Becoming Mexican American

Part 3, “Shifting Homelands,” highlights four specific areas of cultural transformation that came to characterize the growing Chicano community in Los Angeles: family life, religious adaptations, mass culture, and community trends. All four areas complicate the scholarly narratives discussed in the Introduction and Part 1, which suggested that Mexican immigrant culture was intractably traditional and restrictive. While Part 2 explored the two opposing poles of American and Mexican cultures, Part 3 focuses on how these four cultural areas developed within the Mexican immigrant population to produce a unique and stable ethnic community.

The first area that Sánchez identifies as indicative of the cultural transformation of the Mexican immigrant population in Los Angeles is the structure of the family. He begins his analysis by placing several studies of the Mexican family in historical context, thereby demonstrating the inherent problems in each one. Sánchez argues that Mexican migrants’ transition to more industrialized environments did not result in “family disintegration,” nor did it reinforce traditional family practices to maintain stability through a rigid social structure (129-130). Instead, he explains, most sociological studies have ignored the diversity of Mexican migrant families in favor of “a caricature suspended in time and impervious to the social forces acting upon it” (131), which would indicate that an acculturated family was atypical. In reality, every family faced challenges, endured conflict, and acclimated to the surroundings in a variety of different ways that continuously shaped and reshaped its members’ identities.

The process of internal economic migration, followed by immigration, destabilized traditional family structures and forced families to become more flexible in their roles and practices. The modernization of the Mexican economy, the Mexican Revolution, and the hardening of the border with the United States created a tumultuous environment that required difficult decisions to be made. Female heads of households were not uncommon in rural Mexico, but ultimately the decision of where to settle permanently did not fall upon one individual and was approached from the point of view of the sake of the family good. Sánchez describes the process of family migration as “torturous,” in that it could often take years to move an entire family across the border.

Throughout Section 3, Sánchez demonstrates the differences in experience between single male migrants, single females, and families, all of which combined to mold the culture of the Mexican immigrant community. Single male migrants made up the largest group of immigrants, and, in general, an individual man’s marital status served as an indicator of the likelihood that he would return to Mexico. Through the mid-1920s, the central Plaza area of Los Angeles acted as a zone of introduction for the city and was dominated by single men. Here, men could find cheap food, cooked “a la Mexicana,” rental housing, and opportunities for both employment and recreation. Men with families in Mexico were more likely to stay temporarily, but their decision to remain was also impacted by the region they had originated from in the first place. Sánchez frequently refers to a study by anthropologist Manuel Gamio, who analyzed wire transfers and other patterns of remittances to discover which region of Mexico received the most in supplemental aid from emigrant family members. Migrants from agricultural villages in Mexico’s central plateau were most likely to send money back to their families, who had to pay to retain their farmland, while migrants from urban areas in northern Mexico were more likely to settle permanently in Los Angeles and did not have to send remittances to their landless families. Many men would postpone their return trips to Mexico due to cost and end up never leaving at all (135-136).

Mexican women, on the other hand, rarely migrated without members of their extended family unless they had experienced some kind of personal or family tragedy. Those who sought employment were usually contributing to their families’ income, with a view towards achieving an independent income and housing. These women usually worked in white-collar jobs or participated in industrial labor and tended to live in metropolitan areas close to downtown Los Angeles, south and west of the central Plaza (137). Sánchez notes that working women were usually exposed to greater cultural diversity and were more likely to marry outside of the Mexican/Chicano community than migrant men, and they were also more like to naturalize.

According to Sánchez’s statistical analysis of naturalization documents, Mexican men who immigrated as adults were more likely to marry Mexican women, whereas Mexican men who had arrived in the United States before the age of 20 were more likely to marry outside of the Mexican American community, especially if they had come from an urban area. Like single women, Mexican immigrants with a foreign- or American-born spouse of a different ethnicity tended to live in diverse areas south and west of the Plaza, rather than in the Mexican enclaves east of the Los Angeles River. Mexicans who intermarried generally had lighter complexions and could blend more easily into Anglo-dominated society, especially if they had an Anglo or a non-Chicano spouse (139).

The communities west of the river and south of the Plaza provided greater cultural freedom and social independence for young Mexican women from overbearing relatives. This freedom usually manifested in the adoption of the latest American clothing and hairstyles but also created opportunities for greater experimentation with premarital sex and nontraditional gender roles. Single women challenged conventions regarding dating and courtship, while married women often entered the workforce outside the home as family wage-earners (143). Many Chicanos also chose to marry at a younger age, which allowed them to establish their own households, independent of their parents. Migrants who had previously lived west of the river tended to move to East Los Angeles after marriage, which Sánchez argues “symbolized the reassertion of community life, this time in the context of the American barrio. It also signaled the passing from a migrant to a more settled mode of existence” (144-145).

