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Hispanic-Americans Civil Rights Movement America is facing the largest cultural shift in its history. Around the year 2050, whites will become a "minority. " This is uncharted territory for this country, and this demographic change will affect everything. Alliances between the races are bound to shift. Political and social power will be re-apportioned. Our neighborhoods, our schools and workplaces, even racial categories themselves will be altered.
Any massive social change is bound to bring uncertainty, even fear. But the worst crisis we face today is not in our cities or neighborhoods, but in our minds. We have grown up with a fixed idea of what and who America is, and how race relations in this nation work. Just examine the demographic trends.
In 1950, America was nearly 85 percent non-Hispanic white. Today, this nation is 73 percent non-Hispanic white, 12 percent black, 11 percent Hispanic, 3 percent Asian and 1 percent Native American. (To put it another way, we " re about three-quarters "white" and one-quarter "minority. ") But America's racial composition is changing more rapidly than ever. The number of immigrants in America is the largest in any post-World War II period. Nearly one-tenth of the U. S. population is foreign born.
The Census projects that the Hispanic-Americans will surpass blacks as the largest "minority" group by 2005. Yet our idea of "Americanness" has always been linked with "whiteness, " from tales of the Pilgrims forward. We still see the equation of white = American every day in movies and on television (where shows like "Mad About You, " set in majority-"minority" New York, have no nonwhite main characters). We witness it in the making of social policy. (The U. S. Senate is only 4 percent nonwhite -- though over 20 percent of the country is. ) We make casual assumptions about who belongs in this society and who is an outsider. (Just ask the countless American-born Hispanic-Americans who have been complimented on how well they speak English. ) The teens and twenty-something of the Millennium Generation are the true experts on the future of race, because they " re re-creating America's racial identity every single day.
The members of the Millennium Generation defy the easy racial stereotypes. Take an issue as heated as illegal immigration -- and the life of an Oakland teen named Diana. Serious and thoughtful, with hopes of going on to college, the Mexican immigrant has lived most of her life in California. She's more familiar with American culture (not to mention more articulate in English) than most teens. But she does not have a green card, and her chances of pursuing her college dreams seem slim.
Her dad has a green card and two of her four siblings are U. S. citizens because they were born in the United States. Diana was born in Mexico.
So, even though she came to the U. S. at the age of two, Diana will have a nearly impossible time getting citizenship unless she finds the money to hire an immigration lawyer to fight her case. It would be easy to think of Diana as some kind of anomaly, but she is not. Countless undocumented immigrants have spent the majority of their lives in this country. And in California alone, there are over a million residents who belong to families of mixed immigration status.
Another flashpoint is the battle over affirmative action. The biggest backlash has been in America's policy arena. In 1997, the U. S. Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed restrictions not just on illegal but legal immigrants. (For example, many legal immigrants are no longer eligible for government medical care. ) The debate over affirmative action has turned ugly, with opponents like University of Texas law professor Lino Graglia stating that "Mexican Americans are not academically competitive with whites" because of "a culture that seems not to encourage achievement. " (He later added: "I don't know that it's good for whites to be with the lower classes. I'm afraid it may actually have deleterious effects on their views because they will see people from situations of economic deprivation usually behave less attractively. ") Sadly, even the basic tenets of the Civil Rights movement are still controversial.
Take Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's response when asked by a law professor how he would have ruled on the Brown v. Board of Education case which ended legal segregation. Scalia pondered for a moment then said he might well have decided in favor of the segregated school system. The example with Lino Graglia is a fraction of what discrimination young Hispanic-Americans are facing.
As Hispanic-Americans immigrated to the United States in increasing numbers, Latino workers were confronted by well-financed farm and ranching associations that wanted a large, unorganized labor pool, and by Anglo-dominated labor unions that treated the new immigrants as enemies. Mexican American labor activists primarily fought discrimination in the workplace, but they often took the lead in community organizing. Lacking political representation and isolated from the Anglo population, Mexican American farm workers's truffles for equal treatment often met with violence as union meetings were disrupted, members beaten, and leaders deported. Labor-led organizations shared many of the mutualist as' cultural values but rejected nationalism as a dangerous division that weakened all workers.
