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Question for Discussion: According to Limerick,
what role does immigration and racial diversity play
in the development of the modern American West?

Reading: Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, pp. 259-283,
288-292; Steiner, "None of Us is Native"

Video: The Black West: A Television Documentatry;
Japanese American Internment during WWII

Daily Class Web Links

The West as a Biracial Confrontation

In the popular imagination, the frontier froze as a biracial confrontation between "whites" and "Indians." More complex questions of race relations seemed to be the terrain of other regions' histories.
Patricia Limerick (p. 259)

Race and Ethnicity in American Culture

However, American society has always been enriched by its waves of immigrants. John Kennedy observed how Alexis de Tocqueville saw the United States as "a society of immigrants, each of whom had begun life anew, on an equal footing. This was the secret of America: a nation of people with the fresh memory of
old traditions who dared to explore new frontiers ..."
In 2004, the Census Bureau predicted that in the year 2050 minority groups would comprise one-half of the total American population of 420 million.  Hispanics will comprise roughly one-quarter of the population, blacks 15%, and Asians 8%.

Limerick, "Meanwhile, La Frontera"

"For several decades, some historians have earnestly campaigned to redefine the frontier as a contested zone of cross-cultural meetings."
Limerick (p. 79)

The attention of Anglo-Americans has been fixed on the definition of the frontier drawn from the imaginative reconstruction of the story ofthe United States and its westward expansion. But North America has, in fact, had two strong traditions in the use of the term. There is the much more familiar, English usage of the frontier as the place where white settlers entered a zone of "free" land and opportunity.

But there is the much less familiar but much more realistic usage of la frontera, the borderlands between Mexico and the United States. This is not simply a place where two groups meet; Indian people have been influential players in the complicated pattern of human relations in the area. In the nineteenth century, trade, violence, conquest, and cultural exchange punctuated and shaped life in the borderlands.

"In the idea of la frontera, there is no illusion of vacancy, of triumphal conclusions, or of simplicity. As the writer Gloria Anzaldua puts it, the United States-Mexican border is "where the Third World grates up against the first and bleeds." It is a unique place on the planet's surface, a zone where an industrialized nation shares a long land border with a nation much burdened by poverty, "Ambivalence and unrest," Anzaldua says, "reside there and death is no stranger." Any temptation to romanticize la frontera--as a place of cultural syncretism, a place where the languages of Spanish and English have learned to co-habit and even merge--runs aground on the bare misery of poverty in the border towns."

"The idea of the frontier is extremely well established as cultural common property. If the idea of la frontera had anywhere near the standing of the idea of the frontier, we would be well launched toward self-understanding, directed toward a realistic view of this nation's position in the hemisphere and in the world. "The struggle of borders is our reality still," Anzaldua writes ...: "The adventure of frontiers is our fantasy still; the struggle of borders is our reality still."

Limerick, "Meanwhile, La Frontera"

The Multicultural American West

"The West is an extremely rich site for exploring the rewriting of American history as the story of interactions, often tragic, sometimes creative, among a variety of peoples. Our implicit argument, based in what is sometimes called the "new western history," is that the "multicultural West" is the only West there has ever been. This includes challenging conceptions of the frontier that have ignored or covered over the indigenous, Spanish and Mexican, and Asian/Asian American histories in which "the West" is not West at all but simply home or "el Norte" or Gold Mountain to the East. While the West has often been relegated to a "frontier" past, we hope to use this site to explore the multi- and inter-cultural West in the 20th and 21st centuries as well, looking both at continuities with the past and new cultural configurations at play up to the present.
The Multicultural American West

Racial and Cultural Diversity in
the West

Race and Anglo-American Culture

Racial and Ethnic Conflict in the West

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Daily Class Notes

Stan Steiner, None of Us is Native

"None of us is native to this land," Montezuma said to Hernando Cortes. "

"The emperor and his Aztec subjects believed that everyone on earth was a stranger to the earth as well as to one another. Everyone was an eternal wanderer, they said. It was so. The Aztecs once had been foreigners from
the northern mountains and the Spaniards were foreigners from across the sea. Even the local Indians came from somewhere else. In their creation stories, they told of how their ancestors had emerged from the earth and wandered on long journeys until they found their home."

"And to this day the mountains of New Mexico --like those of old Mexico --are home to wanderers and exiles from everywhere on earth. Refugees and adventurers still come to New Mexico , not only from Spain but from throughout Europe, Africa, Asia and South America ."

"Through the centuries, the "Hispanic" or Spanish settlers of New Mexico were men and women of all nations, not merely from Spain . In Mexico , they were so diverse and varied in their origins that the Mexican philosopher Jose Vasconceles called them La Raza Cósmica, the Cosmic Race."

"Mountain men and fur trappers in New Mexico came from many nations. They were self-exiles who found peace among the Indians and Mexicans."

"In New Mexico the Indian, Spaniard and Anglo became part of one historical family. At the same time, on the old Santa Fe Trail , merchants and traders brought the East to the West. The extranjeros , or "strangers," paved the path for what Western historian Howard Lamar has called the "conquest by Merchants."

"Today, we appreciate the fact that the religions and cultures of New Mexico always have been entwined and intermingled. Even though these cultures have often been antagonistic, they have, for the most part, existed side by side and often within each other's families and communities."

"In the last hundred and fifty years New Mexico has seen Polish and Slovak miners settle near the coal fields around Gallup and Silver City. To the north, near the Colorado line, Japanese farmers have maintained vegetable farms for generations. To the south, in the cow towns and oil fields of Little Texas, Irish cowboys and German settlers who learned cowboying from the Mexicans."

