(English) Introduction to Manuel Gamio's Manuel Gamio: El inmigrante Mexicano: la historia de...

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Introduction to Manuel Gamio’s

THE LIFE STORY OF THE MEXICAN IMMIGRANT1

Devra Weber

On April l9 of l927, Jose Castillo sat in his home on a dusty street in the town

of the Simons brickyard, near downtown Los Angeles. He was talking with Luis

Felipe Recinos who was interviewing Castillo for a study on Mexican immigration

by Manuel Gamio, Mexican Immigration to the United States.2 Castillo had worked

at Simons eight years, and had organized a group of workers planning to repatriate to

Colonia Acambaro, Mexico. He paused and began to explain why he wanted to

return. He had first come to the US in l9l0. He was old now, and sick of this place

where “aquí he dejado lo mayor de mi vida y de mis fuerzas, regando con el sudor de

mi frente los campos y fabricas de estos gringos quo solo le saben sacar a u no la

gota gorda y cuando lo ven Viejo ni caso le hacen.”3 He wanted to return to México

with his brothers and their families, so that the grandchildren ‘se eduquen como

Buenos Mexicanos” and would not become “pochos” like those Mexicans who

stayed.

This is a book of conversations. Most obviously, the book is composed of

conversations between an interviewer and Mexican immigrants gathered from l926

and l927. But behind these is a conversational cacophony of overlapping,

intersecting, and continuing discussions and conversations. These were discussions

germane to the early 20th century: part of social change and war, revolution and the

beginning of the dismantling of colonialism, and challenges to the ideological

rationale for slavery and colonialism. They were about progressive social change and

1 I would like to thank friends and colleagues who generously read versions of the manuscript and contributed valuable suggestions: Lois Banner; Jorge Durand; Juan Gomez-Quinones; Gerardo Necochea; Juan Vicente Palerm; Arthur Schmidt; and Alice Wexler. Any inaccuracies are all mine.2 Manuel Gamio, Mexican Immigration to the United States: A Study of Human Migration and Adjustment, 2 ed. (New York: Dover Press, 1971).;Manuel Gamio, The Life Story of the Mexican Immigrant: Autobiographic Documents Collected by Manuel Gamio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930).3

? Interview with Jose Castillo, by Luis Felipe Recinos. April 18, 1927, Los Angeles, California.

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reaction against it. They were about increased international migration, and migration

from Mexico to the US. They were conversations about academic disciplines,

intellectual experimentations and artistic flowering. They were discussions by the

governments of nation states. They were conversations between intellectuals and

nation-states’ conceptions of migration, and migrants’ perspectives and lives as they

lived them.

Gamio formulated the questions behind his book through these

conversations. From the binational intellectual network he drew his assistants who

gathered materials, edited and translated the material. These conversations were

often contentious and reflected broader relations of nation-states, history, neo-

colonialism, and race. The discussions intersected, and criss crossed national

borders, academic disciplines, and intellectual, artistic and political parameters. They

were discussions germane to the l920s, yet remain part of ongoing conversations …..

about race and culture, about immigration, about gender and familial relations, about

change and identity, politics and political change. These conversations which

surrounded Gamio’s project form a pentimiento to present conversations.

Until the l970s, most scholars were interested in immigrants only in

discussions of labor supply, wages and economic development. Only two men

extensively interviewed Mexican immigrants about their lives and perspectives: the

Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio and his North American colleague, Paul

Taylor. Gamio’s two books, Mexican Immigration to the United States and The Life

Story of the Mexican Immigrant were published in the US in 1930. They were

republished in the l970s in response to the Chicano movement and questions raised

about social change. As scholars also began to ask new questions about workers,

workers organizations, women, and immigrants, they rediscovered these books as

and the interviews as a unique and invaluable source of the ‘voices’ from the l920s.

They became classics and, with Taylor’s works, used by every scholar involved in

the reconstruction of the history of Mexicans in the US.4

4 Among the works by Taylor, the most well known are:Paul Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Chicago and the Calumet Region (Berkeley, 1932); Paul Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Imperial Valley, vol. I (1930); Paul Taylor, A Spanish-Mexican Peasant Community, Arandas, Jalisco, Mexico (Berkeley, 1933). See Also Jorge Durand, "Paul S. Taylor y Manuel Gamio: Dos pioneros en el estudio de la migracion mexicana a Estados Unidos" (paper presented at the X

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Yet the books have not been part of Mexican conversations. Manuel Gamio is

well known in Mexico…. the father of Mexican anthropology, author of Forjando

Patria and indigenismo, the excavator of Teotihuacan, and a formidable force behind

the Mexican museums and institutions devoted to the indigenous and anthropology.

His work on immigration was a crucial component of these broader works, yet has

never been published in Mexico and is virtually unknown. Why? Their absence

reflects long standing attitudes towards people of the rural areas, the poor and

indigenous from which these immigrants came. Neither immigrants nor, later,

Chicanos, were seen as important historical agents. The silence reflects intellectual

disinterest and, against the backdrop of US imperialism, the popular view that

immigrants were in some ways traitors….. a charge echoed in corridos of the l920s

to 1990 corrido by Los Tigres del Norte, “Los Dos Patrias.”5

This began to shift in the 1970s. Chicano activists’ political solidarity with

the Mexican student movement led to further intellectual and political exchange.

Mexicans who studied in the US returned to Mexico with new perspectives, such as

Juan Manuel Sandoval, founder of the Centro de Estudios Chicanos in Mexico City.

Congreso de Historiadores Mexico Estados Unidos, Dallas, Texas, Nov 1999 1999), and Jorge Durand, ed., Migracion Mexico-Estados Unidos. Anos Veinte (Mexico D.F.: Consejo Nacional Para la Cultura y las Artes, 1991).

For more recent scholars who have utilized Gamio’s interviews see: David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987).; George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).;Jose Limon, Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican American Social Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).;Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Limon, Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems; Jose Limon, "Nation, Love, and Labor Lost: Katherine Anne Porter and Manuel Gamio," in American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States and the Erotics of Culture, ed. Jose Limon (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 35-72; Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles From the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Zaragosa Vargas, Proletarians of the North: A history of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917-1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).; Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez, Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996) ;Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton and the New Deal (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1994); Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas, 2nd ed. (College Station Texas: Texas A&M, 1995). Juan Gomez-Quinones, Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise 1940-1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990); Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).5 Pablo Gonzalez Casanova published some of Gamio’s interviews in Mexico. Casanova’s publication came at a time when new questions were being raised in both Mexico and the US. GET CASANOVA CITATION

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The newly formed Chicano Studies Centers in the US became more involved with

Mexican scholars. Led by UCLA’s Chicano Studies Center under the direction of

historian and activist Juan Gomez Quinones, they hosted Mexican scholars and

conferences, film festivals, and discussions of culture which furthered understanding

and respect of Chicanos and Mexican immigrants. By the l980s, Mexican historians

were also beginning to ask questions which extended beyond national borders.

Questions such as how immigrant’s roots in Mexico influenced the trajectory of

Mexicans and Chicanos in the US; or how returning Mexicans influenced Mexico.

Mexican scholars of social and labor history unearthed rich materials, often from

local archives, of the specifics of rural areas of Mexico, fleshing out our

understanding of the historical roots of immigration, immigrants and Mexican

communities.

Economic crisis in Mexico and the restructuring US economy spurred a

massive migration of Mexicans in the l980s and l990s. These migrants, and

migration, have in turn changed communities, economies, labor forces, and

binational worker organizing. Both the US and Mexican governments recognize the

growing political power of Chicanos/Mexicanos in the US. The billions of dollars in

remittances immigrants send to their families in Mexico have formed a crucial sector

of Mexico’s gross national product. Academics are scrambling to write articles about

remittances, transnational migrants and communities, and supporting a plethora of

conferences and studies. In short, migration has become an academic growth

industry in both countries.

In the last several years, Mexicanos in the US have played an increasing role

in Mexican politics. In 2001 Vicente Fox was elected president, ending the 70 year

reign of the PRI. Fox, a former executive with Coca Cola who understands the

workings of international capital and corporate ‘multiculturalism’ is addressing the

issue of immigrants and immigration. Fox appeared at the border, stated that

returning Mexicans should be treated with respect by Mexican officials. There have

been discussions of formally recognizing the Mexican nation, of those of ‘sangre

Mexicano’ who live outside boundaries of the nation state. The NAFTA induced

Zapatista uprising has fueled a growing indigenous movement which raises again the

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issue of indigenous in Mexico. This time the indigenous are raising their own issues.

Reflecting the shifting intellectual and political trends in both Mexico and the US,

and the pertinence of these works to the present, these works are finally being

published in Spanish in their entirety.

Part I: Conversations of Manuel Gamio and the Making of ‘the Mexican

Immigrant’

Manuel Gamio’s project took place against the backdrop of several

intersecting and overlapping international conversations. One series of conversations

focused around Gamio’s intellectual development, his relation to changing

paradigms of race and culture, the professionalization of the social sciences, and the

arguments surrounding national policies and legislation. A second series of

discussions were wrestling with the problems of how to develop a cohesive Mexican

nation. There were questions as to what constituted a nation, who would be involved

in the nation state, and how to involve the indigenous. These issues were part of

discussions about economic development, a ‘modern’ work force, material culture

and consumerism. A third series of discussions were going on in the US, with bitter

arguments over similar problems in that country: questions of who constituted the

US as a nation, who should be excluded and who included, and how should

immigration (and specifically indigenous immigration) be addressed. These

conversations were part of long standing discussions over race and immigration, now

set against the background of social unrest and Bolshevik revolution. And finally,

there were the conversations among and with the immigrants themselves and how

they lived migration and work and cultural change. These were about what would

happen to their children; over whether or not they should (or could) return to

Mexico; they were about apparent changes among women; they were about cultural

change and jazz and changing languages. They were about returning Mexicans and

the Mexico they encountered. They were about the Mexican nation. And they were

also about what Gamio called that ‘peculiar nationality’ of ‘semi-Mexicans’ who

would become the Chicano.6

6 Gamio, Mexican Immigration 65

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Manuel Gamio was born in the l880s to a family with economic interests in

mines, land and business, and roots in Spain and Michoacan. After initial studies in

engineering, he switched to archeology and anthropology. In l908 he came to the

attention of Professor Franz Boas, the leading anthropologist of the day. Impressed

with Gamio’s work, Boas helped the student obtain a grant and Gamio left the

following year to study with “Papa Franz” at New York’s Columbia University.7

When Boas had begun his work in the late l9th century, there were no

professional anthropologists and the reigning paradigm stationed peoples and

cultures on an immutable hierarchical scale which ranged from European-defined

“savage” to ‘civilized.” Couched in cultural terms, these were nevertheless racial

classifications which provided a pseudo-scientific rationale for the glaring social and

economic inequalities of l9th century industrializing America. According to this

argument, inequalities were not the result of social problems, but due to the inherent

inferiority of particular races and cultures limited by racially determined aptitudes.

Boas challenged the Social Darwinists and eugenicists . Influenced by Lamarckian

eugenics which argued that acquired characteristics can be transferred to succeeding

generations, Boas began to study the conditions which could modify inherited

characteristics. He discarded the hierarchical scale of a mono ‘culture’ and began to

study the historical development of cultures “in all their plurality” and

interrelatedness . Boas pointed out that studying the historical development of

societies and cultures would demonstrate the values of different cultures, and prove

that given the same historical situations, all cultures and people had equal potential.

Boas’ work in effect shifted the discussion away from the assumption of immutable

racial hierarchies to “issues of racial process which would enable him to cast light

on specific problems of the historical relations of people.”8

7 For an account of Gamio’s life, see Maria de Los Angeles-Gonzalez-Gamio, Manuel Gamio: Una Lucha sin Final (Mexico D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1987); Manuel Gamio, "Franz Boas in Mexico," Boletin Bibliografico de Antropologia Americana VI: 35-45.36.8George Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution (New York: Free Press) 1968, 169, italics mine. For discussions on anthropology and eugenics, see Franz Boas, "The Professional Correspondence of Franz Boas," (Philadelphia, Penn: American Philosophical Society, 1972); Regna Diebold Darnel, "The Development of American Anthropology 1879-1920: From the Bureau of American Ethnology to Franz Boas" (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1969); Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations Between the United States and Mexico, 1920-1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992); Manuel Gamio, "Empiricism of Latin-American Governments and the Empiricism of their Relations with the United States," Mexican Review III; Manuel Gamio,

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Boas work transformed anthropology. As George Stocking describes, Boas

changed the meaning of ‘culture’ and led a “cultural Revolution that, by changing

the relation of ‘culture’ to man’s evolutionary development, to the burden of

tradition and to the process of human reason, transformed the notion into a tool quite

different from what it had been before.” He rejected “simplistic models of biological

or racial determinism…. [and] ethnocentric standards of cultural evaluation,” and

fostered a growing appreciation of “the role of the unconscious social process” in

understanding human behavior. It was, as Stocking points out, a radically

“transformed” concept of culture the social sciences spent much of the 20th century

“working out in detail of the implications of the cultural idea.” By the time Nazi

eugenics had carried Social Darwinism to its genocidal conclusion, Boas’s concepts

of culture and race had become accepted public knowledge in the US. In effect,

Boasian anthropology had seized public understanding of race, culture and evolution

away from the racialist eugenicists.9

Boas was not engaged in simply ethereal intellectual debates, but slugged it

out with racial eugenicists in the arenas of immigration and a wide range of

arguments over social policies. By the l920s, the United States was being rent by the

impacts of World War I, a series of social upheavals which some feared threatened

social revolution, and a growing immigration from central and southern Europe of

people some considered undesirable and inassimilable. Domestically, women were

throwing away their corsets, cutting their hair, smoking, dancing and demanding a

more ‘companionate’ marriage. Returning African American veterans took to heart

"Franz Boas en Mexico," Boletin Bibliografico de Antropologia Americana 6: 35-42; Lina Odena Guemes, ed., La Antropologia en Mexico: Panorama Historico (Mexico D.F.: INAH, 1988); Ann Cyphers-Guillen and Marci Lane Rodriguez, "Franz Boas," in La antropologia en Mexico, ed. Lina Odena Guemes (Mexico D.F.: INAH, 1988), 323-346; Antonio Rodriguez, "Franz Boas," in Los protagonistas, ed. Lina Odena Guemes, La antropologia en Mexico:Panorama historico (Mexico D.F.: INAH, 1988); Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1991); George W. Stocking, "The Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s and the Dualism of the Anthropological Tradition," in Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, ed. George W. Stocking (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 208-276; Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, "Stereophonic Scientific Modernisms: Social Science Between Mexico and the United States, 1880s-1930s," The Journal of American History 86: 1156-1187; Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).; Eric R. Wolf, "Perilous Ideas: Race, Culture, People," Current Anthropology 35: 1-12.; Gamio Franz Boas19429 Stocking Race, Culture and Evolution 232-233; 297-299;301

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the idea of fighting ‘for democracy’ and took part in the black nationalist (and

internationalist) movement of the United Negro Improvement Association, or the

more patrician National Association for the Advancement of Colored People led by

WEB Du Bois. A revolution was being fought out in Mexico on the southwestern

border, and the Bolshevik revolution showed signs of infiltrating the US. Among

these fearful reactions to the modern world were those who reaffirmed patriarchal

dominance, supremacy of white Anglo Saxons, and 100% Americanism which

defined the American ‘nation’ as white and only white. North American eugenicists

were Mandelian, that is they argued that characteristics could not be inherited and

that therefore social reform or attempts to improve the ‘inferior’ were useless. The

problem, as they saw it, was racial mixture and the ultimate result of degeneration or

pollution of the white race with blood of ‘inferior stock.’ These eugenicists favored

the forced sterilization of the ‘unfit’, and fought access to birth control for white

women whom they accused of aiding ‘race suicide’ by refusing to breed. They

opposed the immigration of ‘racially undesirable’ immigrants. Immigration

opponents in the Immigration Restriction League lobbied to pass the l924

immigration law which established quotas for different countries. Boas publicly

argued against the quota, and fought attempts to engage academics of the National

Research Council to eugenically evaluate ‘the relative worth of different ethnic

groups” as a basis for the quotas.10

Gamio’s work was heavily influenced by his work with Boas. One idea

which Gamio said ‘nunca olvide’ was Boas’ annihilation of racial superiority which

determined the success or failure of peoples and communities. Boas introduced

Gamio to modern and advanced methodologies which illuminated “brillantemente al

dirigir las investigaciones arqueológicas, etnográficas, linguisticas y folkloricas, que

se llevaron a cabo.”11 Boas, as Gamio, was vigilant in excising corruption in

anthropology, or the manipulated political uses of the field. And the experience at

Columbia University enabled Gamio to soak up the intellectual ferment among New

York literati, artists, and fellow students of Boas who would become the next

10 For discussions of the US at the time and eugenics see: Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America (Penguin), and footnote eight.. 11 Gamio, Franz Boas, 37.

