Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados: Class and Culture on the South Texas Border [Revised Edition] 9781477312704

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Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados

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Number Forty-Five Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture

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Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados Class and Culture on the South Texas Border Revised edition Ch a d Rich a r dson a nd Mich a el J. Pisa ni

University of Texas Press

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Austin

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Copyright © 1999, 2017 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Revised edition, 2017 First edition, 1999 Publication of this work was made possible in part by support from the J. E. Smothers, Sr., Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 http://utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging Data

Names: Richardson, Chad, 1943– author. | Pisani, Michael J., 1962– author. Title: Batos, bolillos, pochos, and pelados : class and culture on the South Texas border / Chad Richardson and Michael J. Pisani. Other titles: Jack and Doris Smothers series in Texas history, life, and culture ; no. 45. Description: Revised edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2017. | Series: Jack and Doris Smothers series in Texas history, life, and culture ; number forty-five | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016050491| ISBN 978-1-4773-1272-8 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1269-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1270-4 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1271-1 (nonlibrary e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Social classes—Texas. | Social classes—Mexican-American Border Region. | Subculture—Texas. | Subculture—Mexican-American Border Region. | Texas—Race relations. | Mexican-American Border Region—Race relations. | Texas—Ethnic relations. | Mexican-American Border Region—Ethnic relations. | Mexicans—Texas—Social conditions. | Mexicans—Mexican-American Border Region—Social conditions. Classification: LCC HN79.T43 R53 2017 | DDC 305.50972/1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050491 doi:10.7560/312728

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To the individuals along this great fault line we call the border who shared their lives. They illuminated ours in the process. CR and MJP For Elizabeth and our children, with love and gratitude for their unfailing support. —CR For Jana, William, Carina, and Geoffrey, with love. —MJP

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Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments Introduction

xvii

1

PART I. Ranking and Class Inequality

1. Migrant Farmworkers 29 W i t h J ua n i ta Va l dez Cox 2. The Colonias of South Texas W it h Dav i d A r izmen di

73

3. “Only a Maid”: Undocumented Domestic Workers in South Texas 105 4. Social Inequality on the Mexican Side of the Border

141

Conclusion to Part I: Social Class on the South Texas– Northern Mexico Border 167 PART II. Racial and Ethnic Inequality

5. The Pain of Gain: South Texas Schools Then and Now W it h Da n iel P. K i ng 6. From Mexicanos to Mexican Americans to Americans? W it h Chryst ell Flota

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7. “Ahí Viene el Bolillo!”: Anglos in South Texas W it h Jen n y Ch a mber l a i n 8. Race and Ethnicity in South Texas

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Conclusion to Part II: The Interaction of Race, Class, and Ethnicity 307 Epilogue: The Strength and Resilience of People of the South Texas Border 327 W it h Joh n Sa rgen t Appendix A. Borderlife Survey Research Projects Utilized in This Volume 333 Appendix B. Students Who Contributed Ethnographic Accounts 337 Notes

343

Bibliography Index

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One evening as I picked up the phone to call some relatives to ask them for an interview, my mom asked me why I needed to call them. I explained my sociology project and that I had chosen the subject of migrant farmworkers. She then asked me, “Why don’t you interview me? After all, nosotros fuimos migrantes [we were migrants].” Then she added, “It is our turn to tell our story.” St u den t i n t erv iew er

When we published Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados in 1999, people like this student’s mom were able, many for the first time, to tell their own stories. Such individuals and their stories of life in South Texas are amazing. Though they, like population groups everywhere, are a mix of saints and scoundrels, we have found far more of them at the “saints” end of the continuum. While we admit to some bias in this conclusion, it is a bias borne of extensive research and some very poignant personal experiences over a period of almost forty years. We have found them to be amazingly resilient, many in the face of grinding poverty, race- and ethnicity-based discrimination, and outright exploitation. Our challenge has always been to let the people of South Texas tell their own story. The setting for their accounts is the southernmost tip of Texas, bordering Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico. This is a land of seeming contradictions with a rich history, a unique racial/ethnic mix, and a people full of life and hope. Their amazing stories need to be heard. Since we published the first edition of Batos, in 1999, many students, having read the accounts therein, have chosen to conduct their interviews on the same topics covered in that volume. As a result, over the

