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© 2000 by Chris H.  Lewis, Ph.D.
Sewall Academic Program; University of Colorado at Boulder
Created 1 June 2000:  Last Modified: 25 February, 2009
E-mail: cclewis@spot.colorado.edu
URL:    http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/west/hispan.htm


Daily Class OutlineDaily Class QuestionsDaily Class Web LinksDaily Class Notes

 

Question for Discussion: How does Limerick's
concept of the West as "borderlands" change
our understanding of the "American West"?

Reading: Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, pp. 222,
228-233, 239-241, 245-251, 254-258 ;
 Gutierrez, "Significant to Whom," ;
DeLeon, "In Pursuit of a Brown West"

Video: Go Back to Mexico (1994);
Immigration DVD: Cheap Labor (2006)

Daily Class Web Links

Understanding Hispanic History

"In Hispanic history, as in every variety of Western history, one never has the luxury of taking point of view for granted. Hispanics -- like Indians, Anglos, and every other group -- could be victims as well as victimizers, and the meanings of the past could be seen, at times, to be riding a seesaw." (257)
Patricia Limerick

By questioning the Westerner's traditional stance as innocent victim, we do not debunk Western history but enrich it. (54)
Patricia Limerick


The West as Borderlands

The Geography of American Settlement and Development

The Immigration Debate in the West:
1850-2006

Building a 700 mile Fence on a
2000 mile border: Current Debate

American Immigration Numbers

Mexican Maquiladoras and Illegal Immigration

Daily Class Outline



Daily Class Questions

 

 



Daily Class Notes

Limerick, America the Borderland

In the American Southwest, previously the Mexican North, Anglo-America ran into Hispanic America. The meeting involved variables of language, religion, race, economy, and politics. The border between Hispanic America and Anglo-America has shifted over time....
(222)

"In the early nineteenth century, the open lands of Texas provided a temptation Anglo-Americans were
ill-prepared to resist; before 1821, American intruders and squatters -- the "illegal aliens" of their day--were already troubling the Spanish officials of Texas." (229)

"After Independence, Mexico decided that "Texas could bring in Anglo-American colonists, give them land, and convert them to Catholicism, to Mexican citizenship, and to Hispanic civilization. If Anglo-Americans found Indians resistant to "civilization", Anglo-Americans in Texas proved to be as stubborn as Indians." (230)

"In 1850, the California legislature passed the Foreign Miners' Tax, intended to drive non-Anglos out of the mines. Foreigners included Sonororans and, because of a failure to distinguish between the origins of individuals, most Hispanics as well. It was evidently an Anglo-American talent to change overnight from being intruders to being legitimate residents and , conversely, to turn the natives into "foreigners." (239)

"Proximity to Mexico thus made it much easier to retain a traditional identity; immigrants living in Southwestern enclaves often found it unnecessary to learn English or to adapt to Americans customs in food or clothing, since they lived their lives in the company of other Hispanics."
(245)

"Whether they believed mastery lay in the future, present, or past, the conquered and controlled borderland continued to exist only in the imagination. When politicians in the 1980s bemoaned the fact that America had "lost control" of its border with Mexico, they dreamed up a lost age of mastery. In fact, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, the Mexican border was a social fiction that neither nature nor people in search of opportunity observed." (251)

"The Hispanic presence in the Southwest was itself a product of conquest, just as much as the American presence was. The Pueblo Indians found themselves living in "Occupied America" long before the Hispanics did." (255)

"In Hispanic history, as in every variety of Western history, one never has the luxury of taking point of view for granted. Hispanics -- like Indians, Anglos, and every other group -- could be victims as well as victimizers, and the meanings of the past could be seen, at times,
to be riding a seesaw." (257)

"The inclusion of these new angles of vision added vitality and depth to Western American history. Most important, the mestizo background of many Mexicans and Mexican-Americans made a crucial statement about the complex legacy of conquest. In the mestizo, Indian and Hispanic backgrounds met. Accordingly, as George Sanchez has put it, the Mexican "presence in the Southwest is a product of both sides of the conquest--conquistador and victim. It is surely one of the greater paradoxes of our time that a large group of these people so intimately tied to the history of North America, should be known to us under the label "aliens." (258)