"Seeking a new life, refugees from around the world came to New Mexico . Nowadays they come not only from the East but from the Far East as well. In the old Hispanic barrios of the cities one can find Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Filipinos and numerous other peoples from Southeast Asia who have established communities of their own. In Albuquerque shopping malls there are stores carrying the foods and condiments of Asia . Spices of the Orient are sold beside the chiles and tortillas of New Mexico. Some of these foods are remarkably similar. It is only a matter of time before someone invents a Vietnamese burrito or a chile-and-curry salsa. "

"They came and continue to come searching for the Enchanted Land , the Shangri-la of New Mexico promised them in tourist brochures. And so they seek not the gold of Coronado 's Seven Cities of Cibola but the reality of the dream, a home of their own, a place on earth."

To the Aztecs, people had no home on earth. And that may be why they were forever wandering in search of a home.

La Raza and Mexican Cultural Identity

The words, La Raza, as used in Mexico, were first coined in the 1920's by Jose Vasconcelos, a most influential scholar, writer and a great intellectual of his time. In one of his books, La Raza Cosmica, he reflected that the people of Latin America were a mixture of “old world” and “new world.” A place were Europeans, Africans, Asians, Arabs and Jews met in the “new world” Native Americans, mixing with them -- created La Raza.

Thus La Raza as used in Mexico is a reflection of inclusiveness of all the various people of the world creating a unique new people befitting the “new world.”

Mexico is home to people from all the various Latin American countries, and the single largest groups of ‘foreigners' are U.S. expatriates that now total over 1 million. Groups, other than Americans, are Germans, French, English, and of course, Spaniards as well as from all Latin American countries.

(From Patrick Osio, Jr's The Mexican Perspective)

Limerick, Racialism on the Run

In the popular imagination, the frontier froze as a biracial confrontation between "whites" and "Indians." More complex questions of race relations seemed to be the terrain of other regions' histories.
....Limerick (p. 259)

"Over the twentieth century, writers of Western history succumbed to the easy temptation, embracing a bipolar West composed of "whites" and "Indians."
....Limerick (p. 261)

"[In the American West] scapegoats were everywhere at this crossroads of the planet, meeting ground of Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Frontier or not, the twentieth-century West made no peace with the problems of pluralism."
....Limerick (p. 269)

"Despite visions of Western fresh starts and new beginnings, the South's "problem" had long ago moved West." (277)

"Permit blacks a place in American political and social life, and Indians, Asians, and Hispanics
would be next. Western diversity thus gave an edge of urgency to each form of prejudice; the line had to to be held against each group." (278)

"Race, one begins to conclude, was the key factor in dividing the people of Western America. Its meanings and distinctions fluctuated, but racial feelings evidently guided white Americans in their choice of groups to persecute and exclude." (280)

"Judging by the written record alone, a historian blind to actual physical characteristics might think that there were at least eight oppressed races in the West: Indians, Hispanics, Chinese, Janpanese, Blacks, Mormons, strikers, and radicals." (289)

"Minorities and majority in the American West occupied common ground literally. A contest for control of land, for the labor applied to the land, and for the resulting profit set the terms of their meeting. Sharing turf, contesting turf, surrendering turf, Western groups, for all their differences, took part in the same story. Each group might have preferred to keep its story private and separate, but life on the common ground of the American West made such purity impossible."
...Limerick (p. 292)


The Immigration Problem in
the West

The 2004 Pew Study on Illegal Immigration
"estimates the number of persons living in families in which the head of the household or the spouse is an unauthorized migrant--13.9 million as of March 2004, including 4.7 million children. Of those individuals, some 3.2 million are US citizens by birth but are living in "mixed status" families in which some members are unauthorized, usually a parent, while others, usually children, are Americans by birthright."

Since 1970, over 33 million legal immigrants have been welcomed to the United States. More than 8.3 million people immigrated to the United States in the 1980s. In the 1990s, over 10 million immigrants were welcomed into the United States. In fact, Congress in the 1990 Immigration Act increased the number of people allowed to immigrate per year from 35 to 40 percent. Since 1970, the United States has
experienced unprecented levels of both legal
and illegal immigration. People have flooded into the country from all over the world. We can
see high levels of new immigrants in the American West in the early 21st century.

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 33 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 was the highest number of immigrants in any decade in American history. But in the 1990s, over 10 million immigrants will welcomed into the United States in the 1990s, setting a new record for immigration. 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 West 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 West.

Mexico acted to limit further white immigration and more tightly regulate the white immigrants who had settled in the Mexican west. 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 West for American development. By 1848, the United States had conquered the West 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 West from Mexico, American settler began flooding into California and Oregon. It was now the American West, 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 West.By the 1870s, as a result of the increasing presence of Chinese immigrant communities in the West, 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 West 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, Western 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.

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.

In 1965, the United States government passed a new Immigration Act which once again allowed 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 increasing rapidly. 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 an 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 ever 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. This leads us to the era of Globalization. In his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), Thomas
Friedman describes this new era of globalization where corporations can now take
their jobs, factories, and investments to Third
World countries; they don't have to rely on
cheap foreign workers to come to the United
States. The dilemma for some Americans is whether they will now have to immigrate to
get the good jobs. In the early 1990s, American
corporations in Mexico were advertising for White American executives to move down to
Mexico to manage their operations. Patricia
Limerick would find this another interesting irony of the legacy of conquest.


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Created 1 June 2000:  Last Modified: 27 February, 2009
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