MEXICANS IN THE MAKING OF AMERICA MEXICANS IN THE MAKING OF AMERICA NEIL FOLEY The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2014 Copyright © 2014 by Neil Foley All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Foley, Neil. Mexicans in the making of America / Neil Foley. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-04848-5 1. Mexican Americans—History. 2. Mexicans—United States— History. 3. Immigrants—United States—History. 4. United States— Relations—Mexico. 5. Mexico—Relations—United States. 6. National characteristics, American. 7. United States—Ethnic relations. 8. Transnationalism—History. 9. United States—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. 10. Mexico—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. I. Title. E184.M5F65 2014 973'.046872—dc23 2014010425 For Angela, querida madre de nuestras hijas Sabina, Bianca, and Sophia And for Latin@s— Past, Present, and Future CONTENTS Preface ix Prologue: “America’s Changing Colors” 1 1 Th e Genesis of Mexican America 13 2 No Estás en Tu Casa 39 3 Becoming Good Neighbors 64 4 Defending the Hemisphere 96 5 Braceros and the “Wetback” Invasion 123 6 Th e Chicano Movement 148 7 Brave New Mundo 179 8 Fortress America 200 Epilogue: “We Are America” 225 Abbreviations 241 Notes 243 Acknowledgments 320 Index 323 PREFACE Some readers might wonder why a person with a non- Latino name like “Neil Foley” would feel the urge or the need to write about Mexican Amer- icans and Mexican immigrants. It never occurred to me, growing up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, in the 1950s and 1960s, that I was any dif- ferent from the kids I went to parochial school with. We were all “white”— no African Americans or other Latinos attended my elementary school. Most blacks lived in the capital city, as did the tiny Latino community, mostly Central Americans who settled around 18th and Columbia Road in a neighborhood called Adams Morgan. In those days the words “Latinos” and “Hispanics” were not much in use. Th at came later, in the 1970s, about the same time that I began to ponder the challenges our immigrant grandpar- ents faced in making the journey to the United States. My father, Raymond Patrick Foley, was the son of impoverished Irish immigrants from County Kerry, Ireland. He was the youngest of seven chil- dren born in Brockton, Massachusetts. His mother, Julia Sheehan Foley, died shortly aft er he was born. His church gave him a scholarship to attend Boston College, where he studied Spanish and subsequently made a living as a Spanish translator for the FBI and the Department of Justice. My mother, Maria Lilia Trejo, one of nine children, was the daughter of Mexican immigrants who crossed the border into New Mexico before it was illegal to cross without papers. Today she would be called an “anchor baby.” Th ey met during World War II. Like my father, she was a devout Catholic, but practiced the rituals and rhythms of “folk Catholicism” that she was brought up with. Her devotion to the Virgin Mary included our praying the rosary every day aft er dinner during the month of May while our neighborhood friends played ball in the street. At home I listened to my mother’s scratchy rec ords of Mexican ranchera music and grew up thinking her enchiladas, tacos, tamales, frijoles, and sopapillas were Amer- ican food, which of course they are. But not everyone thought so at the time. Th is was long before Taco Bell spread from California to the East Coast. We were a family of eight children in a suburb where Anglo families were much smaller. We were diff erent that way. But so far as I knew, I was as American as anyone else. I spoke unaccented En glish, and nobody ever told me to “go back to Mexico.” My Anglo name partially masked my ethnic- ity, which was hardly necessary since few Anglo Americans in the suburbs of Washington had any contact with or understanding of Latinos. Today Latinos are in all fi ft y states, and by midcentury nearly one in every three Americans will be of Hispanic origin. Although many Ameri- cans believe that Hispanics are newcomers to the United States, Hispanics have been in North America long before Anglo Americans began their relentless march to the Pacifi c in the nineteenth century. Mexicans in the Making of America chronicles the history of Mexicans in the Southwest and the continual northward migration of Mexicans across the interna- tional border, established in 1848, to a region that once belonged to Mexico. In the last half- century, immigration from Mexico and other countries has made America one of the most culturally rich nations in the world, and that, I argue, augurs well for the future of the United States. Th e children of Latinos today will rescue a graying nation whose non- Hispanic white population continues to decline. Th ey will provide the labor and the tax revenues to support el der ly whites, whose numbers are projected to more than double between 2012 and 2060, from 43.1 million to 92.0 million. In countless other ways Latinos will replenish and restore America in this century, if given half a chance. I began researching and writing Mexicans in the Making of America al- most a de cade ago, about the time Congress passed the Secure Fence Act in 2006, calling for the construction of a 700- mile fence on the border with Mexico to prevent unlawful entry into the United States. Time magazine called it the “Great Wall of America,” although the fence, built in part by undocumented Mexican immigrants, hardly compares to the Great Wall of China, except in its objective to keep out “invaders.” Fortunately for me, my mother’s parents crossed the border almost a century ago, before the creation of the Border Patrol— or I wouldn’t be here today. As an “anchor baby” born in the United States to “illegal alien” parents, my mother was supposed to grow up and take advantage of the social wel- fare system, if you can believe Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, and sponsor relatives from Mexico to come over with “family reunifi cation” visas. She did neither. What my mother did do, along with my father, was raise a x PREFACE family of eight children during the springtime of the 1960s, hammer us daily with the importance of studying and getting good grades, and never let us forget that we owed our good fortune to God, la Virgen María, and more angels and saints than I can remember. She suff ered her share of indignities as a brown- skinned “Mexican” when she fi rst moved from New Mexico to Washington, DC, but she rarely told us about them. Th is book, in part, is her story and that of millions of other Latinas and Latinos whose ancestors are indigenous to North America, and without whose labor the American Southwest could not have been developed. PREFACE xi Th e United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. —Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855) Settled by the people of all nations, all nations may claim her for their own. You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world. We are not a narrow tribe . our blood is as the fl ood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation, so much as a world. —Herman Melville, Redburn (1849) PROLOGUE “America’s Changing Colors” A merica today has long ceased being a nation in “black and white.” Th e color of America has been changing since the end of World War II, slowly at fi rst and very rapidly in the last four de cades. Today anyone who has visited urban public schools can see the growing number of children from India, Korea, Japan, Guatemala, Mexico, Dominican Republic, China, Viet- nam, Nigeria, and many other countries. Already generations of children have grown up in an increasingly multicultural nation where millions of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and increasingly Africa have changed the face of America and challenged the notion of America as a nation of “En glish only” citizens. But no other language is heard more oft en on the street corners, in urban stores and suburban malls, and in the workplace than the Spanish language—and no immigrant group stands out for its sheer size and sweeping presence like the Mexican immigrant population. Multicultural America, like multilingualism, is the gift — or the price, de- pending on your point of view— of an eco nom ical ly interdependent world in which peoples globally are on the move, following borderless fl ows of capital and fi nance. Mexicans, like other immigrant groups, come to Amer- ica looking for work and economic opportunities, much like Koreans in Japan, Turks in Germany, Algerians in France, Tunisians in Italy; and Irish, Indians, and Pakistanis in Great Britain. But unlike other immigrant groups, Mexicans, like the Native Americans before them, lived for hun- dreds of years— thousands, in the case of American Indians— before the fi rst Anglo- American settlers crossed the Mississippi River into the present- day American West and Southwest.1 For over two de cades the debate on comprehensive immigration reform has been ongoing with little agreement about how to manage, much less control, the historical movement of Mexicans to El Otro Lado (the Other Side).