Guitierrez, Significant to Whom

"As Mexican Americans were slowly forced, by population pressures and discrimination, to withdraw into shrinking urban barrios and isolated rural colonies, they seemed to gradually disappear from the landscape, thereby fulfilling the prophecies of those proponents of Manifest Destiny who had predicted that the West's indigenous peoples would "recede" or "fade away" before the advance of American civilization, By the turn of the century, Mexican Americans had become, to use the words of one well-known historian, America's "forgotten people." 7

"To assert, however, that America forgot this ethnic group oversimplifies a far more complicated story. What actually occurred was a rather peculiar re-envisioning of the role Mexicans played in the region's past. Gradually released from the necessity of viewing Mexicans as any kind of political or military threat, Americans were able to indulge themselves in romantic reveries about what the landscape must have looked like before the war. In a process no doubt similar to the one that allowed Americans to construct the notion of the noble savage after Indians had been effectively removed from lands they coveted, the consolidation of American control over former Mexican domains allowed westerners to construct what Carey McWilliams aptly called "the Spanish fantasy heritage."

"Moreover, many Mexican Americans knew, to a painful degree, that the seemingly harmless celebration of Spanish fiestas masked the disdain so many Americans felt about the remaining representatives of Hispanic culture in the West. One can easily imagine the bewilderment and anger of Mexican Americans who, knowing that the very term Mexican had already become deeply embedded in the vocabulary of the region as a label of derision and stigma, watched gringos celebrate appropriated cultural events. "

"In many ways, ethnic Mexicans' awareness that they had been rendered insignificant as human beings in this manner has provided one of the major forces driving both their efforts to achieve full political rights in American society and their attempts to recapture and rewrite their own history."

"Whereas many members of the generation active in the 1940s and 1950s seemed to accept the integrationist premises of American liberalism, Chicano radicals of the 1960s and 1970s wanted to engage in a full frontal
assault on this ideology. Rejecting liberalism and the notion of assimilation as parts of a mystifying, imperialist regime of thought that helped reinforce notions of Mexican inferiority by holding up Anglo-American society as the ideal to which Mexican Americans (and other people of color) should aspire, Chicano activists advocated the development of a new positive sense of ethnic and cultural identity." 13

"At their best, however, scholars writing during this period broadened and deepened comprehension of the social history of the West by pulling Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants out of obscurity, by rendering them visible and significant in regional history. And perhaps more important, the best of this generation of historians gave new life to the humanizing project their predecessors had initiated nearly fifty years earlier. "

DeLeon, In Pursuit of a Brown West

"Historians might also consider allocating a more prominent role to Anglos in Mexican-American history and for that matter to African Americans and Native Americans, as Neil Foley and Ramon Gutierrez have done respect ively. Presently, for instance, Anglo Americans rarely play a part other than oppressor and exploiter of powerless minorities in the West. "

"One should expect to find Anglo allies as much a part of Mexican-American history as white people have long been performers in African-American history. Such research would end the stock portrayal of the Anglo as a villain and lead to a more completely integrated history of the West."

"These recent theories suggest that competition in the Southwest -- over land, political control, economic opportunities, and demographic supremacy -- may have been behind the rise of racist sentiments. This approach posits that Anglos had fairly neutral notions about race and that views about immorality, indolence, and vice emanated from negative relations centered on certain social and economic conditions. Only after Anglos subordinated Mexicans and forced them into exploitative situations did the majority use racism as a rationalization for that debasement."

"Chicano history, then, can be quite instructive in understanding the American West. First, it reminds us that settlers came from all directions, not just those areas east of the Mississippi. Indeed, the push north
from Mexico was as significant as westward expansion,
a point dramatized today as Hispanics have come to compose the majority of citizens in some sections of southwestern states (similarly, immigration from Asia in the last few decades reminds us of still another direction). Since immigrants from Mexico after 1848 have come from diverse backgrounds and have adapted in varying degrees to the U.S. landscape, we now recognize that the West has never been a homogeneous place of Anglo Saxons but includes a rainbow of peoples united by their common commitment to the values of human liberty."

"We have come to understand, therefore, that little people can make as indelible an imprint on the history of the West as do elites. Chicano history also gives us a better appreciation of the meaning of regions. Even today, there remain discernible centers of Hispanic concentrations: villages in northern New Mexico, towns in South Texas that reflect a rural ambient, and sprawling barrios in cities such as East Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Houston."