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ensuing years, the file of ethnographic accounts has grown, more than doubling the accounts we had to work with for the first edition. The present book, however, is more than an updating of the first edition. Much has changed since 1999; some of it is encouraging, though change has also brought added challenges. When we published Batos, we neither envisioned the magnitude of the changes nor the quantity and quality of the student research that would follow. Together, these developments do justify a new volume. We continue our focus on class and culture in South Texas with special attention given to migrant farmworkers, life in colonias, maids, social inequality, education, the process of acculturation, ethnic minorities (Anglos, African Americans, and Asian Americans), and race in the South Texas borderlands. Yet, this book must be much more than a simple update or a minor revision. When we published the first edition, we wanted a title that could represent the Valley’s uniqueness and diversity. Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados seemed to fit. Bato, to young Mexican Americans, means “man,” such as “Oye, bato” (Hey, man). It expresses in-group solidarity and epitomizes the sense of identity found among many young South Texas Mexican Americans. Bolillo (white bread roll) and pocho (faded, off-color), in contrast, are terms used to designate members of out-groups. The first indicates an Anglo (a non-Hispanic white), and the second a Mexican American who is regarded as overly Americanized in speech and culture. In Mexico, a pelado is someone suspected of criminal activity, the term possibly related to the practice of cutting very short the hair of Mexican prisoners. Along the border, however, it means someone disreputable, whether involved in criminal activity or not. For this edition, the term best fits those individuals or groups who engage in exploitation and abuse of the unique groups described in this volume. Though these terms are not normally used around members of these groups except in gentle kidding, they are part of local culture. Since this book emphasizes local culture and intergroup relations in South Texas, we felt the use of these colloquial terms, each closely related to the border, was appropriate. In the chapters that follow, we specify more clearly what changes and challenges have emerged since 1999. Still, there are three changes that seem to affect all or most of the population groups we examine. One is the way immigration from Mexico and Central America has changed. Since 1999, the McAllen sector in South Texas has become the primary route of entry for undocumented immigrants across the US-Mexico

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border. It has also received the largest number of unaccompanied minors trying to escape drug-related violence in Central America. The cartel wars and drug violence in Mexico and Central America constitute another impact on the South Texas border region. Though they have had a profound effect on life on both sides of the border, a spillover of violence into South Texas border cities has not really materialized as predicted by many politicians and journalists. A third important development is the host of demographic changes in South Texas and northern Mexico. The border population is growing at a rapid rate, with Mexican-origin people becoming an even larger proportion of the population. Anglos are now only 7 percent of the population of the Lower Rio Grande Valley (the four southernmost counties of South Texas). The growth of colonias (impoverished rural border neighborhoods) has virtually ceased, and the size of the migrant farmworker population has been in fairly rapid decline, with undocumented workers moving to other occupations and other states. Because of these and other changes and because of a greatly expanded archive of student interviews, this volume will not be simply an update of the first edition. Rather, it will cover the entire period of the Borderlife Project, including not just the years described in the first edition but also developments that have happened since. Accordingly, we will provide some of the original ethnographic accounts, about 20 percent, from this early period as well as some of the original surveys. Students who contributed ethnographic accounts in both editions are credited in appendix B. To update our earlier survey findings we also include the results of some surveys we conducted since 1999 and survey data from national samples that are relevant to the subjects at hand. Additionally, we have expanded our geographical reach from the four-county Rio Grande Valley (RGV, or just “the Valley”) to include Laredo (in Webb County) and much of the area historically referred to as the Nueces Strip in this present, revised edition. The current volume, along with its three preceding companions, all published by the University of Texas Press, is possible because of an approach to teaching and research that began officially in 1982 with the Borderlife Project. This project encourages students to not just read about the life around them but get out in the field as locally embedded researchers, generating ethnographic field interviews of family, friends, and strangers. Now, thirty-five years since we began, the ethnographic accounts

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reported by these students are housed in the Borderlife Archive at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). The collection contains student reports of more than ten thousand in-depth interviews and ethnographies plus more than six thousand survey responses generated through separate survey projects. Perhaps even greater than the value of the Borderlife Project and its collection, however, is the impact the process has had on the lives of our student researchers. Their lives were touched by the personal accounts of the people they interviewed, the experience of making sense of what they had seen and heard as they wrote up their research reports, applying concepts learned in their coursework to contextualize what they had experienced, and the pleasure of seeing their work valued when their names appear as contributors in each of the three (and with this volume, four) books published by a renowned academic publishing house, the University of Texas Press. One of our student interviewers explained the project’s impact on his own life. I found this assignment to be very interesting. Being a migrant worker myself, I had never realized that maybe my feeling of inferiority had a cause outside of me. I recall growing up as a child, feeling shame for being a migrant farmworker. I had learned to accept the fact that my parents were poor. When my brother-in-law encouraged me to go to college, I couldn’t see the need—nor could I see myself being able to accomplish it. If my parents who did not have an education were able to survive, I thought, so could I. But when my siblings graduated from college one by one, I got motivated. Even though I started college at a later age, I hope my children will not only be motivated but confident of doing the same.

