"Mexicanness" in New York: Migrants Seek New Place in Old Racial Order
Smith, Robert
Over the past decade, one of the more dramatic population developments in the United States has been the burgeoning of the Mexican community all along the eastern seaboard. Population experts...
...friends and other relatives also followed...
...As immigrants and as Latinos they face different expectations...
...Mexicans...
...8. Author's interview, 1998, New York City...
...2. For Mexicans in California, the answer will be different than for those in New York...
...And the results of adolescent engagements with racialized social relations have sometimes been ironic...
...Population experts predict that within ten years Mexicans will be the largest minority on the east coast-from Florida to New England...
...It is my adaptation of the concept of bounded solidarity as developed by Alejandro Portes and his colleagues...
...This growth has been especially striking in New York City...
...Part of the reason for this is that the lifeworlds of most Mexicans and Mexican Americans, especially youth, do not include too many whites...
...The new migrants to New York are predominantly from the Mixteca region of southern Mexico, a region that includes large parts of the states of Puebla, Oaxaca and Guerrero...
...Mexicans in New York City: Membership and Incorporation of New Immigrant Group," in Sherrie L. Baver and Gabriel Haslip-Viera, eds...
...According to Census data, about one of three U.S.born Mexican women and one of five U.S.-born Mexican men in New York were upwardly mobile between 1980 and 1990 in terms of education and occupation...
...They enter New York both as immigrants and as Latinos...
...As Latinos, they confront social networks that are heavily "racialized"-networks in which ethnic groups are represented on a continuum that runs from black to white...
...With tears in his eyes, he told me about working 12-hour days like his Mexican workers, saying, "When I came to this country I was a good Mexican...
...In California, there has already been a racialization and stigmatization of Chicanos, despite the fact that there has been significant upward mobility in the population there as well, especially among women...
...Hence, many Mexican parents and their New York-born children wonder whether their futures will look more like the hard lives they associate with Puerto Ricans and blacks or more like the upwardly mobile lives they associate with white ethnic immigrants...
...Immigration is not a straight "struggle and prosper" story...
...I have heard many an employer identify with his Mexican employees...
...Why do they have to have a gang...
...ODR was at once an understandable response to a hostile reception from native-born adolescents, and at the same time an embrace of the immigrant analogy-an attempt to self-identify as immigrants in New York and to differentiate from what was understood as a nativeborn underclass...
...For example, many Mexican youth, especially boys, now fear being "stepped up to"-stopped by others to verify if they are in a rival gang or not--by members of Mexican gangs more than they fear confrontation with blacks or Puerto Ricans...
...On the one hand, there are nuanced degrees of white ethnicity and racialization due in part to the presence of first-generation white immigrants such as Greeks, Russians and Italians...
...They fear that if they hang around with other Mexicans they will be pressured to cut school a lot or eventually drop out...
...2 riting in the 1930s, W.E.B...
...when they came to New York many years earlier, when there were fewer Spanish speakers, but lament what they see as the Puerto Rican population's miserable social conditions...
...To be sure, many in the first or second generation do not buy into the immigrant analogy...
...With my countrymen, almost never is there a divorce...
...By 1990, Mexicans also had the largest percentage of 16-19 year olds not in school and not graduated: 47% versus 22% for Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, 18% for blacks and 8% for whites...
...They face the standard U.S...
...Concretely, many second generation youth see that their lives are very similar to the blacks and Puerto Ricans with whom they share neighborhoods, parks and schools...
...younger people earn less, Indeed, among adolescent Mexicans, there has been and teen migrants often do not enter school...
...For example, while some parents express no preferences regarding who their children date, many parents do not want their children to date AfricanAmericans or in some cases Puerto Ricans, even though they themselves may have black and Puerto Rican friends, or even relatives through marriage...
...Allowing for the undercount-many Mexican New Yorkers are undocumented-this means there are probably 450,000500,000 Mexicans in the state and 300,000 in the city alone...
...They either get an abortion or just get on welfare...
...This definition of raza hispana resonated deeply with the contradictions inherent in the immigrant analogy and the racialized hierarchies of New York...
...You know, and why do they have to go around drinking 'forties'...the big bottles of beer...
...But the racial categories in New York City are complicated by two things...
