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WWII and Mexican immigrants
A short note about mexico american war
Essays about ethnography
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When contextualized by historical precedent, does the ethnographic method expose the contrasted emotions that migrants have felt as inhabitants of Mexico and the United States? In historian Deborah Cohen’s first book entitled Braceros! Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar U.S. and Mexico, readers follow the voyages of the Mexican-born men who chose to leave their homeland for the United States as agricultural laborers in the so-called Bracero Program between 1942 and 1964. Throughout her historiography, Dr. Cohen’s credentials as a dedicated investigator of U.S. and Mexican socioeconomic policies manifest themselves in her findings. Currently, Dr. Cohen is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri …show more content…
Yet, she tries to show that U.S. and Mexican military and customs officials as well as farm owners and colleagues caused great stress to the braceros through their discriminatory inspection and hiring practices. To begin with, Cohen quotes U.S. and Mexican people, newspaper articles, and government documents to show that the Mexican state aimed to modernize the Mexican agricultural workforce by determining which adult male applicants to the program seemed like hard-working Mexican citizens, and then sent those who passed public screening exams to the U.S. While there, Mexican politicians presumed, braceros would learn mass growing techniques and bring this new technical knowledge back to Mexico upon return. However, the author also cites her interviews with elderly braceros who returned to northern Mexico in addition to other socio-historical sources to claim that U.S. customs officials and the agribusiness companies that employed braceros sought to civilize them. While braceros lived in workcamps on large farms in California, Texas, and elsewhere, and when they passed through U.S. customs, authorities inspected the braceros’ bodies and taught them hygienic behaviors to see if the braceros could perform the backbreaking farm …show more content…
Above all, political leaders believed that men from Durango had European racial characteristics that made them “ready for modernization” as opposed to more indigenous-looking peasants. In other words, Mexico’s government imagined modernization as a process in which men who looked like the light-skinned inhabitants of the nation’s prosperous northern neighbor had the best chances of succeeding in the agribusiness enterprises that flourished there. During the program’s application process, Cohen found that duranguense applicants had to pay for labor contracts or solicit politicians to confirm that they possessed good moral character, and pass comprehensive physical examinations to migrate north. Subsequently, men would have to pay between fifty and two-hundred pesos each to obtain mica cards permitting them to work in the U.S. or “plead their cases” in letters to Mexican officials if they could not get cards, travel to Durango’s Francisco Zerca Stadium so that the regional program director could see that they had the “callused” hands and strong bodies that would aid their hard work abroad, and endure doctors examining them for lice, new scars, and internal infections. As Cohen discovered from her interviews with barber
In Richard Rodriguez’s “Proofs,” Mexican immigrant’s destination is described, as well as their perceptions and expectations of America. Rodriguez describes the passage to the United States as difficult, yet worthy. He states: “The city will win. The city will give the children all the village could not- VCR’s, hairstyles, drum beat. The city sings mean songs, dirty songs. But the city will sing the children a great Protestant hymn.You can be anything you want to be.” He also states: “Mexico is poor. But mama says there
This book was published in 1981 with an immense elaboration of media hype. This is a story of a young Mexican American who felt disgusted of being pointed out as a minority and was unhappy with affirmative action programs although he had gained advantages from them. He acknowledged the gap that was created between him and his parents as the penalty immigrants ought to pay to develop and grow into American culture. And he confessed that he got bewildered to see other Hispanic teachers and students determined to preserve their ethnicity and traditions by asking for such issues to be dealt with as departments of Chicano studies and minority literature classes. A lot of critics criticized him as a defector of his heritage, but there are a few who believed him to be a sober vote in opposition to the political intemperance of the 1960s and 1970s.
8. Meyer, Michael C., et al. The Course of Mexican History, 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Each day more and more immigrants legally or illegally cross the US border in search of
United States labor officials approached the Mexican Department of Migration about a controlled and managed system of legal migration. The Bracero Program offered Mexicans the opportunity to legally work in the United States. Braceros were healthy, landless, and surplus male agricultural workers from areas in Mexico not experiencing a labor shortage. Braceros met the labor need to American agri-businessmen, but Hernandez counters that the Bracero Program was a system of labor exploitation, a project of masculinity and modernization, and a sit of gendered
Bladerrama, Francisco E., Raymond Rodriguez. Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Alburquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Galarza, Ernesto. A. Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story.
