When the Mexicans first began to move into the USA?
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The Mexicans who first lived in California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, etc., did not “move to the U.S.”, the U.S. moved to them when the U.S., or , in the case of Texas, U.S. citizens immigrating there, took over their territories and finally made states out of them.
Hispanics moved to other states later for the same reason most people move: in search of jobs. Later more residents of Mexico moved to areas of the U.S. with high hispanic population concentrations.
And there have been Hispanics in North America dating back to Columbus’s crew (Columbus himself was Italian), Cortez and other Conquistatores (although many of the Conquistadores were Spaniards of Arabic or Moorish descent) . There are still enclaves of Mexico where the population is overwhelmingly Moorish and celebrate their Moorish heritage. Mexico also has a strong Native American as well as a Hispanic heritage, and is altogether a far more diverse country than many people in the U.S. imagine.
In brief, “Mexicans” have always been in what is now the U.S.. And they have nearly always been hard-working and adaptable. If grades in citizenship were regularly passed out to adults based on hard work and family values– in other words, were each individual given his/her due regardless of culture or race– negative stereotypes of all races would be greatly diminished.
The stereotyping stemmed largely from the obvious contrasts between Hispanic and Anglo cultures, causing certain pictures of Hispanic people to form in the minds of Anglos, and vice-versa. Also, stereotypes grew up from the frontier habit of humorous exaggeration. One of the worst and unfairest stereotypes now pervading the popular culture is the “Redneck” stereotype targeting white people with a rural background, but we kind of brought it on ourselves. More on this below.
Regardless, the stereotypes of minorities became very negative as well as ridiculous, and also quite inappropriate, when the degree of mingling of cultures and peoples reached the point where Anglos knew or should have known Mexican-Americans and members of other groups as individuals.
. My grandfather, who was raised in the hills of Kentucky, said that people in that region often kidded themselves uproarously, told stories about comical stereotypical “hillbillies”, poked fun at extremely isolated residents of the Cumberland Mountains who seldom or never had contact with people outside of their own communities.
He quoted his own father as telling him that he never saw a mirror until just before his wedding when he went down from the Cumberlands to Barbourville, Kentucky, to buy a suit to get married in. Seeing himself in a mirror (he claimed), he asked his mirror image: ” ‘Eye gannies, young man, I see you got yore self a new suit too, didn’t ye?”
(It wasn’t true. That story was old when my great grandfather, born in 1856, was young. )
The expression “eye gannies”, by the way, was extremely old-fashioned then too. The guinea was an old English coin of a rather high denomination. “Eye gannies”– more correctly rendered “By guineas”— was a way of saying, “I’ll bet you a sawbuck…”
A little memorabilia from my great-grandfather’s time. The so-called “Hillbilly” culture, unfortunately so badly parodied now in the “Redneck” culture, was actually a very rich culture valuing homegrown music and book knowledge. Dolly Parton is a very talented and intelligent representive of it. It is where she learned her music.
She’s in my generation. Before Dolly, in my grandfather’s time, people in the hills hoarded books as prized treasures for generations and operated their own one-room schools that, with the aid of McGuffey Readers, provided a high degree of culture and education for those interested.
Both of my grandfathers, like the lovely Dolly Parton never having left the hills until they were adults, could quote the Bible and Shakespeare, and quote great English and American poems at length.
If we today fail to value the Hispanics and other minorities among us, perhaps it is because we have lost respect for our own roots and understanding of our own ancestors’ strengths and complexities. Perhaps we see everyone, including ourselves, in terms of stereotypes, because we have never truly examined our own lives and our own cultures, but, as Socrates is credited by Plato with saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
We were grounded in a culture centuries old, transported from the British Isles and adapted to America. And then we were uprooted by the sudden surge in urban culture, and I fear that some things very valuable died. Included was respect for the classic works of western civilization, so prized in the one-room “hillbilly” schools of my grandfather’s childhood.
Like the Hispanics, modern urban culture has cast us “Rednecks” and “Hillbillies” forth as wanderers from the hills, a place in many ways, only three generations ago, more like England of old than modern America. And a few years ago writer Tony Hillerman reported the existence of old Hispanic communities in the Colorado hills, where people spoke in the musical, drawling Spanish of the Conquistadores of three centuries ago!
Parallels abound– some of them quite tragic– wherever the new has wreaked merciless havoc on the old. Inevitable progress has had its downside. To ease its pain, the best remedy is renewed respect for all, keener respect for our own and everyone else’s roots!
It would be well for all of us to focus more awareness on the fact that that we are a nation of immigrants. We all might well ask, “When did we [whatever group we belong to] first begin to move into the USA?”
Whenever it was, we have enriched it, whether our grandparents spoke Spanish or the leisurely, cadenced Elizabethian English of the hills that my great-grandparents spoke in their childhood. We have in our hearts danced in step with our grandparents, whether they did the square dance or the hat dance. I shall spend the rest of my life learning more about your dances, your music, your ways of thinking, wherever your grandparents lived, because we’re here together now, we’re Americans here together now, nor can we truly learn anything deeply important by forgetting everything that we as a nation comprised of many peoples have ever known!
And aren’t we all, of all ethnic backgrounds, tremendously lucky to have one another? We, the people of all types, are the true wealth, the true richness of America.
I don’t know when the Mexicans first began to move into the U.S.A., nor, for that matter, when my mother’s Native American ancestors first crossed the land bridge from Siberia, as there were waves of them crossing when the wooly mammoth was king, there was a time when even the first Native Americans were just as much immigrants as families that crossed the Rio Grande this morning! There was the time when neither the word “America” nor any other Indo-European word ever had been pronounced in this great land. “And I ask, for the depths of what use is language?” — Edgar Lee Masters.
Whenever it was that any of us came, I thank God that we are all now here together.