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generation of anthropologists. From this would grow the larger intellectual circles

Gamio maintained all his life. Gamio received his MA in l9ll and returned to Mexico

with Boas. Boas urged Gamio to begin an excavation of Teotihuacan, in part for his

doctoral thesis. Gamio worked for years on this project, carefully unearthing the

pyramids which graced this site, and wrote the three volume La Poblacion del Valle

de Teotihuacan. The work was the thesis for his PhD, which he received in l924, but

it was also an under-recognized ‘piedra fundamental’ of applied anthropology.

Gamio had begun his work in l9l7, eleven years before Malinowski outlined his

vision of anthropology, and even longer before applied anthropology gained a

foothold in the US. 12

Manuel Gamio was a public intellectual during the revolutionary and post

revolutionary period. He was part of intertwined political and intellectual discussions

about the Mexican nation, the complex population of Mexico, and how to form the

Mexican nation out of what was at the time an actively hostile diversity. Part of this

was involved with establishing institutions to study the diverse peoples of Mexico,

especially the indigenous. He worked with Boas to establish an International School

of American Archeology and Ethnology in Mexico. The School was short lived, and

closed in l9l2, a victim of the revolution, but it was the first attempt to develop an

international center for anthropology. Gamio would continue the development of

anthropological institutions in Mexico, and in l9l7 became director of what would

become the Dirección de Antropologia. 13

Gamio and other intellectuals were concerned about forming a national

identity and modern nation from the disparate and localized populations and cultures.

The central question was to what extent could indigenous people, who intellectuals

agreed were backward, be part of this new nation. The questions were not new. In

the l880s, when industrial capitalism forced Indians off their land and into the labor

pool, the Porfirian elite had borrowed North American notions of Social Darwinism

12 See Gamio Franz Boas 35-45; Gonzalez-Gamio Manuel Gamio; Rodriguez “Franz Boas” .13 Stocking "Franz Boas." In Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement Three, 1941-1945, edited by John A. Garraty, 81-86. (New York: Charles Scribners, 1993); Weaver, Salomon Nahmad Sitton y Thomas. "Manuel Gamio, el Primer Antropologo Aplicado y su Relacion con la Antropologia Norteamericana." America Indigena 1, no. 4 (Oct-Dec 1990): 291-321; Gonzalez-Gamio Manuel Gamio.

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to rationalize coercive land seizures and forced labor. These measures were

necessary, they argued, because Indians were inherently “indolent’ and as these

backward qualities were racially determined, it was useless to attempt to reform

conditions for the indigenous.

In l9l6 Manuel Gamio published Forjando Patria, the ‘first manifesto’ of

indigenismo and his vision of the indigenous in the new Mexican nation. Gamio felt

that in order to form a modern nation, there had to be a homogenous Mexican

national people with a common identity as Mexicans. He agreed with fellow

indigenista Jose Vasconcelos, that the mestizo was the ‘national race’ who would

carry ‘the national culture of the future.’ Most assumed indigenous cultures were

backward, so the issue was how to integrate the indigenous into the mestizo nation.

Gamio argued this could be done through mestizaje and education. He used a

Boasian argument, and shifted the discussion away from the idea of racial

determinism to a discussion of a more fluid notion of culture. Gamio argued that

Indians had the same aptitude for progress as the European, and were at the bottom

of society not because of inherent racial characteristics, but because they had been

denied an adequate diet and access to education. Their backwardness was thus due to

culture and language as well as race. Gamio’s use of racial and cultural categories

also reflects the Mexican system of racial categories defined more by culture and

social status than the biologically based categories of Anglo American countries.

Colonial Mexico was a caste society which had adopted the class and racial

categorizations of Spain. Yet by the l9th century, economic growth and ongoing

miscegenation had blurred racial categories, and transformed them into fluid

categories defined more by economic and social position than by color. These

categories were fluid: class ‘whitened’ and people ‘passed’ to move up the racial and

social ladder. Mexicans disagreed about what defined ‘an Indian’, but in daily life

Indians could easily pass as mestizos if they spoke Spanish, dressed in ‘modern’

clothes, and took on aspects of Mexican culture.14

14The primary proponents of indigensimo were Manuel Gamio and Jose Vasconcelos, later joined by Alfonso Caso and Aguirre Beltran. Gabriella de Beer, Jose Vasconcelos and His World (New York: Las Americas Publishing Company, 1966); Guillermo Bonfil-Batalla, Mexico Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization, Phillip A Dennis trans., first in English ed. (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, Institute of Latin American Studies, 1996); Manuel Gamio, Forjando Patria, segunda ed. (Mexico

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Coming out of the Porfiarían period and the complete disdain for Indians of

the present or past, indigenismo was revolutionary. Gamio and other proponents of

indigenismo applied Lamarckian assumptions to the issue of indigenous. Indians and

Indian cultural backwardness could be changed through social policies. Indigenistas

also proffered a new vision of indigenous history. They extolled the history of the

imperialistic Aztecs, the resistance of Cuathemoc, and the long dead empires of the

Mixtecs, Olmecs, and Toltecs. Indigenistas trotted out these brilliant pre -colonial

indigenous empires as the historical roots for the Mexican nation and ‘la raza

nueva.’ They exalted a romanticized and sanitized Indian past, yet conveniently

omitted the l9th century caste wars and Indian rebellions which had terrified urban

centers, especially Mexico City. Indians were hailed as integral to the post

revolutionary nation, but as workers and peasants, not as Indians. Indigenismo

reassuringly argued that contemporary Indians would soon disappear into the

mestizo as the process of mestizaje eventually (and biologically) transformed the

indigenous into ‘la raza cosmica.’ Yet mestizaje was an imposed intellectual notion,

“a fantasy of national unity….[which mystified] the very real cultural, social, class

and political divisions of Mexican society.” Most Mexicans continued to view and

treat the living Indians as culturally and socially backward, degraded,

underdeveloped and a barrier to progress. Theoretically, the paternalistic policies of

indigenismo replaced forced coercion. In fact, coercion and pressure into the work

force continued well after the revolution.

Gamio emphasized the need for careful planning which respected indigenous

cultures and people. But indigenismo developed into national policy based on

decisions made by non-Indians , priorities set by non-Indians and measured by a

yardstick of western culture. Government bureaucrats, not Indians, defined who was

and was not an Indian, and in effect undermined the cultural patrimonies which had

“allowed Indian peoples to survive and defend themselves over almost five

D.F.: Editorial Porrua, S.A., 1960); Alan Knight, "Racism, Revolution and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940," in The Idea of Race in Latin America, ed. Richard Graham (Austin: University of Texas, 1990); Miguel Leon-Portilla, Endangered Cultures, Julie Goodson-Lawes trans. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1990); Jose Vasconcelos, A Mexican Ulysses: An Autobiography, W. Rex Crawford trans. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1963); Jose Vasconcelos, Ulises criollo, 3 vols., vol. 1 (Mexico D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1982).

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centuries.” 15As Leon Portilla points out, the paternalism of this ‘induced

acculturation’ extended colonial domination and attempted to break any Indian

control over their lives.. These policies aimed to ‘incorporate the Indian, that is, de-

Indianize him” and push him into “the stream of universal culture.” Indigenistas

argued that this assimilation would enable Indians to enter and gain equality in a

consumer society as workers and consumers. Equality was possible, but only with

the eradication of Indian culture and what Bonfil-Batalla calls “the redemption of the

Indian through his disappearance.”16

Gamio envisioned a biologically defined Mexico, an essentially eugenic

concept. Yet Latin American eugenics was Lamarckian and part of radically

different social policies. Progressive Latin American regimes used Lamarckian

eugenics to argue for social reforms in education, diet, and conditions, demands

diametrically opposed to those of US eugenicists. These eugenics fostered rather

than fought racial mixture, but as part of the “unavoidable necessity of creating a

homogenous society in order to forge a true nation.” Jose Limon points out that

Gamio hoped, in some way, to incorporate elements of indigenous cultures into the

national whole and to maintain a dynamic balance between diversity and a unified

nation. It was an impossible task. He was unable to escape from the conundrum

which increasingly led him to conflate culture and race. Gamio was an

Enlightenment humanist, who considered universal (i.e. Western) culture as superior,

and viewed Indian culture as ‘degraded’ and ‘backward.’ He argued that Indians had

potential to progress, but progress meant acculturating into the dominant culture.

Reluctant indigenous who fought for indigenous rights or refused to cooperate in

their cultural extinction were dismissed as ‘primitive’, ‘ignorant’ and ‘backward.”

Indians who refused to acculturate remained ‘degraded’ and “backward”, in other

words were culturally and racially, still Indians.17

15 Bonfil-Battala Mexico Profundo 119.16 Ibid. 115-116; Leon-Portilla Endangered Cultures 117-119;Alexander Dawson, "From models for the nation to model citizens: 'Indigenismo" and the 'revindication of the Mexican Indian 1920-1940," Journal of Latin American Studies 3: .17 Limon discusses this point in, "Nation, Love and Labor Lost," 35-72; Leon Portilla, Endangered Cultures; Bonfil-Batalla Mexico Profundo. For a discussion of Gamio and race, see also

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Gamio argued that apart from mestizaje, the Indians’ only avenue out of their

“neolítica, prehispánico medeaval” mentality and the creation of a “mentalidad

moderna” was through education. He stressed two forms of education. One was the

education of innovative pedagogy and state policy: the eradication or reduction of

illiteracy, the creation of an educational policies designed to both respect indigenous

cultures while bringing them into the broader Mexican culture; and localized

educational projects and schools around Mexico. The other form of education which

would develop a ‘modern mentality’ for a productive working class, was through

immigration and work in the United States. As Mexicans left small and isolated

villages to became part of the growing national work force, they met Mexicans from

other areas. Monolingual indigenous speakers learned Spanish and, in the US,

sometimes some English. Indians discarded their huaraches and rural dress for shoes

and work pants. They saw other parts of the country, and found jobs in industry:

mines, factories, on the railroads, capitalist agriculture. These jobs introduced them

to different rhythms of work dictated by a time clock. They learned how to operate

machinery, and acquired new skills. And they talked with Mexicans from other

regions.18

Gamio felt that immigration was crucial to Mexican national development.

Gamio recognized that immigrants were usually the brightest, most adventuresome

and resourceful of Mexicans. Immigrants benefited economically, but more

importantly they learned modern work discipline and specialized work skills. They

learned how to operate industrial machinery, learned something about scientific

agriculture, and observed how raw materials were transformed into industrial

projects. Gamio notes “He becomes a laborer of the modern type, much more

efficient than before.” These returning immigrants would help Mexico become “a

great industrial and agricultural country.” They would also learn to be good

consumers, and would return with items of the material culture, such as cars and

18 Gamio, Manuel, ed. Antologia. (Mexico City: UNAM, 1975)., 44; Gamio, Mexican Immigration, 49; Arthur Schmidt, "Mexicans, Migrants, and Indigenous Peoples: the Work of Manuel Gamio in the United States, 1925-1927," in Strange Pilgrimages: Travel, Exile and Foreign Residency in the Creation of Latin American Identity, 1800-1990s, ed. Ingrid E. Fey and Karine Racine (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2000). 170; see also Mary Kay Vaughn, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997).

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tools, as well as record players and radios. Gamio also recognized that immigrants

who had formed cooperative organizations such as mutualistas, de facto unions –

would help develop similar organizations on their return. Gamio had noticed that

immigrants who returned to their old communities tended to fall back into old

patterns of work. For Mexico to take advantage of this industrial ‘education’ required

that returning Mexicans should work in some “large organized centers, some

distance away from centers of the old type.” This would later lead to Gamio’s

involvement with developing colonias where repatriatdos could apply their new

skills to an environment free of pre modern work habits and culture.

Gamio also recognized that as Mexicans met and worked together, Mexicans

crystallized their regional identities in relation to one another while simultaneously

developing a broader national identity as Mexicans. Working in the US only

intensified this nationalism. Exploitation, low wages, harsh treatment and racism

only intensified their visceral understandings of the historical conflicts which

resonated in daily work and relations with Anglo Americans. Those returning

immigrants would also bring with them this heightened sense of nationalism which

would contribute to the process of in a sense nationalizing the country.

Gamio argued that permanent immigration would be “harmful to both

countries, especially if it takes place on the large scale.” The US would be troubled

with “labor struggles and perhaps…racial conflicts” and Mexico would lose “its best

working population, for it is exactly these that emigrate.”19 Gamio’s vision that the

large number of returning immigrants would be a crucial component of rebuilding

post revolutionary Mexico was mistaken. Many remained in the US, their children

born there who would later become part of another national project, that of the

Mexicano/Chicano in the United States.

Manuel Gamio’s interest in nation building and immigration was also part of

international discussions among intellectuals, scholars and artists. He was a pivotal

and under-appreciated cultural mediator in these exchanges. By l926, Gamio was

recognized as a pioneer of applied anthropology, along with fellow intellectuals such

as Boas, and Robert Redfield and Sol Tax of the University of Chicago. Through the

19 Gamio, Mexican Immigration 50.

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l920s, this circle of scholars expanded to include Edward Sapir, Fay Cooper-Cole,

and Robert Park (Redfield’s’ father-in-law) from Chicago, Berkeley professor Paul

Taylor, and Mexican scholar Alfonso Caso Villa Rojas. These conversations were in

turn part of an older exchange among left wing Mexican and US writers, artists,

journalists and intellectuals which stemmed from the binational alliance of the

anarcho syndicalist Partido Liberal Mexicano and the Industrial Workers of the

World of the teens. These organizations worked together in areas as diverse as the

Veracruz oil fields and the agricultural fields and mines of the United States, and

Mexican workers often belonged to one or both organizations. Wobblies fleeing the

US draft during World War I fled to Mexico. Some, known as ‘los slackers’ helped

found the Mexican Communist party. Some Mexicans returning from the US school

of American capitalism also participated in the PCM’s founding. One was Primo

Tapia, a Purepuche from Michoacan, who had organized with the IWW and returned

to Mexico to form the largest agricultural union of the young PCM. Mexican

anarchist stalwarts influenced the younger generation of Mexicans in the US well

into the l930s.20

John Kenneth Turner and his wife, Ethel Duffy Turner, worked closely with

the PLM in both the United States and Mexico. John wrote Barbarous Mexico, a

scathing indictment of Porfiarían Mexico, and Ethel wrote several books about

Magon, the PLM junta and Magon’s companera, Maria Talvera. The dashing if self-

absorbed left wing journalist, John Reed, tramped the northern front of the revolution

and wrote Insurgent Mexico, a political precursor to Ten Days that Shook the World.

20 Gilberto Lopez-y-Rivas Alicia Castellanos-Guerrero, Primo Tapia de la Cruz, un hijo del pueblo (1991); Barry Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Omaha: University of Nebraska, 1992); Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1977); Paco Ignacio-Taibo, Bolshevikis: Historia Narrativa de los Origenes del Comunismo en Mexico 1919-1925 (Mexico D.F.: Editorial Joaquin Mortiz, 1986); Alan Knight, "Intellectuals in the Mexican Revolution," in Los Intelectuales y el Poder en Mexico, ed. Charles Hale Roderic Camp, Josefina Zoraida Vazquez (Mexico and Los Angeles: Colegio de Mexico/ UCLA Latin American Center, 1985), 500-511; Phillip J. Mellinger, Race and Labor in Western Copper: The Fight for Equality, 1896-`9`8 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995); Monroy, Rebirth; Jesús González Monroy, Ricardo Flores Magón y su actitud en la Baja California (México DF: Editorial Academia Literaria, 1962); Javier Torres Pares, La Revolucion sin frontera: El Partido Liberal Mexicano y las relaciones entre el movimiento obrero de Mexico y de los Estados Unidos 1900-1923 (Mexico D.F.: UNAM, 1990); Manuel Gonzalez Ramirez, La Huelga de Cananea; Arturo Santamaria-Gomez, La izquierda norteamericana y los trabajadores indocumentados (Sinaloa: Ediciiones de Cultura Popular, Universidad Autonoma de Sinaloa, 1988). Weber, 'Dark Sweat, White Gold'.