...ODR was formed in the mid 1980s by adolescent Mexicans who defined "the race" as "la raza hispana," and welcomed Mexicans, Central and South Americans, and Puerto Ricans born on the island...
...So during the mid1990s there was a huge increase in the Mexican youth population, resulting in the sudden public presence of Mexican youth in schools, parks and neighborhoods...
...Mexicans," in Foner, ed...
...It is a poor, hot agricultural region, called "tierra caliente," that has sent migrant workers to the United States in small numbers since the 1940s, and from which migration to the United States has been accelerating since Mexico's rural economy went into long-term crisis in the late 1980s...
...I see Puerto Rican girls and it's just like they get pregnant, pregnancy after pregnancy...
...Despite increasing numbers of upwardly mobile second-generation youth, these indicators show increasing numbers of young people, born in Mexico and in the United States, who leave school or join gangs, or become pregnant at an early age...
...Many see limited employment options, little payback from schooling, and feel that the larger society and its institutions think they will fail...
...Such a policy, of course, would have to be linked to the rebirth of anti-poverty efforts on behalf of the entire population...
...While this points to some upward mobility, it also indicates that many people are getting stuck...
...If that self-image is premised on a juxtaposition with African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, it is being challenged by rising indicators of social distress resulting from the settlement and incorporation of Mexicans in New York...
...Puerto Ricans have gotten a lot Americanized...and we still have strong values from over there...
...3. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 1991), especially chapters 1 and 7. See also Joel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Matthew Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998...
...Many parents talk of how Puerto Ricans helped them Vol XXXV, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 200115 Vol XXXV, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2001 15REPORT ON RACE AND MIGRATION Mexican immigrants selling cotton candy in Central Park in Apn 2001...
...We should take note of how the Irish and other "formerly non-white" immigrants became white, and what this means for how immigrants, past and present, have learned and internalized what it means to be "American...
...8 In both of these cases, Americanization among Puerto Ricans is seen as a cause of their having failed, while Mexicans are seen to be insulated by their culture from such erosions of values...
...Both groups did America's dirty work, both were victimized by systematic racism, and they often lived side by side in the poorest parts of northern cities...
...The new immigrants, willing to put in long, hard days of work, have been welcomed by the city's lowwage employers, though their children have received a more ambiguous welcome in the city's schools and neighborhoods...
...To most people's surprise, the approximately 9,000 Mexicans in New York City who applied for amnesty constituted the second-largest group to do so, just behind the approximately 11,000 Dominican applicants...
...It is also interesting that the comments I have heard usually compare Mexicans to Puerto Ricans and blacks or other minorities, and not with whites...
...For now, as Mexicans enter the political, social and economic worlds of New York, they do so within the pervasive and dangerous context of racialization...
...4 The immigrant first generation usually has responded by embracing the immigrant analogy, though in different ways in different contexts...
...cosmopolitan," adolescents significant cause of the surge in the Mexican population during the 1990s was family reunification made possible by the "amnesty" provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA...
...The purpose was to defend themselves against Puerto Ricans and blacks born in New York, whom they saw as their primary antagonists...
...representations of race, based on the "original sin" of slavery, with "whiteness" signalling that a group is fit for full membership in society...
...As Mexican youth report the story, other local youth-especially, but not exclusively, blacks and Puerto Ricans--responded by preying on Mexicans, insulting, beating and robbing them...
...63, No...
...7 This sentiment is echoed, in a separate interview, by a second-generation teen-age girl: "In a Mexican family, you move out with your boyfriend...
...196-212...
...Many Puerto Ricans possess phenotypes that most Americans would consider "black," and experience consonant levels of racial segregation and discrimination...
...Historian David Roediger has used DuBois' insight to analyze how the "Irish became white...
...3 This dynamic of incorporation has lived on through generations in a situation in which immigration to the United States is seen simultaneously as a struggle-and-prosper story-the "immigrant analogy"-and one in which generations of immigrants have succeeded by differentiating themselves from blacks, who are understood to form an underclass...
...Their immigrant bargain is, in fact, implicitly juxtaposed to the situation of native-born blacks: the native-born do not sacrifice, and they therefore will not prosper...
...All this suggests recent immigrants and their allies should step up their fight for an immigrant policy that includes more bilingual education, programs for parents to learn English, summer and after school programs for youth and tighter links between U.S...
