On the Backs of Mexican Americans Too

Dear Mr. Sanchez,

Sadly, it is no surprise that your historical work demonstrates that Mexicans and Mexican Americans have been and are shielded from American tolerance and cultural understanding. In the 1920s case of Rollins v. Alabama, we see that even Sicilians were not welcomed into the fold of whiteness because of their immigrant status (although not completely rejected as nonwhite), let alone an immigrant with clear physical distinctions from a Caucasian.

The funny thing is that racial intolerance is as an effective route to mobilize a classified hegemon as ethnic pride is to unite the minority group. In the effort to form a coherent American ethnicity, deportation and repatriation campaigns sprung up in an effort to weed out the non-American immigrants. But there is some agency in this effort to establish roots. When we do not feel we belong in the dominant culture or the dominant culture does not want us, we either fight or flee.

I find this analogous to the Pan-Africanist Movement of Marcus Garvey in forging an African homeland for Blacks, called Liberia. The strange, “colonized mentality” where the oppressed feel both contempt for their oppressors yet an attraction to their ways is exactly the kind of response that Blacks (and you would argue Mexican Americans) demonstrated regarding this idea of exporting their allegiances elsewhere. “We are American!” is the response yelled in the streets at the notion to relocate and identity is effectually resolved. This period of 1930s was crucial in pouring the cement of race in America and it is helpful to see that Mexican American identity politics were a racial project of the Anglo-American as well.

In Scholarship,
Toni