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Bohemians and left wing North Americans, excited by the Mexican Revolution,

encouraged Mexican intellectuals and artists to visit the US. Through the 20s the

voyagers included composer Carlos Chavez, artists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente

Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros. North Americans in turn visited Mexico,

including anthropologist Zelia Nuttal, novelist D.H. Lawrence, later to write the

problematic The Plumed Serpent, and the wealthy mistress of New York and Taos

salon society, Mabel Dodge Luhan. Some were drawn to Mexico by an interest in

art, such as photographer Edward Weston. Others were interested in politics as well

as art, such as burgeoning photographer Tina Modotti, one time lover of Weston who

remained in Mexico and joined the Communist Party before she was deported to

Italy in the l930s. Other left wing writers went south, including Wobbly journalist

Carlton Beals, Waldo Frank, Elsie C. Parsons, and Bertram Wolfe. Novelists Alma

Reed, John Dos Passos, Frances Toor and Katherine Anne Porter all journeyed to

Mexico. A highlight of these visits was a tour of Teotihuacan with Gamio. Gamio

made a lasting impression on many of these visitors who became friends, among

them Katherine Anne Porter and Frances Toor who, on Gamio’s suggestion, founded

the bilingual magazine Mexican Folkways.21

Gamio pulled from the network formed by these intersecting conversations to

write the book on Mexican immigration. The visits and conversations gave him a

broader perspective on Mexican immigrants to the US and their relation with the

future of the Mexican nation. And Gamio brought together people whom he had met

21 Mildred Constantine, Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993); Adys Cupull, ed., Julio Antonio Mella en los Mexicanos (Mexico D.F.: Ediciones el Caballilto, 1983); Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations Between the United States and Mexico, 1920-1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992); Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Noonday Press, 1995); Limon, "Nation, Love and Labor Lost,",, 35-72; John Reed, Insurgent Mexico (New York: International Publishers, 1974).Daniela Spenser, The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution: Mexico After 1910 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933); Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, "Stereophonic Scientific Modernisms: Social Science Between Mexico and the United States, 1880s-1930s," The Journal of American History 86: 1156-1187; Vargas, Proletarians of the North: A history of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917-1933; Thomas F. Walsh, Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico: The Illusion of Eden (Austin: University of Texas, 1992). Elena Poniatowska, Tinisima (Mexico D.F.: ERA, 1992); Ethel Duffy Turner, Ricardo Flores Magon y el Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexico D.F.: Comision Nacional del C.E.N., 1984); John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969).

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and gotten to know in this series of binational discussions and conversations. One

circle from which he drew was based at the University of Chicago. The University of

Chicago was auspiciously located near the populist and progressive heartlands of the

Midwest. Its pedagogy was influenced by the Chautauqua movement’s progressive

experiments in adult education, and unburdened by the entrenched Sumerian

eugenicists who still dominated older universities. Chicago’s school of sociology and

anthropology became known for innovative questions and methodology which

further revolutionized these fields. This was the “Chicago school.” Chicago scholars

were driven by contemporary social issues stemming from the social dislocation of

pre-capitalist communities under the onslaught of industrial capitalism. Interested in

social process and change, they eschewed ‘exotic’ and isolated communities

allegedly ‘untouched’ by civilization which had been the playground of earlier

anthropologists. They studied the expanding urban areas, and focused on how

urbanization was altering families, communities, neighborhoods and preindustrial

patterns of social relations and control. Led by sociologist Robert Park, the “Chicago

school” viewed these changes through Boasian lens of human ecology, the

relationships between human beings and their changing environment. Their

laboratory was Chicago. The test tubes were the immigrant sub communities of

Chicago.22

Delving into these dramatic social changes entailed exploring peoples

subjective understandings of their lives within this changing environment. They

discarded the older notion of an aloof and disinterested social scientist conducting an

allegedly ‘objective’ field study. Robert Park argued that on the contrary, the

sociologists’ primary interest was “the attitudes of the people involved, as they are

reflected in their very differing accounts of the same historical events…..It is not the

event but the attitude – the individual or the group mind.” 23 Scholars sought out the

22 Park Dixon Goist, "City and 'Community': The Urban Theory of Robert Park," American Quarterly 23:1: 46-59; Don Martindale, "American Sociology Before World War II," Annual Review of Sociology 2: 121-143.; The tenacity which some of these older institutions held on to conservative and disproved interpretations is indicated by the fact that several scholars in Harvard’s Department of Anthropology continued to conduct research into the typology of physical types as late as the mid 1950s. Wolfe, Perilous Ideas, 4.23 Goist, "City and 'Community': The Urban Theory of Robert Park,": 46-59; Robert Park, Race and Culture (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950). 30.

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raw expressions of this subjectivity…… immigrant letters, songs and stories. The

Chicago school reintroduced oral histories into Western social science.24 Out of this

Chicago school came the ground breaking The Polish Peasant in Europe and

America by William I. Thomas and Floiran Znaniecki, which relied on life histories,

immigrant letters as well as field reports. This study marked as well a different

approach to working class history which was reinvigorated in the l970s.25

In the 1920s, Chicago sociologist Ernest W. Burgess and anthropologist

Edward Sapir initiated a mammoth study of Chicago, and enlisted graduate students

to conduct field studies and gather life histories. Robert Redfield, by then a graduate

student interested in Mexican immigrants adjustments to Chicago, joined the project.

Redfield had met Gamio in 1923 when Redfield and his wife, Margaret Park

Redfield, visited Mexico at the behest of former Park student turned social worker,

Mexican feminist Elena Landazuri. Landazuri was a friend of Gamio and Gamio

invited the Redfields to visit Teotihuacan. Redfield was a lawyer looking for a new

career. As he later wrote to Gamio, the Mexican scholar “did much to shape my

life.” Fascinated and impressed with Gamio’s work, Redfield decided to abandon

law for anthropology, and upon returning to Chicago enrolled in the department of

anthropology and sociology. He worked closely with Park, Burgess and Fay Cooper

Cole, and focused on the Mexican immigrant community, an interest which stemmed

from his Mexican visit.26

Elena Landazuri was by now a social worker involved with Jane Adams at

Chicago’s Hull house, and working in the immigrant communities of Chicago.

Landazuri shared Gamio’s concern about the future of Mexico. As she wrote Parks,

“Since I came back from Chicago I have almost no other thought than to see how I

can use what I have acquired in these four years to the better advantage of my

24 Oral accounts were initially considered the only reliable source for any event, and early historians went to written accounts only as a last resort. The reification of writing and print upended this relation, so that any oral information had to be checked against written sources to verify its authenticity. 25 William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, ed. ed Eli Zeretsky, 1984 ed. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1918-1920).26 Martindale, "American Sociology Before World War II,": 121-143; Robert Rubinstein, ed., Fieldwork: The Correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991); Letter from Redfield to Gamio, December 17, 1956. italics mine Robert Redfield, "Papers of Robert Redfield," (Chicago: Special Collections, University of Chicago).

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people.” 27 She was also grappling with questions about the indigenous. Indians, she

wrote, “are not stupid, they are deep and very good and their primitive lives have

some real and great values. I should hate to make of those people factory

workingmen, even if they had to give up witches. I know you think we ought to

instruct them, to teach them; but how is that going to be done in a way that fits them

as they are? We think of democracy and vote, and all our ideas are shaped in a

different fashion than theirs, besides, we ourselves are far from being the product of

the democratic past of the US. I feel that we can only provide better means for their

free growth and wait to see what will come out of it; but I feel it is false to try to

guide our nation towards a preconceived end.”28

Landazuri introduced Redfield to Chicago’s Mexican community, fellow

social workers, church people and immigrants. Redfield eventually made about 40

trips to the community to conduct interviews, gather precise and thorough notes and

make detailed maps of the spatial contours of the Mexican barrio. He wrote his

masters thesis on this community 29 When Redfield moved on to Ph.D. work he

wanted to expand his understanding of Mexican immigrants to urban industrial

United States by studying a town in Mexico. Redfield’s decision to study a Mexican

town for his PhD was an “outgrowth of his early exposure to Mexico by Landazuri,

Gamio and [Frances] Toor.”Understanding their background, he felt was “ a first and

most necessary step in our study of the Mexican in Chicago.” Redfield returned to

Gamio for advice on towns to study: Gamio recommended Tepotzlan, a town in

Morelos and only 60 miles from Mexico City. 30

Paul Taylor, a Berkeley economist, had also started on his studies on

Mexican immigration. His career would span over a half century and in l971 he

would write the introduction to the republication of Life Story of the Mexican

immigrant. Taylor was a progressive social democrat, and actively concerned about

both the economic forces and human costs of the demise of the family farmer and the

onslaught of industrialized agriculture. By the l920s he was working on what would

27 Landazuri letter to Parks, April 16, 1922 MPRPC, quoted in Ricardo Godoy, "The Background and Context of Redfield's Tepotzlan," Journal of the Steeward Anthropological Society 10: 47-79. 28 Ibid. 29 We were unable to locate the manuscript of any trace of the manuscript.30 Godoy, "Redfield's Tepotzlan,": 47-79. 52

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become his multi- part study on Mexican Labor in the United States. Published

between l928 and l934, this work would include studies of Mexicans in the Imperial

Valley of California; South Platte, Colorado; Dimmit county Texas; Bethlehem

Pennsylvania, a center for steel production; Chicago and the Calumet region, and

Nueces County Texas. Taylor traveled around – in California he drove his car

through the Imperial Valley – interviewing workers, school teachers, strikers and

Mexican immigrants on the road, in labor camps, in their homes, or in public places.

His interest in Mexican immigration and the conditions in Mexico led him to conduct

a study on Arandas, Jalisco, which became a supplement to his series on Mexican

Labor. This study on Mexican labor remains the most extensive study of the period,

and Taylor combines economic analysis, statistical data on migration and school

populations, with interviews about strikes, living and working conditions, and

peoples’ lives. Taylor’s studies had an interest in common with the Chicago school

about small farmers and Mexican immigrants making the uncomfortable transition to

an increasingly commercialized and industrialized society.31

In the l930s, Taylor would expand his interests to chronicle the human effects

of agricultural depression in devastated farming areas, and migration into the

agricultural fields of California. Traveling now with photographer Dorothea Lange,

his wife, he talked with farmers and sharecroppers, homeless and migrants, and

produced several works which helped bring the plight of small farmers and

agricultural workers to national attention. Along with progressive journalists such as

Carey McWilliams, Taylor would also illuminate the structure of powerful

agricultural interests and the social effects of industrialized agriculture. In the late

l930s, he testified on business-backed anti-union vigilantism in California

agriculture before the Congressional investigation into violations of the rights of

labor. For the rest of his life, Taylor wrote about rural areas, farming and its people.

This would include series of studies on water rights and limitations, Vietnamese

agriculture, and ongoing issues of Mexican migration. Taylor knew Gamio and

respected his work, and were in at least sporadic contact at this time.32 31 Taylor, Mexican Labor: Chicago; Taylor, Mexican Labor: Imperial Valley.32 Paul Taylor and Clark Kerr, "Uprisings on the Farms," Survey Graphic, January 1935; Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969 (reprint); Paul Taylor, Labor on the Land: Collected Writings, 1930-1979 (New York: Arno Press, 1981); Paul

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The Social Research Council33 had been formed in xxxxxxx and, in May of

l924, formed a Committee on Scientific Aspects of Human Migration.34 Chaired by

University of Chicago anthropologist Edith Abbott, the committee was to select

studies on immigration for funding. Although they had hoped to fund proposals on

European immigration, the submissions were concerned either with African

American migration or Mexican immigration. They would eventually fund not only

the Gamio project, but Redfield’s study on Tepotzlan and Paul Taylor’s study on

Mexican labor. The committee was composed of scholars sympathetic to these

studies. In August of l925, Fay-Cooper Cole of Chicago proposed an apparent

extension of the ongoing project on immigration at the University of Chicago, that is

that the SSRC fund a study on the Mexican roots of immigration. Within a few

months several proposals were presented. Among them were “Mexican Peasant

Communities project” “prepared by Fay-Cooper Cole on behalf of Mr. Robert

Redfield” and Manuel Gamio’s proposal to study “Antecedents ad Conditions of

Mexican Population in the United states and the formation of a Program for a

Definite and Scientific Study of the Problem.” Ultimately, the SSRC funded Gamio’s

project for $13,000 to cover costs from July of l926 to June of l927. The following

year Redfield’s received an SSRC fellowships for “Ethnographic and Sociological

Study of a Typical Mexican Village Community.” This would become his study of

Tepotzlan. 35

Gamio planned to travel to various Mexican communities in the US, speaking

with experts, social workers, church workers and others, gathering written material

on Mexican immigrants, and conducting interviews. He hired assistants among

people he already knew. He hired Elena Landazuri to conduct some interviews in

San Antonio. He would later hire Anita Brenner to translate and edit Mexican

Taylor, On the Ground in the Thirties (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Books, 1983); Paul Taylor and Tom Vasey, "Contemporary Background of California Farm Labor," Rural Sociology, December 1936.Paul Taylor and Tom Vasey, "Historical Background of California Farm Labor," Rural Sociology, September 1936.33 It was originally called the “Social Research Council”34 University of Chicago faculty who sat on this board included Faye-Cooper Cole, Edith Abbott, Charles Merriam. The other members of the subcommittee were Clark Wissler, Robert Yerkes, and RS Woodworth. See Casey Walsh, "The Social Science Research Council and Migration Studies, (1922-1930)," unpublished ms. 1335 Ibid.;Robert Redfield, Tepotzlan: a Mexican Village, 7th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930).

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Immigration to the United States.. Brenner studied under Boas from 1927 to l930,

and was herself a pivotal liason between progressive Mexicans and north Americans.

“Deeply influenced” by Gamio’s writing, she later returned to Mexico and published,

among other works, Idols Behind Alters and The Wind that Swept Mexico. Gamio

had ongoing contact with Redfield and his wife: Margaret Redfield would write

Gamio’s chapter on corridos and Robert Redfield would eventually (at his own

suggestion) edit the book of interviews.36

But the assistant who would conduct most of the interviews was a new

acquaintance of Gamio’s, Luis Felipe Recinos, a young Salvadorian working at La

Prensa in San Antonio. Information on Recinos is spotty. Recinos was the son of a

small market owner in San Salvador. He had traveled to Guatemala in l920 and was

expelled several months later, allegedly for Bolshevik tendencies: the first and only

indication of any strong political leanings. From there he went to Mexico City, where

he said he worked as a proof reader at the Talleres Graficos de la Nacion, and editor

for a daily newspaper, El Democrata. Recinos crossed the border at Laredo, Texas

and settled in San Antonio. Gamio understood he was a reporter for La Prensa, but

the city directory listed him only as ‘worker’ until l926, when he was listed as a

reporter. Recinos met Gamio in a San Antonio hotel in October of 1926: it appears

that Recinos had gone to meet him, possibly to conduct an interview. For reasons

which remain unclear, Gamio hired Recinos a few days later. Recinos worked part

time for Gamio until March, when he quit La Prensa to work full time on the

immigration project. He reportedly worked with Gamio until the projects’ ending in

l927.37

36 Anita Brenner, Idols Behind Alters: the Story of the Mexican Spirit, 2nd (first in 1929) ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); Anita Brenner, The Wind That Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1942 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971 (1943); Delpar, Vogue of Things Mexican; Susannah Glusker, "Anita Brenner: A Mind of Her Own" (1955).37 letter from Manuel Gamio to Dr. Fay Cooper-Cole, October 20, 1926 Berkeley, CaliforniaManuel Gamio Papers, "Berkeley, California," (Bancroft Library, University of California).[Recinos, 1927 #98; consul, April 19, 1927 #330; Applers, varies.. 1924-1925..1919-1920; 1921-1922; 1922-1923; #6]; Letter from Jimenez-G, Mexican delegation in Guatemala to Al. C. Doctor Cutberto Hidalgo, subsecretariat de SRE and letters of November 10, 1920 and December 7, 1920. Mexico CityRevolucion Mexicana durante los anos del 1910-1920, "Mexico City," (SRE); John F. Worley Directory Co, John F Worley Directory Co's (incorporated) San Antonio City Directory, 1927-1928 (San Antonio, Texas: John F. Worley Directory Co. Incorporated, 1928); Manuel Gamio, Mexican Immigration; Mexican Consul (no name), "Informe Sobre Los Ciudadanos Mexicanos Residentes in la Jurisdiccion del Consulado de Mexico in Tucson, Arizona," (Manuel Gamio Papers, Sept 11,

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Recinos was young and single, and probably charming, adventuresome and a

fast talker. Gamio thought that Recinos had been a reporter “for a number of years”,

but clearly didn’t know Recinos well enough to even remember his first name

several months later. Recinos was not an obvious choice .He was not well educated,

having completed only one year of high school and two years of commercial shop.