...DuBois mused that poor southern whites got a "public, psychological wage" by being white that enabled them to feel superior to blacks despite the many commonalities in their material living conditions...
...When Irish immigrants started coming to the United States in significant numbers in the 1830s, they had much in common with African-Americans...
...Supposedly that's only blacks and Puerto Ricans...
...4. This work can be consulted in a variety of venues: Robert Smith, "'Los Ausentes Siempre Presentes': The Imagining, Making and Politics of Community Between Ticuani, Puebla, Mexico and New York City," Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Political Science, Columbia University, 1995...
...9 This woman has identified a potential problem in the collective self-image of much of the Mexican community in New York...
...And as the third-largest Latino group in the city, with an enormous potential for growth, Mexicans are beginning to draw the attention of New York's political and community leaders...
...5. I call this "doubly bounded solidarity...
...From a population that barely existed in the early 1980s, Mexican New Yorkers now number in the hundreds of thousands...
...This is frequently expressed as evidence of the "Americanization" that robs Puerto Ricans of their culture and leaves them vulnerable to the urban vices that Mexicans can resist...
...In particular, many Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children point to what they see as the tendency of Puerto Rican young men to engage in crime, especially against Mexicans, the propensity of Puerto Rican young women to get pregnant, and the tendency of many Puerto Ricans to depend on government assistance...
...Most Mexican gang confrontations actually involve conflicts with other Mexicans, not Puerto Ricans or African-Americans...
...They see these successful black students as role models whose success they wish to emulate...
...The U.S...
...As immigrants they face-and many have internalizedexpectations that they conform to an "immigrant analo14NV2LA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS P I 14 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON RACE AND MIGRATION gy" according to which they will work hard and sacrifice their personal well-being so that their children and grandchildren can prosper...
...How their "Mexicanness" will be defined in New York's complex web of ethnicities remains to be seen...
...Part of the reason for these indicators of social distress is the huge surge in Mexican youth 16 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 16REPORT ON RACE AND MIGRATION migration during the 1990s...
...6. Author's interview, 1993, New York City...
...Being Mexican street, seeing relatively few presence of Mexican youth in helps us do better" describes people who have succeeded how many of these adolesthrough school, and facing schools, parks and neighborhoods...
...1, February, 1998, pp...
...but it's not taken so lightly...
...By the mid 1990s many of these immigrants had their permanent residency and were bringing their families up from Mexico, with or without visas...
...In addiThe figures are disquieting for members of the Mexi- tion to the young Mexicans who are dropping out of can community...
...A second generation woman notes the tendency of Mexicans to assert that they are different from blacks and Puerto Ricans, but is critical of it: "They don't want to be like them," she says of her young compatriots, "but I believe they are, because I believe they do the same things...
...6 In addition to African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, native-born whites are occasionally included in these unfavorable comparisons...
...no single way of adapting to New York life...
...Roediger answers the question of how the Irish came to not only distance themselves from blacks but to embrace an anti-black racism by analyzing their racialized mobilization by the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party...
...See also Robert Smith, Hector CorderoGuzman and Ramon Grosfoguel "Introduction: New Analytical Perspectives on Migration, Race and Transnationalization" in CorderoGuzman, Smith and Grosfoguel, eds., Migration, Race and Transnationalization in a Changing New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001...
...A Greek restaurant owner, for example, extolled to me the virtues of Mexican employees while in the same breath he disparaged African-Americans...
...1 Mexicans do not fit "naturally" into any one spot in New York's social and racial hierarchies...
...Census Bureau enumerated over 260,000 Mexicans in New York State in 2000, of whom more than 180,000 were estimated to be in New York City...
...Tell me, what are you giving to your family...
...See Portes' chapters in Portes, The Economic Sociology of Immigration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995...
...He is the author of Migration, Settlement and Transnational Life (forth- coming, 2002) and many articles on migration and transnation- al communities...
...There are other, ly paid hard work...
...Also see Min Zhou, "Segmented Assimilation: Issues, Controversies, and Recent Research on the New Second Generation," in Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, eds., Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), pp...
...Because you have to think about your kids...
...One of the first Mexican youth gangs in the city called itself ODR, "Organization to Defend the Race...
...The formation of youth gangs grows out of the migration process itself and the often hostile reception that Mexican youth get here...
...most stigmatized position at the bottom of the hierarchy with a Latino group, Puerto Ricans...