The accomplishments of the Borderlife Project help us address an important question in the social sciences: Can undergraduate students contribute meaningfully to conducting high-quality, publishable research? In 2004, the quality of work of the Borderlife Project was recognized in a book published by Harvard University Press entitled What the Best College Teachers Do. The author, Ken Bain, describes the project and the students who participated in the Borderlife Project as follows: In fall 1977, Chad Richardson came to the Lower Rio Grande Valley in the southern tip of Texas and began teaching in the sociology program

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at Pan American University. Polishing off his own graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, he was eager to introduce others to the excitement of his discipline. At his new university, most of the students came from the local area; three quarters spoke Spanish and were of Mexican descent. They had a rich cultural heritage, but by most conventional measures they generally lacked the academic skills necessary to do well in college. A few came from families that had prospered in the local agricultural economy that sprang up along the river. Most students, however, lived closer to the poverty line, and many came from the ranks of the one hundred thousand migrant farmworkers in Hidalgo County, people whose labor had created the wealth of the region but who enjoyed few of its benefits. But they were pioneers, often the first in their families to take a college course, and sometimes the fi rst to read and write. The university, with its open admission policy, cut across a wide swath of SAT scores and high school ranks, but generally didn’t attract many students in higher registers. In this border region, located on the fringes of two national civilizations and not quite comfortable with either, Hispanics valued tradition and culture, yet often found themselves the focus of mean-spirited caricatures that belittled their habits, language, and origins. The twenty percent of the local populations that didn’t come from Mexican roots— what locals called “Anglos”—sometimes felt isolated and alienated from the local cultures, even though, as a group, they had dominant economic and political power.1

More recently, the anthropologist John P. Hawkins, writing in Current Anthropology in 2014, discussed how undergraduate students, especially those of lower incomes, could be involved in research efforts with publishable research. In one style, a professor may coordinate a research project and synthesize the research materials brought to the professor by locally rooted, well-guided undergraduate student ethnographers. Richardson . . . epitomizes this approach and published the result in a sole-authored book that recognizes by name the contributions of 309 student ethnographers that provided case material while exploring (and living) South Texas border life. So, how do scholarly reviews evaluate the products of these partnerships with undergraduates? Rodriguez . . . fi nds Richardson’s collabo-

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ration “a significant contribution to the scant social scientific literature on the country’s Mexican American population that clarifies in important ways the operations of class in South Texas communities.” I draw attention to the fact that Richardson accomplished this task in a setting where many of his students were substantially disadvantaged economically and educationally. Disadvantaged status is no impediment to participation in research and collaborative writing; indeed, it probably makes the outcome and even the process sweeter. Richardson succinctly advances a sustainable local area variation. His work demonstrates my contention that for maximum benefit a field school needs a legitimate research orientation and collaborative writing engagement. Richardson mounts a fully legitimate alternative to an away-based field school that seems well integrated in the department’s curriculum.2

Though most students who have participated in the Borderlife Project were enrolled as undergraduates, usually in upper-division classes, we also involved graduate students. Of the chapter coauthors in this book, only Jenny Chamberlain and John Sargent were not involved in the Borderlife Project as students. The chapter coauthors’ professional affiliations at this writing are as follows: Chapter 1: Juanita Valdez Cox, executive director of the Texas farmworkers union La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE). Juanita was a student in Chad Richardson’s classes (and a sociology major) in the early 1980s. She grew up as a migrant farmworker and eventually became a leader of the United Farm Workers (UFW). She contributed to the chapter by adding extensive comments from her own professional and personal experiences to what we had written. Chapter 2: David Arizmendi, instructor, South Texas College. In the 1990s David was an undergraduate sociology major and master’s program graduate at the University of Texas–Pan American (UTPA). David contributed comments and background information based on his publications and presentations about colonias. Chapter 5: Daniel P. King, PhD, superintendent, Pharr–San Juan– Alamo (PSJA) Independent School District. Daniel took a graduate Sociology of Education seminar from Chad Richardson while working on his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. He contributed to

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the chapter by fact checking and commenting based on his experiences in the very successful college-prep program at PSJA high schools. Chapter 6: Chrystell Flota, PhD, independent scholar. Chrystell took a graduate seminar from Chad Richardson in 2000 while working on her doctorate in business administration. Her seminar paper on the relation between Mexicans and Mexican Americans was incorporated, with her modifications, into the chapter. Chapter 7: Jenny Chamberlain, instructor, South Texas College. Jenny was a lecturer in sociology at UTPA and assisted in the Borderlife Project from 2006 through 2008. She provided comments and observations for the chapter. Epilogue: John Sargent, PhD, professor, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