He was also no auto-didactic and admitted “No soy ‘muy leido’” and that ‘cualquier

persona ha leido mucho mas que yo.”38 His notes are poorly spelled and

ungrammatical, which might call into question whether he had worked as a reporter.

Recinos was clearly concerned bout the conditions and treatment of Mexican

immigrants. He could be a snob towards those he considered of “lower station” and

obsequious to those he admired. He was also a womanizer.

The making of the interviews :initial conversations, Gamio, Redfield and Taylor

Gamio did want to understand and collect materials about the immigrants’

“material and mental life.” Yet he felt that overall the interviews were of “generally

slight and relative” value because the statements people made in interviews often

contradicted “the real characteristics of their lives.” He had only a limited interest in

the subjective. To get around what he considered the primary methodological

problem with life histories, he instructed the interviewers in how to gather the

information. Believing that a direct interview would make people self conscious and

lead to evasive answers, Gamio suggested that the interviews be done surreptitiously

He suggested they talk to people within a group, ostensibly join in their conversation

and listen to responses. He argued that this “pretense of interest” and apparent

“indifference” “generally awoke in [the immigrant’s] mind a process of

introspection. His memory was stimulated; reactions relating to the present arose and

reactions of the past were recalled – all of which yielded a body of statements and

confidences satisfactory because of their sincerity and spontaneity. Once the

interviewer gained the confidence of the individual, “observation was continued by

direct questioning.” By the same token, he recommended that interviewers hide their

note taking, and either take “notes under suitable pretexts so that our subjects might

1926); Luis Felipe Recinos, "Recinos notes on meeting with Immigration officials in Ciudad Juarez,", Manuel Gamio Collection (Berkeley: Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley, 1927). 38 Luis Felipe Recinos notes in Interview with Victoria Garza, December 6, 1926, San Antonio.M.

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not be conscious that we were transcribing their ideas and words” or scribble down

the notes as soon as they were out of sight.39

Gamio prepared a guide for the ‘field workers’ and “an outline of points to be

considered, both objectively and subjectively, with regard to the Mexican

immigrants: those who preserve their own nationality, those who become

nationalized Americans, and those who are Americans by birth but of Mexican

descent.” He stressed that interviews should direct attention to “typical

representatives of the Mexican immigrants,” that is “mestizos and full-blooded

Indians who make up the greater part of both unskilled and skilled labor.” He divided

the work into two parts. One was to make ‘objective observations’ on immigrants’

material lives and attitudes. Within this category, the assistants were asked to

observe food , housing , and clothing, religion, amusements, sports and the

newspapers they read. What was their economic situation, their education, vices, and

crimes, experience with racial prejudice and the cultural attributes and ceremonies of

Mexico they maintained. The second part of the interviews was composed of

subjective observations by immigrants. Here, the areas of questioning was around

patriotism (towards Mexico and/or the United States), racial beliefs and preferences;

adoption of US material culture; religion, both religious views, attitudes towards the

Catholic church and those of the Protestants, and the prevalence of superstitions and

brjueria. Gamio wanted to know about what organizations or clubs workers joined

and why. And for the Mexican immigrants, why did they leave Mexico, how long

had they been in the US, and did they plan to return.40

We will return in a moment to discussing the interviews themselves, and the

conversations between these questions, the interviewer and the immigrants. But first

I want to discuss the participation of Robert Redfield in this project. Robert Redfield

and Gamio were clearly having discussions about immigration, both about Redfield’s

work and Redfield apparently knew about and kept abreast of the progress of

Gamio’s project. Redfield had already developed an interest in life histories, and

when the project was over urged Gamio to publish the interviews as well. Gamio was

busy writing up his own manuscript, and Redfield took over the process of 39 Manuel Gamio Mexican Immigration x-xiv.40 Ibid. “Guide for Field Workers Used in Connection with this Preliminary Study” 197-203.

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translating the interviews, selected 70 to be published, and organized them according

to categories. He wrote introductions to each of these categories. Redfield’s edited

was for years the only publication of these interviews, and thus formed the public

understanding of them. A note is therefore in order as to how he picked and edited

the interviews.

Lacking written evidence of Redfield’s rationale, we can look at later work

for indications of how he edited and used material. Redfield’s work on Tepotzlan

was just completed when he began the editing. Gamio had recommended Tepotzlan

for Redfield’s study. Tepotzlan was not an isolated village, but linked by

transportation to Mexico City and Tepotzlan had actively participated in the

revolution. The town had been a Zapatista stronghold and the revolution had

dramatically altered the towns social structure. By the l920s, Tepotzlan’s Bolshevik

faction numbered over l00 and there were ongoing, intense and sometimes armed

political conflicts. A shoot out in the town plaza between the Bolsheviks and

invading Cristeros, witnessed by the Redfields, was upsetting enough to force them

to flee to the calmer neighborhood of Tacubaya near Mexico City. From then on

Redfield commuted to Tepotzlan. Yet Redfield’s published work on the town was a

whitewashed shadow of a complex town. Redfield’s Tepotzlan was curiously bucolic

and pristine. Redfield adopted what his informant had no doubt told him were the

terms used to designate the divided citizenry. One group Redfield classified as

‘tontos’ who were “ignorant, who have no shoes, no chairs, and who preserve

aboriginal ways in a very large part.” He contrasted them to the ‘corectos’, the

modernizers whom he envisioned were leading the town towards progress and

modernity. Paul Sullivan points out that Redfield’s data was thin and spotty and

based primarily on one informant, Jesus Conde, a ‘corecto.’ 41 Tepotzlan, Redfield

claimed, was moving slowly on a smooth continuum between folk and urban towards

a US defined modern society. In a fascinatingly bold manipulation of data, the

revolution and the Zapatistas were distant memory, there was no Cristero revolt, no

power struggles, and no Bolsheviks.42

41Redfield said the designations of ‘tonto’ and ‘corectos’ were used in the village. Since this information was most probably based on Conde, I assume it reflects the attitudes of the ‘corectos’ towards the other residents of Tepotzlan. 42 For discussions of Redfield’s work, see Godoy, “Redfield’s Tepotzlan.”

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As Paul Sullivan commented on a later study, Redfield’s “selection,

assemblage, and interpretations of them [Mayans] to constitute a portrait of folk

society required prodigious feats of imagination an denial, particularly

concerning….relations with foreigners like himself.” 43 Redfield conceptualized the

transition to urban industrial society as corresponding to the model of United States

capitalism, not the Bolshevik vision of modern society offered by a young Soviet

Union. The US of the l920s was in the midst of a ‘red scare’: the government had

suppressed radical groups, persecuted the Industrial Workers of the World (and the

Partido Liberal Mexicano) , passed criminal syndicalism laws making it in effect

illegal for left wing organizations to organize, and deported alien communists and

anarchists. Within this fevered fear of Bolshevism, the US wanted to extend both aid

and political influence to Mexico. US policy stressed that positive social change was

possible only through education and US technology, not through revolution. This

conclusion would have been impossible to reach with an honest accounting of

Tepotzlan. Redfield’s sanitized Tepotzlan conformed to US interests, and American

officials later used the study for US Mexican policy. Nevertheless, it must have

required a steely and cynical determination to maintain the resolutely romantic image

of a bucolic town while fleeing gun battles in the local plaza. Through his

professional life, Redfield continued to highlight the primitive and exotic isolated

from forces of modernity, homogeneous, illiterate (and presumed ignorant) and

primitive.

Redfield continued to manipulate data with apparent ease. Paul Sullivan

writes about Redfield's work among the Mayans of Quintana Roo, whom Sullivan

describes as “the disinherited offspring of colonial empires and part time laborers in

the capitalist world economy, as well as citizens of a ‘community’ of nations

repeatedly at war with itself.” The Mayans of Quintana Roo were truculently

43 [Sullivan, 1991 #793] 156-159.Clearly Stocking is straining to be polite in his characterization of Redfield in these matters. For discussion of Morley and Redfield among the Mayas see Paul Sullivan, Unfinished Conversations: Mayas and Foreigners Between Two Wars (Berkeley: University of Californai Press, 1991).. Franz Boas denounced unnamed anthropologists (but clearly Morley) in a l9l9 article in The Nation. As a result, Boas was censored by the Council of the American Anthropological Association, and it was not until l967 that the Association adopted a stand against anthropologists engaging in espionage in areas they worked. Ibid. 135-136? Ibid. 156-159.

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dissatisfied after extensive associations with foreigners had taught them that the

world was “treacherous.” They wanted “not sympathy but guns” from foreigners

they encountered. These Mayans had attempted to develop relations with foreign

governments, and had knowledge of and connections with the outside world which

included a well documented and disastrous relationship with Sylvanus Morley, an

agent of the US Naval Intelligence. Redfield ignored these multiple connections to

the modern world, and compared the Mayans of Quintana Roo disfavorably to

another Mayan village, Chan Kom. In the book he tellingly subtitled A Village That

Chose Progress, Redfield described these Mayans as “good” Mayans, open to US

government defined progress, and willing to received assistance from the Mexican

government and outside interests. Redfield preferred their openness, to the more

worldly Mayans of Quinatana Roo who distrusted outside interference as those of

Chan Kom would later.44

The interviews: Conversations, dialogues, and songs

The interviews published in Gamio’s book have been used by scholars

writing about the l920s. Some scholars have gone to the archival source, the tattered

sheets of typewritten notes battered out by Recinos on his typewriter with the

misspellings, cross outs, real names, and Redfield’s occasional note on the

interviews or a furious exclamation about Recinos unorthodox methods. Vicki Ruiz

and Luis Arroyo have briefly discussed interviewer Luis Felipe Recinos, but for the

most part the interviews are presented as short monologues.45

These interviews were not, of course, monologues. They were brief notes, of

from half a page to three pages, of Recino’s comments and his rendition of the

immigrants statements. These dialogues were part of broader conversations in the

making of this project between Recinos (and occasionally Landazuri), Gamio’s

questions, Redfield’s editorial hand, translators who converted the distinctive

Spanish into English, and the immigrants. We have relatively little to go on about

these conversations between the interviewers and immigrants: Recino’s notes,

augmented by material gleaned from historical archives. But with what we have, lets

attempt a reconstruction of these interactions. 44 Ibid. 45 Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadow,

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The words on a written page are a bit like a musical score without

instruments. Silent. But imagine the possibilities: the lilt in the voice, hand gestures,

facial expressions, the pauses, the silences, the vocal emphasis….the hesitations. The

“pues” which gives room to pause for thought, the working class slang and cadence,

various words mixing the English with Spanish. There was background noise and

movements surrounding the conversations…… chatter of other people, in homes the

offers of food or beer; music; asides to other people; or simply the hum of family

members, neighbors, barking dogs, and the clatter of the streets. Some of the noise

and activity might be telling…..a father yelling “Mija, shut off that damn jazz

noise!”, or the different dress of teenaged children coming and going.

Into this has stepped Luis Felipe Recinos, a young man, whom I envision as a

bright, fast talking, possibly duplicitous charmer. Recinos doesn’t explain how found

the people he interviewed, but the dates and occasional comments suggest he started

with workers at La Prensa, moved on to people in the surrounding San Antonio

plaza, and branched off from there. In each town he interviewed newspaper men,

whom I suspect were his first contacts and provided many of the introductions to

people he interviewed. Gamio had given no directions as to the distribution of

interviewees, and the interviews were disproportionately with newspaper men,

members of the small middling class, mutualista officials and settled workers. There

were few migrants. He interviewed people on the street, at bars and dance halls, but

there is no evidence that he tried to find people near work sites. There’s no indication

that he sought out perspectives on organizations other than mutualistas, although he

did occasionally encountered them. His tendency to interview whom he saw as

community ‘leaders’ may have obfuscated leaders within other circles. He relied

more heavily on longer termed residents, understandable as easier to meet, but

underrepresented the more transient and poorer workers. This random selection was

sensible and followed the path of least resistance. But how did this shape his

impression of local communities, and the nature of Mexican immigrants?46

46 For discussion of these questions, see Jorge E. Aceves, ed., Historia Oral: ensayos y aportes de investigacion. Seminario de Historio Oral y Enfoque Biografico (Mexico DF: CIESAS, 1996). Power and Place: Re-Shaping Mexican Identities in Los Angeles, 1900-1930Luis Leobardo Arroyo, "Power and Place: Re-Shaping Mexican Identities in Los Angeles, 1900-1930," (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University, Julian Samora Research Institute, March 1996), 13.

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And what assumptions did Recinos bring to these interactions? His

assumptions would have shaped how he asked Gamio’s questions (as well as some

he may have added), and emerge in his assessments of who was worth interviewing

and who was most accurate or valuable. Recinos could be a snob about some people

and obsequious to others. When Recinos interviewed La Prensa traveling

correspondent, Manuel Marquez, he went to great pains to carefully and accurately

transpose every word. Recinos explained “He procurado transcribir integras las

declaraciones del señor Márquez, que me parecen muy interesantes. Me he guardado

muy bien de no poner en ellas ni más ni menos; si en algunas, por inconsciencia he

usado de otro lenguaje, es decir otra forma de expresión a la usada por el señor

Márquez, he tenido el cuidado especial de que sus ideas y su modo de pensar no

sufran alteración alguna.” But such care was not exercised with everybody, and

Recinos could be dismissive of some interviewees. Recinos freely admitted he was

not well educated, and paid attention to the efforts of parents to teach their children

Spanish and history, and had a respect for intellectuals, regardless of class. Of one

poor couple he dismissed as “Muy estúpida, que se expresa con dificultad, muy

ingnorante, dice que vivió siempre en rancho y no pudo ir a la escuela. ...:” He wrote

down neither their names nor the date.

When women weren’t present, Recino’s conversations with male immigrants

often turned to sexual conquests. We don’t know what Recinos said, but the

conversations suggested he participated in the discussions which did not emanate

from Gamio’s list of questions. Recinos also had a one night stand with a dance hall

worker, Elisa Morales, which he reported in great detail as part of his ‘research.’

Recinos, noting that “que fueron trabadas especialmente para este estudio”,

described meeting her in the dance hall, flirting and dancing and, later, sex with her.

He described her body, her birth control methods, and reported on the sex. “...me

Michael Frisch, "The Memory of History," Radical History Review.Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (1990).Daphne Patai and Sherna Gluck, ed., Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991).Ron Grele, Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History (1985).Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).Alessandro Portelli, "The Peculiarities of Oral History," History Workship 12.

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pareció muy tosca, es decir, que trataba muy al estilo americano...” 47 . But he also

described his sleazy methods of seduction: he told her he was “enamorado de ella”,

and promised her money which he never paid. This self congratulatory tale was

Recino’s only direct foray into sexuality, aside from conversations with men. Not

surprisingly, there is no discussion of or hints at either male sexuality or

homosexuality. Men remained sexually authoritative and thus free from scrutiny.