"Mexican-American history, only a bit older than a score of years, has a secure spot in the history of the West, and it will play an important role in the future
re-envisioning of the West. The success of symposia that attract Borderlanders, Anglo-American academicians, women scholars, and Chicano historians reaffirms the widespread interest researchers have in this fascinating area of study. "

Lewis lecture on Immigration in the West

In 1997, the federal government announced that over 5 million illegal aliens are estimated to be living in the United States. Since 1970, over 23 million legal immigrants have been welcomed to the United States. More than 8.3 million people immigrated to the United States in the 1980s, which is the highest number of immigrants in any decade in American history. If these rates of immigration continue in the 1990s, over 10 million immigrants will be welcomed into the United States in the 1990s. In fact, Congress in the 1990 Immigration Act increased the number of people allowed to immigrate per year from 35 to 40 percent.

How has immigration affected the economy, society,
and culture of the American West? The settlement, development, and continued economic health of the West all depended on the rush of immigrant into the West from the 1820s to this day. However, despite the dependence on immigration for the economic growth and development of the West, Americans in the West have historically have been troubled by the massive influx of peoples into the West. The irony is that on the one hand their economy and society depends on continued immigration, but Westerners resent the coming of immigrants and have tried over the years to block and limit their settling in the West. How can we explain this Western ambivalence about immigration?

Let's look at the current debate over immigration in the United States and in the West to see what the issues are. In 1997, the federal government announced that over 5 million illegal aliens are estimated to be living in the United States. Since 1970, over 23 million legal immigrants have been welcomed to the United States. More than 8.3 million people immigrated to the United States in the 1980s, which is the highest number of immigrants in any decade in American history. If these rates of immigration continue in the 1990s, over 10 million immigrants will be welcomed into the United States in the 1990s. In fact, Congress in the 1990 Immigration Act increased the number of people allowed to immigrate per year from 35 to 40 percent. Despite increasing competition for jobs, the United States continues to increase the number of immigrants it allows legally into the United States. And we really don't know what are the numbers of new illegal immigrants enter the United States each year. Why is the United States welcoming so many new immigrant in the last few decades?

Since the 1970s, Americans have been increasingly concerned about the growing numbers of illegal immigrants, especially from Mexico and Latin America. In the 1980s and 1990s, the majority of Americans want to limit legal and illegal immigration. But America continues to open its doors to more and more immigrants. With 4.7 percent of the world's population, we are taking in more than 50 percent of the world's immigrants. Why are we doing this if the majority of Americans want to reduce this immigration?

In the "Frontline" documentary, "Go Back to Mexico, many Americans in the West, especially in California, describe their concerns about increasing numbers of immigrants coming to the United States. Their concerns range from taking American jobs, using scarce government services like welfare and education monies, increasing overcrowding and demands for public services in California's growing cities, and the immigrants' failure to assimilate into American culture. But why are these immigrants coming? They are coming as economic refugees. Their countries of origin in the Third World cannot supply the high-paying jobs, the standard of living, the opportunities, and the future that living in America can. America still beckons as a land of opportunity for these immigrants.

So we have a fundamental conflict between the U.S. government's policy of welcoming increasing numbers of immigrants, immigrants' desires to come to and contribute to the American economy, and Americans' fear that immigrants are taking their jobs and threatening their standard of living. How have Americans resolved these conflicts in the past. I believe that a brief history of the debate over immigration to the West from the 1820s to the present will shed some light on the current immigration debate and Westerner's historical ambivalence about immigration.

From a larger historical perspective, the first illegal aliens, or immigrant problem, the West faced was the coming of the Spanish to the Americas in the 1500s. By 1600, the Spanish had conquered Mexico and laid claim to what is today the American Southwest, from California to Texas. From the Indians' who had settled in this region, the Spanish conquerors were the first illegal aliens, who threatened to undermine the culture and way of life. Many Indian peoples refused to accept Spanish control over the West.