One other former Borderlife student made an important contribution to this edition as well as to the 1999 edition. Noel Palmenez contributed the drawings in both editions. As coauthors, we share the common ground of having lived and worked not only on the border but in Mexico and Central America as well. We have personal experience working with migrant farmworkers in the United States, teaching at the community college and university levels, and a deep affection for South Texas. These points of commonality have made this joint effort rewarding, collaborative, and easygoing. We believe our different academic approaches and disciplines—sociology and international business—enrich this volume. We also hope that this work will appeal to individuals from diverse backgrounds and be interesting and informative to people like those who are the subject matter of our work. We believe the book should hold compelling interest for students in social science disciplines and be useful to them in understanding key social science concepts. Additionally, we hope it will enrich the academic literature on the people and situations of the US-Mexico borderlands. Finally, we hope our work informs local, regional, and national policy makers in the United States and Mexico to make better decisions, decisions that improve the quality of life in the South Texas borderlands and beyond. In relation to these audiences, our goals for the book are not much different from those we maintained for the Borderlife Project. For example, with Borderlife we wanted to help students experience a greater

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awareness of the rich cultural heritage of the region and gain a greater appreciation for and acceptance of the rich ethnic and racial diversity of the South Texas–northern Mexico borderlands. That remains our primary reason for making this volume available to our readers in South Texas and beyond. With Borderlife, we wanted students of all ethnic groups and different socioeconomic situations to develop an empathetic understanding of this diverse cultural and socioeconomic environment to develop a greater sense of their own historical place in it. Similarly, we hope, through the student interviewers and the people who shared their stories, to make an understanding of this rich cultural environment available to readers everywhere. When we began Borderlife, we wanted to create a community in which professors and students could engage in rich intellectual conversations in a collegial environment. With the current volume, we want not only to include the people of South Texas in these conversations but also to greatly expand the discussion’s reach to the South Texas community and the world beyond. Since its inception, we have used the interview experience and the ethnographic material it generated to challenge students to rethink their assumptions and examine their mental models of reality. We hope to accomplish a similar outcome among lay and other readers of this volume, allowing them to see and understand sociological forces that shape their lives and understand how society, along with personal and biological influences within each of us, affect our behavior and our outlook on life. From the storyteller to the student, from the interviewer to the researcher, the Borderlife Project provides highly authentic and compelling ethnographic accounts. Storyteller, student, faculty researcher, and reader can reflect together on the importance and personal rewards of documenting these experiences. Readers living in and beyond South Texas have marveled at the intimacy of context bounded by empiricism that the three initial publications have provided.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the many thousands of people of the South Texas and northern Mexico borderlands who have shared their life stories with us since the initiation of the Borderlife Project at the University of Texas– Pan American in 1982. This book would not have been possible without our students. Embedded in the local environment, our students through ethnographic interviews and semistructured surveys artfully collected and shared the life experiences and stories of residents in the region. We also thank the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Library archives for access to the Borderlife Collection that now houses the Borderlife Project. With regard to the University of Texas Press, we are indebted to its past editor-in-chief, Theresa May, who green-lighted this revised book project, and for the ongoing support of Kerry Webb, senior acquisitions editor, who gave us valuable encouragement for the project from the early stages of rewriting through the reviewing and editing processes. Her suggestions were always timely and valuable. Also invaluable was the assistance of Angie Lopez-Torres, editorial assistant at the press, in moving this project to fruition. We are thankful for the outstanding artwork provided by Noel Palmenez that graces this volume. We are grateful to Richard Coronado, an instructor at South Texas College, and his students for coordinating the use of the photographs that document many of the themes found throughout this book. We also wish to thank the academic reviewers of this edition for their critical insights; they challenged us to improve the text and found worth in our effort. Any remaining errors are ours alone.

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Chad Richardson’s Acknowledgments Many individuals have contributed greatly to the success of the Borderlife Project and to this current volume. At the risk of omitting many whose contributions have been invaluable, certain individuals cannot remain unsung. It was Mike Pisani’s idea to do a revised edition of Batos. He has been an outstanding coauthor on this volume and on our earlier one, The Informal and Underground Economy of the South Texas Border. Our chapter coauthors are also outstanding contributors and continue to do impressive work in the communities described in this volume. One individual who has given long, thoughtful, and dedicated service to the project is Jesse Medina, still serving as administrative assistant in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at UTRGV. Along the way, numerous graduate assistants also provided highly constructive assistance in the collection and analysis of all the material herein. Principal among them are Amelia Flores, Carlos Sepulveda, and Omar Camarillo. Various colleagues have provided invaluable feedback and support over many years; they include Joe Feagin at Texas A&M, Ellwyn Stoddard at UT El Paso, and Rogelio Saenz at UT San Antonio. Finally, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my wife, Elizabeth, and our children (Mark, Aaron, Daniel, Benjamin, Stephen, Shayla, Janae, and Amy), who not only sacrificed time with Dad but contributed with helpful suggestions, critiques, and assistance.

