Becoming Mexican American

Becoming Mexican American is a nonfiction book published in 1993 by social historian George J. Sánchez. Sánchez examines the cultural adaptation of Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles between 1900 and 1945 and its role in the formation of Chicano identity. The Mexican population of Los Angeles combined practices and beliefs from Mexico and the United States to form a unique ethnic form of Americanism, which was later mobilized by the second generation of American-born Chicanos to shape the labor and political history of the American Southwest.

Sánchez’s Introduction provides a brief overview of the evolution of scholarly trends regarding immigrant acculturation in the United States. While early studies focused primarily on European immigrants in the American Northeast, thereby ignoring the unique experience of Mexicans in the Southwest entirely, later generations of Chicano scholars presented a strict bipolar model of culture that suggested that one could identify as Mexican or American, but not both. Sánchez argues that these restrictive models have limited the exploration of immigrant cultural adaptation and that Chicano culture is in fact defined by its duality of cultural practices.

The book is split into four parts, each of which addresses a particular theme, and they are organized roughly chronologically. The beginning of each section features a series of epigraphs that are analyzed throughout the ensuing chapters. These include quotes from interviews with immigrants, selections from written works, and song lyrics. Each chapter also begins with either an epigraph or an anecdote that illustrates an experience common to the Mexican immigrant population.

Part 1 establishes the historical background upon which the rest of the chapters are built. To understand how Mexican immigrants adapted to life in Los Angeles, it is essential to take into account the environment they came from, the journey they experienced, and the conditions they encountered when they first began to arrive. Chapter 1 explains what Mexico looked like in the early 20th century. The rapidly industrializing country did not take steps to protect its agrarian peasant and industrial working classes, resulting in poverty and displacement on a massive scale. Chapter 2 follows how the experience of crossing the border with the United States changed over time as it shifted from a relatively porous barrier to the strict boundary we are familiar with today. Chapter 3 presents the history of Los Angeles, which experienced exponential population growth throughout the first decades of the 20th century.

In Part 2, Sánchez analyzes competing programs of Americanization and Mexicanization in Los Angeles. Both Anglo Americans and the Mexican government attempted to secure the loyalty of Mexican immigrant working-class laborers through the manipulation of their cultural values and sense of patriotism, but they only succeeded in establishing a unique ethnic population that identified as both American and Mexican. Sánchez explores the manifestations of this evolving sense of cultural identity in Part 3, in which he identifies four key areas that represent changing Mexican American attitudes and practices: family stability, religious adaptations, the growth of mass culture, and the formation of permanent communities in Los Angeles. Within each area, he analyzes the major generational shifts that occurred between Mexican immigrants and their American-born children, which came to characterize the political and social identity of Chicanos as a whole.

Part 4 addresses the instability and restructuring of the Mexican immigrant community during and after the Great Depression. Chapter 10 explores the repatriation campaigns of the early 1930s, which resulted in the removal of nearly one third of the Mexican population of Los Angeles. The remaining communities became concentrated in East Los Angeles and were dominated by working-class families. The Great Depression coincided with the introduction of the second generation into the workforce. Young Mexican American men and women became increasingly involved in labor organizing and local politics, leading to some of the most successful labor campaigns of the century. Finally, however, in Chapter 12 Sánchez examines how virulent racism and discrimination against Mexican youth in Los Angeles came to alienate the second generation, resulting in violent clashes during and after World War II, as Mexican Americans continued to assert their dual cultural identity.