In 1821, after hundreds of years of Spanish domination, Mexico won its Independence from Spain. Mexico was made up of a mestizo people, the descendants of both the native Indian peoples and the Spanish settlers. After winning its independence, Mexico was faced with a real dilemma in the 1820s, many Americans insisted that it was their God-given manifest destiny to conquer the continent and to push aside inferior peoples and cultures. Fearing this threat from the expansionist United States, the Mexican government in the 1820s decided to encourage white American settlers to settle in what is now the American Southwest. The Mexican government offered white settlers free land and freedom from taxes for five years in return for the settlers becoming citizens of Mexico, becoming Catholic, and adopting Mexican culture and society as their own. The Mexican government believed that if the Southwest was settled and developed that the United States could not conquer it from Mexico. This, however, was a grave mistake.

By the 1830s, Mexico realized that encouraging white settlers to settler in the Mexican Southwest was a mistake. White settlers were not recognizing Mexican law, not respecting the rights of Mexicans and Indians, and were refusing to become part of Mexican society and culture. Thus, Mexico faced an immigrant problem in the Southwest. Mexico acted to limit further white immigration and more tightly regulate the white immigrants who had settled in the Southwest. These efforts quickly led to conflict. In 1835 and 1836, settler communities in Texas declared their independence from Mexico and fought a war with the Mexican government. In 1836, the white settlers in Texas, with secret help from the United States government, had won their independence from Mexico. But the Mexican government never really accepted Texas Independence.

In 1846, the United States annexed Texas into the Union and started a war with Mexico in order to win the rest of the Mexican Southwest for American development. By 1848, the United States had conquered the Southwest from Mexico. In fact, the Mexicans' greatest fear had come true: The United States had stolen half of Mexican territory as a result of its war with Mexico. After winning the Southwest from Mexico, American settler began flooding into California and Oregon. It was now the American Southwest, and Americans would now face their own immigrant problems in the region.

The first major immigrant problem America faced in the West was from Chinese immigrants. From the late 1840s to the early 1880s, thousands of Chinese immigrants were recruited and encouraged to come to the American West to work in the mines, farms, and businesses. Fleeing famine and political unrest in China, many Chinese welcomed the opportunity to come to America. However, by the 1850s, many white American settlers in California increasingly saw these Chinese immigrants as a threat. Facing moves to restrict further Chinese immigration, Norman Assing, one of the leaders of the Chinese immigrant community in California, wrote a letter to the governor of California arguing that Californians shouldn't worry about Chinese immigrants. Assing argued that the Chinese were civilized, part of the white race, and helping to build the economy and society of the American Southwest.

By the 1870s, as a result of the increasing presence of Chinese immigrant communities in the Southwest, White Americans formed mobs and tried to burn-down the Chinese homes and drive them out of their cities at gunpoint. This racial violence was widespread, occurring from Seattle to Los Angeles in the 1870s. These white mobs feared the Chinese because they felt they were taking American jobs, threatening white businesses, and not assimilating into American society. Clearly, the American Southwest now had an immigrant problem. In 1882, the United States government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which shut the door to further Chinese immigration to the United States. This was the first time the American government had limited immigration on the basis of race.

However, American businesses, farmers, railroad and mining companies had depended on cheap Chinese immigrant labor for the profits and much of their workforce. Unwilling to pay higher wages to American workers, Southwest economic interests increasingly looked to Japanese immigrants to replace the Chinese workers they could no longer attract from China. From 1882 to the early 1900s, economic and business elites recruited and encouraged Japanese immigrants to come to the West. Afterall, the law said that Chinese immigrants were no longer welcome, but it didn't say anything about Japanese immigrants.

By the early 1900s, many white American workers, farmers, and small businessmen began to fear Japanese immigrants. They argued that the Japanese were taking their jobs, threatening their standard of living, and not assimilating into American culture. Facing increasing pressure from concerned Americans, the United States government created an informal treaty with Japan greatly restricting Japanese immigration to the United States.

However, Western economic interests were still not willing to hire White Americans and pay them higher wages and benefits. Instead, these economic interests looked for another group of immigrants to take the place of the Chinese and Japanese immigrant workers they once depended on. From the early 1900s to 1924, Western economic interests recruited and encouraged Indians and Philippinos to immigrate to the American West. Of course, as you might imagine, by the late 1910s, the growing number of Indian, Phillipino, and Eastern Europeans immigrants in the West caused white Americans to again worry about an immigrant problem. In 1924, the Federal government passed the Immigration Act which shut the door to further immigration from Asia and Europe to the United States. But this didn't solve the immigrant problem for Western White Americans.