Mike Pisani’s Acknowledgments Chad Richardson has been instrumental in my development as a scholar in his roles as teacher, mentor, friend, and collaborator. I was introduced to the Borderlife Project in an elective sociology seminar that I took while working on my PhD in international business at UTPA. I was fortunate to have served in several roles related to the project, first as a student of Professor Richardson, then as a reader of his books, next as a researcher employing a version of the Borderlife methodology for a time at Texas A&M International in Laredo (and utilizing the Borderlife archive at UTPA), and fi nally as a colleague and coauthor on this and one prior book and several journal articles. I have appreciated Chad’s genuine passion for serving others—students, South Texans, the academy, family, and his faith community. I deeply appreciated the opportunity

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to collaborate once again with Chad, one of the hardest-working and most thoughtful people one could know. Many at Central Michigan University (CMU) have facilitated my ongoing research of the South Texas borderlands. First is Professor Van Miller, friend, colleague, and fellow borderlander. In the College of Business, I appreciate the financial support and encouragement of Dean Chuck Crespy. In addition, I thank my current and past chairs of the Management Department, Luis Perez-Batres and Mahmood Bahaee, for their support during this project. Similarly, I am indebted to CMU for a semester-long sabbatical in the spring of 2014 that facilitated the early stages of this book project as well as to the Office of Sponsored Research and Programs for financial support. I wish to thank my wife and partner in life, Jana, not only for the time and space to complete this book but also for her patience, interest, and listening skills as this multiyear project unfolded. She has always been there for me, in more ways than she knows. Thanks also to our three children, William, Carina, and Geoffrey, and our three pets (Pixie, Puzzle, and Kit-Kat) for enduring my time away from them during this project.

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Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados

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Introduction

Politicians love the border. Some use it to get elected, to get campaign money, and to get voters all riled up. They demand more border walls and more boots on the ground to stop illegal immigration and protect American citizens from cross-border violence. They portray the border, especially the South Texas border, as a wild and dangerous place where US citizens cower in the shadows as Mexican cartels carry out kidnappings, murders, and open violence. And it is not just US politicians getting in on the act. In the United Kingdom, a 2015 conservative British newspaper ran a headline that proclaims, “Revealed, America’s Most Fearful City Where Texans Live Next to a ‘War Zone.’” The article is about the border city of McAllen, Texas, and claims that it is “a 10-minute drive from Reynosa,” Mexico, and that McAllen residents “can hear gunshots all hours of the day and spot drug smugglers in their streets.”1 In 2014, Governor Rick Perry called for “a show of force” on the Texas border to deter the violence and stop the illegal border crossings. At one point he donned a flak jacket and wraparound sunglasses to join state police on a river patrol. Soon after that, Perry ordered the Texas National Guard and a large contingent of Highway Patrol officers to South Texas.2 A few years earlier, Governor Perry and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (2009–2015) warned the citizens of their respective states about beheadings and bombings in the border zones of each state. In both cases, the violence they reported happened not in their states but across the border in Mexico. Nevertheless, these politicians chose to portray their own border communities as lawless and violent.3 The portrayals of Texas border cities as dangerous are not supported by the FBI’s 2014 ranking of most dangerous cities as measured by vi-

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olent crime per 100,000 inhabitants. Of twenty-one Texas metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) on the list, Brownsville-Harlingen (less than sixty miles downriver from McAllen and just across the river from Matamoros, Mexico) was ranked as the least dangerous. McAllenEdinburg-Mission was also far down the list (16th), as were the other two border MSAs, El Paso (12th) and Laredo (9th). At the top of the FBI list were metropolitan areas that are not on the border: Lubbock (1st), Dallas-Fort Worth (3rd), and Houston (5th). Indeed, all of the Texas border metropolitan areas had violent crime rates below the Texas state average.4 Other data fly in the face of the characterization of border cities as dangerous places to live. A Gallup-Healthways annual report ranks the largest 190 American cities or communities in terms of how their citizens feel about and experience their daily lives. This survey measures how residents from each community evaluate their sense of purpose, social relationships, financial security, connection to their communities, and physical health. In the 2016 Gallup-Healthways poll, apparently citizens of the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission MSA, counted as one community, were not really bothered by hearing those gunshots all day long or stumbling over drug smugglers in their streets. Indeed, the community of McAllen-Edinburg-Mission scored close to the top (11th best out of 190) in the nation and beat out every other Texas community in the study in relation to community well-being scores. Other Texas cities (El Paso, on the border in West Texas, and Corpus Christi in South Texas had strong rankings as well, scoring 31st and 25th, respectively). A closer look at the five categories that produced this ranking is even more revealing. The McAllen MSA was ranked 2nd nationally in relation to respondents’ sense of purpose (defined as liking what one does each day and being motivated to achieve one’s goals). Corpus Christi (also within the Nueces Strip) was ranked 1st in this category. McAllen came in 7th in the social category (having supportive relationships and love in one’s life). McAllen was 11th in its sense of community (defined as liking where one lives, feeling safe, and having pride in the community). McAllen was still near the top 10 percent, or 20th, in physical well-being (defined as believing one has generally good health and enough energy to get things done). Nevertheless, with regard to the fifth variable (fi nancial), McAllen ranked 140th, much closer to the bottom. The aspect of financial wellbeing was defined as being able to manage one’s economic life to reduce stress and increase stability. Since South Texas has some of the highest

