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Mexican-american Reflections

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Published: Mar 25, 2024

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Being Latina and the struggle of the dualities of two worlds

Reflections on why our identities can help create a better world for all of us.

A few days ago, I attended a Zoom presentation organized by ASUN entitled “What does it mean to be Latinx?” Every time I witness the complexity of identities in the Latinx community in the United States, I am amazed. Amazed that we are always perceived as a homogenous group, when in reality, we couldn’t come from more different backgrounds, and we couldn’t have more different and complex identities. Also, the challenges we face are as different as each of our stories. So, in the spirit of Hispanic Heritage Month, please indulge me in letting me tell you my story.

There is a well-known character in Mexican history that invokes both love and condemnation from most Mexicans. Her name was Malintzin but history knows her as La Malinche . Her story is similar to that of U.S.A.’s Pocahontas ; the beautiful indigenous woman who abandons her tribe to help the white man. (The legends omit how she became the property of such White men, but that’s another story). 

La Malinche was a Nahúatl woman who was given to Hernán Cortés as a slave. Due to her upperclass education, she spoke two languages, an ability that made her very useful to Hernán Cortés in communicating with the indigenous people as he went about conquering Mexico. On one hand, she was intelligent and, clearly, resilient. But on the other hand, she helped Cortés begin the Spanish colonization of the Nuevo Mundo. This duality is what gives her such a complex identity. And this duality is one that follows me.

When I was in high school, several of my classmates would sometimes call me Malinchista . As you can imagine, that was NOT a compliment. By definition, a Malinchista is “a person who denies her own cultural heritage by preferring foreign cultural expressions” (I’m not making it up; look it up).

In my early teens, I discovered American football. While switching channels on the television, I stumbled across a game being played in several feet of snow. I had never seen this! The game was being played in Minnesota. That year, the Dallas Cowboys won the Super Bowl, and I became a die-hard fan of Roger Staubach and “America’s Team.” This marked the initiation of my love for all things American. I learned about Formula 1, Sports Illustrated and Tiger Beat. Yes, Tiger Beat introduced me to the American darlings of my generation. My bedroom walls were covered with pictures of American teen idols I had never seen before in my life (in the 1970s, Mexican TV programming didn’t broadcast many American TV shows; I only remember Dallas and The Partridge Family , which of course, I loved).

I also loved English-language songs. I used to spend my money buying cancioneros , books similar in format and quality to comic books, for people who were learning to play the guitar. The cancioneros had the lyrics of the songs along with the music notes. I literally used these cancioneros to practice my English. I would translate each word of the songs, and then I would play the records over and over until I memorized the lyrics and could actually follow the singer pronouncing the words. Do you know how hard it is to sing at full speed: “Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall?”

By the time I was in college, I had already spent time in the city of Dallas (and yes, I made the pilgrimage to Irving, Texas and the Cowboys’ stadium) – and perfected my English. I started studying English when I entered first grade. By middle school, my parents were paying a private tutor. In Mexico, English was accepted as the lingua franca needed to succeed in the world, and my parents were going to make sure I learned it. (My dad had taught himself English, and he shared my enthusiasm for English language magazines, although not for the Dallas Cowboys.) Learning a second language allowed me to learn about, navigate and integrate into a different culture. And, unlike La Malinche , I did this of my own volition.

When I made the decision to come to the United States to study, my father told me, “If you ever decide this is not for you or things don’t work out, come back home.” But I was not turning back. In my mind, America was the best place in the whole world (my small world, at least). I had spent a semester in an exchange program at the University of Oklahoma, and I knew back then I belonged in the United States. One of the things that caught my attention early on was the fact that people could wear their pajamas to class (I know you’ve seen it), and nobody blinked an eye. One could wear her hair in blue spikes or wear slippers to the grocery store, and no one would say a thing. To me, that was amazing! People didn’t bother you, judge you or care what you wore. I felt America was the place where not only public services worked, but where you could be yourself and you could be free to be whomever you wanted to be. There was a sense of freedom that was refreshing.

However, for a long time I felt like I didn’t belong here, and I didn’t belong in Mexico, either. Navigating two worlds was not precisely difficult  but sometimes unsettling . You spend your time “live switching” from English to Spanish to Spanglish and back again. You mix Cholula with Five Guys hamburgers. You watch American soccer but listen to the Mexican commentators (otherwise it’s like listening to golf announcers). And you truly think Mexican soccer fans are like the old Oakland Raiders fans, only worse. Women in Mexico are as rabid fans as many men, but, at least back in my day (I feel ancient now), you didn’t see many women go to the stadiums. As a woman, I never felt safe. I only went to a match if my male friends went with me. This is one of the most striking differences between the U.S. and Mexico: American soccer fans are so mild-mannered in comparison!

Another striking difference I noticed when I first came to the U.S. was that I was not getting cat calls out when I was out walking in the streets. In Mexico, everywhere I went (since I was a preteen, for goodness’ sake), I would be subjected to cat calls and whistles – and the harassment only got worse the older I got. My experience as a woman was of always being on high alert. But when I came to the U.S., I felt respected. I could exist without being harassed continually. Women here seemed to have a voice and the same opportunities as men to grow and pursue their dreams. I felt free to pursue a career and to not be expected to only dream of marrying and having children. Although, over the years, I’ve come to realize there still is much room for improvement.

Back in the 1500s La Malinche did what she could to survive (did I say historians think she died before she was 30?). History asked her to do a task she didn’t want, and she did her best. I am sure she considered her options and bought time, respect and the right to live in the best way she could. She used her skills to earn a place in history, and although her role continues to be debated, I cannot blame her. Did I turn my back on my country? Or did I look for a better life? My circle of Latina friends in the U.S. is full of intelligent, professional women who left their countries and built a better life ­– a different life – here in the United States. They all miss their families, and they all support their biological families in many ways. What they can do from here, however, is more than they could have done had they stayed in their countries of origin.

Being Latina in America is both an honor and a challenge. We struggle with the dualities of our worlds. We struggle with the adjectives that define us. We are a complex mix of races, traditions and experiences. We care for our people, and we work tirelessly to do what must be done to help each other. The complexity of our identities can help us create a better world for all of us, a world where our differences are not viewed as a threat but as an asset. A world where we all thrive. ¡Sí, se puede!

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For me, being Latino means living between two worlds

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Being a Latino in  the U.S. can sometimes mean an evolving sense of identity. When I was a child, I identified simply as American — without a hyphen, asterisk or modifier.

I thought being American meant reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, learning about the War of 1812 in history class and watching blockbuster hits with friends. 

But being at home was living in another world.

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Ma would cook enchiladas en salsa verde  and, at least once a week, would shove the phone in my face, “Ten, habla con tu abuela que te quiere oír.” Translation: My grandma wanted to hear my voice. 

I loved being in two worlds. 

But that feeling of being a total American was short lived. When I was 7 or 8 years old, my parents told me I was born in Mexico. My American life was radically redefined. Later, I would come to be defined as a “dreamer,” still feeling no less American but with an asterisk.

In college, I did not feel like I was entirely from Mexico or the U.S. and toyed with identifying as Chicano. I was attracted by the feeling of nepantla — the Nahuatl word for “in the middle.” 

But I still felt more Mexican, though the only home I knew was here in the U.S. Most of my classmates were born here and seemed to have a better grasp on the two identities.

Feeling more Mexican than completely American, I wasn’t feeling Chicano. I’m not just one thing — and, ultimately, being Latino isn’t one specific experience either. 

That was five years ago. I’m working in Los Angeles on a permit through DACA , a policy that allows people brought here as children like me to work. And after having lived in Washington, D.C., — the mecca of American politics — surrounded by people from different backgrounds, I have a new sense of self. 

Now, every time someone asks, “What are you?” or “Where are you from?” my answer is: I’m an Angeleno who was born in Mexico.

Hispanic, Latinx, Chicano. Immigrant, naturalized or U.S. born. Black, white, brown, blended. 

Being Latino can mean so many different things, rooted in about two dozen  different places of origin. And though Latinos may have a language in common, there isn’t a singular voice or narrative for the Latino experience.

Some speak English at work, hablan español en la casa or speak both languages con nuestros amigos —  or no Spanish at all. Some fuse the two languages to say  donde nos parkeamos, or “where do we park.”  

There’s no denying that Latinos are changing politics , entertainment and the culture of the country. 

The U.S. Latino population is at 57 million and counting. In California, Latinos have surpassed whites as the largest ethnic group.

In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, The Times wants to hear about your Latino identity. We plan to publish a collection of stories that highlight the variety of voices and experiences within the Latino community.

So tell us your story: What does being Latino in 2016 mean to you? You can fill out the survey below or share your story on Instagram using #MyLatinoIdentity or #MiIdentidadLatina.  

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I’m a First-Generation American. Here’s What Helped Me Make It to College

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My father is an immigrant from Mexico who decided to sacrifice his home to give me a better life. He grew up with the notion that the United States had one of the best education systems in the world and he saw that education as my ticket to participate in the pursuit of happiness.

When he moved to America, he chose Flushing, Queens, in New York City—which this year became an epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis—because the public elementary school was highly regarded for its academics and safety. But navigating the public school system was extremely difficult, marked with constant reminders that the system was not designed for students like me. These difficulties and inequities have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis and will continue to impact students if they remain unaddressed.

My father always lived with the fear that if people found out I was the son of a Mexican immigrant, I would be ostracized in the classroom. From the first day of elementary school, he prayed that no one would bother me for being Mexican American, and that I would learn English quickly so I could defend against attacks on my identity. I have gone through all my academic career fighting the stereotypes that Mexicans are all “lazy” and “undocumented.”

I have experienced an interesting duality as a Mexican American, one that has played a formative role in my education and development. I have two languages, two countries, two identities. I learn in English but live in Spanish. I am Mexican at home but American at school.

I first became aware of this code-switching in middle school. The ways I interacted with my white, wealthy peers were far different from with my Latinx friends. I understood that English held more power than Spanish. Many people associate an accent or different regional variants of English to be unsophisticated, so I worked to be perceived as “articulate” and “well-spoken” at my local elementary and middle schools. In fact, it was my attention to coming across as “articulate” that helped me get into the high school that I attended.

I wanted to attend a high-achieving high school, but I did not perform well on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) and therefore failed to be admitted into one of New York City’s specialized high schools. But the principal of Millennium High School, a selective public high school in Manhattan, offered me a spot—and gave me a shot. Principal Colin McEvoy saw more than the student who failed to get into a SHSAT school. He saw a well-spoken kid who was determined to find a school that would have the resources to achieve his goal of graduating and going to college. My father had sacrificed everything so I could go to college, and I saw Millennium as the means to get there.

Not every student can have the same opportunity I did, but every school community and educator can take certain steps to support students who feel at odds within a system that was not designed for them. Here are three steps that will help students like me:

1. Play an active role in their students’ lives outside of academics. While this is important during “normal” times, it is even more important now during the global pandemic when students are worried about their family, cut off from friends, and unsure what the future holds. Each student should be assigned a teacher who also serves as adviser, an additional adult figure in their life to help guide and assist them—even if this is done virtually. At Millennium, each student in the beginning of the high school experience is assigned an adviser and meets in advisory class three days a week to complete college-preparatory activities and check in with their adviser about academics and their personal life.

2. Acknowledge how political developments may affect students. Schools should provide students who may be affected by a policy decision with the tools to protect their education. I have many friends who have been affected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy and had to go through the complex process of ensuring they could study in the country without their parents. This June, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to rescind DACA, but immigrants’ fight for protection under the law is far from over. It is important for teachers to understand how politics can impact the well-being of students—and how the fear of those impacts often take a toll on students’ academics.

3. Offer guidance on how to apply to college and options aside from college. My former high school requires every student to meet with the college guidance counselor at least twice, once each in their junior and senior years. As the first in my family to apply to college, these meetings were essential for me to figure out the application process, as well as for navigating financial aid and scholarships. It was only with this guidance that I applied for a Posse Foundation scholarship and earned a full scholarship to Middlebury College—opportunities that I would not have even known about otherwise.

As the COVID-19 vaccine gets rolled out more widely, there remain a lot of unknowns in higher education and in many families’ financial futures. Educators can help students explore alternate opportunities during this difficult time, including community college, internships, apprenticeships, gap years, or service-learning options.

Students of marginalized communities are both fighters and academics. Going through the American education system is difficult, and there are active ways that schools and educators can help their students navigate it. This is not a matter of doing the work for the students but acknowledging that there are several challenges present in students’ lives—challenges that may be exacerbated during a pandemic—and helping them navigate them.

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Racial Identity and Racial Treatment of Mexican Americans

Vilma ortiz.

Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

Edward Telles

Department of Sociology, Princeton University

How racial barriers play in the experiences of Mexican Americans has been hotly debated. Some consider Mexican Americans similar to European Americans of a century ago that arrived in the United States with modest backgrounds but were eventually able to participate fully in society. In contrast, others argue that Mexican Americans have been racialized throughout U.S. history and this limits their participation in society. The evidence of persistent educational disadvantages across generations and frequent reports of discrimination and stereotyping support the racialization argument. In this paper, we explore the ways in which race plays a role in the lives of Mexican Americans by examining how education, racial characteristics, social interactions, relate to racial outcomes. We use the Mexican American Study Project, a unique data set based on a 1965 survey of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio combined with surveys of the same respondents and their adult children in 2000, thereby creating a longitudinal and intergenerational data set. First, we found that darker Mexican Americans, therefore appearing more stereotypically Mexican, report more experiences of discrimination. Second, darker men report much more discrimination than lighter men and than women overall. Third, more educated Mexican Americans experience more stereotyping and discrimination than their less-educated counterparts, which is partly due to their greater contact with Whites. Lastly, having greater contact with Whites leads to experiencing more stereotyping and discrimination. Our results are indicative of the ways in which Mexican Americans are racialized in the United States.

Mexican Americans have lower levels of education than non-Hispanic Whites and Blacks. Some scholars have argued that this is a result of Mexican immigrants having relatively low levels of education especially by standards in the United States, yet this gap is persistent and continues into the fourth generation ( Telles & Ortiz, 2008 ). To explain this, we have argued that the education disadvantage for Mexican Americans largely reflects their treatment as a stigmatized racial group rather than simply being a result of low immigrant human capital or of other causes suggested in the literature ( Telles & Ortiz, 2008 ). This paper investigates the role of race and racialization among Mexican Americans by more directly examining the relationships of education, skin color, and social interactions with racial identity and racial treatment (discrimination and stereotyping).

The role of race in the lives of Mexican Americans has been hotly debated. On the one hand, some argue that Mexican Americans have been racialized throughout their history in the United States ( Acuña, 1972 ; Almaguer, 1994 ; Barrera, 1979 ; Foley, 1997 ; Gomez, 2007 ; Montejano, 1987 ; Ngai, 2004 ; Vasquez, 2010 ). Their long and continuous history as labor migrants destined to jobs at the bottom of the economic hierarchy and their historic placement at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, preceded by the conquest of the original Mexican inhabitants in what is now the U.S. Southwest, have created a distinct racial category of “Mexican” in the popular imagination. While not as heavily excluded from economic and social integration as African Americans, Mexican origin persons have encountered severe racial barriers, which have structured opportunities for them. These scholars argue that Mexican Americans lag educationally and economically even after several generations in the United States, as a result of this treatment. They have been thus limited to mostly working class jobs and from successfully integrating into middle class society.

On the other hand, others consider Mexican Americans to be similar to European Americans with modest backgrounds ago that arrived in the United States more than a century ago ( Alba & Nee, 2003 ; Bean & Gillian, 2003 ; Perlmann, 2005 ). These assimilation theorists argue that while Mexican Americans may be slightly darker, slightly more stigmatized, and slightly more disadvantaged than these prior European groups, these factors will only slightly delay their integration into U.S. society. The key word here is “slightly.” These scholars recognize some of the disadvantages faced by the Mexican origin population but they do not consider these disadvantages sufficiently severe to affect long-term integration. However, the persistent educational disadvantage across generations and frequent reports of discrimination and stereotyping (like those we provided in Generations of Exclusion ) challenge this view.

In this paper, we examine the ways in which race plays a role in the lives of Mexican Americans. While we use the same data previously used in Generations of Exclusion , the analysis are entirely new. Here, we study the relationships between racial appearance (such as skin color), education, and social interactions (such as contact with Whites), on the one hand, with racial identity and racial treatment, on the other. This paper thus extends our findings from Generations of Exclusion .

Mexican Americans and Race in History and Sociology

The issue of race among Mexican Americans is contested in many ways. The racial heritage of Mexicans is mixed, with varying mixtures of European, Indigenous, and African ancestry. As a result, Mexicans are heterogeneous in their racial characteristics, ranging from having light to dark skin and eye color with many in the brown and mestizo middle. Outsiders tend not to see Mexicans as White or Black. Rather they are viewed through the stereotypic lens of being non-white or brown and largely indigenous-looking. Still much about the racial status of Mexicans is debated. Two issues in particular are—one is whether Mexican is a racial category and, two is whether Mexicans are white or non-white.

Mexican Americans themselves often provide ambiguous responses to race questions, perhaps reflecting their own uncertainty about their race as well as ambivalence about being non-white ( Gomez, 1992 ). Historically, Mexican Americans responded to questions about ethnic background with labels such Latin American or Spanish , as we showed with 1965 data in Generations of Exclusion ( Telles & Ortiz, 2008 ). This reinforced European ancestry in responses about group membership and a distancing from indigenous heritage. Up to the 1960s, Mexican American leaders, such as those in the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), emphasized the Spanish/European/White heritage of Mexican Americans, in attempts to secure rights as first class citizens and despite their treatment as non-white in American society ( Gross, 2003 ; Haney-Lopez, 2006 ).

