talk.politics.misc

Why don't we cry about the discrimination against other
races that goes on in Mexico? Why don't we cry about
the de-facto discrimination that goes on against
caucasian-americans in Mexico by the judicial and law
enforcement authorities today? Who speaks for them?
Who speaks for the victims of latino hate crime perpetrated
in the US today?

"American Patriot" wrote in message
news: @ ...
South by Southwest: Mexican Americans and Segregated Schooling,
1900-1950
Vicki L. Ruiz

Recalling her rural California girlhood, María Arredondo stated
simply, "I remember signs all over that read 'no Mexicans allowed.'"

Historian Francisco Balderrama contends that at the dawning of the
Great Depression "more than 80 percent of the school districts in
southern California enrolled Mexicans and Mexican Americans in
segregated schools."

While Mexican American struggles for educational desegregation remain
largely hidden from history, the case of Méndez v. Westminster (1946)
helped pave the way for Brown v. Board of Education nearly a decade
later.

Indeed, Thurgood Marshall himself was a co-author of the NAACP's
Amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in the Méndez case. The
narrative that follows briefly delineates the institutional nature of
segregation "for the cause of Americanization" as well as two
significant legal challenges by Latino parents on behalf of their
children.

Between 1910 and 1930, over one million Mexicans (one-eighth to one-
tenth of Mexico's population) migrated northward. Pushed by the
economic and political chaos generated by the Mexican Revolution and
lured by jobs in . agribusiness and industry, they settled into
existing barrios and created new ones in the Southwest and Midwest. In
1900 from 375,000 to perhaps as many as 500,000 Mexicans lived in the
Southwest.

Within a short space of twenty years, Mexican Americans were
outnumbered at least two to one, and their colonias became immigrant
enclaves. In some areas, this transformation appeared even more
dramatic. Los Angeles, for example, had a Mexican population ranging
from 3,000 to 5,000 in 1900. By 1930 approximately 150,000 persons of
Mexican birth or heritage resided in the city's expanding barrios.

As historian David Gutiérrez has so persuasively argued, immigration
from Mexico in the twentieth century has had profound consequences for
Mexican Americans in terms of "daily decisions about who they are--
politically, socially, and culturally--in comparison to more recent
immigrants from Mexico."

Indeed, a unique layering of generations has occurred in which ethnic/
racial identities take many forms--from the Hispanos of New Mexico and
Colorado, whose roots go back to the eighteenth century, to the
recently arrived who live as best they can in the canyons of northern
San Diego County.

/pubs/magazine/deseg/