Sánchez identifies Belvedere and Boyle Heights, both east of the river, as barrios that became “the locus of Chicano cultural development” (145). These communities integrated Mexicans born in Mexico and in the United States, often through marriage, to create a culture considered unique to the Los Angeles barrios. Cultural and generational differences between Chicanos and Mexican-born migrants, however, led to tension in married couples, particularly with respect to childbearing and childrearing. American-born women lamented their Mexican-born husbands’ desire to produce many children, while the Mexican-born men resented their American-born wives for wanting to work outside the home rather than staying home and raising the children (146). Sánchez’s analysis indicates that Mexican immigrant women who married a man born in Mexico would bear significantly more children than those who married an American-born Chicano or Anglo man (147). Larger families commonly resided in the barrios of East Los Angeles, where they developed family ties that provided a strong base for the Chicano community to grow.

It is within these communities that Anglo Americans attempted to intervene on the part of organized religion, which Sánchez goes on to address in Chapter 7. As families utilized a variety of creative strategies to adapt to their new environment in Los Angeles, so, too, did individual Mexican migrants exercise their ability to modify their religious practices to fit their lives. Religion constituted an important aspect of Mexican community life, particularly since many rural villages were organized around the central authority of the local church. However, in Los Angeles, Mexican immigrants were able to escape the oversight of the Catholic Church and interact with a variety of different religions, depending on their spiritual and community needs. By examining Mexican immigrants’ outward expressions of religious belief, Sánchez argues, it is possible to capture a sense of the evolution of their systems of belief.

Prior to the 20th century, in both Mexico and California, the Catholic Church and various Protestant denominations developed a fraught relationship with the working class. The Porfirian state distanced itself from the Catholic Church because traditional religious practices ran counter to the state’s modernizing and civilizing mission. Despite Mexico’s historical relationship with Catholicism, many Mexicans, particularly in the northern states, expressed a deep distrust of the Church as an institution. A shortage in the number of clergy members meant that many villages did not have a dedicated priest and instead developed their own community-specific folk practices. The urbanization of northern Mexico led some Mexican migrants to cross paths with Protestant missionaries from the United States, whose messages appealed more to the common laborer’s life experience than the elite attitudes of the Catholic Church. This complex history of religious interactions underscores Sánchez’s point that, although many Mexican immigrants identified at least nominally as Catholic, they brought a variety of experiences to their new homes in Los Angeles that would inform their choice of religious affiliation.

Members of Protestant denominations in Los Angeles, particularly from the Methodist Church, were the first to engage with the Mexican immigrant population, thereby forming an early stage in the development of Americanization programs. Ministers like Robert McLean, Jr., of the Presbyterian Church, linked proselytization to social services in Mexican barrios but were forced to be lax in their definition of “conversion.” One minister, when asked why he allowed older Mexican women to say the rosary in the back of the church during sermons, responded, “We can’t take everything away from them at once” (155). In addition to providing charity for the poor, initial conversion programs sought to train Mexican youth for industrial occupations. Protestantism was closely linked to hard work and economic progress, but more importantly, to Anglo industrialists, “it served both God and the Chamber of Commerce to train Mexican laborers to be punctual and observant, docile and politically impotent” (155). Despite their belief in conversion as a civilizing factor, homogenous Anglo Protestant congregations preferred to fund missionary activities and the construction of Protestant churches in the barrios, rather than endure the presence of reformed Mexican Catholics among themselves.

Representatives of the Catholic Church held very similar beliefs regarding Mexican immigrants to their Protestant counterparts but attributed Mexican barbarism to a lack of proper religious instruction. Father Leroy Callahan stated that his experience working with the Mexican immigrant community was “as truly missionary as the evangelization of the heathen, with the sole difference that we are laboring amongst those who are Catholic by baptism” (160). Since the 19th century, the Church had attempted to “root out” the “foreignness” of Mexican Catholicism in the United States, and by 1919 it had officially linked knowledge of Church doctrine to practices of good American citizenship. This approach proved to be problematic, especially because the Church refused to invest in building new infrastructure, training Mexican priests, or producing a Spanish language liturgy (166). Mexican Catholics took matters into their own hands by continuing folk practices in their own homes, and by establishing ethnic religious organizations.

Although Protestantism produced many influential male lay leaders, ethnic Catholicism empowered women to shape new religious sensibilities that reflected the needs of Chicano Catholics in East Los Angeles. Mexican laborers rarely had time to attend public masses, so it fell to the women of the family to maintain altars and other displays of religious expression within the home. Furthermore, both private and public celebrations of religious sentiment featured more ethnic symbols and figures, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, as opposed to those of orthodox American Catholic practices (167). By the 1930s, Mexican Catholic organizations had become a significant political and cultural force, as demonstrated the 1934 Virgin of Guadalupe procession. Political persecution of Catholic clergy and institutions in Mexico motivated Mexican Catholics to use the annual procession as a form of protest against the actions of the Mexican government. Forty thousand people, including Catholics of other ethnicities, marched in the procession under the symbols of Mexico and Mexican Catholicism, demonstrating the strength of Mexican Catholics in Los Angeles to both the local Catholic Church and the government (168-169).