However, a new generation of “Chicano” activists in the 1960s radicalized the Mexican American movement for civil rights, leading to an affirmation their indigenous or non-white roots while advocating equal opportunity for all, regardless of race ( Haney-Lopez, 2003 ; Muñoz, 1989 ). Since then, many Mexican Americans have embraced non-white notions of who they are. Today, many political elites position themselves as Hispanic and White ( Haney-Lopez, 2003 ) while many academics, legal scholars, and activists position themselves as Chicano or Latino and non-white ( Delgado, 2004 ). Among the general population, Mexican is often used as a response to the question “what is your race?” ( Gross, 2003 ), thus reflecting a popular understanding that Mexican is a racial category distinct from Whites, Blacks, or Asians.

Sociologists have also debated how to define Mexicans racially. Using the census parlance of race and ethnicity, many rely on the official definition of Mexican as an ethnic group and that Mexicans can be of any race ( Alba & Nee, 2003 ). This perspective of defining Mexican as an ethnic group aligns with notions that Mexicans are similar to previous European ethnic groups. For these scholars, ethnic groups are treated in more benign ways than racially distinct groups. Since Mexicans are not considered a racial group and thought to differ only slightly from Europeans, they should follow similar patterns of incorporation ( Alba & Nee, 2003 ), easily move into honorary White status ( Bonilla-Silva, 2003 ; Haney-Lopez, 2006 ), and subsequently incorporate fully into mainstream society ( Alba & Nee, 2003 ).

Intermarriage adds another layer of complexity to the question of whether Mexicans are a racial category. Intermarriage of Mexicans with European Americans (or Whites) has been the most common type of intermarriage, leading to the speculation that this will also serve to quickly move Mexicans into being White ( Alba, 2009 ; Alba & Islam, 2009 ). Yet children of Mexican-White marriages, while having lighter skin, may not actually abandon their Mexican identification ( Jiménez, 2010 ). Moreover, intermarriage increasingly involves other racial groups like Blacks and Asians, especially in multi-racial places, like Los Angeles. While the children of these intermarriages may lose some connection to being Mexican as a result of a having a Black or Asian parent, they do not move closer to being White, so they should continue to be racially ambiguous and non-white.

Mexican Americans in the Census

The United States government, in its efforts to count persons and their characteristics, has played a major role in how Mexicans are defined and classified, and these definitions have shifted significantly over the years. There are two key issues about the classification of Mexicans—one is whether individuals are asked directly about being Mexican (or Hispanic) origin, and two is how the census collects and analyzes racial information for Mexicans (and Hispanics).

Asking about Hispanic origin is relatively straightforward. Every census since 1970 has included a question on Hispanic origin. The most recent (2010) wording of this question is: Is this person of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin? The response categories have generally included Mexican (along with Mexican-Am. and Chicano), Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other. Since 1990, individuals were asked to fill in the country of origin when responding other Hispanic. 1 Prior to 1970, Mexicans (and Hispanics) were not asked directly about being Hispanic origin. Rather Information about place of birth, parents' place of birth, and mother tongue was collected in those censuses and these characteristics were used to count and describe the Mexican origin population.

The issue of how race is collected and analyzed for Mexicans (and Hispanics) is much more complicated ( Gibson & Jung, 2005 ). The general trend over time has been a shift from no classification to Mexican as a race, to Mexicans as White , to Mexicans as any race . Mexicans have resided in the U.S. since the mid-nineteenth century, yet up to the 1920 census, the Census Bureau made no mention of Mexicans or how to classify them. However, it appears that enumerators themselves made attempts to distinguish Mexicans from others since an unusually high number of “mulattoes” with Spanish surnames were counted in western states in 1880 ( Hochschild & Powell, 2008 ).

The first time that Mexicans are officially counted is the 1930 census. That year, Mexican was listed as a racial category, the one and only time that this occurred. Also, enumerators were employed to collect census information and individuals did not respond for themselves. The instructions provided to enumerators provide insights into how Mexicans were viewed at the time. They read as follows:

Mexicans .-Practically all Mexican laborers are of a racial mixture difficult to classify, though usually well recognized in the localities where they are found. In order to obtain separate figures for this racial group, it has been decided that all person born in Mexico, or having parents born in Mexico, who are not definitely white, Negro, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese, should be returned as Mexican (“Mex”) 2

These instructions indicate the understanding that Mexicans were mixed race but clearly not White or perceived as White. The use of “laborers” in the first line of this instruction suggest that class may have played a role into the use of Mexican in that laborers might have been classified as Mexican but higher status Mexicans might have been classified as White ( Hochschild & Powell 2008 ).

In response to protests from the Mexican government and LULAC about using Mexican as a racial category, the Census Bureau changed the official designation of Mexicans to White ( Gross, 2003 ; Hochschild & Powell 2008 ). Consequently, the 1940 and 1950 census provided the following instructions to enumerators: “Mexicans are to be regarded as white unless definitely of Indian or other nonwhite race.” 3 This clearly shows the shift from Mexican as a race to Mexicans as White . The population of Spanish mother tongue—defined from place of birth, parents' place of birth, and mother tongue—was counted and described in official publications ( Gibson & Jung, 2005 ). 4

Enumerators did not completed forms in the 1960 census, rather census forms were mailed to households and completed by individuals,. This made it possible for Mexicans (and Hispanics) to respond using any racial category. But the Census Bureau in both 1960 and 1970 continued to define Mexicans (and Hispanics) as racially White . Therefore Mexicans (and Hispanics), who responded other to the race question, had their answers changed (or recoded) to White . This served to ignore what individuals reported about themselves. Starting in 1980, the Census Bureau stopped defining Mexicans (and Hispanics) as White and defined them as being of any race . This meant that they stopped changing responses as other race provided by Mexicans (and Hispanics). Consequently from 1970 to 1980, there is a sharp increase in the overall number of individuals reporting that they are other race, largely attributed to large percentage of Hispanics who choose other race ( Gibson & Jung, 2005 ). More than 40 of Hispanics answered other to the race question in 1990 ( Rodriguez, 2000 ) and more than 45 percent of Mexicans reported that they are other race in 2000 ( Bonilla-Silva, 2003 ). 5

Of course, what is rarely acknowledged or reported is that when Mexicans report their race as other , they subsequently add Mexican in the explanation to this response—de facto, naming Mexican as their race. Census officials raise the concern that Mexicans, and Hispanics more generally, choose racial responses that do not fit officials' definitions of race. They find this so objectionable that they have sometimes argued that Latinos are “confused” or find it “difficult” to understand the race question on the census ( Rodriguez, 2000 ). 6 When we consider how the Census Bureau has changed the racial classification of Mexicans from none, to Mexican , to White , to any race , it could be argued that government bureaucrats are confused.

Mexican Americans as Non-Whites

Race is a social construct but one that has had real consequences in the United States. Although granted de facto White racial status with the United States conquest of much of Mexico in 1848 and having sometimes been deemed as White by the courts and censuses, Mexican Americans were rarely treated as White ( Gomez, 2007 ; Haney-Lopez, 2006 ). Historically and legally, Mexicans have been treated as second-class citizens. Within a few short decades after their conquest in the mid-nineteenth century, Mexican Americans, although officially granted United States citizenship with full rights, lost much of their property and status and were relegated to low-status positions as laborers. Since then, Mexican immigration has continued to be of predominately low status. Throughout the twentieth century, Mexicans with low levels of education and from poor backgrounds immigrated to the United States to fill the lowest paid jobs (agriculture, domestic work, construction) with peaks during the Mexican Revolution in 1910 to 1929, during the agricultural guest worker program for Mexicans (Bracero program) from 1942 to 1964, and post the Immigration Act of 1965 which liberalized immigration from the Americas. Most of Mexican immigration has been to the southwestern United States, although Mexicans have begun to settle in nearly all regions of the United States since about 1990. This continuous immigration throughout the twentieth century has meant that the Mexican origin population in the United States includes many persons born in the United States, varying in generational status from first (immigrant) to fourth and even fifth generation. These later generations have continued to face educational and economic disadvantages as we documented in Generations of Exclusion ( Telles & Ortiz, 2008 ).

Unfair and discriminatory treatment against Mexican Americans has extended beyond the economic realm. School segregation has been extensive, both historically and in contemporary periods. Throughout history, Mexican children were sent to separate and inferior schools ( Alvarez, 1986 ; San Miguel, 1987 ; Sanchez, 1993 ). School segregation was repeatedly challenged in the courts. While they were treated as non-white by Whites, challenges to segregation were won by employing the racial designation of White under the law, meaning that Mexicans as Whites could not be segregated from other Whites ( Martinez, 1997 ). Courts did allow the segregation of Mexicans due to language or migrant status. In the post civil rights era, Mexicans were used as the non-Blacks that integrated schools for Black children ( Gross, 2003 ; Mechaca, 1995 )). Eventually Mexicans moved from being considered White to brown, probably due to both legal and social changes although it is difficult to tell which of these occurred first ( Gross, 2003 ). As Mexicans came to be defined as non-whites, they were better able to make claims of unfair treatment and seek legal remedy. 7

Persuasive anti-immigrant sentiment and treatment has also worked against all Mexicans whether immigrant or born in the United States. Viewed as alien and low status, Mexican immigrants were (and continue to be) scapegoated and targeted for mistreatment. Even though immigrants were a minority of all Mexican Americans up to the 1980s, the perception of all Mexican Americans as low status immigrants has been pervasive ( Massey, 2009 ; Vasquez, 2010 ). The immigration legislation of the 1980s has made legal entry to the United States by Mexicans almost impossible, yet immigration has continued. This forced the overwhelming majority of Mexican immigrants in the late twentieth century to enter the United States without proper documentation. This has served to further fuse anti-Mexican and anti-undocumented immigrant sentiment ( Massey, 2009 ). This suggests that in the eyes of many White Americans, all Mexicans are “illegal” and all “illegals” are Mexican ( Chacón & Davis, 2006 ; Chavez, 2008 )

Research Purposes

If Mexican Americans see themselves as part of a racial category and are treated largely as non-white, what implications does this have for their experiences? Racial experiences are varied and involve many aspects of a person's life. On the one hand, some experiences concern how members of racial/ethnic groups view themselves. They may perceive themselves to be members of an ethnic group, like Italian-American, in a largely symbolic manner ( Waters, 1990 ). Or their identity may be a racial one, which implies a ranking along a racial hierarchy and which carries palpable social consequences. Secondly, they may encounter stereotypes which define how they should behave or who they should be; or they may encounter discrimination where they are treated differently due their group membership.

Racial appearance should factor into racial treatment, since we often define race as based on physical difference. 8 For example, Mexican Americans who are darker and physically differ to a greater extent from Whites are more likely to be perceived as members of the group. Moreover, to the extent that the group is considered non-white and stigmatized, darker Mexican Americans would be subject to greater stereotyping and discrimination than their light skin counterparts. Another indicator of racial appearance could be that of having a non-Hispanic parent. The offspring of mixed marriages, in addition to a skin color advantage, might carry other characteristics of Whiteness such as non-Spanish names and cultural or social resources that make them more acceptable to Whites.

Additionally we expect education to be related to racial outcomes among Mexican Americans. On the one hand, Mexican Americans with less education may have stronger perceptions of themselves as members of the group than those with more education. Conceivably, this relationship could be reversed if those with more education have greater awareness of being part of the group. What of the relationship between education and racial treatment? Less educated Mexican Americans might experience more stereotyping and discrimination because of their disadvantaged educational status. Or the more educated might experience worse treatment because of greater interactions in mainstream institutions and with members outside of their group. Additionally being more educated might increase awareness that Mexican Americans are treated in a racial manner and that might explain part of the education effects; in other words educated Mexican Americans might perceive that discrimination exists to a greater extent and that might partially explain their reports of being discriminated against.

Lastly, social interactions with Whites and with other Mexican Americans might affect perceptions and treatment. Having a greater number and closer relationships with Mexican Americans should reinforce the connection with the group but it is uncertain how these will affect treatment. Conversely interactions with Whites might result in more negative treatment but will that affect perceptions of being Mexican.

Lastly, what kinds of discrimination experiences do Mexican Americans describe? In what settings do they experience discrimination? Responses to open-ended questions in our survey provide glimpses into these experiences.

In sum, this paper examines (1) racial characteristics like skin color, (2) education, and (3) social interaction variables like contact with other Mexicans and Whites as predictors of (1) racial identity as in choosing a racial identity as Mexican and being perceived as Mexicans (2) racial treatment as in experiences of stereotyping and discrimination.

This study draws on a unique data set of 758 Mexican American adults between the ages of 30 to early 50s who were interviewed between 1998 and 2002. These respondents are adult children of the original respondents in the Mexican American Study Project (MASP).

MASP is a unique data set based on two waves of data collection 35 years apart. The original data was based on a random sample of households with adult Mexican Americans in Los Angeles County and San Antonio City who were interviewed in 1965-66 and those findings were published in The Mexican American People ( Grebler, Moore, & Guzman, 1970 ). We conducted a follow up survey with the original respondents from this earlier survey and their adult children in 1998-2002 and our findings were published in Generations of Exclusion ( Telles & Ortiz, 2008 ).

The re-interviews with surviving original respondents produced a longitudinal sample (1965 and 2000) of 687 original respondents who were age 18 to 50 in 1965. Two adult children were interviewed producing an inter-generational sample of 758 child respondents who were age 30 to early 50s when interviewed in 2000. Moreover, both the original 1965 respondents and their children are almost evenly divided by generations-since-immigration with about one-third of the child sample being second generation, one-third of the third generation and another third in the fourth generation or more.

In 2000, original respondents and adult children were interviewed extensively about ethnic identity, behavior, and attitudes; education and socio-economic status; political attitudes and behavior; family attitudes and behaviors. In this paper, we analyze the child sample based on their responses as well as some information from their original respondent parents.

In our analysis, we study two sets of outcomes—(1) racial identity as in choosing a racial identity as Mexican and being perceived as Mexicans (2) racial treatment as in experiences of stereotyping and discrimination. We examine three key sets of predictors—(1) racial characteristics like skin color, (2) education, and (3) social interaction variables like contact with other Mexicans and Whites.

Dependent Variables

We examine four outcomes in this paper and we show the distribution for these variables in Table 1 . Two of the outcomes measure racial identity . The first refers to how the respondents identify racially in response to “when forms or the census ask if you are White, Black, Asian, American Indian, or other, what do you answer?” To replicate the census question, we provided an “other” option for this question but purposefully did not include a Mexican American or Latino/Hispanic response category. Many respondents answered Mexican, Mexican American, or Mexican origin while others responded Hispanic or Latino. Responses to this question were grouped into Mexican, Mexican American, or Latino (coded as 1) compared to all other responses, such as White or Black (coded as 0). Two-thirds reported identifying as Mexican or Mexican American or Latino to the question about race (see Table 1 ). The second perception measure involves responses to “Do you think that when someone meets you for the first time that they think of you as Mexican? We coded their responses as perceived by others as Mexican (coded as 1) or not perceived or probably not perceived to be Mexican (coded as 0). Table 1 shows that 38 percent are definitely perceived as Mexican while 62 percent are not or probably not perceived as Mexican.

Our final two outcomes measure racial treatment . The first of these is whether respondents experience being stereotyped by others. We asked: “Sometimes people have ideas about what certain groups are like or what they are supposed to do. Do you ever find that other people expect you to be like or do things that they expect of Mexicans?” The responses are yes (coded as 1) or no (coded as 0). Table 1 shows that 58 percent perceive that they had experienced stereotyping. The second experience measure is whether respondents reported experiences of discrimination. We asked “Have you been treated unfairly because of your ethnic background?” The responses are yes (coded as 1) or no (coded as 0). Almost half (48 percent) reported experiences with discrimination. In contrast, Alba reports that approximately five percent of White ethnics experience discrimination ( Alba, 1990 ). 9

Predictor Variables

The first set of predictors captures physical markers of racial status, including one about actual skin color and another about parentage (means and ranges are presented on Table 2 ). Respondents' skin color was rated by interviewers rather than by respondents. We use the seven-point scale with seven being the darkest and one being the lightest. 10 The average on the skin color scale was 4.3, which is about halfway on the seven-point scale and indicating a medium brown skin color. A non-Hispanic parentage variable codes respondents that have only one parent as non-Hispanic as one and those with two Hispanic parents are coded as zero. Approximately 8 percent of respondents in the sample have a non-Hispanic parent. 11

Education is the second key predictor in our analysis (see Table 2 ). We compare three categories: those with less than high school (around 16 percent and the reference category), high school graduates and those with some college (71 percent), and college graduates or more (13 percent) 12 .

We include a measure indicating whether respondents perceive a lot of discrimination against Mexicans. We asked “how much discrimination do you think there is today again people of Mexican origin?” A significant percentage, 36 percent, reported that there is a great deal of discrimination against Mexicans. This is a measure of whether discrimination occurs generally and differs from the outcome measure of whether respondents report experiencing discrimination personally

The third set of predictors measure the extent of social interaction with racial/ethnic groups (see Table 2 ). The first involves the amount of contact with Whites, which was measured in our survey with four responses—not at all, a little, some, and a lot. Most respondents, 88 percent, reported having “a lot of contact” with Whites and thus we grouped this variable into two categories—not a lot of contact (coded as 0) and a lot of contact (coded as 1). The second social interaction variable gauges the frequency of friendships with Mexicans measured on a four-point scale ranging from none to few friendships (coded as 1), about half (coded as 2), most (coded as 3), and all friendships (coded as 4). The average is 2.3 or about halfway on the four-point scale.

Control Variables

We control for three sets of variables: individual characteristics, generational status and socio-economic background (means and ranges are presented on Table 3 ). The individual characteristics include gender, urban area, age and type of interview. Female (coded as 1) is compared to male (coded as 0), which divides at approximately 50 percent. The variable, San Antonio, refers to whether the original respondent parent was interviewed in San Antonio (coded as 1) or Los Angeles (coded as 0) with 36 percent of the sample from San Antonio and the remainder from Los Angeles. Age is a continuous variable ranging from 32 to 59 years old and averaging 42. Interviewed by phone (coded as 1) refers to respondents who were interviewed by phone, which is about 27 percent of the sample, rather than in person (coded as 0); we include this variable because some questions were not asked in the phone interviews and because they were somewhat more likely to have moved out of the area.

