History of Mexico

History of Mexican Americans

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mexican-Americans were once concentrated in the states that formerly belonged to Mexico, including California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas; they began creating communities in Southern California (Los Angeles, California, Long Beach, California, Santa Ana, California, San Bernardino, California and San Diego, California); San Francisco, California; Denver, Colorado; Dallas, Texas; Houston, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona and other industrial cities and steel producing regions when they obtained employment there during World War I. More recently, Mexican immigrants have increasingly become a large part of the workforce in industries such as meat packing throughout the Midwest, in agriculture in the southeastern United States, and in the construction, landscaping, restaurant, hotel and other service industries throughout the country.Mexican-American identity has also changed markedly throughout these years. In the past hundred years Mexican-Americans have campaigned for voting rights, stood against educational, employment, and ethnic discrimination and stood for economic and social advancement. At the same time many Mexican-Americans have struggled with defining and maintaining their community's identity. In the 1960s and 1970s, some Hispanic student groups flirted with nationalism and differences over the proper name for members of the community of Chicano/Chicana, Latino/Latina, Mexican-Americans, Hispanics or simply La Raza became tied up with deeper disagreements over whether to integrate into or remain separate from Anglo society, as well as divisions between those Mexican-Americans whose families had lived in the United States for two or more generations and more recent immigrants.

Contents [hide]

1 Before the founding of the United States

2 Manifest Destiny and the incorporation of the Hispanic people

3 Anti-Mexican American violence (1840s to 1920s)

4 Immigration and diffusion of Mexican-American communities throughout the U.S.

5 The Big Swing

6 The Mexican Revolution

6.1 Mexican Immigration in the 20th Century

7 Labor struggles

8 The civil rights movement

9 The Chicano movement

10 Mexican-Americans and electoral politics

11 See also

12 References

13 Notes

[edit]Before the founding of the United States

Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, California, Colorado, and Wyoming were part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain and later formed part of the newly independent Mexican Republic. The Spaniards first entered the region in the late 16th century, starting small settlements in what is now New Mexico.

In California, Spanish Franciscan friars formed a string of missions designed to convert the Indians to Christianity. Along with the system of forts and land grants to favored associates of the king, the missions enabled small-scale Spanish settlement of the coastal California by a few hundred Spanish immigrants. Very small Spanish-speaking settlements were established near missions & forts in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas by the mid 18th century.

[edit]Manifest Destiny and the incorporation of the Hispanic people

Beginning in the 1820s, immigrants from the U.S. and Europe settled in Texas (Tejas), then part of Mexico. Anglo and Hispanic Texas joined to fight Mexico in 1836, defeating an invading army and declaring the independence of Texas. The Texas Republic included Tejanos as leading citizens, but Mexico refused to recognize its legal existence. The US annexed Texas in 1845, leading to the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. After six months of harsh negotiating, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed on February 2, 1848, ending the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848). It represented so much more than just an end to hostilities, however.

The war had been over territory — specifically, most of the southwestern portion of today's United States. Much of that land historically had been controlled by Spain and then Mexico after they had taken the land from the Mayans who had already been living there. But in 1845, both the United States and Mexico claimed to control portions of the same territory. The U.S. government rallied the country to war after declaring