...The willingness of Mexican immigrants to work hard makes them different from native-born workers, he said, and he detailed how they moved up step by step from being busboys, to dishwashers, to cooks...
...It's a matter of pride...
...and Robert Smith, Migration, Settlement and Transnational Life, forthcoming, 2002...
...Mexicanness" in New York 1. See Robert Smith, "Mexicans: Social, Educational, Economic and Political Problems and Prospects in New York," in Nancy Foner, ed., New Immigrants in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming, 2001...
...68-93...
...They wonder-worriedly-whether they will become a marginalized, racialized minority or an incorporated ethnic group...
...See Dowell Myers and Cynthia Cranford, "Temporal Differentiation in the Occupational Mobility of Immigrant and Native-Born Latina Workers," American Sociological Review, Vol...
...This leads to an emphasis by employers on their own similarities with their Mexican immigrant employees, and the difference of both from native minorities...
...7. Author's interview, 1997, New York City...
...institutions and the communities from which immigrants come...
...My research with Mexicans in New York over the last fifteen years has yielded a complex picture of responses to the need to define oneself within racialized hierarMexicans do not fit "naturally" into any one spot in New York's social and racial hierarchies...
...He's your husband because you sleep with him...
...According to the Census, Mexicans as a group went from having one of the highest per capita incomes of all Latinos in New York in 1980 (when the community was smaller) to having one of the lowest in 1990...
...Robert Smith teaches sociology at Barnard College...
...cents understand themthe prospect of years of poor- selves...
...society, one had not simply to be "not black" but also in many instances "anti-black...
...Mexicans formed gangs and crews to defend themselves...
...In many places, especially those with relatively small minority populations, such as some towns in New York's Hudson Valley or on the Delmarva Peninsula just east of Washington, DC, they already are...
...Mexican vendors have become a common sight in Nev York's parks...
...On the other hand, African-Americans share the members of U.S...
...Gender, Race and Schools in Educational and Work Outcomes of Second Generation Mexican Americans in New York," in Marcelo Suarez-Orozco and Mariela Paez, eds., Latinos in the 21st CALL FOR F NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HI National Con February 11-1 Houston, Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming, 2001...
...Many of the people we have interviewed for our projects report not knowing many whites, except for teachers or employers, and that most of their classmates, workmates, or people they see in the parks or in their neighborhoods, are black or Latino...
...What the Irish had learned, in essence, was that to be full chies...
...Latinos in New York (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996...
...This process, too, engaged with racialization...
...9. Author's interview, 1997, New York City...
...who see Mexicanness as only one identity among many, and there is a small group that dissociates itself from Mexicans in public places and identifies instead, in most cases, with upwardly mobile blacks...
...I had one Puerto Rican friend who has had five husbands in her lifetime," says an immigrant mother...
...Within this social context, racialization-the logic of moral and civic worth based on one's ethnic or racial affiliation-takes place within the Mexican community itself...
...5 While many Korean, Greek, Italian and native-born employers explicitly or implicitly compare Mexican immigrants to native-born blacks and Puerto Ricans, hence treating them as part of the out-group, they also see them as immigrants like themselves, or like their immigrant predecessors, hence part of their in-group...
...Answers will emerge as they begin to negotiate their way through the city's system of social and racial hierarchies...
...Other Mexican youth I have interviewed report that they are not stepped up to because they "look Dominican" or "look Ecuadorian," and hence are let pass uninspected...
...Research assistance during 19982000 by Sara Guerrero Rippberger, Sandra Lara, Agustin Vecino, Carolina Perez, Griscelda P6rez, Linda Rodriguez and Lisa Peterson is gratefully acknowledged...
...Social psychologists have observed school at alarming rates, some upwardly mobile youth that a positive ethnic identity have used their Mexican is usually associated with ethnicity to differentiate greater life success, but for There was a huge increase in the themselves from other many of these young people, minorities in their schools self image is formed around Mexican youth population, and neighborhoods, whom an identity that includes resulting in the sudden public they see as not serious about being vulnerable on the school...
...We've had girls getting pregnant, you know...
...In the labor market, for example, Mexican workers frequently confront complex and contradictory forms of ethnic solidarity...
...but they also speak Spanish and are immigrants...
Vol. 35 • September 2001 • No. 2