The second of the control variables is generational status (see Table 3 ). Generation 1.5 refers to respondents born in Mexico and raised in the United States, which is about 7 percent of the sample. Generation 2.0 refers to those born in the United States with two parents born in Mexico, which is 8 percent of respondents. Generation 2.5 are born in the United States with one parent born in Mexico and the other parent in the United States, which is 22 percent of the sample. Generation 3.0, the reference group, are born in the United States with both parents born in the United States and two to four grandparents born in Mexico, which is 40 percent of the sample. Generation 4.0 are born in the United States with both parents born in the United States and three of the four grandparents born in the United States, which comprises 23 percent of respondents.

The third set of control variables refers to socio-economic background (see Table 3 ). Much of this information is from the respondent's parent (the original respondent) and collected in either 1965 or 2000. Father's and mother's education range from 0 to 17 with an average of about 9 years of education. Income is family income in 1965. This was collected as a categorical variable, which we recoded to thousands. The average income is about $6,000 and the lowest category refers to income of less than $500 and the highest category refers to income of more than $20,000. Homeownership refers to whether the original respondent parent owned a home in 1965 (coded as 1); approximately 55 percent owned homes. The variable, number of siblings, ranges from 0 to 15 with an average of 5 siblings. Parent spoke Spanish to their children is coded as 1 for Spanish and 0 for not speaking Spanish (this was reported by the original respondent parent). About 85 percent of respondents had parents who spoke Spanish to them when they were children. The last variable is parents were married in 1965 while the respondent was growing up; 85 percent of parents were married at the time of the original survey.

Table 4 presents logistic regression analysis where racial identity as Mexican is the dependent variable. The numbers presented on this table, and the other tables with multivariate analyses, are odds ratios. An odds ratio equal to: one indicates no relationship, less than one indicates a negative relationship with numbers closer to zero indicating a stronger negative relationship, and greater than one indicates a positive relationship with larger numbers indicating a stronger positive relationship 13 .

Notes: Logistic regression; odds ratios presented; adjusted for 482 sibling clusters;

Racial Identity as Mexican

In the initial model on Table 4 , we observe that skin color is marginally related to racial identity as Mexican, indicating that darker respondents are somewhat more likely to identify racially as Mexican. 14 Having a non-Hispanic parent is unrelated to racially identifying as Mexican. More educated respondents were less likely than the low educated to identify racially as Mexican. Those who completed high school or have some college are significantly less likely to identify racially as Mexican—54 percent are less likely to do so. And the college educated is marginally less likely to identify racially as Mexican. In the second model, perceiving a lot of discrimination does not have a direct effect on identifying as Mexican or change the education effect. In the third model, contact with Whites and friendships with Mexicans are unrelated to identifying as Mexican.

The rest of Table 4 present control variables. Respondents from San Antonio and respondents who were interviewed by phone were significantly less likely to identify racially as Mexican. Gender and age are unrelated to identifying as Mexican. Generational status is unrelated to identifying as Mexican. The indicators of socio-economic status were also unrelated to identifying as Mexican (except for a marginal effect of income in the all three models).

Perceived as Mexican

Table 5 presents the findings for being perceived as Mexican. The first model indicates that having darker skin is significantly related to being perceived as Mexican. An odds ratio of 1.3 reveals that with every unit increase on the skin color scale, being perceived as Mexican increased by 30 percent. Those with a non-Hispanic parent are significantly less likely to be perceived as Mexican—about half as likely (odds ratio equals .44). More educated respondents were less likely than the less educated to be perceived as Mexican. Those who completed high school or have some college are 54 percent, and the college graduates are 31 percent, as likely to be perceived as Mexican. In the second model, perceiving a lot of discrimination does not have a direct effect on being perceived as Mexican or reduce the education effect.

Effect of Racial Appearance, Education, Social Interactions, and Controls on Perceived as Mexican among Mexican Americans

The third model indicates that those who have a lot of contact with Whites are half as likely to be perceived as Mexican (odds ratio equals .51). Persons with more Mexican friends are more likely to be perceived as Mexican—approximately one and a half times as likely (odds ratio equals 1.45). The effect of non-Hispanic parent, which was significant in the initial model (odds ratio equaled .44) and, is slightly reduced and is now marginally significant (odds ratio is .54). This is due to adding the extent of Mexican friends to the model. So persons with a non-Hispanic parent are less likely to be perceived as Mexican but some of this effect is through the friendships that Mexican Americans have with other Mexicans. 15

The rest of Table 5 present control variables. Gender and being from San Antonio are unrelated to being perceived as Mexican. Older respondents are marginally less likely to being perceived as Mexican. Respondents interviewed by phone were less likely to being perceived as Mexican in the first and second model but is not significant in the third model when social interactions are added to the model. The fourth generation is less likely to be perceived as Mexican than the third generation. Generation two differs from generation three in the first and second model but is not significant in the third model when social interactions are added to the model. The indicators of socio-economic status are unrelated to being perceived as Mexican.

Experience Stereotyping

The first model presented on Table 6 indicates that skin color and having a non-Hispanic parent are unrelated to experiences of stereotyping. More educated respondents are more likely to have been stereotyped by others. The relationship between education and experiences of stereotyping is especially strong—those with a high school or college education are more than twice as likely to being stereotyped than those less than high school (odds ratio equal 2.1 and 2.4 respectively).

Effect of Racial Appearance, Education, Social Interactions, and Controls on Experience Stereotyping among Mexican Americans

The second model on Table 6 shows that perceiving a lot of discrimination against Mexicans has a direct and positive effect on personal experiences with stereotyping. The third model shows that contact with Whites also increases experiences with stereotyping—those with more contact with Whites are two and a half times more likely to experience stereotyping. The extent of Mexican friends, on the other hand, is unrelated to experiences of stereotyping.

One reason that education is thought to lead to more experiences with stereotyping is that education may sensitize minorities to experiences of racialization. In other words, through learning about the history of racism and discrimination against the group, Mexican Americans may become more aware of its existence in their own lives. Adding general perceptions of a lot of discrimination (in the second model) does not change the relationship between education and perceptions of having been stereotyped. That more educated Mexican Americans perceive having more experiences of being stereotyped remains strong and significant in the second model.

Another reason that education is thought to relate to experiences with stereotyping is that participation in educational institutions provides more contact with Whites and thus greater awareness of White attitudes. Consistent with this, we observe that the education effects are somewhat reduced when contact with Whites is introduced in the third model. For instance, the college graduate effect is 2.4 when contact with Whites is excluded from the second model and is 1.99 when contact with Whites is added in the third model. So greater contact with Whites probably explains some of the experiences of being stereotyped.

The rest of Table 6 presents the control variables. Gender, being from San Antonio, and age are unrelated to experiences with stereotyping. Respondents interviewed by phone were less likely to experience stereotyping. Generational status was unrelated to experiences with stereotyping (except for that marginal effect of generation 1.5 in the first model). The indicators of socio-economic status are unrelated to experiences of stereotyping (except for that marginal effect of homeownership in the first model).

Experience Discrimination

As Table 7 shows, being darker also leads to reports of experiences with discrimination— an odds ratio of 1.2 indicates that with every unit increase on the skin color scale, reports of discrimination increased by 20 percent. Having a non-Hispanic parent is unrelated to reporting discrimination.

Effect of Racial Appearance, Education, Social Interactions, and Controls on Experience Discrimination among Mexican Americans

College educated respondents are more likely to report experiences of discrimination— twice as likely as those with less than a high school education (odds ratio equals 2.0). On the other hand, those with a high school education do not differ significantly from the least educated. In the second model, we observe that perceiving a lot of discrimination generally has a direct and positive effect on personal experiences with discrimination (odds ratio equals 2.3). In the third model, having more contact with Whites is shown to being more likely to be experience discrimination (odds ratio of 1.96). Having Mexican friends is unrelated to experiences of discrimination.

One of the issues we have tracked in the multivariate analysis is what happens to the education effects as we introduce perceptions of discrimination and contact with other groups. First, we observe that the education effect does not change between the first and second models when general perceptions about discrimination are entered into the model. Second, we observe that the college graduate effect is somewhat reduced between the second and third models when contact with Whites is introduced into the model. The college effect is 2.0 and statistically significant in the second model but when social interactions are introduced in the third model, the effect is reduced to 1.79 and is only marginally significant. Having more contact with Whites may partially explain why college graduates report more experiences of discrimination.

One of the control variables, gender, indicates that women are less likely to report discrimination (in contrast, gender was unrelated to any of the other racial outcomes). Given the strong relationship of gender and discrimination, we did some exploratory analysis separately by gender and we found that skin color has a much stronger effect for men than women. This is shown as the interaction effect between skin color and gender (Darker Color X Female) in the fourth model on Table 7 . This significant interaction effect indicates that darker men are much more likely to experience discrimination while darker and lighter women do not differ in their experiences of discrimination.

The rest of Table 7 presents the control variables. Being from San Antonio and age are unrelated to perceptions of experiences with discrimination. Respondents interviewed by phone were less likely to experience discrimination. Generation 1.5 reports more experiences with discrimination while the other generational groups do not differ from third generation.

The last group of control variables refers to socio-economic status. Parental education has an unusual pattern of relationships to discrimination experiences in that the greater the father's education, the more likely they are to report experiences of discrimination while the greater the mother's education, the less likely they are to report experiences of discrimination. Number of siblings is significantly related to experiences of discrimination in the third model when social interactions are entered in the model. The other controls—income, homeownership, speaking Spanish, married parents—are unrelated to experiences with discrimination.

Summary by Predictor Variables

Overall, skin color, education, and contact with Whites have the strongest relationships with the racial outcomes. Mexican Americans who are darker, more educated, and have more contact with Whites are more likely to be perceived as Mexicans, experience more stereotyping, and experience more discrimination. Additionally, skin color has a different relationship with discrimination experiences for men and women such that darker men report more discrimination.

Describing Incidents of Discrimination

The question in our survey on discrimination, which we used in this paper, was “Have you been treated unfairly because of your ethnic background?” Respondents who indicated that had been treated unfairly were also asked to describe these experiences. Respondents provided examples from various aspects of their lives including work, school, police, public life, and peers and their responses illustrate their real life experiences, beyond the yes/no responses to close-ended questions that we examined through quantitative analysis above.

The largest number of comments—over 90—was about employment incidents. The most prevalent among these were reports about being denied promotions. One respondent reported that “they were hiring for assistant foreman, and I had seniority and better qualifications and I was overpassed for the position.” Other respondents reported that they were not hired for jobs based on their racial appearance. Respondents also reported negative or hostile interactions with supervisors—one respondent reported filing a federal discrimination complaint against a supervisor. Still other respondents reported difficulties with customers or clients where their help was rejected. There were also a small number of reports about being denied an apartment.

Another large number of reports—45 reports—referred to school-based incidents. These included encountering teachers that had low expectations of them as in indicating surprise at the respondents' academic ability, or assuming that respondents did not speak English or had recently arrived from Mexico. Some respondents reported getting into trouble for speaking Spanish. Other reported derogatory names, such as “wetback,” by teachers or other school officials.

Respondents also reported problems with peers. Some of these incidents were physical as in the respondent who reported that other children tried to cut out his brown eyes in first grade. Other respondents reported being beat up by peers in junior high or high school. While these were events that took place in school setting, other similar events happened in neighborhoods and with peers while growing up. Incidents where respondents were called derogatory names or rejected by friends of friends or by parents of friends.

The other very large category of incidents involved being denied service in restaurants. Some of incidents involved direct comments like “we do not serve people like you.” Other incidents involved being ignored or receiving very slow service. Respondents also reported receiving poor service in stores by being ignored or followed.

There were about 20 reports involving police. These involved being stopped and harassed by the police. Some of these events led to arrests or searches. Some respondents reported being called derogatory names like “wetback.” There were other incidents involving government officials, like being scrutinized by the border patrol as they crossed the border

Although all of our respondents came of age in the post civil rights era, they reported fairly extensive experiences of discrimination and being stereotyped. This is evident in their responses to standard survey questions (with close-ended responses) as well as in their accounts of specific instances discrimination (presented in the previous section). These experiences were prevalent in institutional settings like the work place and school as well as in public places like restaurants and retail stores. These experiences, although almost certainly fewer in frequency and lesser in intensity than that documented historically ( Montejano, 1987 ), are indicative of pervasive racism and discrimination continuing in the post civil rights era.

Skin color is important in our findings in that darker Mexicans are more likely to be perceived as Mexican and experience discrimination. These are strong relationships controlling for the many other factors in our analysis. To outsiders, skin color is a key marker of group membership, consequently darker Mexican Americans are treated as stereotypically Mexican. Additionally, darker men report more experiences of discrimination than lighter men and women in general. This is consistent with prior research showing that minority men are especially likely to face obstacles in education, the labor market, and criminal justice system ( Harrison, Reynolds-Dobbs, & Thomas, 2008 ; Hersch, 2008 ; Reimers, 1983 ). Some respondents indicate this in their reports of incidents with police officers. On the other hand, having a non-Hispanic parent has a relatively weak effect. Although being the child of inter-marriage is considered one mechanism by which Mexican Americans can move away from being Mexican to being honorary White ( Alba, 2009 ), we do not find this to be the case. Children of intermarriage do not differ in most ways from those with two Mexican parents. 16

Education is important. Mexican Americans with more education report that they were less likely to racially identify as Mexican and be considered Mexican by outsiders, and more likely to be stereotyped and face discrimination. Among the strongest relationships we identified was that of education with being stereotyped. It appears that educated Mexican Americans go against the notions that outsiders have about the group. This may be partly due to the low levels of education among Mexican immigrants and that Mexican Americans even in later generations have relatively less education. Outsiders expect Mexican Americans to be less educated and treat them accordingly. But to apply that expectation to all Mexican Americans creates a stereotype.

Having more education means living and working in environments with more Whites and participating in institutions of higher education also involving more interactions with Whites. Greater contact with Whites partly explains the relationship between education and experiences of stereotyping and discrimination consistent with prior research by Feagin and his colleagues (e.g., Feagin & Sikes, 1994 ). Moreover, contact with Whites has a significant and independent effect on experiences of stereotyping and discrimination (which is not diminished by controlling for other factors). The specific examples of discrimination that respondents shared illustrate how this operates. In work places with employers and co-workers, Mexican Americans are likely to come in contact with Whites that treat them in discriminatory ways; for instance they report being passed over promotions or not getting hired. In education settings, teachers and other school staff make derogatory remarks or convey the message that Mexican Americans are less worthy. Mexican Americans also reported unfair treatment in public spaces, like restaurants and stores. It is in these interactions beyond the family and ethnic neighborhood, that Mexicans Americans face unequal treatment.

Limitations

The most significant limitation of this study is probably identifying the extent of discrimination and stereotyping. Collecting precise information on discrimination and stereotyping in survey research is challenging. Individuals may not always have information about how or whether they are systematically being treated differently from others or they overestimate whether they are being treated unfairly due to their group membership. While measuring racial treatment in a precise manner is unlikely, several factors make us confident that we are capturing a real phenomenon. One is that experimental studies show strong evidence that discrimination exists 17 ( Pager & Hana, 2008 ) supporting our respondents' reports of discrimination. Two is the legal history showing the ways in which Mexican Americans have been and continue to be treated in discriminatory ways ( Gross, 2003 ; Haney-Lopez, 2006 ). Three is the much greater reports of experiencing stereotyping and discrimination by Mexican Americans than other ethnic groups, such as Italians ( Alba, 1990 ). Lastly, the pervasive patterns of racial inequality as we describe here and in our prior work ( Telles and Ortiz 2008 ) support the view of substantial racialization of Mexican Americans over several generations.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge comments by Gary Koeske.

Appendix A. 

1 1Enumeration forms and questionnaires found in the IPUM website: http://usa.ipums.org/usa/voliii/tEnumForm.shtml

2 Enumeration forms and questionnaires found in the IPUM website: http://usa.ipums.org/usa/voliii/tEnumForm.shtml

3 Enumeration forms and questionnaires found in the IPUM website: http://usa.ipums.org/usa/voliii/tEnumForm.shtml

4 Up to 1950, the Mexican origin population comprised the vast majority Hispanics in the United States. Puerto Ricans were only beginning to migrate to New York City and the Cuban immigration had not begun in earnest ( Bean and Tienda 1987 ). Mexican Americans continue to be the majority at about 66 percent.

5 By 1980, while Mexicans continue to be the largest Hispanic group, there are significant numbers of Puerto Ricans and Cubans residing in the United States. By 2000, there are significant of Dominicans and Central Americans ( Guzman 2001 ).

6 Also unacknowledged by census officials is that the race question itself is confusing since it includes seven Asian categories (Asian Indian Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, other Asian), four Pacific Islander categories (Native Hawaiian, Guamanian or Chamorro, Samoan, other Pacific Islander), and only four race categories (White, Black, American Indian, some other race). The census question on race includes many more country of origin or ethnic categories than racial categories.

7 School segregation of Mexican American children was common in California and Texas. In 1928, 64 schools in eight Southern California counties had Mexican student enrollments of 90percent or more (cited in Sanchez 1993 :258). Another study reported that 80 percent of school districts with substantial Mexican American enrollment practiced segregation (cited in Sanchez 1993 :258). Alvarez (1986) lists 64 schools in eight California counties, including several in Los Angeles, that were 90 to100 percent Mexican. Well-known California judicial cases of segregation included the school districts of Lemon Grove (in the 1930s) and Westminster (in the1940s). Although segregation was documented in both California and Texas, egregious discrimination may not have endured into the 1960s in California to the same extent as it did in Texas.