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Introduction 3

rates of poverty in the nation, this result is not particularly surprising. What is surprising to many is that a community with such a high degree of poverty can have residents ranking at the top in feeling good about their lives and their community. In addition to measuring the preceding five aspects of community well-being, the researchers examined several measures of access to food, medicine, and basic health care services. Since these variables are closely related to a family’s financial status, the McAllen community again scored at or near the bottom. It ranked dead last (190th), for example, in food insecurity (experiencing times in the preceding twelve months when respondents did not have enough money to buy food that their families needed). Also, it ranked last (190th) in the proportion of residents who reported having health insurance.5 Finally, this community, because of the very poor economic situation of its residents, again ranked last in the number of respondents reporting they had personal doctors.6 So how can these border residents rank so low with respect to financial well-being,7 food security, health insurance, and access to personal doctors and yet score so highly in community well-being? The short answer represents the first major aim of this volume—to show that South Texas residents are amazingly resilient in the face of intense difficulties and are highly adept at leveraging their social relationships, connections to family and community, and even proximity to the United States-Mexico border to overcome these deficits. A second and related aim is to explain how, despite the decline in extreme racism and exploitation that predominated throughout the region in earlier times, South Texas remains at the bottom in socioeconomic measures like those just mentioned. We will show that far less obvious forms of discrimination—structural and cultural bias—today perpetuate much of the inequality in this South Texas borderland. Our third aim is to let the people of South Texas tell their own stories through their own words—and by so doing, help outsiders understand their life situations and the innovative ways they find to meet life’s difficulties. One person interviewed, for example, relates, “If we have to leave our house, I usually inform one of my neighbors. We usually keep watch for one another. You will not see any policemen coming into our neighborhood to keep an eye on things. That is why we have to count on each other.” Another resident of a South Texas colonia (impoverished rural border neighborhood community) said, “People here take turns keeping an eye

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Introduction

on the kids after they come home from school. They also know who is good at certain tasks. For example, Juana, the one that lives in number 3 makes excellent tortillas. Everyone comes to me when they need work done on their car. Carlos, the one in number 7, knows a little about electricity. We don’t hesitate to help each other out. Our colonia is a little world on its own. We all help each other in any way we can.” One of our student interviewers was impressed with the pattern of unity she observed in low-income neighborhoods. “Six out of my seven interviewees,” she writes, “got along really well with their neighbors. When something was needed, all they needed to do was ask someone in the neighborhood. One of them told me, ‘Whenever we need something like an ingredient to make a meal or some building material, our neighbors help us out. We do the same for them when they are in need.’” Sometimes, getting assistance utilizes not only neighbors but informal and cross-border resources. One woman recalled, One day, my husband got very sick and my neighbor offered me some medication she had purchased at the flea market.8 As time passed, my husband got worse until he was not able get out of the bed. I was so worried that we decided to go to Mexico. The doctor there told me that the medication our neighbors had given us was causing an allergic reaction. I am glad I took him to Mexico, even though I put us both at risk by having to sneak across the river to get back.

Though some may condemn this woman for accepting prescription drugs from a neighbor and crossing the border to see a Mexican doctor, her decisions make sense in light of very limited income and regulations that put health insurance out of reach for people like her. Her story reveals a resilience that arises from a strong base of social capital (networks of family, friends, neighbors, and so forth) working together to fi nd solutions when societal institutions do not work well for them. The fact that this response is rather widely employed was revealed in 2008 when several colleagues and Chad Richardson undertook a survey of cross-border health care utilization by residents of Texas border counties to determine how many border residents cross the border to get four specific types of health care services in Mexico.9 The results are shown in table 0.1. Appendix A lists the surveys cited in this book. When border residents report not having a doctor or medical insurance, they may be crossing to Mexico to visit Mexican doctors who charge them much less and are reputed to spend more time with each

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Introduction 5

Table 0.1. Use of health care services in Mexico by Texas border residents

Ever used the service

Service type Pharmacy Physician Dentist Inpatient facility Any of the four types

Used the service within the previous twelve months

Percent

Standard error

Percent

Standard error

35.0 24.8 33.0 4.1 51.7

1.3 1.2 1.3 0.5 1.3

26.3 21.9 17.2 1.8 34.0

1.2 1.1 1.0 0.4 1.3

Source: Cross-Border Utilization of Health Care Survey, 2008 (n = 1,405).