In one interview Redfield omitted from the book, Jose Fernandez Rojas a

“jefe de redacción de noche” at La Prensa made a telling statement about sex,

national revenge, and the complicated criss crossing of gender and racial/national

difference. Rojas said, “No me faltado nada, he tenido buenas mujeres, pues soy muy

afecto a ellas, especialmente a las ‘gringas’ y cada vez que estoy fornicando a una de

ellas hago de caso que estoy vengando una de las ofensas cometidas a mi patria por

este pais.” And whether motivated by forestalling serious involvement or in

retaliation against Anglo men, he told Recinos “Me he dedicado especialmente a

enamorar mujeres casadas...” 48

Both Gamio and Recinos assumed immigrants as objects of study, yet

Recinos clearly had his own ideas about .the relative value of different interviewees.

He judged journalists and upper class immigrants as more accurate and trustworthy.

His favoring of certain interviews directed Gamio, and also the reader, as to how

much credence he should give each interview. In effect his assessments, and

probably Gamio’s own, reflected class and ethnic hierarchies. The more value

placed on an interview, the more care Recinos took in transcribing the words exactly.

Most of the journalists apparently knew they were being interviewed. Gamio,

worried that if people knew they were being interviewed would be hesitant to speak

frankly, told the interviewers to use subterfuge. We can only guess at how people

reacted to speaking with Recinos or Landazuri, or how they might have reacted to

knowing they were being interviewed. Would it have changed what they said and, if

so, how? Gamio’s assumption that surreptitious observation would lead to more

‘truth’ is debatable: it only meant that people were reacting out of a different 47 Vicki Ruiz discusses this incident, Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: 61-62; Interview with Elisa Morales, April 16, 1927, Los Angeles.48 Interview with Jose Fernandez Rojas March 3, 1927, San Antonio, Texas; Interview with Elisa Morales.

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understanding of the conversation, not necessarily one which was more truthful.

Interviewers lying to people is rightfully criticized now on ethical grounds. But

subterfuge, which implicitly maintains the interviewee as object, precludes the

possibility of a more revealing dialogue. If people had known they were being

interviewed would they have interjected the questions they considered important, or

didactically lecture Recinos on what they would like preserved for history? In short,

without knowledge of the interview, its harder to envision how these immigrants

would have structured their lives differently for Recinos.

The interviews were next used by Gamio. He culled information from them

but made few references to the interviews or quoted any one person. He used them in

conjunction with other sources. As Gamio was metaphorically packing them up for

storage, Redfield suggested the interviews be published on their own. Redfield

recognized that the interviews were “brief statements made to hurried investigators

in the course of casual contacts,” not life histories of more developed relations and

conversation. He also recognized their value to “give us some degree of

understanding of the Mexican immigrant; after reading them we know better what to

expect of him, and we are in a better position to formulate scientific problems about

him.” 49 Redfield clearly was bored by some of the interviews …… and finds that

“the experiences of the Mexican of little education….repeat themselves almost to

monotony.” He eliminated the interviews that “seemed…to throw no light on the

behavior of Mexican immigrants,” cut some passages, and occasionally when a

“phrase was ambiguous” edited the statement to be “intelligible.” In keeping with the

promised confidentiality of the interviews, Redfield changed the personal names, and

removed many place names to protect anonymity. Redfield then did “little more than

group them under what seemed to me appropriate headings.” And although each

interview often had a number of points, by grouping them he emphasized some

points while ignoring others. His introductory comments to each section “are to be

considered as the leads or hypothesis which the materials suggest to me” which

should be explored further.”50

49Redfield introduction, Gamio, Life Story of the Mexican Immigrant. xii-xiii50 Ibid.

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In this process, these notes of interviews were translated into English by

Robert C. Jones, and then grouped again by Redfield. Translation itself robs the

linguistic tools of an interviewee: it eliminates working class cadence, slang, and

undermines the subtleties of words and phrasing. It is a form of “linguistic

colonization,” which buries the interviewee in the shroud of another tongue.51

Redfield’s choices and grouping further regimented the by now translated interviews.

Redfield’s categorized the interviews thusly. The first four sections were: “The

Mexican Leaves Home;” “First Contacts;” “The United States as a Base for

Revolutionary Activity;” and “The Economic Adjustment” (further divided into ‘the

village Indian’, ‘mestizo and middle class,’ ‘mobility in the United States’, ‘mobility

in Mexico,’ ‘the uses of literacy’ and ‘the second generation.)’ These were followed

by “Conflict and Race-Consciousness”, a section divided into “the Migratory

Laborer”, “Some Immigrant Women,” “Patriotism”, “Spanish’ Mexicans”. The sixth

section was “The Leader and the Intellectual,” which he subdivided into “Three

Urban Mexicans,” Evangelical Protestantism,” and Journalism and Leadership.” The

next section was on “Assimilation” and the final was, “The Mexican-American.” The

complete listing of interviews, pseudonyms and the categories are reproduced in the

Appendix, but a few comments on Redfield’s choices and categories, and their

omissions and elisions.

Who did Redfield reject completely? Recinos’ sexual encounter was cut, as

were Rojas’ comments. In the section under Economic Adjustment, categories and

pseudonyms erase several pertinent points: the identity of photographer Cassasola,

who had fled Mexico after being charged with embezzling funds while serving as

consul; under ‘the uses of literacy’ glossing over what the immigrants read; and

burying the point that several workers listened avidly to socialist and anarchist

speakers in Los Angeles downtown Plaza. One, possibly as part of his ‘economic

adjustment’ was planning to join the Industrial Workers of the World. Redfield chose

the interviews for “The Leader and the Intellectual” for their formal education and

“greater sophistication.” Noting that most were “of white blood”, Redfield

51 For an incisive discussion of translation and imperialism, see Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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established this group as the educated ‘observers’ and assured the readers that they

all presented “a fairly objective and realistic statement.” These men included one ex-

Mexican consul, three Protestant ministers; and three journalists whom he dubbed

also as ‘leaders.” Redfield omits the autodidacts, and implicitly denies that heads of

unions, mutualistas or other community organizations were leaders. In his choices he

demonstrated a ease with manipulating data in similar ways as he had on Tepotlzn. .

Yet the voices of the immigrants’ counter narratives comes through these

cross cutting conversations, emerge through hastily scribbled notes of their words,

translation and editing. Immigrants raised themes not stressed by Gamio, Recinos or

Redfield: the breadth of work experience in the mines, factories and fields of both

countries; the complexity of gender relations; organizing and radical ideas. And here

they are at least presented in the language of Recino’s notes, as close we can come to

their own words. We come to these statements from another time, with different

questions and understandings, to engage in yet another conversation with Gamio,

Recinos, Redfield and the immigrants of the 1920s, and the voices of immigrants

II: THE WORLDS OF MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS

In this section, we return to Jose Castillo and the concrete, and often

contradictory, world faced by Mexican immigrants of l926 and l927 in Texas,

California and Arizona. Luis Felipe Recinos began in San Antonio, went to the

border towns of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez…. staying longer than anticipated to

clear up his immigration status (he had entered without papers) after being stopped

and detained at the border. He then went to Los Angeles before doubling back to

interview immigrants in the Arizona cities of Tucson and Phoenix, and the mining

towns of Miami and Superior. There were, of course, similarities to the experiences

of Mexicans in each area, yet each community had been formed out of different

historical circumstances: San Antonio, the old center of Mexican Texas where brutal

conflicts continued; Los Angeles, the hub of immigrants, cultural change, and the

largest of the Mexican populations; Tucson, where descendents of the older Mexican

families who predated US conquest coexisted with a growing population of

immigrants; and the mining towns of Miami and Superior, where segregation

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permeated everything from the housing, to the churches, to the wage structures and

the jobs.

Who were “Mexicans?” In the l920 s US, the term “Mexican” could mean

new immigrants, immigrants in the US for several decades, and children born there.

They were Tejanos, Californios, New Mexicans, and Tucsonenses. They were

Mexicans from the states and indigenous groups of Mexico. The overwhelming

number were workers, but there was also a small Mexican elite and refugees from

conflicts in Mexico. Others were members of a nascent and small middle class: store

keepers, barbers, school teachers, and traders. Mexicans had worked in agriculture,

in the mines, in factories, in stores and offices and on the railroads. Many wanted to

return to Mexico, others wanted to stay. Some liked the US, others hated it and

worried that their children were becoming agringada. Men complained about

Mexican women changing in the US. They were religious, they were anti-clerics.

Catholic and Protestant. They were Wobblies, Magonistas, Villistas, Carrancistas

and the apolitical. Some had fought in the revolution, all had been affected by the

fighting, and many had moved north in its wake. They held in common their pride in

being Mexican, in Mexican culture, and their almost unanimous refusal to become

citizens of the United States. They lived in cities, company towns, agricultural

camps: most had lived in a number of these places. These are their stories. 52

Texas: Class Divisions, Border Conflict, and Base of Revolution

Texas’ history was one of conflicts. Texas had been the bone of contention

between Mexico and invading Anglo Americans who launched the revolution against

the Mexican government which would eventually lead to the Mexican-American

war. After 1848, incoming Anglos pushed Mexican landowners off their lands and

edged out Mexican traders. Some were disposed by the workings of economic

change, but others faced open and armed coercion by gunmen hired by Anglo

landowners and the Texas Rangers. Open warfare continued in southern Texas, and

the story of a Mexican who shot and killed an Anglo sheriff became immortalized in

Corrido del Gregorio Cortez because it so exemplified the still bitter feelings and

52 For an interesting discussion on Mexicano culture and relation to class, see Juan Gomez-Quinones, On Culture, Popular Series 1 (Los Angeles: UCLA, Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 1977).

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conflicts. As Americo Paredes has pointed out, these conflicts heightened a sense of

Mexican nationalism, and gave birth to the modern corrido.53 If borders sharpened

identities, south Texas was at the cutting edge of Mexican nationalism.

Texas had also become a staging area for Mexican revolts and revolution. El

Paso - Ciudad Juárez was the largest immigrant port of entry and the major economic

entrepot for US and Mexican railroads and trade. During the revolution, this border

town divided by the Rio Grande, had been the major thoroughfare for weapons and

refugees, and a hotbed of plots and spies. It was in El Paso that the Partido Liberal

Mexicano hatched their unsuccessful plan to capture Ciudad Juarez, where Francisco

Madero launched his successful attack on Juarez, and where Adolfo de la Huerta

made plans to topple Madero. By l927, Texas was still the site for political plots and

intrigue, but by now these were being developed by deposed Porfiriatos and

conservative members of the Catholic Church. Felix Diaz, Porfirio Diaz’ nephew and

himself the instigator of a plot against Madera, was touring Mexican communities to

gather support for reestablishing the Mexican Constitution of l857. And in 1927 the

US Department of Justice uncovered a ‘vasto complot’ by Adolfo de la Huerta to

finance a revolution in Mexico from his base in Texas.54

San Antonio, just north of the Valley of South Texas, was an old Mexican

town, and the culture, language and people were still heavily Mexicano. By the

1920s, San Antonio had also become a thriving entrepot and labor center. In 1927,

La Prensa reported that two thousand Mexicans had arrived at Ciudad Juarez, part of

the workers who were arriving daily by train from central Mexico. Most, it was

reported, planned to head to California to work the harvests. Mexicans gathered at

employment offices, such as the Alamo City Employment Agency, to sign up for

work in Colorado’s sugar beet fields, the railroads, industrial plants of Detroit or

Chicago, or for local work in Texas. Spanish language newspapers carried the

53 Limon, Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems.; Zamora The World of the Mexican Worker; Montejano Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas; Américo Paredes, With His Pistol in his Hand: A Border Ballad and its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971 (1958)).54 [Timmons, 1990 #342; Garcia, 1981 #534; Velez-Ibanez, 1996 #833]; on the various plots see La Prensa 3/12/25.

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ubiquitous and frantic ads for workers, often nestled next to articles warning laborers

of crooked Enganchadores and employers. 55

The class divisions of the Mexican community were outlined by the San

Pedro river which flowed through the middle of San Antonio. To the East, on the

heights, lived the wealthy exiled ex-generals, politicians, clergy and intelligencia.

Some had come during the revolution – landowners, Diaz supporters, journalists, and

supporters of vanquished revolutionary factions. By the l920s, San Antonio had

become a destination for Mexicans clergy fleeing the anti-clerical edicts of the

l920s. At one point eight refugee Bishops, including the Archbishop of Mexico City

expelled in l927, lived in San Antonio. These refugees brought with them an elite’s

sense of class and race, and formed a group which lived apart from the working class

barrios. The interests of this group of immigrants remained focused on Mexico, not

the US, and were fired by a desire to return in power. Newspapers, such as La

Prensa, reflected the elite’s interest in Mexican politics and culture, and their interest

in elevating and ‘educating’ fellow Mexicans who were workers. 56

To the West of the Creek, next to the Stockyards and the red light district,

lived working class Mexicans. This barrio was home to over 40% of the Mexican

population. Overcrowded shacks were squeezed together, uncomfortably close to the

outhouses. These shacks were floorless, lacked indoor plumbing or electricity:

people paid $2 to $8 a month rent. By the late l920s cottages, some with electricity,

gas and access to sewers, began to dot the barrio. The conditions of life contributed

to a painful toll in death and diseases. Tuberculosis was rampant, and when the

influenza epidemic hit San Antonio, it was “en el distrito mexicano y especialmente

en los suburbios ocupados por las clases mas necesitadas y humildes, es donde mas

peligro hay ahora.” This barrio centered around the San Fernando Church and Milam

Plaza, an old political center, where people still gathered to talk, listen to a ‘reader’

of the daily newspaper, heatedly debated politics, and sometimes sang corridos.57

55 La Prensa 3/20/27.56 Richard Amado Garcia, "The Making of the Mexican-American Mind. San Antonio, Texas, 1929-1941: A Social and Intellectual History of an Ethnic Community" (Ph. D., University of California, Irvine, 1980), 96-103, 176-179.57 Garcia, Mexican American Mind

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Mexicans in San Antonio, as in other areas, wanted their children educated,

even if parents were sometimes forced to pull children out of school to work. Texas

schools were segregated. Teachers punished students who spoke Spanish on campus

and schooling didn’t include what parents felt was an adequate history of Mexico or

Mexicans. As these interviews testify, the Spanish language and Mexican history

were important enough that some working families took the time to laboriously teach

their children themselves. In other areas Mexicans set up schools for their children.

In Cotulla Texas, they set up an Escuela Mexicana, praised by La Prensa as “una

prueba palpable de mexicanismo” to “imbuir en el espiritu de los hijos de mexicanos

radicados en este pais, el perfecto conocimiento de la lengua y el amor hacia la

patria.” 58 The Professor who established a “colegio Mexicano” in the office of the

Sociedad Hijos de México in San Antonio, explained its intention to “cultiva

nuestros idioma castellano….y las materias de carácter cultural….y se de especial

atención a la enseñanza de nuestra geógrafa y nuestra historia.”…”para formar el

corazón del niño mexicano, inculcándole la religión de la patria.” in effect, “una

educación completa, sólida y eminentemente nacional.”59

Mexican adults could also enjoy an active informed and intellectual life,

although not all did so. Among workers, there were some who were auto didacts,

such as Jose Santamaria. Santamaria, a “peón, jornaleros en ‘lo que halle’, was a

voracious reader whose father had taught him Spanish and of Mexico and who in

turn taught his own children. San Antonio had eleven Spanish language newspapers

of various political stripes. There were relatively high rates of illiteracy among the

newer Mexican immigrants, but illiteracy didn’t necessarily relegate one to complete

ignorance. Those wanting news could usually find a ‘reader’ at a Mexican plaza, and

literate workers read to their paisanos who could not.60

Texas was still riddled with attacks on Mexicans. Certainly , this was part of

a broader upsurge in overtly violent racism across the US. Many Anglo Americans,

especially of the middle and upper classes, were perturbed by labor strikes, changing

gender relations, African American militancy and the effects of ‘undesirable’

58 La Prensa 12/26/2659 Ibid 3/16/2760 Interview with Jose Santamaria, April 27, 1927, Tucson Arizona; Garcia, Mexican American Mind

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immigration. Some joined the movement for “100% Americanism” which called for

a return to an imaginary nation of white Anglo Saxon Protestants cleansed of Jews,

blacks, Catholics and immigrants. Eugenicists still argued the ‘scientific’ proof of

racial inferiority and pressed for restricting immigration. A revived Ku Klux Klan

gained a massive following outside the south. In the north, a series of brutal race

riots broke out in l9l9 as whites hunted down and killed blacks. White supremacy

groups waged a reign of terror. Between 1882 and l934 over five thousand people

were lynched by vigilantes. The majority were southern black men who were

lynched, burned to death, and mutilated in front of large crowds who gathered in

carnival like atmosphere to view the spectacle. Viewers often posed for pictures with

dangling corpses and ripped off body parts to keep for souvenirs. Mexicans were a

prime target in the Southwest. They were viewed by many Anglo Americans as

inferior due to “Indian blood’, and barely tolerated as temporary, cheap and

expendable labor. Immediately following World War I, one Mexican was lynched

each week in Texas, on the average. In one Texas town 300 whites drove out all the

blacks and Mexicans.61

Tejanos were understandably among the first to form protective

organizations. Following World War I Tejanos formed the League of Latin

American Citizens (LULAC), a middle class organization which argued for their

civil rights as American citizens of Mexican descent. Organizations such as LULAC

soon became involved in electoral politics, a forerunner to a more “Mexican

American” perspective of Mexicanos who were citizens in the US and wanted to

carve out a political niche from which to fight for basic civil rights.