8 A number of studies have examined the relationship between skin color and socio-economic outcomes. These studies have shown that darker Mexican Americans have lower education, earnings, and other economic outcomes ( Arce, Murguía and Frisbie 1987 ; Murguía and Telles 1996 ; Telles and Murguía 1990 ).

9 Appendix A presents correlations among the outcome variables. The interrelationships are low(less than .1) except for the relationship between perceptions of being stereotyping and reports of being discrimination (which equals .3).

10 The skin color chart used in our survey had 9 categories. There were few respondents in the two lightest categories and few in the two darkest categories so these categories were combined so that we ended up with seven categories.

11 The original MASP may have under-sampled Mexican origin women married to non-Mexicanmen because Spanish surname was used for sampling in more integrated neighborhoods.

12 Our sample appears more educated than current data on the Mexican origin. This is due to the fact that our sample is U.S. born with most being third and fourth generation. A sample of Mexican origin drawn today would be overwhelming immigrant and second generation. This results in low education levels among Mexicans today since immigrants have low levels of education.

13 We use robust standard errors in the logistic regression to adjust sibling clustering.

14 We did additional analysis in an attempt to explain the marginally relationship between skin color and identify racially as Mexican. Specifically we examined whether omitting education and non-Hispanic parent changed this relationship—making it stronger or weaker—but did not find that this marginal relationship changed in any meaningful way.

15 One indicator of having a non-Hispanic parent is having a non-Spanish name. We substituted having a Spanish name for having a non-Hispanic parent in the analysis to see if this effect was different. We found similar results as we did with non-Hispanic parent. Also since respondents with a white parent tend to be lighter skin than those with two Mexican parents, having a non-Hispanic parent is correlated with skin color. Thus it is possible that excluding skin color from the analysis might change and make significant the effect of non-Hispanic parent. We did additional analysis where we excluded skin color and doing so did not change the effect of non-Hispanic parent.

16 As reported in footnote 16, the effect of non-Hispanic parent is due to a relationship with skin color since excluding skin color from the analysis does not change the effect of non-Hispanic parent.

17 Experimental studies are the gold standard of research, including research on discrimination. As an example of this kind of study, profiles of “applicants,” actually fictional individuals with equal credentials, are submitted to employers; researchers examine whether employers call back or offer a job to “applicants”; and treating “applicants” differently based on race is evidence of discrimination because other differences among “applicants” are held constant. What an experimental design does not provide is an understanding of how discriminatory treatment affects victims in real life.

Contributor Information

Vilma Ortiz, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles.

Edward Telles, Department of Sociology, Princeton University.

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American latino theme study: core essay, the american latino heritage.

This American Latino Theme Study essay surveys American Latino history through a focus on five individuals – Félix Varela, María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, Arturo Schomburg, Luisa Moreno, and Edward Roybal – whose lives trace major historical developments from the early 19th century into the contemporary era.

by Stephen Pitti

We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents...Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashion'd from the British Islands only ... which is a very great mistake.

— Walt Whitman, 1883 [1]

The Latino past is as important to United States history, and as rich, as that of any group in U.S. society. As historian Vicki Ruíz has noted, "From carving out a community in St. Augustine in 1565 to reflecting on colonialism and liberty during the 1890s to fighting for civil rights through the courts in the 1940s, Spanish-speaking peoples [have]made history within and beyond national borders."[2]Relevant scholarship on these and other topics has exploded since the 1980s, mirroring the demographic growth of the Latino population – which now stands at some 50 million U.S. residents – with important histories about Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Central Americans, Cuban Americans, and South Americans published every year. As those books and articles demonstrate, no brief summary can distill the diversity of this Latino population; the many ways in which these groups have shaped national institutions, American culture, or U.S. cities and towns; or the heterogeneity of their perspectives and experiences. From the arrival of the Spanish in the 15th century into the early 21st century, Latinos have built missions and presidios; developed ranching, agricultural, and high-tech industries; written poetry, novels, and songs; preached on street corners and from pulpits; raised families; built businesses and labor unions; and supported politicians and critical national and international initiatives. Some trace their residency to Spanish-speaking or indigenous forebears who arrived in New Mexico or elsewhere prior to the establishment of the U.S. Others arrived more recently as immigrants or refugees in the 19th, 20th, or 21st centuries. Deeply embedded in economic and political life across many decades, Latinos have played instrumental roles in the development of the U.S., and public recognition of the Latino past is long overdue.

The essays included in "American Latinos and the Making of the United States: A Theme Study" collectively demonstrate that Latinos have shaped U. S. courts, military, and educational institutions, the identification and treatment of disease, and much more. They illustrate that Latinos' impact has been felt in all regions of the U.S., from the Southeast to the Pacific Northwest, and from California to the Upper Midwest and New England, and that their visibility and involvement has increased exponentially in many of these areas over the last 50 years. They trace how the integration of hemispheric economies, the development of trade and movement of working people, the investment of U.S. businesses in Latin America, the economic demands of U.S. employers, and instances of political conflict and violence in the hemisphere have shaped Latino demographic growth and influenced communities already resident in the U.S. And they portray the daily struggles of everyday people alongside the achievements of influential residents, low-wage work experiences combined with prescient economic investments, encounters with segregation, and struggles to improve American democracy.

This introductory essay surveys this long and varied history through a focus on five individuals, many of them rarely remembered today, whose lives trace major historical developments from the early 19th century into the contemporary era. Ranging across historical periods, places of origin, and area of professional expertise, these figures embody themes discussed in detail in the accompanying essays, and they make the case that Latinos have played critical roles in the United States since the early 19th century. They include the Cuban priest Félix Varela, the Mexican author María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, the Puerto Rican bibliophile and collector Arturo Schomburg, the Guatemalan civil rights organizer Luisa Moreno, and the Mexican American politician Edward Roybal.

Félix Varela

Among the most important Latino intellectuals and religious leaders of the Jacksonian era, Félix Varela would become a well-known figure in the U.S., Europe, and his native Cuba by the time of his death in 1853. Born in Havana in 1788, Varela engaged with a North American society that had long been connected to Latin America – from the 1565 founding of Saint Augustine, Florida, to the establishment of Spanish colonies in New Mexico in the 16th and 17th centuries, to the establishment of presidios and missions along the Pacific Coast in the 18th and 19th centuries; to the extensive commerce that connected the U.S. to the Caribbean and Mexico in the 19th century.[3]The son of a criollo mother and an Iberian army captain, Varela was born into a Cuban society shaped not only by Spanish imperial rule, but also by close attention to the politics of the recently-established U.S. to the north. As a Catholic priest, a writer and translator, an educator, and a proponent of Cuban nationalism, Varela became one of the first Latinos to use his exile in the U.S. to argue for broader democratic change in Latin America. Recent calls for his canonization as a Catholic saint underscore his importance in North American religious history.

Orphaned as a child, Varela lived an international life during an era of revolution. He moved to live with his grandfather in the Spanish colony of Saint Augustine, Florida for several years before resettling in Havana in 1801. There he entered the seminary, became a deacon and then a priest, and finally took a philosophy professorship that allowed him to pursue his interests in the natural sciences, education, and above all, national identity. Well regarded, Varela's fellow Cubans elected him to a government position in 1821, and he spoke out against slavery, and in favor of Latin American independence. Those comments, however, coincided with a conservative turn in imperial governance, making it impossible for him to stay in Spain or return to Cuba. In 1823 Varela departed instead for the U.S. Taking up residence in Philadelphia and then New York City, he encountered other Cuban exiles who had also fled political repression, many of whom saw the U.S. as a new base for organizing on behalf of a free Cuba.

As a priest in a changing New York, Varela ministered over the next 24 years to the city's growing Catholic population, including many Irish and Italian immigrants, founded a nursery and parochial schools, and served at Saint Peter's Church, Christ's Church, and at the Church of the Transfiguration. His diocesan superiors recognized his success in appointing him vicar general in 1837, a position that gave him oversight of all of New York state and parts of New Jersey. Varela spent the last few years of his life in Saint Augustine, which had become part of U.S. territory in 1819, and he died in that city in 1853, some 15 years prior to the 1868 outbreak of a long war between Spain and Cuba that would eventually lead to Cuban independence.

Like other Cuban Americans in the 19th century, Varela had remained connected to both the Caribbean and the U.S. throughout his adult life, engaging with diverse, fellow New Yorkers in churches and neighborhoods while promoting Cuban nationalism as a writer and publisher. Inspired by the American Revolution, able to write and speak more openly as a resident of the U.S., and eager to see Latin America throw off the yoke of Spanish rule, he had translated Thomas Jefferson's A Manual of Parliamentary Practice into Spanish for readers in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the hemisphere interested in political reform. His commitments as a priest advanced a politically-engaged form of religiosity that anticipated the efforts of future generations of Latino Catholics and Protestants. Just as important, Varela's work as a writer, translator, and journalist connected him to the 19th-century world of Latin American and American letters, and they placed him within an intellectual tradition that extended before and after his lifetime. Describing Cuban poets and pamphleteers in 1840s and 1850s New York City and New Orleans, one literary historian notes that "these writers believed that the United States offered an opportune setting for publishing tracts that would persuade the Cuban population to rise against the colonial government on the island. Writing to Cuba, they also simultaneously tried to reach English- and Spanish-language readers in the United States."[4]In similar ways, other 19th and 20th-century novelists, poets, and journalists from Latin America wrote for San Antonio, Los Angeles, Miami, or Chicago newspapers or publishing houses, keeping their eyes on both domestic and international audiences.

In the final years of his life, Varela witnessed the geographic expansion of the U.S. and the declining power of Spain, as the Florida society that he had known as Spanish in his youth became U.S. territory. Varela's death in 1853 coincided with the Gadsden Purchase, a territorial acquisition in southern Arizona and New Mexico that marked the last major expansion of U.S. territorial borders within the continental U.S. The redrawing of U.S. borders, and U.S. diplomatic and military engagements with Latin America, therefore also shaped his life, just as it defined the broader experiences of many Latinos in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many exiled Cuban writers in 1850s New York promoted the U.S. annexation of their island as a way to eliminate Spanish rule and bring American democracy to the Caribbean. Some held different views, just as ethnic Mexicans in the Southwest expressed conflicting opinions about U.S. westward movement, 20th-century Puerto Ricans debated one another about their island's ideal relationship to Washington D.C., and other Latinos – Dominicans, Salvadorans, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Chileans, and others – have responded in various ways to U.S. military interventions in the hemisphere.[5]

María Amparo Ruíz de Burton

Born in Baja, California in 1832, nearly 50 years after Félix Varela's birth in 1788, the writer and social critic María Amparo Ruíz de Burton registered her own views of U.S. territorial expansion, American politics, and Latin American relations. As the granddaughter of a prominent military commander and former Governor in the Mexican north, Ruíz de Burton hailed from a privileged family that had held large tracts of land in what is today Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties, as well as in the area around Ensenada in Baja California.[6]Growing up in La Paz, she enjoyed private tutors in French and Spanish, and the eminent Californio Mariano Vallejo would later call her a "learned and cultured lady, concerned with the honor and traditions of her land..."[7] But her life – and the experiences of hundreds of thousands of others throughout the region – experienced inexorable change as a result of the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846. While that conflict brought Alta California and other regions of northern Mexico under U.S. control in 1848, it also introduced Maria, then just 15-years-old, to Henry Stanton Burton, a Lieutenant Colonel more than 10 years her senior who led the invading U.S. Army in Baja California.

Many details of this love story are unavailable in the historical record, but we know that the romance was an unlikely match. While most Baja Californians rejected the presence of the U.S. army and military occupation in 1846, María and other members of her family were among the small number of Mexicans who boarded refugee transport ships bound for Alta California at the conclusion of the war, becoming U.S. citizens in the process. In July 1849, she married Henry Burton in Monterey, California over the protests of both Catholic and Protestant church officials who protested the ceremony. While Burton and other U.S. troops accommodated to the Mexican-majority environment in Monterey, Ruíz de Burton went to school to learn English, became enmeshed in Gold Rush society, and gave birth to two children over the next three years. Her struggle to make a new life in the post-1848 California resonated with the efforts of other Latinas in this period, according to recent historians.[8]Eager to settle down, her family purchased the Rancho Jamul near San Diego, a property once held by former Californio Governor Pío Pico. But in 1859 the Army summoned Burton back to the East Coast, and María and her family spent the following decade, including the Civil War years, far from Southern California, taking up residence in New York, Rhode Island, Delaware, Virginia, and Washington D.C., where she became close friends with First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and others in government circles.

After twenty years of marriage and the trial of the Civil War, Henry Burton died of complications related to malaria in 1869, leaving María with heavy financial debts. She returned to California the following year to protect her property from the creditors, lawyers, and squatters who were seeking to take ownership of her land – an overwhelming problem for many Californio landholding families in the 1860s and 1870s.[9]Ongoing legal battles further drained her assets, but María directed her frustration into new business efforts, and into her writing career. As a businesswoman, she managed agricultural and ranching operations on her San Diego County property, creating a cement company that depended upon limestone quarried from Rancho Jamul, produced castor beans for commercial sale, and organized the construction of a reservoir. María came to know the law in great detail, as she fought to retain her property holdings in both Alta and Baja California in the courts. She published articles and letters about her land claims in San Diego newspapers, and traveled extensively, but she ultimately lost most of her rancho by the time of her death in Chicago in 1895.

While property loss was a common experience for 19th-century Latinos, Ruíz de Burton's work as a writer made her unique among her contemporaries. She left behind a pioneering literary legacy that captured many of the cultural and political concerns of her generation. Building on plays she had written in the 1850s, she released in 1872 what may have been the first English-language novel written by a Latina in the U.S., inaugurating a tradition of women's writing that accelerated in the 20th century. That first book, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), published by J.B. Lippincott in Philadelphia, satirized the racial politics and hypocrisy of New England abolitionists, drawing attention to the effects of U.S. expansion on Mexican Americans in California. Subsequent writings continued to draw attention to issues of racial discrimination, economic justice, and political governance. Some readers have interpreted her 1876 rewriting of Don Quixote, performed and published in San Francisco as Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts, Taken from Cervantes' Novel of That Name, as Ruíz de Burton's effort to link Californios to a more glorious Spanish past; others have seen it as a critique of Spanish-Mexican mishandling of its Alta California settlements. Finally, The Squatter and the Don (1885), her best known novel, this one published under the pen name "C. Loyal" ("Loyal Citizen"), employed a story about a romance between a Californio and a squatter to draw attention to the depredations of Anglos in Southern California, the dangers associated with railroad monopolies in post-Civil War society, and the false promises of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the U.S.-Mexico War.[10]

These concerns about race, conquest, and similar themes make Ruíz de Burton's writings, in the words of literary scholars Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, "clearly a precursor to Chicano/a literature, as her novels investigate issues at the core of Chicano/a history and literature." The Squatter and the Don stands as "the first published narrative written in English from the perspective of the conquered Mexican population ... a narrative space for the counterhistory of the conquered Californio population."[11] Ruíz de Burton's literary work reflected conditions of economic and political struggles that were common for many 19th-century Mexican Americans, and her work, like that of Félix Varela, owed a great deal to the territorial expansion of the United States in the mid-19th century. Arriving in California during the Gold Rush, her circumstances were shaped by the U.S.-Mexico War, by the Civil War, and by the changing California economy in the 1860s and 1870s. As they would for others in U.S. history, wars brought major changes for Ruíz de Burton and members of her family, changing Latinos' relationship to U.S. citizenship, and the aftermath of those conflicts presented both challenges and opportunities to vulnerable members of American society.

Arturo Schomburg

If María Amparo Ruíz de Burton's experiences encapsulated many of the major issues facing Latinos from the 1820s into the post-Civil War years, Arturo Schomburg's work resonated with key themes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1874, Arturo grew up in a family of mixed ethnic and racial background, with a mother who hailed from the Virgin Islands and a Puerto Rican father who claimed partial German ancestry. Like thousands of other contemporary Caribbean migrants, Schomburg made his way to New York City in the late 19th century, drawn to the economic opportunities in that metropolis as well as its cosmopolitan character. From the time he arrived in 1891, Schomburg joined fellow Puerto Ricans and Cubans in pressing for Latin American independence, following the lead of Félix Varela who had pushed a similar program prior to the Civil War. But now, living among working-class New Yorkers, many of them Spanish speakers, Schomburg became active in new social and political organizations – including the Cuban Revolutionary Party, a recently-founded group called Las Dos Antillas [the Two Antilles], and a Masonic Lodge that welcomed African American, Afro-Cuban, and Afro-Puerto Rican members.[12]

In taking up residency in late-19th century New York, Schomburg joined a diverse and growing community of the city's Latinos who maintained strong ties to the Caribbean and the politics of anti-imperialism. His residency in New York from 1891 until his death in 1938 coincided with major changes in the composition and orientation of that population. Working together across national lines during the 19th century, Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants had long organized meetings, run newspapers, lobbied U.S. policymakers, and helped raise money for the fight against Spanish control. During Schomburg's time, the inspirational leadership of this movement fell to the Cuban poet, journalist, orator, and organizer José Martí, who spent considerable time among Cuban and Puerto Rican exiles in the U.S., and who helped to inspire the founding of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York City in 1892. Martí's efforts gave shape to the late-19th century Cuban revolution against Spain and subsequent U.S. entry into that conflict, and he became an important symbol of Cuban nationalism, hemispheric solidarity, and anti-imperialism after his death.[13]

Schomburg was intimately connected to those developments, and he watched as new circumstances unfolded in New York and other mainland cities following the outbreak of war in Cuba in 1895. As a defining historical moment for U.S. Latinos, that conflict, and U.S. intervention in 1898, proved a catalyst for new migrations, and new transnational ties, between the mainland U.S. and the Caribbean basis; it created an independent Cuba in 1902 and the establishment of Puerto Rico as a U.S. colony (and later commonwealth); it led the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court to affirm that Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens; and it inaugurated an era of more aggressive U.S. interventions into Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other former Spanish colonies that in turn prompted new groups of Latinos to migrate into the mainland U.S. from the early-1900s forward.[14]

Schomburg's involvement in anti-colonial, exile politics, and in his Masonic community, put him in touch not only with those developments, but also with other working-class Latino New Yorkers who redefined Brooklyn, Manhattan, and other boroughs throughout his lifetime. More than 60 percent of Puerto Ricans who lived in the mainland U.S. made their homes in New York City by 1920, and that proportion rose to 85 percent by 1940. According to Virginia Sánchez Korrol, "the attraction of New York City was largely economic. Job opportunities, above all, loom as the single most important factor encouraging potential migration."[15]Many of Schomburg's Puerto Rican compatriots found jobs in the construction or garment industries, while many Cubans took employment in cigar factories, an international enterprise that employed workers up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Other Latinos found work in different manufacturing operations, in railroad industries, or in low-wage agricultural labor. Throughout the U.S., Latinos and Latinas worked in those sectors and others during a time in which American capitalism depended more heavily on low-wage work by immigrants and people of color, and during a period in which U.S. economic investments in Puerto Rico and Mexico were destabilizing rural economies and prompting outmigration to the U.S.

