance of everyday forms of resistance and the politics of culture, as well as institutions and organizations not normally seen as vehicles for everyday and working class change, we can delve into the strategies that helped Mexicans in interwar South Chicago cope with the oppressive environment that surrounded them. Individual Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in interwar South Chicago, including steel workers, shop owners, union organizers, and social workers, formed a community that was able to change its physical and cultural environment to help its members and create a degree of resistance that helped Mexicans persevere against intimidation and prejudice. These individual and community histories—the stories of people, organizations, and their physical surroundings—shed light on Mexicano life in a place far from the border and at the industrial heart of the United States.


Author(s):  
Robert T. Chase

In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave plantations. This system persisted until the 1940s when, led by Texas, southern states adopted northern prison design reforms. Texas presented the reforms to the public as modern, efficient, and disciplined. Inside prisons, however, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, intensifying the labor division that privileged some prisoners with the power to accelerate state-orchestrated brutality and the internal sex trade. Reformers' efforts had only made things worse--now it was up to the prisoners to fight for change. Drawing from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners, Robert T. Chase narrates the struggle to change prison from within. Prisoners forged an alliance with the NAACP to contest the constitutionality of Texas prisons. Behind bars, a prisoner coalition of Chicano Movement and Black Power organizations publicized their deplorable conditions as “slaves of the state” and initiated a prison-made civil rights revolution and labor protest movement. These insurgents won epochal legal victories that declared conditions in many southern prisons to be cruel and unusual--but their movement was overwhelmed by the increasing militarization of the prison system and empowerment of white supremacist gangs that, together, declared war on prison organizers. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book weaves together untold but devastatingly important truths from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the past to the mass incarceration of today.


2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicki L. Ruiz

This essay reviews someof the scholarship of the last twenty years that illuminates significant twentieth-century experiences and the multiple identities of Mexican-origin populations in the United States. The racial/gendered contours of Chicana/o history are explored through research that focuses on the Chicano movement, labor and civil rights organizations, identity and community, education, segregation, and sexuality and power. Throughout the history, complicating notions of mestizaje (morena/o), whiteness (blanca/o) and cultural coalescence (caféé con leche) influence and explain individual and institutional actions. Therefore, in this essay the situational nature of racial constructs in the historical (and the historians’) moment are discerned by both a focused overview of critical works in the field and specific cases, including a preview of a case study on school desegregation in the Southwest. Este ensayo revisa parte de la investigacióón de los últimos veinte añños que ilumina experiencias significativas en el siglo XX sobre las múltiples identidades de las poblaciones de origen mexicano en los Estados Unidos. Los contornos raciales/ genééricos de la historia chicana son explorados a travéés de la investigacióón que se centra en el movimiento chicano, las organizaciones de derechos civiles y laborales, identidad y comunidad, segregacióón educativa, sexualidad, y poder. A travéés de la historia, complejas nociones de mestizaje (morena/o), blancura (blanca/o) y fusiones culturales (caféé con leche) influyen y explican las acciones individuales e institucionales. Por esa razóón, en este ensayo la situacióón de las construcciones raciales en el momento históórico (y en el de los historiadores) son discernidas a travéés de una revisióón panoráámica centrada en los trabajos crííticos del campo y, a la vez, bajo casos especííficos, incluyendo un estudio particular sobre la desegregacióón de una escuela en el Suroeste de los Estados Unidos.


Author(s):  
Lorena Oropeza

In 1967, Reies López Tijerina led an armed takeover of a New Mexico courthouse in the name of land rights for disenfranchised Spanish-speaking locals. The raid thrust Tijerina and his cause into the national spotlight, catalyzing an entire generation of activists. The actions of Tijerina and his group, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Alliance of Land Grants), demanded that Americans attend to an overlooked part of the country’s history: the United States was an aggressive empire that had conquered and colonized the Southwest and subsequently wrenched land away from people who lived there—Mexicans and Native Americans alike. To many young Mexican American activists at the time, Tijerina and the Alianza offered a compelling and militant alternative to the nonviolence of Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. Tijerina's place at the table among the nation’s leading civil rights activists was short-lived, but his analysis of land dispossession and his prophetic zeal for the rights of his people was essential to the creation of the Chicano movement.  In this fresh and unvarnished biography, Lorena Oropeza traces the origins of Tijerina's revelatory historical analysis to the years he spent as a Pentecostal preacher and his hidden past as a self-proclaimed prophet of God. Confronting allegations of anti-Semitism and accusations of sexual abuse, the narrative captures the life of a man—alternately mesmerizing and repellant—who changed our understanding of the American West and the place of Latinos in the fabric of American struggles for equality and self-determination.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 86-90
Author(s):  
Shervin Assari ◽  
Mohammed Saqib ◽  
Cheryl Wisseh ◽  
Mohsen Bazargan

Introduction: Socioeconomic status (SES) indicators are among the main social determinants of health and illness. Less, however, is known about the role of SES in the epidemiology of polypharmacy in immigrant Latino Americans living in the United States. This research studied the association between three SES indicators, education, income, and employment, and polypharmacy in older first generation Latino American immigrant adults. Methods: Data was obtained from the Sacramento Area Latino Study on Aging (SALSA, 1996-2008). A total of 632 older first generation Mexican-American immigrants to the U.S. entered this analysis. The independent variables were education, income, and employment. Polypharmacy was the outcome. Age, gender, physical health, smoking, and drinking were the covariates. Binary logistic regression was used to analyze the data. Results: Employment was associated with lower odds of polypharmacy. The association between education and polypharmacy was above and beyond demographic factors, physical health, health behaviors, and health insurance. Neither education nor income were associated with polypharmacy. Other determinants of polypharmacy were poor self-rated health (SRH) and a higher number of chronic medical conditions (CMCs). Conclusion: Employment appears to be the major SES determinant of polypharmacy in older foreign-born Mexican Americans. Unemployed older Mexican American immigrants with multiple chronic diseases and those who have poor SRH have the highest need for an evaluation of polypharmacy. Given the age group of this population, most of them have health insurance, which provides an opportunity for reducing their polypharmacy.


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