Mexican nationalism, like racial discrimination, pitted workers against each other and made them all vulnerable to exploitation on the job. Opposed to racism in all forms, given the opportunity, Mexican American labor activists readily joined in multiethnic organizing (Ruiz 1987). Electoral participation is only one of a larger pattern of Hispanic-American political engagement. As the oldest Latino communities in the United States, Mexican Americans (since 1848) and Puerto Ricans (since 1898) have a long history of organizing to protect themselves against cultural discrimination. Social movement organizations were often the only outlets for political representation and self-defense in a society where Hispanic-Americans were outnumbered and barred from effective participation in the institutions of government. Hispanic-American organizations generated a leadership cadre and served as vehicles through which interests of class, gender, occupation, and ideology were mediated through the lens of race.
Although Mexican American and Puerto Rican activists shared common experiences of racial and ethnic injustice, organizations emerged with distinct understandings of life and race relations in the United States. Today, racial and ethnic considerations continue to inform and drive the organizing impulse among Mexican American and Puerto Ricans. Some organizations promote politically moderate ag enda's, while others espouse revolutionary or separatist goals. The study of these groups yields a more complete understanding of Latino politics and the complex forces driving a growing political force. Since the end of the Mexican-American War (1846 - 48), Mexican Americans have organized numerous responses to racism, segregation, and violence (Acuna 2000). But until the turn of the twentieth century, Mexican Americans were too economically weak, politically marginal, geographically isolated, and poorly acquainted with the legal traditions of the United States to launch sustained political campaigns.
However, as the population grew, so did the number of organizations representing the community (Tirado 1970). Over time, three distinct forms of organizations emerged to protect members of the community from outside threats: the mutualist as or mutual aid societies, Mexican American labor unions, and civil rights organizations. The mutualist as were the earliest organizations for Mexican Americans. Common in Mexico and the American Southwest prior to that area's annexation by the United States, the mutualist as issued funeral insurance, acted as credit unions, created libraries, and published newspapers.
What distinguished the mutualist as from other activist groups operating at the turn of the twentieth century was their organizers' ardent Mexican nationalism, rejection of cultural assimilation, and distrust of American political institutions. Through the mutualist as, the webs of race, class, and culture, created a tight bond of interdependence among Mexicans living in territories they believed properly belonged to Mexico. In order to reinforce group solidarity and keep the Anglo society's cultural influences at hay, the mutualist as sponsored traditional dances, barbecues, and celebrations of Mexican patriotic holidays. In large cities like Los Angeles and San Antonio, the Mexican Consulate established relationships with different organizations as it sought to harness nationalist sentiment among the immigrant population in order to further its domestic and foreign policy aims. The mass deportation of Mexican citizens during the Great Depression and the growing numbers of native-born Mexican Americans depleted the ranks of those most responsive to appeals to Mexican nationalism. Although a few prominent nationalists did remain after the 1930 s, their ideas would not reemerge in full force until the dawn of the Chicano Movement.
Hispanic-American political organizations today serve a population increasingly differentiated along the lines of class, gender, and occupation. Mexican American business and professional associations, like their Anglo counterparts, advance their members' economic interests through lobbying, advocacy, and networking. The changes the next millennium brings will at the very least surpass and quite possibly will shatter our current understanding of ethnicity, culture and community. The real test of our strength will be how willing we are to go beyond the narrowness of our expectations, seek knowledge about the lives of those around us and move forward with eagerness, not fear. The U. S.
is becoming increasingly diverse. Under the "middle" projection envisioned by the Census Bureau, which incorporates the most likely future scenarios in fertility, mortality, and immigration rates, a majority of the U. S. population will belong to minority groups sometime shortly after 2050. The largest absolute growth will be in the Hispanic population.
They will outstrip blacks as the Nation's largest minority group by 2010. After 2020, they will add more each year to the population than all other ethnic / racial groups combined. Their numbers are anticipated to rise 32 million by 2050, when they will constitute 24 percent of the US populace. Bibliography: Ruiz, Vicki L. 1987. Cannery Women/Cannery Lives.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Tirado, Miguel David. 1970. "Mexican American Community Political Organizations: The Key to Chicano Political Power. " Acuna, Rodolfo. 2000. Occupied America: A History of Chicano's. New York: Longman.
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Research essay sample on Hispanic Americans Civil Rights Movement