Schomburg and other Latinos often faced stark discriminatory obstacles during this period. By the late-1930s, many found themselves clustered in racially defined barrios located near low-wage factories, meatpacking plants, or farms. Signs reading "No Mexicans Allowed" appeared in early-20th century Texas and other parts of the Southwest, and marriages between Latinos and whites were not allowed in some parts of the U.S. Race-based arguments in the U.S. Congress had kept New Mexico from achieving statehood until 1912, and residents of that region faced new struggles for equality in the World War I era, and in strikes by coal miners in Gallup, New Mexico during the early-1930s. In many workplaces and neighborhoods, organizers and everyday residents struggled to improve their circumstances, launching important organizing efforts in the rural Southwest, in midwestern cities like Chicago and Detroit, and up and down the East Coast.[16]

Like many contemporaries, Schomburg aspired to middle-class status, but he proved more talented, more determined, or more fortunate, than most. Frustrated in his efforts to become a lawyer, Schomburg taught Spanish, worked as a messenger and a clerk, and finally settled for a mailroom job at the Bankers Trust Company, where he rose to supervise its Caribbean and Latin American mail section. As racial segregation increased in New York and throughout the U.S., Latino urbanites like Schomburg often found themselves living in close proximity to African Americans, and sharing schools and other institutions with other low-income communities of color. Recalling the 1930s, Evelio Grillo noted that Afro-Cubans in Tampa, Florida "enjoyed larger and larger places in black American life, as teachers, as social workers, and some as leaders in the black American community. They chose black American spouses almost exclusively. Many of them attended college, with the largest number at Florida A&M, the public university for blacks."[17]Others in New York instead identified themselves, and at times organized themselves, by national group or more broadly as Afro-Latinos. Born in Cayey, Puerto Rico in 1901, the writer and activist Jesús Colón "identified as a black man who happened to be Puerto Rican", according to one scholar, and he came to "represen[t] the voice of those Puerto Ricans who have made their lives in the United States metropolis" prior to his death in 1974. Cubans and Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, on the other hand, created El Club Cubano Inter-Americano in 1945 as one of the 20th century's first racially inclusive Latino organizations that brought Afro-Latinos together with African Americans for political and social events.[18]

In the decades prior to World War II, Schomburg was among the most influential Puerto Ricans in the U.S., and it was his interest in scholarship, in history, and in collecting that made him famous. Throughout his life, Schomburg maintained a broad interest in black culture and history, inspired to research and write in part by past Cuban and Puerto Rican independence struggles, by the 19th-century example of the Afro-Cuban fighter Antonio Maceo, by the leadership of Rafael Serra and fellow Latinos in 1890s New York, and later by the Harlem Renaissance. Committed to uncovering the contributions of "Negroes" to world history, he collected documents, books, and stories that defied contemporary arguments about black intellectual inferiority. Those efforts made him one of the most prominent cultural figures of the Harlem Renaissance, as W.E.B. DuBois and many other writers consulted his archives in pursuing their own work from the 1910s onward. His collecting efforts were the foundation of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, housed at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library, and his legacy is felt, also, in the annual Schomburg Symposium organized by the Taller Puertorriqueño in Philadelphia "that each year explores a different theme or aspect of Africa and its diaspora and its connection to the [Latino]heritage."[19]

Schomburg's efforts as an historian resonated with the broader intellectual work of Latinos during the early 20th century. Newspapers were critical to this historical period, and these years saw the establishment of key organs such as La Prensa in New York (1913); San Antonio's La Prensa (1913); and Los Angeles's El Heraldo de México (1915) and La Opinión (1926). Latin American social scientists such as José Vasconcelos, Manuel Gamio, Jovita González, and Martín Luis Guzmán spent time in California, Texas, Illinois, and New York. Finally, novelists published important works of literature. Writing in New York City, for example, the Colombian immigrant Alirio Díaz Guerra authored Lucas Guevara in 1914, perhaps the first Latino immigrant novel in U.S. history, while Mexican author Conrado Espinosa published El sol de Texas (Under The Texas Sun) in San Antonio in 1926.[20]

Schomburg's life therefore reminds us of many important developments in the late-19th and early-20th century experiences of Latinos in the U.S. As an Afro-Latino, he experienced discriminatory treatment from fellow Latin Americans as well as from others in U.S. society, and he aligned himself with other Spanish speakers from the Caribbean – Puerto Ricans and Cubans – but also with African Americans in turn-of-the-century New York. Race limited his economic advancement during this era of Jim Crow, but Schomburg joined other Latinos nationwide in developing community organizations, political clubs, and social groups through which he found like-minded New Yorkers, expressed his own views, and contributed to city life. With an international vision and strong sense of history, he made uniquely valuable contributions to African American intellectual culture in New York as a writer, archivist, and bibliophile, providing just one example of how 19th and 20th-century Latinos contributed to other groups in U.S. society, and how their intellectual commitments have given shape to modern American culture.

Luisa Moreno

The experiences of Luisa Moreno, one of the most influential labor and civil rights leaders in the mid-20th century U.S., differed markedly from the work of Schomburg and encapsulated critical developments between the late 1920s and the early 1950s. She was one of the relatively small number of Central Americans who made their way to the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century, a number that would increase a great deal in the 1970s and 1980s. Born Blanca Rosa Rodríguez López in Guatemala in 1907, she grew up, like María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, in a privileged Latin American family. Intending that his daughter become a nun, her father, a powerful coffee grower, sent nine-year-old Blanca to a convent in California for four years. The rebellious teenager, however, rejected her parents' authority upon her return. Aspiring to a university education, she left home for Mexico City where she found work as a journalist, published a volume of poetry, and mingled with artists in that capital city. After marrying an artist who was considerably older, she moved with him to New York City in 1928 and gave birth to a daughter just weeks after the 1929 stock market crash.

As an immigrant and young mother in New York, Moreno was privileged to speak perfect English (thanks to her schooling in California), and to be highly educated and light-skinned. She nonetheless lived in Spanish Harlem alongside working-class Puerto Ricans and Cubans of the sort whom Schomburg knew well. There she experienced a downward economic mobility not uncommon among Latinos in the 20th century, living as a poor seamstress in circumstances far different from those that she had known in her native Guatemala. Like others in the 1930s, she found her way to radical politics during the Depression decade, joining the ranks of the Communist Party, working to organize a small union for fellow Spanish-speaking garment workers, and then taking an American Federation of Labor job in 1935 to organize cigar workers in Florida. Concerned about poor housing, dangerous living and working conditions, discrimination and low wages paid to women and immigrants, she began a new life dedicated to social justice and more democratic involvement by poor people in the U.S. Other Latinos and Latinas shared Moreno's interests in the 1930s, prompted to join union and civil rights campaigns by the new hardship facing their communities, by New Deal legislation that inspired some hope for change, and by new leadership in the U.S. labor movement.

Thoroughly transformed from the young woman who had left her Guatemala home nearly a decade before, Blanca Rosa ("White Rose") Rodríguez renamed herself Luisa Moreno ("Dark") in the mid-1930s, adopting a surname that signaled her new affiliation with the working-class people of color she sought to organize. Her first name connected Moreno to the famed Puerto Rican feminist Luisa Capetillo who had been active several decades earlier.[21] Working among Latinos and African Americans, she proved a very successful organizer of Florida cigar workers, negotiating a contract that covered 13,000 employees before abandoning the American Federation of Labor for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a new labor organization that affirmed a commitment to organizing racial minorities, women, and unskilled workers.

As an employee of the United Cannery and Packinghouse Workers of America (UCAPAWA – an affiliate of the CIO), Moreno was sent first to San Antonio, Texas to assist striking Latinas in the pecan shelling industry. Those women, who played a critical role in the Texas economy, were led by Emma Tenayuca, a young orator and organizer whose first labor activism had centered on changing San Antonio's cigar industry a few years earlier. Raised by a mother descended from Spanish settlers and a father who claimed indigenous heritage, Tenayuca later reflected that "I think it was the combination of being a Texan, being a Mexican, and being more Indian than Spanish that propelled me to take action.'" Tenayuca and other civil rights proponents focused their efforts on San Antonio's West Side, a four-square mile section in which 80,000 ethnic Mexicans endured low wages, sub-standard housing, and the highest infant death rate in the U.S. Despite opposition from the Catholic Church, city officials, and some Mexican American organizations, the city's pecan shellers organized marches, rallies, and strikes that helped to transform the politics of that critically important Latino neighborhood.[22]

Eager to see West Side residents and others gain a voice in American politics, Moreno next set off to establish the first national Latino civil rights organization. Meeting in April 1939 in Los Angeles, she brought together more than a 1,000 delegates from more than 100 organizations to form el Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española (The Spanish-Speaking Peoples' Congress). No such event involving representatives of Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban, and other communities had ever taken place in U.S. history, and Moreno's efforts at once carried forward the pan-ethnic political organizing of Martí, Schomburg, and others, even as it anticipated by more than 30 years the creation of national Latino organizations that emerged in the 1960s and 1970. That conference therefore proved a milestone in Latino political history, as delegates from across the country, and from different Latino groups, committed themselves to fair housing, an end to educational segregation, unionization campaigns targeting low-wage women and immigrants, a ban on police brutality, and other demands. Just a few years removed from massive repatriation drives targeting ethnic Mexicans in Southern California and other parts of the country, the organization courageously demanded an end to such deportation pressures, with Moreno speaking eloquently about deportation trains as "caravans of sorrow" that looked eerily like the vehicles then being used to round up Jews and other "aliens" in Europe.[23]

As an organizer in Southern California before and during World War II, Moreno worked with a broad group of individuals and organizations concerned about democracy and inequality, including liberals and leftists on the West Coast, members of the Hollywood community, and working-class, often immigrant, Californians of scarce means. The number of Latinos in the Los Angeles area had grown exponentially over the course of Moreno's lifetime, thanks in part to the Mexican Revolution (1910-1921) and Cristero Revolts (1926-28) that helped to drive hundreds of thousands of rural and urban people north across the border.[24]With few Central Americans in the region until the 1970s, Moreno worked with organizers such as Josefina Fierro, whose father had fought in the Revolution under Francisco "Pancho" Villa, and whose mother had been a follower of the Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón. Fierro had worked on immigrant rights campaigns in Southern California since the mid-1930s, and she and Moreno distinguished themselves as among the most important advocates of women's rights in the U.S. during the Depression and World War II years, providing leadership that would lay a foundation for later advancement. Many of their efforts centered on social equality for women of color. In December 1939, for example, El Congreso passed a resolution in California on "The Mexican woman" that criticized the "double discrimination [she suffers]as a woman and as a Mexican," and that called "for women's equality, so that she may receive equal wages, enjoy the same rights as men in social, economic, and civil liberties, and use her vote for the defense of the Mexican and Spanish American people, and of American democracy."

As El Congreso struggled to improve American democracy, their concerns, like those of most Latinos, changed with the outbreak of World War II. On the East Coast, Bernardo Vega recalled that after Pearl Harbor "the war absorbed the attention of everyone, and the Puerto Rican community in New York concentrated most of its energies on the war effort. For my part, I too was disposed to do all that was in my power to contribute ... to the defeat of fascism."[25] Young people rushed into military service, and many Latinos and Latinas gave their labor to war industries throughout the U.S. World War II was a transformational time for many, as men and women took up arms or entered defense industries, Puerto Ricans traveled to New York City in larger numbers, new immigrants arrived from Mexico to take railroad and agricultural jobs, rural residents moved to cities, and cultural life in Florida, the upper Midwest, New York, Texas, and California changed quickly.[26]

During these same years, U.S. civil rights organizations defended young Latinos, African Americans, and others who were attacked for wearing zoot suits, and often derided as anti-American, during wartime rioting. Moreno had rebelled against her own family 15 years before, and she understood the 1930s and 1940s as years of tremendous youth creativity in Latin America and the U.S. Barrio residents in California, Arizona, and Texas – often fiercely patriotic – had developed styles of dress and linguistic expressions that challenged their parents' conservatism, celebrated African American jazz, and flaunted ducktail hairstyles, tall pompadours, pegged pants, tight skirts, and other exaggerated fashions. Faced with anti-Latino violence in Los Angeles and elsewhere, and newspaper headlines that announced that Mexican youth were inherently violent and intellectually inferior, civil rights leaders such as Moreno, Fierro, and Alice McGrath pushed the federal government, military officials, elected city and state representatives, and West Coast journalists to defend Latino communities during wartime.[27]

Despite new violence and the persistence of older challenges to their advancement, Latinos certainly saw some social and political progress during and after World War II. In Texas, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) effectively used frequent reminders about Mexican American contributions to the Allied war effort, and Good Neighbor rhetoric of inter-American cooperation, to attack educational discrimination and the denial of public accommodations to Latinos. Leaders such as Alonso S. Perales and Carlos Castañeda pushed the state Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to end discrimination in hiring and wages. Returning veterans in Chicago and elsewhere took advantage of the G.I. Bill and federal housing assistance to attend college, purchase homes, and secure middle-class employment in the postwar economy. After years of struggle, residents of Puerto Rico established their right in 1952 to elect a Governor and adopt a constitution of their own as a Commonwealth, rather than a formal colony, of the U.S. The large number of Puerto Ricans moving to New York City and other mainland locales, including some 151,000 between 1940 and 1950, and 470,000 between 1950 and 1960, formed new community organizations and participated in religious, civic, and other groups. Landmark court cases, many argued by Latino lawyers, challenged racial discrimination in education, in fair housing, and in jury selection during the 1940s and 1950s.[28]

Latinos also became more visible in the U.S. cultural sphere during and after the war, affirming their place in American society by excelling as artists and performers. Actors such as Rita Moreno, Ricardo Montalbán, and Desi Arnaz took more influential roles in theater, film, and television. Postwar journalists accelerated the growth of Spanish- and English-language media, driving up the circulation of newspapers such as Los Angeles's La Opinión, and the merger of El Diario and La Prensa in New York in 1962. Musicians such as Mario Bauzá, Beny Moré, Celia Cruz, Miguelito Valdés, and others played to packed houses on both coasts and in the upper Midwest. Latino writers published new fiction and memoirs, including Pedro Juan Soto's Spiks (1956), which explored Puerto Rican struggles in New York City, and José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho (1959), which sought to represent Mexican American experiences in the 1930s and 1940s. Latinos became more visible in American sports, as well, thanks to boxers such as Kid Gavilán, and to baseball players such as Mike García, Orestes (Minny) Miñoso, Ozzie Vigil, and Vic Power. Moreover, they authored important works of scholarship, including studies of Puerto Ricans in Chicago by the pioneering sociologist Elena Padilla, work in labor economics by Ernesto Galarza, and explorations of South Texas folklore and border conflict by musicologist Américo Paredes. These trends accelerated during the postwar period, as new groups of Latin Americans arrived in the U.S. seeking opportunities, or fleeing the Cuban Revolution or political turmoil in the Dominican Republic, throughout the 1950s and 1960s.[29]

Although they applauded these cultural efforts, activists associated with El Congreso and similar groups found that World War II and the immediate postwar years also presented new obstacles to Latino civil rights. Violence directed at zoot suiters had put gendered and racialized hostility towards working-class Southern Californians on display. Both unionists and middle-class Mexican Americans saw the postwar renewal of the Bracero Program, a wartime contract labor agreement between Mexico and the U.S., as an effort to flood labor markets with low-wage, temporary workers from Latin America. Latinos in New York and other cities found themselves competing for scarce industrial jobs during a time in which that sector failed to expand, and in which many garment factories and assembly plants relocated to the South in search of cheaper labor. By the late-1940s, Cold War-era concerns about communist infiltration, and a common desire to avoid the sort of labor and civil rights conflicts that had defined the 1930s, led to new surveillance of Moreno and other suspected radicals. As a result, in this time of new challenges for organized labor, El Congreso, a broad-based civil rights organization, never managed to convene after World War II. Fearing police surveillance and possible deportation, Fierro left the U.S. for Mexico in 1948, and Moreno did the same in 1950.

Edward Roybal

The postwar period witnessed the development of Chicano and Puerto Rican civil rights efforts in the 1960s and 1970s, and the formation of influential organizations such as the United Farm Workers, the Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs, ASPIRA, the National Council of La Raza, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Puerto Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. These organizations drew from the experiences, the resources, and the energies of Latinos who had been involved in civil rights efforts since the 1940s and 1950s, including Puerto Ricans in New York such as Antonia Pantoja, and they often used celebrations of Latino culture to help galvanize Americans as neighborhood residents, workers, or citizens.

