An Immigrant's Tale: The Mexican American Southwest 1850 to 1950

Abstract

Recent scholarship on Mexican Americans in the United States, relying largely on qualitative evidence, sees racism and exploitation as the major explanatory factors in their history. Using representative samples of persons of Mexican origin, we argue that immigration is fundamental to their historical experience. A small, beleaguered community in 1850, the Mexican-origin population grew during the late nineteenth century due to greater security under US jurisdiction. However, immigration between 1900 and 1930 created a Southwest broadly identified with persons of Mexican origin. Economic development in Mexico, restriction of European immigration to the United States, and extreme cross-border wage differentials prompted extensive emigration. Despite low human capital, circular migration, and discrimination, immigrant Mexicans earned substantially higher wages than workers in Mexico or native-born Hispanics in the United States. They followed typical immigrant paths toward urban areas with high wages. Prior to 1930, their marked tendency to repatriate was not “constructed” or compelled by the state or employers, but fit a conventional immigrant strategy. During the Depression, many persons of Mexican origin migrated to Mexico; some were deported or coerced, but others followed this well-established repatriation strategy. The remaining Mexican-origin population, increasingly native born, enjoyed extraordinary socioeconomic gains in the 1940s; upward mobility, their family forms, and rising political activity resembled those of previous immigrant-origin communities. In the same decade, however, the Bracero Program prompted mass illegal immigration and mass deportation, a pattern replicated throughout the late twentieth century. These conditions repeatedly replenished ethnicity and reignited nativism, presenting a challenge not faced by any other immigrant group in US history.

El Sueño Americano? The Generational Progress of Mexican Americans Prior to World War II

“…The Mexican-born population we consider in this study, from the middle of the nineteenth century through around 1910, was increasing at a fast rate (Borjas and Katz 2007;Clark 1908;Escamilla-Guerrero 2018;Gratton and Merchant 2016). 4 With the end of the Mexican-American War and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, large portions of Mexican territory were ceded to the United States, which created a new group of residents who did not cross a border themselves but had the border cross them.…”

“…For classic overviews, see Gamio (1930), Cardoso (1976), and Taylor (1929). A set of articles by Merchant (2015, 2016) provides a more recent overview. See also Feliciano (2001), on the outcomes of first-generation immigrants, and Kosack and Ward (2014), on the selection of the first-generation and return migrants.…”

“…This is a familiar fear today, but the historical environment may have been particularly advantageous for Mexican and Mexican American outcomes compared with the modern environment: Wage inequality after 1915 was falling, the penalty for a lack of English fluency was small, and undocumented entry was not criminalized until 1929 (Goldin and Katz 2008, ch. 2;Gratton and Merchant 2015;Ngai 2003;Perlman 2005;Ward 2020a). On the other hand, there were significant barriers to historical progress since Mexican Americans were "legally white but functionally nonwhite" (Benton-Cohen 2011, p. 33).…”

“…Linking provides an additional benefit: the ability to observe higher-order generations. Assimilation studies typically directly observe only the first and second generations (Smith 2003;Gratton and Merchant 2015), but we can go further since we observe grandparental birthplace during childhood and then link children forward to their adult outcomes. 1 Linking further allows us to measure educational disparities for the great-grandchildren of Mexican immigrants.…”

Cautious Citizenship: The Deterring Effect of Immigration Issue Salience on Health Care Use and Bureaucratic Interactions among Latino US Citizens

“…Fifty-two percent of Latino adults are foreign born, and 85 percent of all Latinos have at least one immigrant grandparent (Fraga et al 2011). Migration into Latino communities in the United States has been sustained over a century, replenishing Latino ethnic identity and reviving anti-Latino nativist impulses (Gratton and Merchant 2015;Jiménez 2008). Unlike immigrants from various European countries, Latino incorporation traces through conquest in the 1800s, through migration preceding the Great Depression, to newcomers sponsored through the Bracero guestworker program that operated from 1942 to 1964, and to present-day workers from Mexico and other Latin American countries responding to the demand for cheap labor in the United States since the 1970s (Gutiérrez 2004;Massey 2002).…”