Los Angeles: Immigration Center, large Mexican population, and laboratory of

cultural tensions and change

By l920 more Mexicans lived in Los Angeles than any other place in the

world outside of Mexico City. It was also becoming a center for immigration and a

crucible of cultural tension and change. Los Angeles had been a predominantly

61 The racial climate of the US can be seen in:[MacLean, 1994 #158; Tuttle, 1997 #162; Gordon, #186; Altschuler, 1982 #214; Carter, 1975 #215; Wolf, Feb. 1994 #249; Laughlin, 1922 #296; Almaguer, 1994 #378; Gordon, 1999 #554; Rydell, 1993 #762][Cardoso, 1976 #425; Chalmers, 1981 #433] Zamora, World of the Mexican Worker; Montejano Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas; Foley White Scourge. “Race riots” meant whites attacking blacks.

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Mexican city until the l880s, and by the l920s railroads linked LA to Mexico and

other parts of the United States. New immigrants gravitated to the Mexican center of

LA, called Sonoratown. Nestled close to the old Placita and the railroad tracks,

Enganchadores set up makeshift offices and signed up job-hungry migrants to work

in Colorado’s sugar beet fields, Midwestern mines and railroads and agricultural

fields. Mexicans were also the laboring backbone of Los Angeles: they constructed

the roads, worked in garment factories, canneries, small manufacturing, furniture

shops, cement factories, nurseries and lumber, and at the docks at the San Pedro

harbor. Mexicans worked at low paying jobs where conditions were often dangerous.

Agricultural work, stretching ten or more hours a day, required stooping and rapid

picking which strained or injured backs. Small children tagging along with their

parents were sometimes smothered in a bed of cotton or could be crushed by a

machine. Garment workers sometimes sewed through their fingers in their haste to

meet the piece rate set quotas. Industrial machinery took its toll on workers such as

Leonardo Cuellar, who died after his left arm was crushed by machine gears at the

Salado Gravel Company.62

They worked at jobs similar to those they had done in Mexico, and labored at

a smorgasbord of often seasonal jobs which enabled them to piece together a living.

Recinos interviewed ELIAS GARZA, a displaced sharecropper from Michoacan,

who had worked in a Mexican sugar mill, labored on Kansas railroads, and finally

settled in Los Angeles where he pieced together a living with jobs at a packing plant,

a stone quarry, at a railroad, and picking cotton. GILBERT HERNANDEZ, although

trained as a printer in Mexico, had helped build Mexican railroads, and mined

copper in Cananea mines. In California, he had found work as a day laborer and

picked crops before eventually managing a pool hall. While seasonal work was

uncertain, the multiplicity of jobs meant that often agricultural workers were also

miners, day laborers, engineers, steel hands or even artisans.63

By the time Recinos came to Los Angeles, economic expansion and an

extensive interurban railway system had enabled Mexicans to move out from the

62 By 1920, 33,644 Mexicans lived in Los Angeles. By 1930 the population would reach 97,116. [Monroy, 1999 #664]63 PUT INFO RE INTERVIEWS

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Placita to surrounding areas. They had moved into the eastside communities of

Belvedere, Boyle Heights, Maravilla and barrios in communities such as Anaheim,

El Monte, Pacoima, Azusa, Corona, San Fernando. They had moved south into Watts

(known by Mexicans as Tejuata), and west to the barrio of Sotelo in West Los

Angeles which had grown out of the camp for Mexican workers who had constructed

the Red Car Line. Recinos found Mexican neighborhoods segregated, the housing

poor and without the basic amenities of running water, electricity or paved streets.

Some immigrants lived in box cars, in tents or rows of four room houses where each

house was occupied by several families. Others lived in agricultural camps under

tents or canvas stretched across trees or bushes: they relied on the irrigation ditches

for the water to clean clothes, bathe or drink. Those with steady work settled in

homes, renting the land for a few dollars a month or buying on credit. Some settled

in house courts, which Recinos described as shacks “of scavenged materials or

boards held together with battens or strips of wood hammered over the ends of

boards where they connected.” Many kept a goat, roosters, or a cow and grew corn

and other crops as insurance against hard times. The poor conditions affected their

health. In l927 Mexicans composed more than eleven percent of Los Angeles’

population, but accounted for fourteen percent of the deaths. The mortality rate for

Mexican babies was more than twice as high as that for Anglo American infants.64

There was a small elite in Los Angeles, and a small but growing middle class.

Some were from old families. Some worked in various capacities as intermediaries,

such as Francisco Palomares who procured Mexican workers for Speckles sugar

before becoming director of the San Joaquin Agricultural Labor Bureau. Yet the

Mexican population and its barrios were overwhelmingly working class. Here social

and family ties cut across the faint class lines that were beginning to emerge. Store

owners, barbers, small merchants and contractors came from the working class,

depended on a working class clientele, and had relatives or compadres who still

worked for wages. These close ties generated concerns and obligations that kept

them close to their working class neighborhoods and communities. They were often

considered community representatives, were usually literate, often bilingual and had 64 Monroy, Rebirth, 19,21; Governor C.C. Young, Mexicans in California: Report of Governor C.C. Young's Mexican Fact-Finding Committee., (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1930).

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experience dealing with the bureaucracy, employers and government agencies of the

Anglo world.65

Mexicans in Los Angeles as in other areas attempted to ameliorate the worst

of conditions and provide some security for their families. What stability they had

came from the intersecting family and social networks, mutualistas, social

organizations and unions. Out of necessity, relations were still driven by mutuality

and reciprocity essential to survival. As Gamio recognized, immigrants formed

organizations and institutionalized mutualism in mutual aid societies. Mexicans

pooled their money, enabling the mutualistas to act as burial societies, and offer life

and health insurance. The membership was broad, but reflecting the communities,

tended to be mostly workers, with some small merchants and contractors as well.

The dues were low, and mutualistas still acted more out of ideas of mutuality than

stringent interpretations of membership. They usually helped indigents with medical

care, transportation to Mexico or funeral costs, and accepted memberships of the sick

and dying. Although some businessman began to complain about these practices,

most mutualistas ignored the complaints and continued to extend help to the needy,

even if not members. Mutualistas were also fluid, and transmogrified with changing

needs of the community from social institutions to temporary labor unions or even

political groups. Among dozens of these organizations, some of the largest were the

nationally based Alianza Hispano Americana, la Cruz Azul, and the Comite de

Beneficcienia Mexicana. The Mexican consul worked with these organizations, and

organized Comision Honorificas which acted as extensions of the consular office and

worked to help Mexican citizens and ward off left wing organizing.66

65 See Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold66 [Briegel, 1974 #9; 1974 #88; Sanchez, 1993 #100; Bogardus, 1934 #315] Francisco E. Balderrama, In Defense of La Raza: The Los Angeles Mexican Consulate and the Mexican Community, 1929 to 1936 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982).Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994).? Paco Ignacio-Taibo, Bolshevikis: Historia Narrativa de los Origenes del Comunismo en Mexico 1919-1925 (Mexico D.F.: Editorial Joaquin Mortiz, 1986); Javier Torres Pares, La Revolucion sin frontera: El Partido Liberal Mexicano y las relaciones entre el movimiento obrero de Mexico y de los Estados Unidos 1900-1923 (Mexico D.F.: UNAM, 1990); Dirk Raat, Revoltosos: Mexico's Rebels in the United States, 1903-1923 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981); Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold.43.

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The immigrants brought with them ideas and experiences of Mexico which

shaped their adjustment to the US. In the Mexican areas of heaviest out-migration,

there had been Indian rebellions and widespread if sporadic peasant rebellions

against land expropriations. Workers in industry had formed organizations and

participated in strikes which had helped lead to the Mexican Revolution. In the US

Mexicans were shunned by the American Federation of Labor, a grouping of craft

unions. Despite various claims that Mexicans were ‘unorganizale’ , Mexicans relied

on social networks, communal organizations, unions and alliances with sympathetic

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and affiliates of the Communist Party of the

Untied States.67

Mexicans were vital to both US and Mexican social conflicts of the early 20th

century. Mexican immigrants had lived through the revolution and, as Adolfo Gilly

commented, “stored up a wealth of experience and consciousness.” Haunting

personal memories of rapacious carnage coexisted with personal connections to and

aspirations for a revolution for social change. There were ongoing divisions among

Mexicans which stemmed from the revolution, and veterans of various factions

refought old battles in frequent arguments in labor camps, on the streets or in town

plazas. The revolution was a formative experience of immigrant workers of the

l920s. Organizer Leroy Parra said that while unions were new to many of them “the

Mexican people are revolutionary as it is. They had [the Mexican Revolution] behind

them that helped them to see the exploitation here in this country.” Even if few

joined unions, Mexicans were receptive to labor and left wing organizations that

“helped the working people”.68

Ricardo Flores Magon, leader of the anarcho-syndicalist Partido Liberal

Mexicano, had left Mexico and recreated the PLM in Los Angeles. By l9l4 the PLM

had an estimated membership of 6000 in the US, and in Los Angeles alone over

10,500 people read the PLM newspaper, Regeneracion. The PLM worked with

German, Italian and Anglo American anarchists, holding meetings in the Italian hall

and organizing various demonstrations in the Placita a block away. The PLM allied 67 Paco Ignacio-Taibo, Bolshevikis; Javier Torres Pares, La Revolucion sin frontera; Dirk Raat, Revoltosos; Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold.68 Adolfo Gilly, The Mexican Revolution (London: Verso Press, 1983).; interview with Leroy Parra by Devra Weber, Los Angeles, CA April 18, 1971

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with the IWW and organized together in both countries. Although the PLM had

declined in size and militancy by l925, a victim of government persecution,

anarchists remained influential in labor organizing and left wing circles. By the

1920s some Progressive Mexicans began to turn to the CPUSA. The PCM had only

sporadic and informal contacts with their compatriots in the US, but the PCM

newspaper El Machete had a broad circulation, especially in Los Angeles. Mexican

communists formed Spanish speaking cells of the CPUSA and younger Mexicans

joined the Young Communist League. Membership was small, yet these leftists

would play a disproportionate role in organizing and leading strikes in the l930s.69

Recino’s interviews began to answer some of Gamio’s questions about

identity and culture. Some of the questions were whether immigrants still felt

“mexicano”; whether Recinos could see signs of Mexican patriotism and

nationalism; and if there was a war between the US and Mexico, what side would the

immigrants join. The large and heavily immigrant community of Los Angeles, where

Mexicans and their children came into direct contact with Anglo Americans and

other groups, was a city where the cultural tensions, conflicts and changes could be

seen. Segregation, racism, working class status and geographic mobility of

immigrants tended to reinforce their identity as Mexicans and, coupled with their

lack of political power, underscore their reliance on each other. The expansion of the

Mexican population and barrios tended to create a stronger identification as working

class Mexicans for many immigrants. Others, especially the second generation,

learned English, and were beginning to adopt aspects of American culture.

Yet in the l920s, it was not surprising that people called themselves Mexicans

or Mexicanos, for what else were they? Many were Mexicans by birth and

citizenship: 84% of Los Angeles Mexicans had been born in Mexico. Proximity to

the border, historical tensions with the US, ongoing discrimination and poor

treatment, a constant influx of new immigrants, and the ease of returning to Mexico

contributed to a sense of Mexicanidad even after long periods of residence. Recinos

noticed the proliferation of Mexican flags and pictures of Mexican heroes in most 69 Juan Gomez-Quinones, Sembradores: Ricardo Flores Magon y el Partido Mexicano (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 1982).; William Wilson McEuen, "A Survey of the Mexicans in Los Angeles 1910-1914" (University of Southern California, 1914). Cited. Weber Dark Sweat, White Gold.

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Mexican houses, which gave “patriotism…an almost religious quality.” Few

immigrants had any intention of becoming American citizens. Among other ethnic

groups about half became naturalized citizens: only about four percent of Mexicans

changed their citizenship. Community opinion towards naturalization varied with the

community. In Los Angeles, with a large immigrant population and relatively few

Mexicans born in the US, the few who naturalized tended to keep it a secret. One

merchant who had considered becoming a citizen rejected the idea because his

clients would consider him a traitor and boycott his business. Parents encouraged

their children to learn English, but the working class language was still

overwhelmingly, and usually exclusively, Spanish.70

Within this overarching identity as Mexicans were deep divisions and

conflicts. North Americans homogenized Mexican ‘culture’, yet immigrants were a

varied group, composed of the elite of Mexico city; industrial workers, rural ex-

campesinos, and various regions and indigenous groups. Mexicans differentiated

among themselves on the basis of ethnicity, regional identities, class and length of

residence in the US. Working class immigrants, marginalized in both the US and

Mexico, were defined as much by Mexican racial and class categorizations as those

of North America. To elite Mexicans they were scorned as poor, backwards, and

‘dark.’ These class and racial fissures ran through Mexican communities, crossed

relations at work, communities and within families, and crossed both borders and

the spectrum of political opinion. Recent immigrants derisively called US-born

Mexicans agringada pochos, and these so-called ‘pochos’ called the new immigrants

“cholos” or “chimacos” and often treated them as ignorant hicks. 71

There was a cultural diversity among Mexicans formed by migration and the

complex and ambiguous relations between those in the US a generation or more,

those who were becoming “Mexican-Americans” and the newly arrived immigrants.

All these groups considered themselves “La Raza.” 72 As Vicki Ruiz points out,

“there is no single hermetic Mexican or Mexican-American culture, but rather

70 Evangeline Hymer, "A Study of the Social Attitudes of Adult Mexican Immigrants in Los Angeles and Vicinity" (M.A., University of Southern California, 1923); [Young, 1930 #534]; quote from Gamio, Mexican Immigration, 128 71 Ibid.,12972 Ibid.130

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permeable cultures rooted in generation, gender, region, class and personal

experience.” Mexicans, she noted “pick, borrow, retain and create distinctive cultural

forms.” 73 Mexican immigrants encountered the multilayered and cross cutting

cultures of the burgeoning American consumer culture, Anglo regional cultures and

differing cultures of US born Mexicans. Spanish was the language of the streets, but

Mexicans in some areas had hispanicized some English words, creating a

‘spanglish,’ and developed slang peculiar to the different parts of the southwest.