The 1924 Immigration Act did not include Mexicans and immigrants from Latin America. Western economic interests made sure they still had a source of cheap labor to work in the farms, mines, and businesses. By early 1930s, thousands and thousands of Mexicans had immigrated the American West. But with the Great Depression of the 1930s, many White Americans came to see these Mexican immigrants as a problem. In the early 1930s, blaming these Mexican workers for the economic Depression in the West, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, both legal and illegal immigrants, were rounded up and forcibly returned to Mexico. White Americans now believed that with the Mexican immigrant problem taken care of there would be plenty of jobs for them.

However, after their Mexican workers were rounded up and deported, Western economic interests still did not want to hire more expense, local White workers. Instead, they recruited poor, Southern farmers and their families to migrate the American West in the 1930s. As a result hundreds of thousands of poor, White Southerners migrated to the West and took the jobs once held by Mexican immigrants. This worked for a while, but by the late 1930s, Western economic interests were facing a real dilemma: They couldn't find enough cheap White, Southern workers to work for them. Thousands of these workers had moved into the growing Western military industries and many more refused to work for such low wages and in such horrible conditions. So what did the Western economic interests do now?

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Western economic interests convinced the Federal government that it should actively support Mexican immigrants to come and work in the West. They argued that there was now a shortage of cheap labor to work in the fields, mines, and factories of the West. From the late 1930s to 1964, working closely with Western economic interests, the United States government encouraged millions of Mexican workers to both work and settle in the American West. But, by the early 1960s, many White Americans again began to worry about the growth of Mexican immigrant communities in the West and competition for jobs with Mexican workers. They demanded that the Federal government end its support for the bracero program in 1964. However, in 1965, the United States government passed a new Immigration Act which once again large numbers of immigrants to come from Europe and Asia.

As a result of increasing federal government support for immigration since the 1970s, we have seen the numbers of legal and illegal immigrants rapidly increasing. However, the majority of American still feel, as they always have, that massive immigration threatens their jobs, standards of living, and American culture and society. Anti-immigrant sentiment in the West has been rising since the 1980s. So why has the government welcomed even larger numbers of immigrants in the 1990s than in the 1980s? This is the real question that needs to be addressed if Americans are going to have and open and honest public debate about its immigration problem.

Since the 1970s, in order to keep American companies in the United States, the Federal government, under pressure from large global corporations such as IBM, Microsoft, Ford, and GE, has open its doors to record numbers of immigrants. Just as Western economic interests depended on and still depend on new waves of immigrant workers to keep wages down and their profits up, America's largest corporations are demanding an every larger supply of workers. By rapidly increasing the number of workers seeking work, and actively creating competition between American and immigrant workers, American companies can keep wages low and demand that their workers accept a reduced standard of living. Recognizing this threat to their standard of living, American workers then demand that the government close its doors to future immigration. But their demands are going unheard. American companies, many with global operations, just threaten to move their operations out of the country if the government doesn't make sure that wages are low and their profits are high. The best example of this pressure can be seen by looking at the debate over increasing numbers of "guest workers" be allowed into the United States. Microsoft recently threatened to take some of its operation to India if the government didn't allow Indian computer programmers and engineers to work in the United States as temporary "guest workers."

The larger conclusion is that America does not have an immigrant problem. It has a jobs and wages problem. As long as American economic interests are unwilling to pay the wages demanded by American workers to maintain their relatively high standards of living, high compared to other, poorer, less-developed countries, then they will be forced to seek and recruit immigrant workers to the United States. The history of immigration to the American West best illustrates this process. Visitors to the West comment on the large Asian, Mexican, and Latin American communities in its major cities. The West is a meeting point of people from around the world because American economic interests have encouraged immigration and continue to do so. Until the government refuses to be blackmailed by America corporations and limits further immigration to the West and to America, Americans will debate about the causes and cures of the immigration problem. The larger unanswered question is this: Can the United States maintain its high standards of living in a global economy that is creating a downward spiral of living standards, as global corporations force workers to accept falling wages or lose their jobs to other countries. In the end, if American economic interests can't import workers to keep wages low, they will export their factories and companies.