Figure 0.1. Examination room in a medical clinic in Río Bravo, Mexico. Photo by Xena Luna; © X. Luna, used by permission.

patient. Also, many South Texas residents purchase prescription medications at Mexican pharmacies, often informally without first needing to get prescriptions.10 While they save money, they increase the risk of adverse reactions. Nevertheless, among the 356 respondents in the 2008 Cross-Border Utilization of Health Care Survey who reported doctor

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6

Introduction

visits in Mexico, 96 percent mentioned that the services they received there met their expectations. The resilience and strength of South Texans in the face of great difficulties that many face are characteristic of most of the studies reported in the chapters of this book. Another important finding is that South Texas Hispanics manifest generally positive relations with and little resentment against Anglos despite a history of extreme racial and ethnic discrimination and violence that marked most of the preceding 150 years.

A Brief History of Racial, Ethnic, and Class Conflict in South Texas In map 0.1, the area in extreme South Texas between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, called the Nueces Strip, was not part of Texas when Texans and their Mexican allies defeated Antonio López de Santa Anna to gain independence in 1836. But following Texas independence, Texans attempted to claim the Nueces Strip, occasionally sending troops to support their claim. Mexicans bitter from defeat raided northward into San Antonio. Texans eager to expand their territory agitated to make the Rio Grande their southern border. In 1842, they retaliated for Mexican raids and sacked Laredo. Then they launched an attack against Ciudad Mier, fifteen miles upriver from Roma. The Mexican army captured and took two hundred of them to Salado, Mexico, forced them to draw from a jar of mixed-color beans, and then executed the seventeen who drew black beans. This added to a deep resentment of Mexicans by Anglos in South Texas. After the United States annexed Texas in 1845, President James Polk sent troops into the disputed Nueces Strip near Brownsville. When Mexican troops attacked them to defend their territory, politicians in Washington used the battle to justify a war with Mexico. Abraham Lincoln, then a young congressman from Illinois, introduced a resolution in Congress in an unsuccessful attempt to force President Polk to admit that the battle had not occurred on American soil.11 When a full-fledged war followed, Mexico lost not only the Nueces Strip but most of the territory of the American Southwest. After the defeat of Mexico by the United States, Mexican Americans living in the Nueces Strip lost most of their property to Anglo ranchers through theft, extortion, and trickery. Much of their land had been granted to their ancestors by the king of Spain centuries earlier. Juan Cortina, a veteran of the Mexican-American War, was one of these landowners, with property in Mexico and Cameron County. After wit-

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Map 0.1. Map of South Texas. Map by Amy E. R. Freeman.

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8

Introduction

nessing a marshal in Brownsville pistol-whip a former employee, Cortina shot the marshal and escaped into Mexico. On July 13, 1859, he launched a raid against Brownsville, capturing Fort Brown and the local jail. He then freed the Tejano (Hispanic Texan) prisoners and killed several Americans suspected of brutalizing the Tejanos.12 The governor of Texas sent two companies of Texas Rangers to put down the revolt. In their first battle, Cortina’s men thoroughly defeated the Rangers. When the US Army arrived, Cortina moved his forces to Rio Grande City. Eventually, his army of five hundred Tejanos and Mexicans was defeated by the larger force of soldiers and Rangers. Nevertheless, Cortina escaped unharmed amid a hail of bullets. On March 15, 1860, Robert E. Lee, who had served as General Winfield Scott’s chief of staff during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), left San Antonio to pursue Cortina. Although he was unable to trap Cortina, Lee managed to secure a promise from Mexican officials that they would make the arrest.13 During the winter of 1860–1861, Lee was stationed at Fort Ringgold (Rio Grande City), where he commanded the Second Cavalry. That was his last command in the US Army.14 During the US Civil War, the Nueces Strip again became contested territory. The Confederacy used it to evade the Union blockade by shipping cotton into Mexico and importing arms through Mexico. During the Civil War, Cortina joined the Union forces, helping them capture Brownsville. Hostilities continued until May 13, 1865, when the last battle of the Civil War was fought at Palmito Ranch battlefield, just east of Brownsville. Though the war had ended weeks earlier, the command to surrender had not yet reached troops on the distant USMexico border.15 As the hostilities came to a close on the north bank of the Rio Grande, a major war was under way on the Mexican side. The French under Napoléon III were trying to force Mexico to accept the Austrian Maximilian as its emperor. Mexican nationalists, under the leadership of Benito Juárez, had been driven to Mexico’s northern border and were desperately fighting to maintain their independence against these imperial troops. In 1866, a small army under the leadership of General Mariano Escobedo attacked an imperialist army of 1,300 French and Austrian troops near Camargo, across the river from Rio Grande City. There they thoroughly defeated the French in the Battle of Santa Gertrudis. This battle was a turning point in the war that led to the defeat of Maximilian in Mexico at Querétaro in 1867. At the close of these two wars, Cortina returned to his practice of stealing Texas cattle, gaining the reputation of having stolen more