Religion was part of the culture and most Mexicans were Catholics, but what

this meant varied. There were devout Catholics who attended church regularly, those

who didn’t attend church, and anti clerics who may have believed in God but were

vehemently opposed to the Catholic Church and its priests. US Catholic churches

usually lacked Spanish speaking priests, let alone Mexican priests, and made

relatively few efforts to integrate Mexicans. Catholic church’s programs in Mexican

communities were designed to help alleviate poverty, and to combat the inroads of

Protestants and what they regarded as “communism.” The Protestant churches sent

social workers into Mexican communities and with practical help made inroads in

the community. The Los Angeles Methodists were especially active. In 1918 they

increased the resources for immigrants, established schools in immigrant areas, and

built a new Methodist church in the Mexican section of downtown LA. By 1932 Los

Angeles Baptists had founded eight Mexican churches, the Methodists had five, and

the city was dotted with Pentecostal sects whom Mexicans dubbed as the

“allelujahs.”74

In the teens North Americans, worried about large numbers of unassimilated

immigrants, had created Americanization programs to teach immigrants how to

become “American.” These programs offered lessons in English, health care,

“proper” cooking and child care, and sewing, along with classes in civic

participation, (US) patriotism, and US democracy. Mexicans gladly took the

practical classes, but the efforts to acculturate them failed. Mexicans responded to

these efforts in manners similar to the group taking classes at the Protestant-run

73 Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows.5074 n.a., "The Mexicans Are Coming," California Christian Advocate 1918.; Garcia “Mexican American Mind” 364; Monroy Rebirth 141.

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Friendly house in Phoenix Arizona. They politely attended a fourth of July

celebration, but when the American national anthem was sung they insisted on

following it with a rousing rendition of the Mexican national anthem which clarified

where their loyalties lay. Even in Tucson, with an old Mexican population, an angry

newspaper editor denounced the Mexican consul who had the US National Anthem

played at a 16 de septiembre celebration. It was, he said, an insult to the “numerosa

y respectable (sic) colonia Mexicana.” 75

The United States’ modern consumer society was far more seductive. The

economic boom of the l920s had fueled a plethora of new products sold by an

expanding advertising industry. Advertisements for consumer products such as cars,

washing machines, appliances, cosmetics and clothes appeared in the growing

number of mass magazines, urging the readers to be ‘modern’ and ‘up to date’ by

purchasing the product. The advertisements helped create a sense of both desire and

envy for a product, and the feeling that purchasing a product brought with it a “life

style.” Books such as How to Win Friends and Influence People pushed ‘personality’

which could be in effect be sold, rather than the older notion of “character.”

Newspapers such as La Prensa ran articles on such things as “El Arte de Vivir

Felix.”76

Mexicans were avid movie fans. A study reported that young Mexican

women in Los Angeles went to the movies at least once a week. Even a small

mutualista in rural Imperial Valley boasted it now had a “motion picture machine.”

Cities offered tantalizing dangers and delights, but in Los Angeles women could not

only see their vamping heroines on the screen but were in close enough proximity to

Hollywood to flirt with the idea of becoming a “star,” or at least an extra. Recinos

probably sampled from these films as he traveled. The Texas theatre in San Antonio

offered films and programs in Spanish, and among the movies it showed in l927

were “The Temptress” starring Greta Garbo and Antonio Moreno and Jackie

Coogan in “Johnny Get your Hair Cut.” In Tucson he might have been lured to the

Opera House to see Tom Mix “y su caballo Toney” in “Canon de Luz.”. Recinos also

knew that Mexicans loved sports. They established their own baseball teams and 75 Monroy Rebirth; El Mosquito 9/30/2576 Monroy Rebirth, 185; La Prensa 3/3/27 and l/16/27

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cheered for Mexican boxers such as Bert Colima, “el Mexicano de Whittier”

considered the best middleweight on the Coast.” As they noted in local parlance “fue

noqueado” but usually “el noqueo.” Mexican sports figures were also workers, such

as “Caballero” Eduardo Huaracha, a boxer Recinos interviewed who appeared with

Bert Colima and worked at the Simons brick yard.77

Los Angeles was already a city of immigrants. Walking down Main Street in

downtown los Angeles, Recinos would have seen Mexicans, Jews from New York

speaking Yiddish, and English speaking patrons mixing with Molokan Russians and

Japanese. Main Street also sported a lively Mexican cultural life with the Teatro

Hidalgo which catered to the lavish tastes of “la gente bien.” Workers went to

revistas, zarzuelas, dramas, circuses, burlesque and Spanish language movies. Stores

offered goods in Spanish, the Pharmacia Hidalgo offered familiar medicines, and

Mexicans could pick up newspapers from Mexico or the US. The newest was a

newcomer, La Opinion, started in l926 by the publisher of San Antonio’s La Prensa.

The Repetorio Musical Mexicana sold records of Mexican music for 75 cents. The

music industry had expanded in the l920s, recording regional and ethnic music while

simultaneously spreading popular music to a widening audience of radio listeners.

Pedro J. Gonzalez, an ex telegrapher with Villa, had formed a singing group called

“Los Madrugadores” and was a popular LA radio personality. Mexicans still made

their own music. Guitars seemed to be a staple in most houses. Los Angeles had a

small orchestra of Mexican children, and several bands. Some Mexicans had

established careers in entertainment, such as Tucson born singer Luisa Espinel who

entertained throughout the US and Europe before settling in Los Angeles.78

Mexican women and gender relations changed in the United States, but what

were the causes? Some pointed to the example of North American women who had

the vote, and often worked outside the home. North American marriages, at least for

the middle class, had shifted to the “modern” concept of companionate marriage in

77 La Prensa 1/16/27; El Tucsonense 4/21/27 and 5/7/27; for discussion of boxers see Monroy Rebirth 5678 For Pedro Gonzalez see Sanchez Becoming Mexican American; Luisa Espinel was born Luisa Ronstadt, and was the great-aunt of singer Linda Ronstadt in Thomas E. Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941 (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press). 189-191; Monroy Rebirth.

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which husbands and wives shared interests and enjoyments, including sex. Sex was

out in the open. Sexual manuals were available which preached sexual fulfillment for

women as well as men. The automobile provided a privacy hitherto unavailable to

courting couples, causing one wag to label them “brothels on wheels.” The once

radical idea of birth control became more widely accepted and gave some protection

against unwanted pregnancy.

Modernism and the culture of consumerism provided new role models for

‘modern’ girls and women who bobbed their hair, shortened their skirts, began to

wear ‘color’ and learned to dance the Charleston. Mexican as well as other women

were engrossed by the tantalizing images of flappers and vamps which moved across

the screen in darkened movie theatres, giving ‘lessons’ in how to be a ‘modern

woman.” Mexicanas could watch Latina actresses such as Lupe Velez (dubbed the

“Mexican spitfire”) and Dolores del Rio. But there were other favorites such as Clara

Bow (the “it” girl) and seductive vamps such as Nazimova, Pola Negri or Gloria

Swanson. Variations of the modern women were plastered across the wonderfully

salacious movie magazines, which pictured glamorous women smoking, drinking

and flirting with men. These women were assertive with men, sexual (and thus

dangerous). 79

Most men, whether Mexican or Anglo, disliked the ‘new woman.’ One

confused man lamented in a corrido, “Las Pelonas” that “Even my old woman has

changed on me.” The hue and cry in Mexican newspapers was similar to the uproar

in the English speaking press over changing women. Newspaper articles condemned

“flapperismo.” La Opinon approvingly quoted Helena Rubenstien’s criticism that

“with her short hair, with her painted cheeks and lips, with her skirts to her knees

they [women] all seem the same. One no longer finds the true attraction and beauty

79 For the changes affecting women in the modern period see Ellen DuBois, "Working Women, Class Relations and Suffrage Militance: Harriet Stanton Black and the New York Woman Suffrage Movement, 1894-1909," Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 34-58; Lynn Dumenil, Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985); Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right; Elaine Taylor May, "Expanding the Past: Recent Scholarship on Women in Politics and Work," Reviews in American History 10 (Dec 1982): 216-233; Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); Delpar Vogue of Everything Mexican; Ruiz From Out of the Shadows.; Monroy Rebirth.

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with which women should be possessed.” These complaints made little difference:

one poem complaining about “La Mujer Moderna.” ran beside an article revealing

Pola Negri’s beauty secrets. The “the dangerous sexuality” of women was featured in

newspaper stories, such as one about a man who poisoned himself over “una

flapper.” As Doug Monroy comments, whatever the ideal model of the woman,

flapper or Virgen, the idea that women could use physical allure as an active

participant or even initiator in sexual relations “met with powerful repulsion, and

attraction.” Yet appearances didn’t necessarily indicate a fall from grace. One l926

observer commented that even the “girls” already “flapperizadas” “knelt before the

chapel with their lighted candles in an atmosphere of great reverence and faith.”

Mexican girls of the second generation often tried to balance the temptations they

encountered with the desire to please their parents. Chaperones were used less, not

from want of parental efforts, but more from futility of the system in a vastly

different environment.80

Yet we need to think more carefully about our assumptions about Mexican

women and notions of gender relations they brought from Mexico. A closer look at

women’s lives may show that even in Mexico these relations did not always

correspond to the ideal woman and gender relations. Working class Mexicanas had

shouldered the hard work in rural areas, especially after men started migrating to find

work. These women had worked, migrated, and been through a violent revolution.

Some had joined the troops as camp followers, and others had taken up guns and

fought. Women usually migrated with men, but not always. In the US, single women

found jobs and married women were more likely to work at home, taking in borders,

cooking, sewing and washing clothes for money. Yet desertion, widowhood and

economic hardship forced women into the work place where they had more contact

with people outside the family and, as they began to bring home money, more say

over how it was spent. Women could make strategic decisions about relationships,

and some left one man for another once or even several times.81

80 Monroy Rebirth, 169, citing 1928 La Prensa article entitled “El Flapperismo he hecho iguales las mujeres”; the poem “La Mujer Moderna” was published in El Mosquito 6/20/25;La Prensa carried the story of the man who poisoned himself over a flapper 1/17/27;[Badillo, #540]1;Ruiz From Out of the Shadows 51-71.

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One of Gamio’s primary concerns was whether the immigrants planned to

return to Mexico and participate in the nation building he envisioned. Recinos found

an overwhelming desire to return. Yet immigrants stressed that there was no work in

Mexico, and that the violence racking Mexico made it difficult to live there. There

were some such as Baptist minister M.A. Urbina, a loyal Mexican with no intention

of changing his nationality, who did not plan to return but only to visit every two or

three years. Mexicans were ambivalent about the US. North America offered

employment and freedom from war, but they missed Mexico. Immigrants maintained

an increasingly nostalgic sense of Mexicanidad fed by homesickness and a sense of

nationalism which they passed on to their children. But this didn’t translate into large

numbers of immigrants returning to rebuild Mexico.

“El Pueblo de Simons”, a Company Town near Los Angeles

One group of Mexicans planning to repatriate lived at the company town of

the Simons brick plant. The Mexican government encouraged repatriation and there

were various attempts to return. In Van Nuys, near Los Angeles, a group of workers

had obtained lands in Zacatecas from the Mexican government, portions of which

would be given to all who returned. Returning Mexicans did bring back expertise

and material culture, such as Eulalio Heredia who drove the Ford he had bought after

six months at the Detroit factory back to Queretero where he planned to set up a

small business. The men at Simons wanted to repatriate to Colonia Acambaro in

Mexico.82

The 350 acre Simons brick yard had been established in l900 by British

industrialist Walter Simons. This plant produced up to 600,000 bricks daily, which

were used in building a growing Los Angeles, including the west side campus of the

University of California. The town was called “el pueblo de Simons” by the more

than 3000 men, women and children who lived there. Most were immigrants from

Guanajuato and Michoacan. Located on the old Bandini land grant east of downtown

Los Angeles, Simons had a private railroad line, its own school, store, post office,

church and police force. Workers lived in company owned shacks which lacked 81 Ruiz From Out of the Shadows, 3-32; Devra Weber, "'Raiz Fuerte': Oral History and Mexicana Farmworkers," Oral History Review 17 (Fall 1989).;Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold 94-97;82 Gamio visited Acambaro in August of l927, where the colony of repatriatdos had not done well. Gamio Mexican Immigration.238

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indoor toilets. They got by with furniture made from “dry goods boxes, shoe boxes

and roughly finished lumber.” Some grew food on small plots of land and tended

animals which could augment their meager wages. The conditions of work and

housing could be deadly. Brick dust lodged in workers’ lungs and blew over the

town, leading to tuberculosis and silicosis. 83

Walter Simons was part of the Los Angeles social elite, described in one

article as “the beneficent patron whose wisdom and tactfulness in handling his large

force of workmen have been proved efficacious by the freedom from industrial

troubles of any kind.”84 This was high praise in the open shop town of Los Angeles

which had been rent by strikes from the l890s through the teens. Simons was

successful, in other words, of controlling his workers, preventing strikes, while

simultaneously keeping wages low. Workers were required to live on Simons

property and company gates were locked at night to prevent anyone leaving or

entering. Supervisor Genaro “Henry” Prado patrolled the camp wearing a company

badge and carrying a pistol. Troublemakers and would-be unionists were summarily

fired.

Reporters preferred to dwell on Simon’s symbolic largesse of paternalism:

the brick yard band which performed for Simons’ private parties and marched in the

Tournament of Roses parade; the 16 de septiembre parade when floats carrying the

queen moved along Simons’ dirt streets; the Simons baseball team (a staple in

company towns); and the Christmas trees and gifts Simon’s personally gave to

workers’ families. Members of the Simons community enjoyed these activities and

incorporated them into part of their making of family and community. Yet they knew

that grimmer realities determined the daily life: indicated in an offhand remark in a

laudatory article about Simon’s Christmas festivities that these “merry-faced brown

83 Ray Babcock, "Simons residents spend day with old friends," The Montebello News October 20, 1981; Charles Elliott, City of Commerce: An Enterprising Heritage (Los Angeles: Hacienda Gateway Press, 1991). for a fictional account of Simons see Janet I. Atkinson, Los Angeles County Historical Directory (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland and Co, Inc., 1988); Alejandro Morales, The Brick People (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1988); Ray Ramirez, personal communication, February 2001.84 Elliott, City of Commerce: An Enterprising Heritage. 65 italics mine

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skinned youngsters….[born in the US] will be citizens of the republic if they live.”85

The death rate for children was notoriously high.

The conditions at Simons may have made some of the workers more open to

radical ideas. One unnamed worker planning to repatriate had been influenced by

speakers he heard in the Placita in downtown Los Angeles. where “compañeros....

decían pura verdad, dicen que el capital es el; que se roba todo y que el dinero no

sirve para nada, que es necesario que todos trabajen....” He planned to join the IWW,

and noted that among the repatriatdos “vamos un group de ‘radicalistas’ que

llevamos, pues, las ideas de los anarquistas....”. Immigrants clearly brought more

back to Mexico than cars and work skills.

Arizona: Tucson’s Older Mexican community, and Copper Mining Towns

Tucson, originally settled by Mexicans from Sonora, had remained culturally,

linguistically and demographically a Sonoran town until the l880s. Bypassed by the

Anglo invasion of the l850s, Tucson avoided the bitter guerilla warfare of Texas and

California. A Mexican elite owned large ranches and stores, enjoyed a flourishing

cultural life and maintained political power. In the 1880s this changed. The Southern

Pacific Railroad extended into Arizona, linking the territory to eastern markets,

capitalists and Anglo migration. Speculators snatched up land and farming shifted

from subsistence to commercial agriculture which undercut Mexican farmers who

could not survive in this increasingly competitive business. The expanding demands

for copper in electricity, industry and World War I led to a boom in the mining

industry. Anglo families settled in the old presidio area, pushing Mexicans into

southern Tucson where they formed the basis for working class barrios such as the

large Barrio Anita, the commercial Tiburon and the raucous Barrio Libre. By the turn

of the century, Anglos dominated Tucson’s economic and political life. Mexicans

had become a minority. Immigration during the Mexican revolution expanded the

Mexican population by 75%, and the new immigrants became absorbed into the

already established Mexican community. 86

85 Ibid. 66 italics mine86 Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses. 33, 166, 186; see also Richard Griswold del Castillo, "Tucsonenses and Angelenos: A Socio-Economic Study of Two Mexican-American Barrios 1860-1880," Journal of the West 28: 58-66.; Western Directory Co, Tucson City Directory (Long Beach, California: Western Directory Co, 1927); Tucson Newspapers Inc, Hispanic Visions: Tucson Arizona (Tucson, AZ:

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Most of Tucson’s Mexican population worked in agriculture, mines, and on

the railroad as ‘jornaleros, peons.’87 Labor recruiters picked over potential

agricultural workers like cattle. Felipe Hale, editor of Tucson’s El Mosquito

described the Enganchadores seasonal recruitment of cotton pickers, and warned

readers of lies and false promises. He admonished them to remember the large

trucks, “cargados de carne humana’ passing through the streets of Tucson, taking our

disillusioned paisanos to the border, half naked and hungry, because during the

picking season it was impossible for them to make savings and buy clothing and

return to the ‘Patria” Laborers made about $2.50 a day for 8 hours; carpenters made

up to $8; waiters made from $15 to $18 a week. Servants, mostly women from

Sonora, made between $8 and $10 a week, plus food88 Women who worked in stores,

such as Kress, made a minimum of $10 a week for a 40-plus hours week. Some

artisans maintained old standards in the face of economic pressures to modernize.