In Los Angeles County, it was neighborhood organizers, some of them connected directly to Moreno and El Congreso, who helped to elect Edward Roybal, one of the most influential Latino politicians in the late 20th century, to elective office in 1949. In so doing, they launched a political career that would lead Roybal to the U.S. Congress in 1963. Roybal's political career stretched from the 1940s into the early-1990s. Like the other historical figures reviewed here, his biography connects with key themes of his time such as the emerging power of Latino voters, the Latinization of Los Angeles and other major cities, and the institutionalization of Latino politics on the national scene. Born only a few years after Moreno, he made his impact on American life just as she was stepping away from her labor and civil rights organizing, and only months before she left the U.S. for Mexico.

Edward Roybal became a longtime Southern Californian, living in Los Angeles at a time in which the region became home to the largest number of ethnic Mexicans in the U.S. Like most others, however, he was a transplant, not a native, of that city. Born in New Mexico in 1916 to a family that traced its roots in the region back to Spanish colonization, Roybal moved with his parents to Los Angeles in the early 1920s during the height of pre-World War II Mexican migration to the West Coast. His native New Mexico had recently achieved statehood in 1912, and Roybal had spent his first years in a bilingual region in which Hispanos enjoyed some representation in local politics, and from which voters later sent Dennis Chávez to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1930 as the first Mexican American elected to that body. Many residents of the state suffered economic hardship after World War I, however, and Mexican Americans – including the families of soldiers who had fought in that conflict – sought jobs outside the state as sheepherders in Wyoming, mine workers in Colorado, agricultural laborers in California, and more. In 1922, when his father lost his job in a railroad strike, the Roybals left Albuquerque seeking new opportunities in Boyle Heights, a growing Mexican American neighborhood area on the east side of Los Angeles. He graduated from Roosevelt High School 12 years later, took a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC – an important New Deal Program), worked at times in the low-wage garment industry during the Depression, and then returned to school to study business at the UCLA and law at Southwestern University.

In a time when few Mexican Americans entered colleges and universities, Roybal had been able to secure more education than most Latinos in the U.S., and he hoped to put that schooling to good use. Concerned about public health, he took a position with the California Tuberculosis Association and rose to direct education programs for the Los Angeles County Tuberculosis and Health Association. In that capacity, he combated diseases that preyed upon poor residents of the area's barrios and colonias. Like many other Latinos nationwide, Roybal also served in the armed services during World War II, utilizing what he had learned at UCLA as an accountant for an Army infantry unit. A proud veteran, Roybal was well positioned at war's end to become a member of the American middle class, and he considered moving to the suburbs and pursuing a more comfortable life. However, his interest in advancing the cause of Latino electoral representation, civil rights, and equality of opportunity won out. He spent his vacation time in 1945 and 1946 in Chicago studying community organizing under Saul Alinsky, and when other politically active Latinos urged Roybal to run for office, he agreed to put himself forward as a candidate in 1947.

Working with like-minded Southern Californians, Roybal lost that first bid for Los Angeles City Council, but his friends and colleagues maintained their campaign organization with an eye to the next election. Over the following months that group gained the support of Alinsky as well as prominent members of Los Angeles's Jewish community, Hollywood liberals, city and county officials, Catholic clergy, and labor unionists. Multi-ethnic coalition building in fact proved key to many postwar Latino political movements. Members of Roybal's group called themselves the Community Service Organization (CSO), and they set out to register new voters for the next election through small house meetings that gathered together neighbors and friends. These were years of high political expectations for Latino voters in California, New York, Illinois, and other states, an era that saw the establishment in 1949 of critical new organizations such as the American G.I. Forum in Three Rivers, Texas. CSO organizer Fred Ross Sr. noted the large number of potential Mexican American voters in places like East Los Angeles, that "in the past ten years practically the entire United States-born second generation has come of voting age." In his view, "sizeable segments of this second generation, particularly the veterans, are possessed of a strong social will to bring about basic improvements in the neighborhoods so that at least their children can have a better life, a better place to live it." In just over three months, the CSO registered 11,000 new voters in East Los Angeles, assuring that on election day in 1949 Edward Roybal would not only win his city council seat, he would also double the number of total votes cast in the 1947 election.[30]

With Roybal's victory, Los Angeles had elected its first Mexican American city councilman since 1878, and news of the CSO's success spread throughout Latino communities in California and Arizona. Buoyed in part by the African American civil rights movement, CSO organizer Fred Ross, Sr. identified and trained young leaders throughout the state such as César, Helen, and Richard Chávez; Dolores Huerta; Cruz Reynoso; and Herman Gallegos. Through tireless organizing and hundreds of house meetings, they shaped the most important Latino civil rights organization on the West Coast during the 1950s. Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Central Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area, and colonias from San Diego to Monterey organized for neighborhood improvement or labor campaigns, made arguments before city council meetings, and ran naturalization classes for elderly immigrants. From 1949 until the early-1960s, the organization brought tens of thousands of California and Arizona voters – most of them Latinos – into the electoral process for the first time, and activists pressed politicians and candidates to pass a minimum wage for agricultural workers in the state, and to approve an old-age pension system for non-citizens who had worked in California for decades.

Latinos elsewhere worked on similar projects related to economic justice and political empowerment during the 1950s, and that decade laid a foundation for Latino electoral representation from coast to coast. In Los Angeles, Roybal pressed for Fair Employment Practices, an end to police brutality, and similar issues of concern to many ethnic Mexicans, running unsuccessfully as the 1954 Democratic candidate for California Lieutenant Governor. In 1956, Denver made Bert Gallegos the first Latino on its city council, and voters in El Paso, Texas elected Raymond Telles as the 20th century's first big city Latino mayor in 1957. Arizona's Alianza Hispano-Americana joined with Texas's LULAC and American G.I. Forum, and with California's CSO, to form an umbrella network of Mexican American political groups, the American Council of Spanish-Speaking Organizations, in the early 1950s. Electoral campaigns involving Latino organizers escalated towards the end of the decade thanks to the establishment of Viva Kennedy! clubs during the 1960 presidential campaign. Overseen by campaign staffer Carlos McCormick, their mobilization of the Latino electorate in California, Colorado, and elsewhere played a key role in John F. Kennedy's narrow electoral victory. In New Mexico, for instance, Kennedy claimed a victory margin of just 2,000 votes, while his win in Texas by just 46,000 ballots is often credited with winning him the national election.

The 1960 presidential election galvanized many Catholic voters, and the Viva Kennedy! campaigns brought recently-elected Latino politicians together for the first time. In October 1960, the campaign met in New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with both Mexican Americans from the Southwest and Puerto Ricans from New York.[31]Kennedy's election energized new Latino political efforts, as voters elected Henry B. González the first Mexican American Congressman from Texas in 1961, and residents of Los Angeles in the following year made Philip Soto and John Moreno the first Latinos in the California Assembly for more than 50 years. In 1962, Southern Californians also sent Edward Roybal to the U.S. Congress as the first Latino elected to the House from that state in the 20th century.

Roybal served in Congress from 1963 to 1993, an era defined by Latino demographic growth throughout the U.S. thanks in part to new migrations from Cuba and the Dominican Republic. By 1962, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 had already prompted an enormous upsurge in that population in Florida, New York, New Jersey, and other states. As a community that traced its residency in the U.S. to the late 18th and early 19th century, the era of Félix Varela, the number of Cubans had grown steadily since World War I – with 16,000 arriving in the 1920s, roughly 9,000 arriving in the 1930s, 26,000 during the 1940s, and some 80,000 in the 1950s. Their numbers rose sharply after 1959, however, and U.S. government programs, including the Cuban Adjustment Act, gave that population special preference in immigration law. Some 300,000 Cubans immigrated between 1965 and 1973; another 125,000 "marielitos" entered the U.S. around 1980; and a large group of "balseros" arrived in the mid-1990s.[32]Similarly, the 1960s and 1970s saw a dramatic upsurge in the Dominican population of the U.S., as well. Prompted by political turmoil and repression, economic challenges in their home country, and U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965, the number of immigrants from that country increased from fewer than 10,000 in the 1950s to more than 90,000 in the 1960s; nearly 150,000 in the 1970s, more than 250,000 in the 1980s; and more than 330,000 in the 1990s. While most settled in the New York area, Dominicans moved in significant numbers to Florida and other parts of the U.S., as well.[33]During the 1970s and 1980s, new groups of South Americans, including Chileans, Argentinians, and Colombians, also moved to the U.S. in growing numbers, drawn by economic opportunity as political violence created dangerous instability in their home countries.[34]

Roybal's term in Congress also coincided with changes in the mainland Puerto Rican population, and with the arrival of large numbers of Central Americans to California and other parts of the U.S. after 1980. Thanks in part to more convenient air travel linking New York and San Juan, Puerto Ricans continued to move to that city and other parts of the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s, building communities that had developed dramatically during the 1940s and 1950s when island industrialization programs had actively encouraged outmigration. Moreover, it was not just New York's barrio that grew, as the Puerto Rican presence spread and became more visible after 1960 in Hartford, Boston, Worcester, and other Northeastern cities; in Newark and Trenton and Philadelphia; in Cleveland and Chicago; in Los Angeles and San Francisco; and in Tampa and Miami.[35]During the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1980-1988), immigration from Central America, especially from El Salvador and Guatemala and Nicaragua, developed as residents fled civil wars, U.S. military involvement, and economic hardship in the hope of securing work and security in the U.S. The number of Central Americans increased from 331,219 in 1980 to 1,323,380 by 1990, with many moving to California, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Washington D.C., and Illinois. Many considered themselves temporary refugees, eager to return to their home countries after the cessation of hostilities, but the duration and extent of violence in Central America, and the possibilities seemingly available, encouraged many Central Americans to settle permanently in the U.S.[36]

Most important to Roybal's California Congressional district, the number of Mexican migrants to the U.S. grew after the conclusion of the Bracero Program in 1965. Arrivals from that country comprised 25 percent of the total number of immigrants admitted legally to the U.S. between 1960 and 2000, and hundreds of thousands of other border crossers entered the U.S. without documents in order to work in agriculture, industry, or the service sector. As the scale of Mexican migration increased in the 1970s and 1980s, thanks both to demands for low-wage workers in the U.S. and to economic restructuring in their home country, migrants hailed from regions of Mexico that had sent few emigres in the past, braving new and more militarized regulations at the U.S.-Mexico border, and they moved in larger numbers to regions of the U.S. such as the rural South and Midwest.[37]

Throughout Roybal's term in Congress, immigrant- and U.S.-born Latinos drove U.S. economic growth, their remittances bolstered Latin American economies, they joined the U.S. military in large numbers, and they played critical roles in shaping American literature, film, radio, and other cultural productions. Many also joined Roybal in winning election to influential political offices. Maurice Ferre became mayor of Miami in 1973, the first Puerto Rican to lead a major city in the mainland U.S.; Henry Cisneros and Federico Peña, both Mexican Americans, became mayors of San Antonio and Denver in 1981 and 1982. Born in Cuba, Xavier L. Suárez became the first Cuban American mayor of Miami in 1985. Moreover, voters elected Latino governors in several states, including Raúl Castro and Jerry Apodaca in Arizona and New Mexico in 1974, and Bob Martínez in Florida in 1986. Some of these gains were due not only to the growing number of Latino voters, or to the political skills of individual politicians, but also to Congress's extension in 1975 of Voting Rights Act protections to Latinos and other "language minorities," which mandated bilingual election materials, and a key 1982 amendment to the act that shaped voter redistricting in areas with large numbers of Latinos.[38]

Just as important to Roybal's time in office were the social movements emerging after 1960 in which Latinos mobilized to change American politics, U.S. cities, educational institutions, workplaces and job sites, and more. These efforts built upon, but also departed from, already established Latino mutual aid organizations and neighborhood improvement associations, church-based groups, and efforts associated with the Democratic Party. Members of the League of United Latin American Citizens in Texas helped to create the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations (PASSO) based on Viva Kennedy! clubs, for instance. In 1962, former leaders of the Community Service Organization in California started the labor and civil rights organization that became the United Farm Workers of America. New York's Puerto Rican Day Parade, which had begun in 1956 as the Desfile Hispanoamericano de Nueva York, took on a new activist cast by the late-1960s, and the Puerto Rican Forum in New York, established in 1957, while continuing to develop community leaders, established groups such as ASPIRA and the Puerto Rican Family Institute over the following decade. Other political and cultural responses challenged the U.S. political system, and some adopted more confrontational engagements with officials, employers, and American institutions.

The 1960s and 1970s were years of political urgency, scholars contend, when Puerto Ricans and other Latinos "came to embody that famous line from the Langston Hughes poem: "Nothing lights a fire like a dream deferred."[39] As one recent study of Chicago's 18th Street suggests, "Some local activists worked in social service agencies, formed community-based organizations, and began building coalitions with other groups across the city. Others had more radical critiques of American society and envisioned revolutionary social changes that struck at the root of inequality."[40]By the early 1970s, Latinos had formed organizations such as the Young Lords Party in Chicago and New York, and the Brown Berets in California and Texas; students were arguing for better schools in California and Texas, and for the establishment of programs teaching Chicano Studies and Puerto Rican Studies; and young and old expressed growing concern about the death tolls paid in the Vietnam conflict by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and others. Immigration reform became a key feature of the national political agenda, as well, with some Latinos arguing for greater restrictionism during the 1970s and 1980s, and most seeming to value a pathway to citizenship for undocumented U.S. residents.[41] Latinos debated the merits of legislation that sought to make English the official language of states like California or of the entire nation, while other immigrant- and U.S.-born residents became involved in a revived labor movement during the 1980s and 1990s in the hope of addressing the deep structural disparities in employment, living conditions, and education levels that dogged cities and rural areas into the late 20th century.

Congressman Roybal and many other Latinos in elected office responded to these concerns and others from the early 1960s into the early 1990s. Serving on important House committees, he became the first to introduce a bilingual education bill to the U.S. Congress, promoted public spending on AIDS and Alzheimer's research, worked to expand veterans' benefits, proposed national health care legislation, and voted to establish a cabinet-level Department of Education. Roybal also built dialogue between Latinos serving in the U.S. Congress, and between Latino government officials throughout the U.S. In 1976 he co-founded the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), a legislative service organization that initially brought Roybal together with fellow representatives Kika de la Garza (D-TX), Baltasar Corrada del Río (Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico), Herman Badillo (D-NY, and the first Puerto Rican elected to serve in the House), and Henry B. Gonzalez (D-TX), but that welcomed many more representatives in the 1980s and 1990s across a widening ideological spectrum, including Manuel Lujan (R-NM), Bill Richardson (D-NM), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Esteban Torres (D-CA), Robert Garcia (D-NY), Nydia Velásquez (D-NY), José Serrano (D-NY), Robert Menendez (D-NJ), and others. In the same year of the founding of CHC, Roybal also established the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), serving as president of that large body until 1991.

President William J. Clinton recognized the critical historical contributions of Congressman Roybal awarding him a Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001. In addition, the work of other influential Latinos such as Antonia Pantoja, César Chávez, and Dolores Huerta, along with a long list of Congressional Medal of Honor winners, has come to greater national attention in recent decades. The U.S. has too often ignored the centrality of women like Luisa Moreno and María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, or men like Félix Varela or Arturo Schomburg, who also shaped our collective past, served and educated fellow Americans, advanced the democratic political process, or helped to define American culture. Perhaps, following the logic of Walt Whitman's argument in 1888, some have remained so "impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashion'd from the British Islands only ... a very great mistake." Such abandonment, such insistence, now requires a steady and determined affirmation of the most narrow descriptions of national belonging, and a turning away from all of the evidence that shows Latinos as key historical participants, collaborators, and leaders in many fields throughout the U.S. In fact, the first consideration of Latinos' place in North America was authored more than 400 years ago in 1610, well before the Pilgrims named Plymouth Rock, with the publication in Spain of Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá's Historia de Nuevo México. That text, considered "the first published history of any American state," should remind us again of the longstanding presence of Latinos in North America, of the critical histories we miss when we ignore those subjects, and of the many important paths that Latinos have explored since the colonial period.[42]

As the previous pages suggest, individuals such as Félix Varela, María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, Arturo Schomburg, Luisa Moreno, Edward Roybal, and others must be our guides if we are to understand how and why people have long moved between Latin America and the U.S., the democratic struggles linking U.S. residents to other countries, the importance of religiosity in everyday life, the work of our best writers and artists, and the extent to which Latinos have built this national community, and other communities, over more than two centuries. The essays that follow, authored by some of the nation's most distinguished scholars, delve more deeply into these and other critical aspects of our nation's past.

Stephen J. Pitti, Ph.D., is Professor of History and American Studies, Director of the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Master of Ezra Stiles College at Yale University. He teaches courses in Latino studies, ethnic studies, Western history, 20th-century immigration, and civil rights. Pitti is the author of The Devil in Silicon Valley: Race, Mexican Americans, and Northern California and is working on two books: The World of Céasar Chávez and Leaving California: Race from the Golden State. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies from Stanford University.

[1] Walt Whitman, "The Spanish Element in Our Nationality" in The Complete Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, 2 vols. (New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1948), 2:402.

[2]  Vicki L. Ruíz, "Nuestra America: Latino History as United States History," Journal of American History 93, no. 3 (2006): 656.

[3]  David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

[4]  Rodrigo Lazo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States, Envisioning Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 2.

[5]  Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Ramón Grosfoguel, eds., Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Cary Cordova, "The Mission in Nicaragua: San Francisco Poets Go to War," in Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America, eds. Gina M. Pérez, Frank A. Guridy, and Adrian Burgos, Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 211–231.

[6]  For an introduction to the Mexican period in Alta California, see David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982).

[7]  Quoted in Beatrice Pita and Rosaura Sánchez, "María Amparo Ruíz De Burton and the Power of Her Pen," in Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, eds. Vicki L. Ruíz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 82.