Chapters 8 and 9 continue with the theme of mass cultural engagement to demonstrate the evolution of mass culture and community practices among the growing Chicano population. Chapter 8 addresses the development of a market and advertising aimed specifically at Mexican immigrants, primarily through the lens of musical production. The cumulative purchasing power of the Mexican immigrant population spurred on creation of cultural products like movies, which began to incorporate Mexican actors who embraced their ethnic identity, such as Dolores del Río (174). American companies tended to dominate these markets, but there was ample room for Mexican entrepreneurs to compete for the title of most “genuinely Mexican.” Mauricio Calderón, for example, came to dominate Los Angeles’s Spanish-language music market with his record and phonograph store, the Repertorio Musical Mexicana, which was hailed as “the only Mexican house of Mexican music for Mexicans” (175).

The growth of the Mexican market encouraged entrepreneurs to experiment with new products, and musical production proved to be one of the most fertile creative industries. Musicians from various regions in Mexico combined a plethora of musical styles to capture the experience of the Mexican immigrant working class. The corrido, a form of ballad song, became prominent in the 1920s due to its musical flexibility and its ability to present “a narrative viewed through the eyes of the people” (178). Musicians were regarded as “social interpreters” who spoke truth to power in their songs to “sing what they [could not] say” (180). Ethnic middlemen like Calderón identified talented musicians and connected them with recording companies, leading to a boom in the commercial recording of Mexican music. Recording companies benefitted not only from the huge royalties collected from the sale of Mexican music, but also from the fact that it was against the law to import records directly from Mexico, limiting competition within the market (182).

The expansion of the music industry in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s coincided with the advent of commercial radio, which also served as an arena for cultural and economic experimentation. Spanish-language broadcasts provided a particular appeal for illiterate Mexican laborers, who found other forms of media like newspapers to be inaccessible. Spanish radio broadcasting became highly competitive, especially among large advertisers seeking to capture a share of the Mexican immigrant market. The popularity of Spanish-language radio programming eventually invoked a backlash from Anglo-American officials in the 1930s, who limited the amount of airtime that could be dedicated to non-English content. Their activities, however, encouraged the expansion of radio broadcasting in Mexico, leading Mexican American entrepreneurs to reestablish their operations just across the border (183-184).

Sánchez’s discussion of the “dance craze” that overtook Mexican American youth in the 1930s serves as a transition into Chapter 9, in which he argues that patterns of consumption and cultural adaptation reveal the evolution of Chicano culture over time. Despite the lack of social mobility that most Mexican immigrants experienced, the fact that they were able to settle and form a stable, permanent community in Los Angeles indicated a social transition within the working class itself. The city provided stable work opportunities, meaning that constant migration was no longer a necessity for survival. Neighborhoods like Belvedere provided a setting for residents to establish communities within which they could acculturate on their own terms and survive external economic and social pressure together.

Home ownership played a critical role in the formation of Chicano communities. Earlier in the 20th century, only middle-class families possessed the means to purchase property in East LA. Changes within the property market, which resulted from more Anglos moving west, decreased the value of properties on the east side of the city, making houses a more attainable purchase. Sociologists who examined the shifts in the property market in the 1920s deemed home ownership a poor economic choice, since these homes did not increase in value over time and were often located in unfavorable areas, thanks to the influence of Anglo realtors. However, the psychological effect and personal pride of owning one’s own home proved to be immeasurable. Setting down roots through the purchase of a house was, in itself, an act of resistance against the encroaching Anglo population, which continuously attempted to relegate Mexican laborers to low-paying, migratory jobs.

Mexican American families had to be extremely judicious with their spending, but their purchases reveal patterns in changing cultural and generational attitudes. Automobiles, in particular, became an important investment for Chicanos, despite the expense, because they served a variety of purposes. Although Los Angeles had an expansive public transit system, its various routes were unreliable, and some had fallen into disrepair. Cars allowed individual laborers to travel to a wide range of worksites, regardless of the distance and the accessibility of public transit. Automobiles also opened up more opportunities for recreation, including visiting national parks outside of the city and traveling across the border to visit relatives in Mexico. Although families did spend a significant amount on recreation, most of the family income was dedicated to the purchase of food. Mexican women tended to reproduce food trends from Mexico, including the manufacturing of tortillas and the consumption of beans. Clothing, on the other hand, primarily reflected American trends, much to the chagrin of Mexican parents.

Young people’s participation in the workforce and their exposure to other ethnicities created cultural attitudes that were very different from those of their parents’ generation. Anglo employers often lauded Mexican workers for their docility and unwillingness to stand up to their supervisors. This was not the case for Mexican Americans who had been born and/or brought up in the United States.