Shoemakers sewed by hand, and “no se adaptan a los métodos modernos.” A

prosperous Mexican talabartería lamented that to ‘progresar estamos perdiendo en el

‘arte’ de la talabartería.” 89

Tucson was home to the first mutual aid society in the US, the Alianza

Hispano-Americana.90 Dominated by businessmen, their initial goals included

acclimating workers to capitalism: to “elevate la raza”, teach workers to ‘moderate

its customs, respect itself and respect others,’ and to instill in them a “love of

work.”91 This group had at best an ambivalent relation to labor organizing. During

World War I another society, the Liga Protectora, urged workers to prove their

Tucson Newspapers Inc, 1986); Joseph F. Park, "The History of Mexican Labor in Arizona During the Territorial Period" (MA, University of Arizona, 1961); Thomas E. Sheridan, Del Rancho al Barrio: The Mexican Legacy of Tucson (Tucson, Arizona: The Mexican Heritage Project, Arizona Heritage Center, Arizona Historical Society, 1983); C.L. Sonnichsen, Tucson: The Life and Times of an American City (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982); Arizona Daily Star, "Tucson's Barrios: A View from Inside," (Tucson?, 1978), 28; editor Steven Encinas, Looking into the Westside: Untold Stories of the People, 1900-1997 (Tucson, Arizona: Tucson Pima Arts Council, 1997); Velez-Ibanez, Border Visions; Maria I Vigil, ""The Barrios: How they Got Their Names"," Tucson Citizen, Thursday September 27, 1979 1979, 4-5.87 "Informe Sobre Los Ciudadanos Mexicanos Residentes in la Jurisdiccion del Consulado de Mexico in Tucson, Arizona,".88 Luis Felipe Recinos, "Field Notes, Tucson," (Manuel Gamio collection, 1927).89 Ibid90 Sheridan Los Tucsonenses 108-11091 quoted in Ibid, 111-112

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loyalty to the US and avoid the ferocious mining strikes in Clifton-Morenci and

Bisbee.92 As the population grew, workers formed their own mutualistas such as the

Sociedad Amigos Unidos, which only admitted working men. Others were

specifically political and composed of Magonistas and Wobblies Community

conflicts were often fought out, or mirrored in, the mutualistas. Tucson’s caustic El

Mosquito complained that a small clique ran a local mutualista but benefited only a

few.93 Prominent mutualista members received help without question, but some

‘pelado” needed a doctors certificate to prove he was ill.94 Mutualistas were accused

of political or religious bias, and factions sometimes split off to form their own

organizations.95 In Tucson the editors of El Tucsonense, and a new generation of

middle class leadership who disagreed with the Alianza formed The Sociedad

Mutualista Porfirio Diaz. 96 Organizations with American born membership began

to organize to defend civil rights and participate in US electoral politics.

Recinos wrote detailed motes about the housing. Those with a weekly

paycheck might buy a house, usually on credit, which were decorated with ‘todos

los objectos modernos que necesitan actualmente, fonógrafo, radio, teléfono, baños,

escusados modernos.” Some workers lived in small houses, made from adobe,

ladrillo y mezcla,, con techo de ‘tejamanil’ “in the Mexican style “(not seen in San

Antonio or LA). Some buildings had extensions with up to 10 rooms, one for each

family. The residents might have a phonograph and tables and chairs, and adorned

the walls with ‘santos, anuncios, calendarios, retratos de familias, banderas

mexicanas y americanas, o solamente mexicanas, cuadros de Hidalgo, Guerrero y

Juárez, bustos de Madero, cuadro representando escenas mexicanas, postales de

México y otras cosas por el estilo.”Women cooked over wood stoves and by l926,

most were able to bathe in tin bath tubs at home rather than going to public baths.

The poorest lived in small ‘jacales construidas en las afueras de la ciudad’ with dirt

floors and no kitchens, or the very old and dilapidated adobes which lacked paint,

92 Ibid 169, 17293 El Mosquito .11/19/21 from notes in English re, by Joseph Noriega94 Ibid 12/14/21. 95 El Tucsonense 4/26/27 They also said it was unclear who was actually running the group,. If it was true, they continued, that the Alianza “tiene prohibido en sus reglamentos a sus miembros aue tratan ningún asunto político ni religioso en su seno…”, then it was being used “para propaganda.”96 Sheridan Los Tucsonenses 169

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sanitation or drainage. The residents here were mostly peones, servants and

mendigos, and ‘indígenas en su mayoría, o hijos de indios de la tribus mexicanas

aquí estsatblecidas y que se han mezclado ya con mestizos marcadamente

indios,”[sic] Single men could rent a bed in ‘hoteles mexicanos’ for 25 cents to

50cents a night , six beds to a room. 97

Tucsonenses had migrated to where they had ‘familiares’ and, as in other

areas, barrios became laced with extended kin and compadres, in effect reproducing

parts of communities and social networks of Mexico. They maintained strong ties

with Sonora and other Arizona towns. The “Citizen Auto Stage” shuttled between

Tucson and Arizona mining towns, and made regular trips to the hometown of many

Tucsonenses, Magdalena, Sonora Buses traveled from El Paso to Los Angeles , San

Francisco and other cities. Mexicans here, as elsewhere, were beginning to purchase

the affordable Model T Fords which gave workers more mobility and enabled them

to take their families.98

Even with the considerable and ongoing ties among Mexicans, Recinos was

also impressed by the number of different racial and ethnic groups and the

intermarriages and interactions among them. Mexicans were “mezclados con toda

clase de de (sic) razas” and married to Anglo Saxons, Germans, English, Americans,

blacks, Yaquis, Chinese and Japanese. There were Mexican mestizos and Indians,

some of whom had intermarried with Indians of Arizona.

The schools were segregated. Anglos went to their own schools, but

Mexicans often attended school with Spanish, Italian, Irish, and Chinese children.

In l921, over 50% of the students were children of immigrants. The schools

instituted Americanization programs, banned Spanish from school grounds, and

ignored Mexican holidays and culture. Children were punished for speaking Spanish.

One woman remembers “I was always scared in school,” but another said “we spoke

Spanish [in secrecy]. They couldn’t keep it from us. It was our first language.”99

Recinos noted that some of the elite called themselves Mexicans, while others,

“ya emprejuicidcadas’ call themselves Spanish or “espanoles de America.” Some

97 Field Notes, TucsonRecinos, "Field Notes, Tucson,".98 El Mosquito 12/25/21, 6/1/25,10/3/2399 in Tucson notes. Steve Encians, ed. Interview with Lydia Carranza Waer, July 30, 1997

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with an Anglo parent ‘tuve la impresión de que no obstante que hablan mejor el

ingles que el castellano, de que ‘piensan’ en ingles, sienten grandísimo afecta hacia

los elementos mexicanos y se cuentan dentro de ellos.” [sic]100 Yet overall, even

Mexicans born in the US often felt a ‘Mexicanidad.’ Recinos interviewed the

daughter of a Mexican mother and North American father, who said ‘quería mas a

los mexicanos porque eras mas simpáticos que los americanos, que le gustaba mas la

música mexicana porque era mas dulce y que le agradaba mucho mas la cocina

mexicana que la americana, porque aquello tiene mas sabor. Me dijo que su corazón

es mexicano en todo y por todo, pero que ama a los Estados unidos porque es patria,

porque aquí ha nacido y aquí morirá.” Jose Santamaria, who had never been to

Mexico, stated emphatically he was a patriotic Mexican , not agringado, and that

“soy Mexicano de sangre aunque sea ciudadano de este pais no me importa nada de

aqui.” Delfina Ortiz, whose great grandparents had first come to Tucson said “me

siento si mas cerca de los Mexicanos porque son mi raza, porque llévelo sangre

Mexican en todas mis venas.”

As an older Mexican community, many Mexicans had been born in the US

and were US citizens. Tucsonenses worked out their Mexicanidad in relationship to

US citizenship. Felipe Hale, editor of El Mosquito, urged readers “de sangre

Mexicana” to vote, and added that if you ‘quiere a México’ you will vote for a

democrat. Voting was in effect an expression of Mexicanidad, and probably of some

concrete political voice as a group. Citizenship was not necessarily equated with

nationality.101

The Mining towns of Miami and Superior

The nearby mining towns of Miami and Superior were part of the binational

network of the Arizona-Sonora mining triangle which included Globe, Miami,

Bisbee, Douglas, and, across the border, Cananea and Nacozori. These mines were

owned by a handful of American investors, and worked by Mexican miners who

labored on both sides of the border under the same wage structures and conditions.

By l9l0s, Arizona’s copper industry was the largest in the US.102 Miami, built in 100 Recinos, "Field Notes, Tucson,". re “mezcla de razas”101 El Mosquito 7/15/22102Jerome, Clarksdale and Cottonwood; Miami, Globe, Claypool, Los Adobes, Inspiration and Superior; Ray, Sonora, Barcelona, Hayden, San Pedro and Winkelmen; Bisbee, Lowell, Warren and

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l909, and Superior, built in l9ll were among Arizona’s oldest copper towns. Anglo

and Mexicans both worked here, but Anglo miners had the better jobs and were paid

twice as much for the same job. In Miami, approximately 70% of the workers were

Mexicans.

On both sides of the border, this was industrial mining, using blasting, steam

powered equipment, and heavy hauling and loading. There were no safety

regulations, no respirators, and it was “dusty, smoky, hot…” The copper dust lodged

in their lungs….They used to call it miner’s consumption”103 Miners routinely

contracted tuberculosis and the deadly ‘miners lung’.104 Some were crushed to death,

or perished in deadly mine fires. Mexicans were given the most dangerous and dirty

jobs yet were paid half of what Anglo workers received. European and European

American workers made $3 to $3.50 a day, while Mexicans made from $1.50 to

$2.105 Mining was impermanent work, and miners often moved from one mine to

another within Arizona and across the border in Cananea and Nacozari. While

unsettling for families, migration linked communities within the mining triangle. The

flow of workers and similar conditions contributed to binational labor organizing,

whose efforts came to fruition in strikes such as the 1903 Clifton Morenci strike, and

the Cananea strike of l906. 106

These company towns were segregated and controlled. Companies owned the

houses, schools, post offices, stores, hospitals and churches. The Mexican barrio of

Tintown; Douglas; Clifton and Morenci; and Ajo-Gibson Antonio Rios-Bustamante, "As Guilty as Hell": Copper Towns, Mexican Miners and Community, 1920-1950:The Spacial (sic) and Social Consequences of the Mining Industry in Arizona, ed. Centro de Estudios Historicos essay por El Seminario de Historia OBrero Mexicano, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (Tucson, Arizona: unpublished ms, typewritten, October 1993). 163103 Rita Maria Magdaleno, Cuentos y Memorias: Mexican Americans in Miami, Arizona 1920s-1940s (Miami, Arizona: Committee for Preservation of Mexican American Oral History in Miami, Arizona, 1996). I believe most life spans were longer, but miners lung was chronic and killed men while still young104 La Prensa 1/8/27105 Mellinger, Race and Labor in Western Copper. 34106 Ibid. 41 During World War I, Douglas and his allies played on wartime fears of the Germans, and convinced the public that union members were pro-German and sympathizers of the Wobblies, effectively driving away other parts of the coalition of farmers, ranchers, small businessmen and workers. Arizona returned to control of the “copper collar” As a result, many of the middle class Mexican leaders turned violently anti union, perhaps reflective of their own desire to prove their loyalty to the US In the various mining conflicts, el Tucsonense supported the anti union forces: they accused German agents of fomenting the l906 Cananea strike, supported the Sheriffs after they deported en masse striking miners and their families from Bisbee, since been called the largest mass kidnapping in history. Sheridan Los Tucsonenses l80

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Miami hung on the side of a hill overlooking the town. Mexicans lived in wooden

shacks without indoor plumbing. Some houses had no doors or windows, and when

people slept they could see stars through gaps in makeshift roofs. ” From their

houses, Mexicans could see the American section, on the opposing hill, with neat

cottages, paved streets, lighting, indoor plumbing and garbage collection.107

Mexicans worked with Spaniards, Italians, Irish, some French and French Canadians,

and frequently intermarried with Italians and Spanish.108 Anglos and Mexicans were

segregated. They went to different theatres, restaurants, schools and YMCAs.

Churches were divided down the middle, with Anglos on one side, Mexicans on the

other. Anglo restaurants posted signs saying “no dogs or Mexicans allowed”. In

Miami, Mexicans were allowed in the Anglo YMCA swimming pool only on

Saturdays when they were allowed to swim in the ‘slimy water’ before the pool was

drained and cleaned.109

Conclusion

Recinos disappeared from the written record after he finished the interviews.

Gamio went on to write the book and devote the next three decades to building

Mexican anthropology, its institutions and working to build Mexico. Redfield

continued to write of exotic natives, and Taylor wrote for fifty more years on

agriculture and agricultural workers. But the real follow up to this book are the

thousands of Mexican immigrants who have crossed the border, in both directions,

since the 1920s. Many of the immigrants interviewed for this book stayed, and some

I have tracked down further information included in footnotes to the interviews.

About others we have no information. What is most striking about these immigrants

as we read them at the beginning of the twenty first century are the similarities in

concerns, hopes and aspirations, the ambivalence about remaining in the US, the

tension between economic need and cultural desire, and the development of the

second generation and organizational efforts to alleviate conditions.

Yet some conditions have also changed. Latinos, in many areas

predominantly of Mexican extraction, are becoming the largest ‘minority’ in the

107 La Prensa 1/14/27108 Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge: Harvard, 1999).101-102109 Magdaleno, Cuentos y Memorias: Mexican Americans in Miami, Arizona 1920s-1940s.17

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United States, and in some areas such as California are well on their way to being the

majority. Spanish is the language of many streets in the US and more North

Americans, Anglo American as well as Latinos, are bilingual. Mexicans area a

growing political power and in Los Angeles Antonio Villaragosa, son of immigrants,

may well become the city’s first Mexican mayor in 129 years. It is, as one Los

Angeles friend says, “la reconquista.” The indigenous are migrating north but, unlike

the l920s, call themselves ‘indigenous’, not ‘mestizo.’ Many are from groups in

Oaxaca: Mixtecs, Zapotecs, Triques, Mixes, Chontalles and others. Some are

Purepuches or Yaquis or other groups.

Mexican immigrants continue to form organizations to deal with the new

environment. Immigrants organize different forms of mutual aid societies, but there

are more Mexican state based organizations. The Oaxacans, whose sense of

organization stems from indigenous communalism, are known for organizing. A

Oaxacan-wide federation was recently organized, composed of town associations,

area federations, and the binational Frente Indigena Oaxaquena Binacional. Unlike

the l920s, when ambitious Mexican politicians visit the Southwest, they meet with

Mexican indigenous leaders.

Immigration has also spurred a greater understanding between Chicanos,

immigrants and Mexicans in Mexico. Cross border musical confluences, increased

intellectual discussions, alliances and cooperation among unions and community

groups in both countries. Under pressure of indigenous resurgence in Mexico and the

increasing power of Mexican immigrants and Chicanos in the US, urban Mexicans

are also beginning to recognize that it is time to pay attention to the Mexican

immigrants of the 1920s and to Gamio’s project on immigration.

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