[8]  Deena J. González, Refusing the Favor the Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820-1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Antonia I Castaneda, "Presidarias Y Pobladoras: Spanish-Mexican Women in Frontier Monterey, Alta California, 1770-1821" (Ph.D., Stanford University, 1990); Maria Raquél Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007); and Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

[9]  For more on Latinos in the U.S. Civil War, see Loreta Janeta Velazquez, The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and Travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Otherwise Known as Lieutenant Harry J. Buford, Confederate States Army (Hartford, CT: T. Belknap, 1876); Santiago Tafolla, A Life Crossing Borders: Memoir of a Mexican-American Confederate / Las Memorias De Un Mexicoamericano En La Confederacion (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2009); Jacqueline D. Meketa, Legacy of Honor: The Life of Rafael Chacon, a Nineteenth-Century New Mexican (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986); and Jerry D Thompson, Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas, 1st ed. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007).

[10]  María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, Don Quixote De La Mancha (San Francisco: J.H. Carmany and Co., 1876); and María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don: A Novel Descriptive of Contemporary Occurrences in California (San Francisco: Samuel Carson & Co., Publishers, 1885).

[11]  Pita and Sánchez, "María Amparo Ruíz De Burton and the Power of Her Pen," 72.

[12]  Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, "The World of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg," in The Afro-Latino Reader: History and Culture in the United States, eds. Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 70–91.

[13]  Lillian Guerra, The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Laura Lomas, Translating Empire José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); and Alfred J López, José Martí and the Future of Cuban Nationalisms (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006).

[14]  Vicki Ruíz argues that the years 1848, 1898, and 1948 represent "three historical moments pivotal to reimagining an American narrative with Latinos as meaningful actors." See Ruíz, "Nuestra America," 656.

[15]  Virginia Sánchez Korrol, From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1917-1948 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 28.

[16]  Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2005).

[17]  Evelio Grillo, "Black Cuban, Black American," in The Afro-Latino Reader: History and Culture in the United States, eds. Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 103.

[18]  Linda C. Delgado, Carmen Theresa Whalen, and Víctor Vázquez-Hernández, "Jesús Colón and the Making of a New York City Community, 1917-1974," in The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives, eds. Carmen Teresa Whalen and Víctor Vázquez-Hernández (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 64–87; Jesús Colón, A Puerto Rican in New York, and Other Sketches (New York: Mainstream Publishers, 1961); Jesús Colón, The Way It Was, and Other Writings: Historical Vignettes About the New York Puerto Rican Community (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1993); and Nancy Raquel Mirabal, "Melba Alvarado, El Club Cubano Inter-Americano, and the Creation of Afro-Cubanidades in New York City," in The Afro-Latino Reader: History and Culture in the United States, eds. Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 120–126.

[19]  Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, "Invoking Arturo Schomburg's Legacy in Philadelphia," in The Afro-Latino Reader: History and Culture in the United States, eds. Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 95.

[20]  Nicolás Kanellos, Hispanic Immigrant Literature: El Sueño Del Retorno, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011); Nicolás Kanellos, ed., Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States, Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Nicolás Kanellos, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: a Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2000).

[21]   Vicki L. Ruíz, "Moreno, Luisa (1907-1992)," Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 493.

[22]  Alicia R Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Women of the Depression: Caste and Culture in San Antonio, 1929-1939, no. 2 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1984); Rodolfo Rosales, The Illusion of Inclusion: The Untold Political Story of San Antonio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); and Richard A. Buitron, The Quest for Tejano Identity in San Antonio, Texas, 1913-2000 (New York: Routledge, 2004).

[23]  Vicki L. Ruíz, "Luisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism," in Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, eds. Vicki L. Ruíz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 175–192; Vicki L. Ruíz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950, 1st ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); and David G. Gutiérrez, ed., Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States (Wilmington, NC: Scholarly Resources, 1996).

[24]  George J Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

[25]  Bernardo Vega, Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York, ed. César Andréu Iglesias (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 206–207.

[26]  Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez, Mexican Americans & World War II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez, A Legacy Greater Than Words: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas of the WWII Generation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); and Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez and Emilio Zamora, Beyond the Latino World War II Hero the Social and Political Legacy of a Generation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).

[27]  Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Catherine Sue Ramírez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Anthony F Macías, Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935-1968 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

[28]  Edna Acosta-Belén, Puerto Ricans in the United States: A Contemporary Portrait, Latinos, Exploring Diversity and Change (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006), 81; and Emilio Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics During World War II (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009).

[29]  Mérida M. Rúa, ed., Latino Urban Ethnography and the Work of Elena Padilla, Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Ernesto Galarza, Strangers in Our Fields (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1956); Ramón Saldívar, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and Adrián Burgos, Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

[30]  Kenneth C. Burt, The Search for a Civic Voice: California Latino Politics (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 2007), 60.

[31]  Ibid., 190.

[32]  Melanie Shell-Weiss, Coming to Miami: a Social History, Sunbelt Studies (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009); Robert M. Levine, Cuban Miami (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2000); María Cristina García, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959-1994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Silvia Pedraza, Political Disaffection in Cuba's Revolution and Exodus, Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Andrea O'Reilly Herrera, Remembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Miguel González-Pando, The Cuban Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998); and Julio Capo, "It's Not Queer to Be Gay: Miami and the Emergence of the Gay Rights Movement, 1945-1995" (Ph.D., Florida International University, 2011).

[33]  Sherri Grasmuck, Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Patricia R. Pessar, A Visa for a Dream: Dominicans in the United States, New Immigrant Series (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995); Silvio Torres-Saillant, The Dominican Americans, The New Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998); Rafael Pérez-Torres, "Shifting Negotiations of Identity in a Dominican American Community," Latino Studies 5, no. 2 (July 2007): 157–181; Ramona Hernández, The Mobility of Workers Under Advanced Capitalism: Dominican Migration to the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York After 1950 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

[34]  Marilyn Espitia, "The Other 'Other Hispanics': South American-Origin Latinos in the United States," in The Columbia History of Latinos in the United States Since 1960, ed. David G. Gutiérrez (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 257–280.

[35]  Edwin Meléndez and Edgardo Meléndez, eds., Colonial Dilemma: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Puerto Rico (Boston: South End Press, 1993); Ramón Grosfoguel, Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Ramón Grosfoguel, eds., Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Felix M. Padilla, Puerto Rican Chicago (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987); Clara E. Rodriguez, Virginia Sánchez Korrol, and José Oscar Alers, eds., The Puerto Rican Struggle: Essays on Survival in the U.S. (New York: Puerto Rican Migration Research Consortium, 1980); Carlos Antonio Torre, Hugo Rodríguez Vecchini, and William Burgos, eds., The Commuter Nation: Perspectives on Puerto Rican Migration (Río Piedras, P.R: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1994); and The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).

[36]  Jacqueline Maria Hagan, Deciding to Be Legal: a Maya Community in Houston (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Cecilia Menjívar, Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Susan Bibler Coutin, Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants' Struggle for U.S. Residency (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Nora Hamilton, Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); María Cristina García, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Terry A. Repak, Waiting on Washington: Central American Workers in the Nation's Capital (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).

[37]  Douglas S. Massey, Return to Aztlan: The Social Process of International Migration from Western Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Douglas S. Massey, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002); Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey, Crossing the Border: Research from the Mexican Migration Project (New York: Russell Sage, 2004).

[38]  Louis DeSipio, "The Pressures of Perpetual Promise: Latinos and Politics, 1960-2003," in The Columbia History of Latinos in the United States Since 1960, ed. David G. Gutiérrez (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 428–429.

[39]  Kelvin A. Santiago-Valles and Gladys M. Jiménez-Muñoz, "Social Polarization and Colonized Labor: Puerto Ricans in the United States, 1945-2000," in The Columbia History of Latinos in the United States Since 1960, 102.

[40]  Lilia Fernández, "From the Near West Side to 18th Street: Un/Making Latino/a Barrios in Postwar Chicago," in Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America, eds. Gina M. Pérez, Frank A. Guridy, and Adrián Burgos (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 241; and Mike Amezcua, "The Second City Anew: Mexicans, Urban Culture, and Migration in the Transformation of Chicago, 1940-1965" (Ph.D., Yale University, 2011).

[41]  David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

[42]  Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 241.

The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the opinions or policies of the U.S. Government. Mention of trade names or commercial products does not constitute their endorsement by the U.S. Government.

Part of a series of articles titled American Latino/a Heritage Theme Study .

Previous: American Latino Theme Study Introduction

Next: American Latino Theme Study: Empires, Wars, Revolutions

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The ways Hispanics describe their identity vary across immigrant generations

The terms Hispanics in the United States use to describe themselves can provide a direct look at how they view their identity and how the strength of immigrant ties influences the ways they see themselves. About half of Hispanic adults say they most often describe themselves by their family’s country of origin or heritage, using terms such as Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican or Salvadoran, while another 39% most often describe themselves as “Hispanic” or “Latino,” the pan-ethnic terms used most often to describe this group in the U.S.

Meanwhile, 14% say they most often call themselves American, according to a national Pew Research Center survey of Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019.

The use of these terms varies across immigrant generations and reflects their diverse experiences . More than half (56%) of foreign-born Latinos most often use the name of their origin country to describe themselves, a share that falls to 39% among the U.S.-born adult children of immigrant parents (i.e., the second generation) and 33% among third- or higher-generation Latinos.

For this analysis of what Hispanics think is important to their identity, we surveyed 3,030 U.S. Hispanic adults in December 2019 as part of Pew Research Center’s 2019 National Survey of Latinos. The sample includes 2,094 Hispanic adults who were members of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. It also includes an oversample of 936 respondents from Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel, another online survey panel also recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses.

Recruiting panelists by phone or mail ensures that nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. This gives us confidence that any sample can represent the whole population (see our Methods 101 explainer on random sampling), or in this case the whole U.S. Hispanic population.

To further ensure that this survey reflects a balanced cross-section of the nation’s Hispanic adults, the data is weighted to match the U.S. Hispanic adult population by gender, nativity, Hispanic origin group, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

For the purposes of this report, references to foreign-born Hispanics include those born in Puerto Rico. Individuals born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens by birth. The survey was conducted in both English and Spanish.

Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology .

Meanwhile, the share who say they most often use the term “American” to describe themselves rises from 4% among immigrant Latinos to 22% among the second generation and 33% among third- or higher-generation Latinos. (Only 3% of Hispanic adults use the recent gender-neutral pan-ethnic term Latinx to describe themselves. In general, the more traditional terms Hispanic or Latino are preferred to Latinx to refer to the ethnic group.)

The U.S. Hispanic population reached 60.6 million in 2019. About one-third (36%) of Hispanics are immigrants, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. Another third of Hispanics are second generation (34%) – they are U.S. born with at least one immigrant parent. The remaining 30% of Hispanics belong to the third or higher generations, that is, they are U.S. born to U.S.-born parents.

The December 2019 survey also finds U.S. Hispanics are divided on how much of a common identity they share with other Americans, though views vary widely by immigrant generation. About half (53%) consider themselves to be a typical American, while 44% say they are very different from a typical American. By contrast, only 37% of immigrant Hispanics consider themselves a typical American. This share rises to 67% among second-generation Hispanics and to 79% among third-or-higher-generation Hispanics – views that partially reflect their birth in the U.S. and their experiences as lifelong residents of this country.

Speaking Spanish seen as a key part of Hispanic identity

What it means to be Hispanic can vary across the group. Hispanics most often say speaking Spanish is an essential part of what being Hispanic means to them, with 45% saying so. Other top elements considered to be part of Hispanic identity include having both parents of Hispanic ancestry (32%) and socializing with other Hispanics (29%). Meanwhile, about a quarter say having a Spanish last name (26%) or participating in or attending Hispanic cultural celebrations (24%) are an essential part of Hispanic identity. Lower shares say being Catholic (16%) is an essential part of Hispanic identity. (A declining share of U.S. Hispanic adults say they are Catholic .) Just 9% say wearing attire that represents their Hispanic origin is essential to Hispanic identity.

The importance of most of these elements to Hispanic identity decreases across generations. For example, 54% of foreign-born Hispanics say speaking Spanish is an essential part of what being Hispanic means to them, compared with 44% of second-generation Hispanics and 20% of third- or higher-generation Hispanics.

Most Latinos feel at least somewhat connected to a broader Hispanic community in the U.S.

For U.S. Latinos, the question of identity is complex due to the group’s diverse cultural traditions and countries of origin. Asked to choose between two statements, Latinos say their group has many different cultures rather than one common culture by more than three-to-one (77% vs. 21%). There are virtually no differences on this question by immigrant generation among Latinos.

Few Hispanics report a strong sense of connectedness with other Hispanics, with only 18% saying what happens to other Hispanics in the U.S. impacts them a lot and another 40% saying it impacts them some. Immigrant Hispanics (62%) are as likely as those in the second generation (60%) to express a sense of linked fate with other Hispanics. This share decreases to 44% among the third or higher generation.

Note: Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology .

• Comparison of Generations
• Hispanic/Latino Identity
• Immigrant Populations
• Integration & Identity
• Racial & Ethnic Identity

Ana Gonzalez-Barrera is a former senior researcher focusing on Hispanics, immigration and demographics at Pew Research Center .

Large shares in many countries are pessimistic about the next generation’s financial future

Key facts about asian americans, a diverse and growing population, u.s. millennials tend to have favorable views of foreign countries and institutions – even as they age, younger, more educated u.s. adults are more likely to take part in citizen science research, on the cusp of adulthood and facing an uncertain future: what we know about gen z so far, most popular.

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Selective List of Journals Specializing in Mexican American Literature

• Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies Aztlán presents original research that is relevant to or informed by the Chicano experience. An interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, Aztlán focuses on scholarly essays in the humanities, social sciences, and arts, supplemented by thematic pieces in the dosier section, an artist's communiqué, a review section, and a commentary by the editor, Charlene Villaseñor Black. Aztlán seeks ways to bring Chicano studies into critical dialogue with Latino, ethnic, American, and global studies.
• Latino Studies Journal Latino Studies has been published since 2003. It has swiftly established itself as a leading, international peer-reviewed journal. Not only has Latino Studies received awards and accolades, but also the active support of the scholarly community.
• The Bilingual Review Publishing since 1974, the Review continues to feature quality articles in the areas of bilingualism, bilingual education, and ethnic scholarship, as well as the best creative literature by established and emerging Hispanic writers. You will also find book reviews, publication notices, and a section of professional announcements of upcoming events
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Becoming Mexican American Essay

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In the book Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, George J. Sanchez, associate professor of American studies, ethnicity and history at the University of Southern California, studies the historical formation of the Mexican American identity, specifically in the first half of the 20 th century.

The city of Los Angeles during that time period in history was the hub of an intense and multifaceted cultural interplay between the indigenous American culture – rooted as it has been since its inception in the experience of the immigrant – and the influx of Mexican people that comprised the city’s most significant immigrant population at the time.

In choosing to focus on the years between 1900 and 1950 in Los Angeles, Professor George J. Sanchez specifically highlights a number of significant aspects that formed the Mexican American identity: war, repatriation, popular culture and Americanization programs.

The formal deportation and repatriation campaigns that took place during the Great Depression in the 1930s forced thousands of Mexicans back to the country of their birth; those who managed to stay in Los Angeles lobbied for civil and labor rights as Mexican Americans through unions and the policies associated with Roosevelt’s New Deal programs (Sanchez 12).

Professor George J. Sanchez’s broader argument on how identity is created offers a view of identity for Mexican immigrants during this time period as an amalgamation or third way between life as a Mexican and life as an American.

In George J. Sanchez’s words, “as Mexican immigrants acclimated themselves to life north of the border, they did not remain Mexicans simply living in the United States, they became Mexican Americans. They assumed a new ethnic identity, a cultural orientation which accepted the possibilities of a future in their new land” (Sanchez 12).

The purpose of this essay is to answer the question, is the Mexican American entertainer Pedro J. Gonzalez Mexican or American? This essay begins with George J. Sanchez’s supposition and builds upon it, as it employs certain events from Pedro J. Gonzalez’s life, specifically, his emigration to the United States, his deportation and his citizenship in 1985, to argue that Pedro J. Gonzalez was ultimately an American.

The essay reaches this conclusion on account of two key choices that Pedro J. Gonzalez made: the first, his choice to return to the United States following his deportation, and the second, his choice to become an American citizen in 1985 (Waldo and Sullivan 3).

This essay also argues that Mexican immigrants such as Pedro J. Gonzalez employed popular culture, particularly the corrido – the Mexican folk song – to serve as a bridge between the two cultures, and in turn the corrido came to underpin many elements of the new Mexican American identity as it formed.

Pedro J. Gonzalez was born in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1895; during his teenage years Gonzalez became a freedom fighter with other Pancho Villa supporters during the Mexican Revolution from 1910 through 1920 (Waldo and Sullivan 3).

A woman saved Pedro J. Gonzalez from a firing squad in 1919; three months later they were married and moved to Los Angeles in 1923, where he found employment as a longshoreman (Waldo and Sullivan 3). Pedro J. Gonzalez embarked on a radio career in Los Angeles as a Spanish-language radio personality in 1932, hosting his own two hour morning show on the Burbank based radio station KELW (Waldo and Sullivan 3).

The primary audience for Pedro J. Gonzalez’s radio show was the Mexican laborer getting ready for work in the morning; Pedro J. González was also the front man for a band called Los Madrugadores (Waldo and Sullivan 3). This radio show soon operated as a news resource for the burgeoning population of Mexicans in Los Angeles – a number of whom were illiterate in both languages – and Pedro J. Gonzalez deployed th

Open conflicts soon developed between Pedro J. Gonzalez and the Los Angeles municipal power base, specifically District Attorney Buron Fitts (Waldo and Sullivan 3). In 1934, Fitts arrested Pedro J. González on sexual assault charges; the court sentenced him to fifty years, six of which he served in the San Quentin prison (Waldo and Sullivan 3).

Pedro J. González regained his freedom in 1940, whereupon he was deported to Mexico; he spent the next thirty years in Tijuana as a radio personality (Waldo and Sullivan 3). Despite the deportation, tantamount to exile, Pedro J. González chose to return to Los Angeles in 1971; he applied for and received his American citizenship in 1985 (Waldo and Sullivan 3).