The fourth chapter is called “The Mexican Cornucopia” in light of the multiple communities and groups interested in claiming the borderlands territory. With the United States’ interest in Sonora’s mines, and an increasing amount of Spanish, Apache, Yaqui, American, Mexican and Chinese newcomers, this area became booming with interaction. These groups came for the mining, ranching, and farming industries. Sonora, once forgotten and barren became industrial and modern-like, all because of the mines that “remade a formerly isolated region at the ragged edges of states and markets into an industrial crossroads fed by circuits of capital, labor, and transnational collaboration that extended deep into both nations” (4). Part II also focuses on the Chinese and Native (Apache and Yaqui) immigrants to Mexico. The border was difficult easy for some, but greatly difficult for others to cross. An Act was passed in 1882 that allowed Chinese to enter Mexico, as long as their profession was in commerce, entrepreneurship, or the mining and farming industries. (120) This meant that a large portion of people were not allowed, and it was also very discriminatory. As early stated in the book, the interests are to protect against outsiders while simultaneously benefiting from them therefore creating a pick-and-choose situation.
When Spaniards colonized California, they invaded the native Indians with foreign worldviews, weapons, and diseases. The distinct regional culture that resulted from this union in turn found itself invaded by Anglo-Americans with their peculiar social, legal, and economic ideals. Claiming that differences among these cultures could not be reconciled, Douglas Monroy traces the historical interaction among them in Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California. Beginning with the missions and ending in the late 1800s, he employs relations of production and labor demands as a framework to explain the domination of some groups and the decay of others and concludes with the notion that ?California would have been, and would be today, a different place indeed if people had done more of their own work.?(276) While this supposition may be true, its economic determinism undermines other important factors on which he eloquently elaborates, such as religion and law. Ironically, in his description of native Californian culture, Monroy becomes victim of the same creation of the ?other? for which he chastises Spanish and Anglo cultures. His unconvincing arguments about Indian life and his reductive adherence to labor analysis ultimately detract from his work; however, he successfully provokes the reader to explore the complexities and contradictions of a particular historical era.
Portes, Alejandro and Ruben G. Rumbaut, “Immigrant America: A Portrait.” Kiniry and Rose 336-337. Print.
their work on the railroad systems and in the field of agriculture. Work Cited Page 1. What is the difference between a. and a. Zaragosa Vargas, "Major Problems In Mexican American History" The Mexican Immigrant Experience, 1917-1928, Zaragosa Vargas (233). 2.Merton E. Hill, "The Development of an Americanization Program" The Survey 66, no.3 (May 1931). In Carlos E. Cortes, ed., Aspects of the Mexican-American Experience (New York:Arno Press, 1976), pp. 113-117.
During the 1940s, Los Angeles was a period with liberating and limiting experiences for Mexican-Americans, especially for women. After the events of the Zoot Suit Riots Mexican-American people were ostracized for their “violent” nature. In order to distance people away from that stigma the debate centers on the cultural overview of the period. Women were given a voice that centers on their contributions to the workforce during WWII. While men were away fighting in the war women were working in the defense industries and gaining the means to live a comfortable lifestyle. The historiographical debate showcased that Mexican-American women were acquiring higher status, as they refused marginalization. Escobedo (2013) answered the questions that
Bibliography:.. Becoming Mexican-American by George Sanchez, Oxford University Press, Inc. 1993.
The ethnic- Mexican experience has changed over the years as American has progressed through certain period of times, e.g., the modernity and transformation of the southwest in the late 19th and early 20th century, the labor demands and shifting of U.S. immigration policy in the 20th century, and the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. Through these events Mexican Americans have established and shaped their culture, in order, to negotiate these precarious social and historical circumstances. Throughout the ethnic Mexicans cultural history in the United States, conflict and contradiction has played a key role in shaping their modalities of life. Beginning in the late 20th century and early 21st century ethnic Mexicans have come under distress from the force of globalization. Globalization has followed the trends of conflict and contradiction forcing ethnic Mexicans to adjust their culture and combat this force. While Mexican Americans are in the struggle against globalization and the impact it has had on their lives, e.g., unemployment more common, wages below the poverty line, globalization has had a larger impact on their motherland having devastating affects unlike anything in history.
According to Dirlik, “transnational literatures present a challenge not only to historical ways of thinking, but also to the ways we have organized the study of the world in terms of nations, areas and regions” (Dirlik 2002:209). Transnational identities provoke a reconceptualization of the understanding of identities in relation to being attached to just one geographical location, but does not ignore borders, for undocumented immigrants in the U.S. not being able to legal cross the border is a fundamental marker of their identity (Chavez 2013). When autobiographic due to their subjectivity serve similar purpose of ethnographies, it allows writers from non-hegemonic groups to communicate their experiences while conveying anthropological information (Dirlik 2002:218).This correlated with American anthropologist, Paul Stoller, argument that personal ethnography serves as a bridge that connects two words and interweave the distant lives of others to more familiar (Stoller 2009). Understanding narratives written by conscious mestizas as ethnographic work allows the study of the process of identity formation and their political consciousness that serves as a vehicle of knowledge about their
Under the Bracero program, many men from Mexico were contracted by the United States government to produce food while American men were away fighting World War II. As described in the film Braceros, these men worked incredibly hard to ensure their livelihoods, even describing that the American farmer “were telling us that we had to take a break, but we didn’t want