Choice here is the operative word when deciding what constitutes identity. Gonzalez chose willingly to return to the United States despite his fractious relationship with the authorities in Los Angeles and the hardship he faced, particularly the time he served in the San Quentin prison, an indication that he personally identified as an American, otherwise he would have stayed in Mexico.

Pedro J. Gonzalez employed the corrido, a form of folk music popular among the Mexican working classes, as a kind of political forum. In Professor George J. Sanchez’s words, “the corrido was an exceptionally flexible musical genre which encouraged adapting composition to new situations and surroundings.

Melodies…were standardized or based on traditional patterns, while text was expected to be continually improvised…corrido musicians were expected to decipher the new surroundings in which Mexican immigrants found themselves while living in Los Angeles. Its relation to the working-class Mexican immigrant audience in Los Angeles was therefore critical to its continued popularity” (Sanchez 178).

Pedro J. Gonzalez was one of the core innovators of the corrido genre, and employed the genre regularly throughout his career to communicate the distinct experience of the Mexican immigrant (Sanchez 177). According to Sanchez, Pedro J. Gonzalez “remembered composing corridos with seven other soldiers fighting with Pancho Villa in secluded mountain hideouts during lulls between battles” (Sanchez 177).

The corrido formed a cultural bridge between the Mexico that Pedro J. Gonzalez’s audience had left behind and the new identities and lives they were constructing in Los Angeles. In essence the folk songs made sense of the new surroundings for the Mexican immigrants, while maintaining a vibrant connection with the home culture.

In the book Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, Professor George J. Sanchez examines an important period of Mexican American history, the first half of the 20 th century, localized in Los Angeles, as well as an important cultural and political figure from that time, Pedro J. Gonzalez.

Despite the difficulties Pedro J. Gonzalez faced at the hands of corrupt city officials, which led to a six year jail stint at San Quentin, Gonzalez’s actions – returning to the United States and applying for and receiving his citizenship in 1985 – demonstrated that he himself identified as an American.

Works Cited

Martin, Waldo E. Jr. and Patricia Sullivan. “Pedro J. González.” Civil Rights in the United States . New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2000. Print.

Sanchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2018, October 12). Becoming Mexican American. https://ivypanda.com/essays/becoming-mexican-american/

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IvyPanda . 2018. "Becoming Mexican American." October 12, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/becoming-mexican-american/.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Becoming Mexican American." October 12, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/becoming-mexican-american/.

Mexico's first female president is also its first Jewish president

Claudia Sheinbaum didn't just make history when she was elected Mexico's first female president .

She will also be the first Jewish president in a country with one of the largest Catholic populations in the world. Though she's not religiously observant, Sheinbaum identifies as culturally Jewish and has spoken about her heritage in the past.

“I grew up without religion. That’s how my parents raised me,” Sheinbaum, 61,  said  in 2018 at gathering hosted by a Jewish organization in Mexico City. “But obviously the culture, that’s in your blood.”

Her maternal grandparents were Jews who immigrated to Mexico from Bulgaria before the Holocaust, while her paternal grandparents had fled from Lithuania in the 1920s. Sheinbaum's parents were born in Mexico.

While campaigning, Sheinbaum said she considers herself a woman of faith but is not religiously affiliated ; perhaps that's why there has been relatively little discussion about her becoming Mexico's first Jewish president.

Tessy Schlosser, a historian and director of the Mexican Jewish Documentation and Research Center in Mexico City, said that for Mexicans of Jewish heritage, approval and expectations of Sheinbaum’s government seem to align more with "her personal political preferences than with her Jewish ancestry."

Even Jewish newspapers in Mexico mostly focused on her historic win as the first woman to lead the country, barely mentioning her Jewish background.

"Sheinbaum, whose [ancestors] immigrated to Mexico escaping poverty and antisemitism, including the Holocaust, grew up in a secular, science-driven household. She doesn’t perform her Jewish identity in public," said author and Amherst University humanities professor Ilan Stavans , who is also Mexican and Jewish and has written extensively about the Jewish diaspora in Latin America.

Sheinbaum was a physicist and climate scientist before she went into politics; her father was a chemical engineer, and her mother was a cell biologist.

'Part of Mexican Jewish tradition'

Still, Sheinbaum's ascent to the presidency is significant, Stavans said.

“The election of Claudia Sheinbaum as Mexico’s first female Jewish president is a benchmark for the Jews of Latin America, whose presence in the region goes back to the arrival of Columbus and his crew at the end of the 15th century,” Stavans said.

Her election has opened a door toward a greater understanding of the history of Jews in Mexico, especially after local political figures used her heritage to launch attacks against Sheinbaum, questioning whether she was born in Mexico or was even Mexican.

An estimated 50,000 Jewish people live in Mexico. The majority are settled in Mexico City and its surroundings, with small communities in the cities of Monterrey, Guadalajara, Tijuana, Cancún, San Miguel de Allende and Los Cabos.

The first Jews arrived in Mexico in 1519, along with the Spanish colonization. The community began to grow substantially by the early 20th century, as thousands of Jews fled from the Ottoman Empire to escape instability and antisemitism.

The Mexican Jewish community is formed by Ashkenazi Jews, from Central and Eastern Europe, and Sephardic Jews, mainly from Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain and Syria.

“Jewish identity encompasses many areas, including cultural, not just religious. Under these parameters, although Sheinbaum is not part of the organized Jewish community, her family’s history is part of Mexican Jewish tradition and history, as she herself assumes,” Schlosser said in Spanish.

Mexico remains overwhelmingly Christian, with nearly 100 million Catholics and 14 million Protestants, according to a 2020 census.

Sheinbaum's win also comes at a critical time as the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip has displaced more than 1 million Palestinians and left more than 35,000 people dead, according to officials in Gaza.

Since the beginning of the war last year, Sheinbaum has condemned attacks on civilians. She even called for a cease-fire and said she supports a two-state solution.

Her stance echoed views she wrote in a 2009 letter to the editor of La Jornada , a Mexican newspaper, condemning what Sheinbaum described as “the murder of Palestinian civilians” during an Israeli bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip.

"Her loyalties are with the oppressed and downtrodden. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, she sides with the former without rejecting the latter, favoring a two-state solution, which these days appears more untenable that in recent memory," Stavans said.

Sheinbaum begins her six-year presidential term on Oct. 1.

"Her sheer arrival" to the presidency, Stavans said, will generate interest in Jewish Latin Americans' rich history and culture.

Nicole Acevedo and Arturo Conde reported from New York and Albinson Linares from Mexico City.

Nicole Acevedo is a reporter for NBC News Digital. She reports, writes and produces stories for NBC Latino and NBCNews.com.

Arturo Conde is an editor and a bilingual freelance journalist. He writes for La Opinión A Coruña and has been published in Fusion, Univision and City Limits.  

Albinson Linares is a reporter for Noticias Telemundo based in Mexico City. 

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Guest Essay

I Supervised New York City Judges. Juan Merchan Put On a Master Class in the Trump Trial.

By George Grasso

Mr. Grasso is a retired New York City administrative judge.

I spent almost 13 years as a judge in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. I supervised judges presiding over a wide spectrum of cases, dealing with complex legal issues, angry victims, difficult defendants and intense media scrutiny. The job can at times be thankless and frustrating.

But for all the cases I saw, I never encountered anything remotely as challenging as what Justice Juan Merchan faced in his Manhattan courtroom while presiding over the first criminal trial of a former president. And since Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 counts, Justice Merchan has come under further vicious attack.

As a retiree, I was able to attend each day of the Trump trial. What I saw was a master class in what a judge should be — how one can serve fairly and impartially for the prosecution and the defense, and above all remain a pillar for the rule of law in America.

Since the indictment over the cover-up of hush-money payments was issued last year, Justice Merchan has been subjected to an unrelenting pressure campaign. The defendant, Mr. Trump, and his supporters viciously attacked the judge and his family in deeply personal terms. Most judges strive to maintain their composure under the greatest of stress, but few succeed — yet Justice Merchan remained cool, calm and collected at every step of the trial.

As a supervising judge, I always emphasized the importance of maintaining control to those under my charge. That is how a judge ensures that all defendants — especially the most difficult ones — get a fair trial. That is how everyone is treated with courtesy and how rulings are evenhanded and fair. In this area, Justice Merchan excelled.

He issued a gag order carefully designed to protect witnesses, jurors, prosecutors and court staff, but left himself out of the order. He did this to ensure that the defendant’s right to harshly criticize the proceedings was protected even though he must have known that he would become an even greater target of Mr. Trump’s ire. When Mr. Trump repeatedly violated the order, Justice Merchan bent over backward to avoid sending the defendant to jail, despite a clear legal justification to do so.

It is hard for me to think of another defendant acting out in the same manner who would have received such lenient treatment. But special times — and special trials — sometimes call for special measures. A judge needs to know when to apply such measures.

In the course of the trial, he maintained his composure. Defense attorneys received many favorable rulings, and in some instances (like during the testimony of Stormy Daniels) he even made and sustained objections on behalf of the defense during direct examination. On other occasions, when Mr. Trump engaged in particularly objectionable behavior (like muttering curses about a testifying witness), he calmly called one of the defense attorneys to the bench to put a stop to the inappropriate behavior. Other judges might have called out the behavior directly, embarrassing Mr. Trump in front of the jury, which could be seen as prejudicial to the defendant.

I can’t think of one time when the judge interjected himself unnecessarily against either prosecution or defense, but not everyone agrees with that. In a recent New York Post opinion piece , for example, the lawyer Alan Dershowitz referred to “one of the most remarkable wrongheaded biases I have ever seen” regarding Justice Merchan’s handling of the defense witness Robert Costello’s behavior.

Maintaining order and fairness in a courtroom is not bias; it is how justice is served, and it is no easy thing to obtain.

Since the verdict, Republicans have unleashed further attacks against Justice Merchan. One Arizona Republican running for a House seat called Justice Merchan “a corrupt and biased political operative” and said that he “must be disbarred and prosecuted.”

Let’s be clear, these attacks are not really about Justice Merchan. They are direct attacks on our entire system of justice. As President Biden said in remarks concerning this case on Friday afternoon, they are reckless, dangerous and irresponsible.

However, I do agree with Mr. Dershowitz’s position in that same opinion essay that we should televise trials in New York State, so all could see for themselves what I saw every day and what he saw on the day he was there. For most Americans who followed the case, all they were able to see has come from media gaggles outside the courtroom.

Justice Merchan had to set a boundary between Mr. Trump’s raucous but protected speech (barring transgressions of the gag order) and the fact-based evidentiary and back-and-forth questioning that is central to a trial. By guarding that boundary, he protected the integrity of the rule of law.

I am aware of the deep divisions in our country as to the wisdom and strength of this case. But I am certain that Americans were well served by Justice Merchan.

George Grasso is a retired New York City administrative judge and a former Police Department first deputy commissioner.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Debunking 12 Myths About Trump’s Conviction

D epending on your perspective, the conviction of Donald Trump on 34 counts in a Manhattan courtroom was either a refreshing affirmation of the rule of law or a miscarriage of justice in a politically motivated prosecution. A jury returned a verdict finding that Trump had caused the falsification of checks, invoices, and ledgers to conceal the payment of $130,000 to adult film actress Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election, with intent to conceal the violation of campaign finance and tax laws.

We are all entitled to our own views of the case, of course, but opinion should also be based on facts. Certain myths are creeping into the conversation and distorting the truth about Trump’s conviction. And it’s worth examining some of these myths in order to dispel them.

Myth: No one knows what Trump was charged with.

Response: Trump was charged in a 15-page indictment, handed up by a grand jury, with 34 counts of violating New York Penal Law 175-10 in the first degree, which is a felony.  A violation in the first degree occurs when a person falsifies business records with an intent to defraud that includes an intent to commit, aid, or conceal another crime. In addition to the indictment, the Manhattan District Attorney filed a 13-page statement of facts detailing the allegations.

Myth: Prosecutors stretched the law to convert a misdemeanor into a felony.

Response: Under New York law , a simple falsification of business records without any intent to commit or conceal another crime is a violation of the statute in the second degree, punishable as a misdemeanor.

An intent to conceal another crime is an aggravating factor that brings enhanced penalties, such as a felony. This law containing degrees of severity was enacted by the New York legislature, and it is a common way of structuring laws with escalating penalties for more egregious violations. (For example, penalties for federal drug offenses range from misdemeanors for simple possession to lengthy terms of imprisonment for aggravating factors based on quantity or intent to distribute.) The grand jury found probable cause of 34 violations in the first degree, and the trial jury found proof of these crimes beyond a reasonable doubt.

Myth: The prosecution didn’t tell Trump what he was charged with until closing argument, a violation of due process.

Response: While the indictment specified each of the checks, invoices, and ledger entries alleged to have been falsified, it did not specify which crime Trump allegedly concealed.  A  defendant is entitled to fair notice of the crime with which he is charged so that he can effectively defend himself at trial, but New York law does not require this level of specificity in the charging document. New York case law requires that the indictment allege only a general intent to conceal a crime, not an intent to conceal a specific crime.

Nonetheless, prosecutors provided this specificity in a prosecution filing in November 2023 , five months before his trial began. In that filing, prosecutors disclosed that the crimes they alleged Trump intended to conceal were violating state and federal campaign finance laws and violating state tax laws. The court rejected an additional basis offered by the prosecution, falsifying business records outside the Trump organization.

Myth: It was improper for a state prosecutor to charge a federal offense.

Response: The parties litigated this issue months before the trial and the court found that statutes outside of the laws of New York were proper bases to be considered “other crimes.” For example, case law has held that an offense under the New York statute prohibiting possession of a concealed weapon by a person who has been “previously convicted of any crime” may be proved by showing that the person was convicted of a crime in another state.

New York courts have also upheld the use of federal offenses as the predicate crimes in other cases involving the falsification of business records in the first degree, the very crime charged in Trump’s case.

Myth: Trump would not have been charged for a mere bookkeeping error if his name were anything other than Donald J. Trump.

Response: The Manhattan DA’s office has filed charges for falsification of business records 9,794 times since 2015. When announcing the charges, Bragg emphasized the importance of the integrity of business records in Manhattan, the “home to the country’s most significant business market.” He explained: “We cannot allow New York businesses to manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct.” At the time of Trump’ s indictment, Bragg, had already filed 120 cases alleging violations of 175-10, all of them in the first degree based on the concealment or commission of another crime.

Myth: There is nothing illegal about paying hush money, and famous people do it all the time.

Response: Paying hush money itself is not a crime, but it is a crime to falsify business records. And it is a more serious crime to falsify business records with, as in this case, intent to conceal other crimes. These include violations of campaign finance laws, by accepting donations over the legal limit, and violations of tax laws, by inaccurately characterizing the payments as income.

Myth: The charges were filed after lengthy delay to interfere with Trump’s campaign for president.

Response: While prosecutors have discretion as to whether and when charges should be filed, there is no evidence that this case was brought to interfere with an election. In fact, the trial court found that the reason for the delay in bringing charges was partly Trump’s own doing.

In 2018, the case was being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which convicted Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, for the same conduct, and referred to Trump in the charging document as “ Individual-1 .” For reasons unknown, federal prosecutors during the Trump Administration did not bring charges against Trump. Once federal prosecutors closed their investigation, Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, Jr., started this investigation, but was delayed by Trump’s prolonged challenges to grand jury subpoenas for his financial records, taking his objections all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court .

When Vance retired and Bragg was elected, Bragg insisted on reviewing the evidence before deciding whether to continue with the case. Ultimately, he decided to go forward. All of these factors contributed to the delay.

Myth: Justice Juan Merchan was biased because of his $35 financial contribution to Joe Biden and because of his daughter’s work as a democratic political consultant.

Response: Justice Merchan sought an opinion from the New York Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics , regarding both of these issues, and received an opinion that he need not recuse himself from the case. The finding of Trump’s guilt was made by a jury that Trump’s lawyers helped select.

Myth: Juan Merchan is a judge on the New York County Supreme Court.

Response: Merchan’s correct title is “justice,” even though he presides in one of New York’s trial courts, which are called the Supreme Court of each county. The state’s highest court is called, oddly enough, the New York Court of Appeals.

Myth: Justice Juan Merchan violated Trump’s rights to defend himself by refusing to permit him to call an expert witness.

Response: In Trump’s defense, he wanted to call Brad Smith, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, as an expert witness on federal election law. Expert witnesses are permitted to testify in trials to assist the jury in understanding facts about matters beyond ordinary understanding. Matters of law, in contrast, are for the judge to provide.

Justice Merchan did not prohibit Smith from testifying, but when he ruled that he could testify only about facts, and not law , Trump’s team decided not to call him as a witness. Contrary to this myth, Justice Merchan would have erred if he had permitted Trump to call an expert witness to testify about the law.

Myth: Justice Merchan violated Trump’s First Amendment rights to free speech and to testify in his own defense by imposing a gag order in the case.

Response: The gag order entered by Justice Merchan and upheld by the five-judge appeals division did not prevent Trump from testifying in his own defense, a right Merchan expressly explained to Trump in open court during the trial. Trump had every right to do so, and chose to instead exercise his right to remain silent at trial.

The gag order restricted the defense from making statements outside of court that targeted witnesses, jurors, staff and family members of the court and prosecution team, though not Justice Merchan or Bragg himself. The court of appeals found that the order properly protected witnesses and the fair administration of justice.  

Myth: The U.S. Supreme Court may intervene and overturn Trump’s conviction before the his sentencing on July 11, which is four days before the GOP convention.

Response: Trump may appeal his conviction after he is sentenced on July 11. The case could not go before the U.S. Supreme Court until he exhausts all of his appeals in the New York state court system, which likely will take more than a year. Then, Trump could ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case, but only for alleged errors applied to federal statutes or the U.S. Constitution, such as the due process clauses of the 5 th and 14 th Amendments.

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