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Introduction 9

Texas cattle than any other individual. Texas Rangers retaliated by invading Mexico, burning villages, and indiscriminately hanging Mexican citizens. Eventually, under pressure from the US government, the president of Mexico, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, arrested Cortina and imprisoned him in Mexico City in 1872. Reaction to Cortina’s raiders turned into deep suspicion of anyone thought to be Mexican along the border. From 1915 to 1919 Texas Rangers began rounding up and often lynching many local Mexican Americans in their effort to tame the area.16 Mexicans who were arrested were often shot “trying to escape.” Many vigilantes managed to get themselves appointed as Rangers and had themselves photographed next to piles of bodies of supposed bandits. Longtime residents remembered the raids and hangings decades later. By this time, Anglo dominance over Mexican-origin people in the Nueces Strip was characterized by extreme racism and outright exploitation. Largely due to racism, thousands of Hispanic citizens and Mexicans were rounded up, shot, hanged, or driven across the border into Mexico. Then Anglo settlers and public officials exploited the powerlessness of Mexican Americans by wresting large tracts of land by trickery and collusion between public officials and Anglo settlers.17 Artemio,18 a lifelong resident of the Rio Grande Valley, was ninetyseven years old at the time of his interview in 1991. He described an incident that happened around 1917. Some people from Mexico came over here and started trouble. They were telling us poor farmers that we could take back land that once was ours. They said we should get rid of the Anglos and be proud once again. That’s when the Anglos called the Texas Rangers. I remember the boxcars coming into town and those great big men on their horses with their hats and guns. Once the Rangers took charge, they didn’t really know who started it or who was involved, so they would just go out and round up some men. If they saw you walking down the street and one told you to come, you went. They would take a man outside of town and tell him to start running. They would shoot him in the back as he ran and report to the man in charge that they just shot another bandit. People were really afraid of them. They could do whatever they wanted and no one ever questioned them. I still don’t trust them.

Arturo, an older man from San Benito and a lifelong Valley resident, also remembered those times. His family lost thousands of acres originally granted to his ancestors by the king of Spain. He said,

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10 Introduction

They slowly killed us. They would shoot our animals and force us off the land. My father lost much land this way, but they had other methods. They would also fail to send us tax forms, so we never knew when to pay our taxes. Then one of them would claim default on the land, pay the taxes, and become owner of our land. Since they had the sheriff and the lawyers and since our people didn’t understand the language or their system, they stole the land under our house. Many of us around here lost land to a wealthy man from Harlingen. People there still think of him as a hero.

Prior to 1900, the main industry in South Texas was ranching. Many Anglo ranchers had married prominent Hispanic women, and most discrimination tended to be class-based as opposed to racial or ethnic discrimination. Hidalgo County in 1914, for example, had only 700 Anglo farmers who paid the poll tax compared to 1,200 Hispanic voters whom political bosses like John Closner could mobilize, allowing them to run unopposed. They managed to get a railroad into the Valley and advertised throughout the Midwest for farmers to come develop the rich soil of the area. As a result, land that sold for 25 cents an acre in 1903 was selling for $300 an acre in 1919. This land rush resulted in a large number of Anglo farmers who ousted the political bosses, disenfranchised the Hispanics, and segregated the towns and cities along the railroad and Highway 83, which runs alongside it. The cities most rigidly segregated were Mission, McAllen, Weslaco, and Harlingen.19 María was seventy-five years old and had lived in South Texas all her life. She still remembered what it was like in those years. Her parents died when she was a young girl, so she moved in with her uncle Eduardo and his family. He was a skilled carpenter who worked for a prominent Anglo farmer. María recalled how her uncle would get up before sunrise and get home well after dark. He and his fellow workers always did what they were told. One day, his boss was angry about something and my uncle didn’t exactly agree with him, so they exchanged a few words. At the end of the day, when the workers started for home, the boss told him to stay and redo something he hadn’t done right. The others left. That night he didn’t return home. We stayed up all night worrying. The next day we asked our neighbors about him, but no one had seen him. My cousin went to talk to his boss, but he said that Eduardo had left after redoing his job. Days passed and no one could tell us anything. Then, Saturday morning, they found my uncle in a nearby wooded area. His body was riddled with bullets and

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Introduction 11

Figure 0.2. Blatant

racism was common for the Mexicanorigin population in South Texas in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

covered with cactus. The older people took him to the river to clean him and pluck the thorns from his body so they could bury him. But we had to wait until night because we were afraid of the KKK.

Trinidad Peralez lived in South Texas during the same period. He recalled finding work with an Anglo family in Elsa. In exchange for my labor, they gave me cornbread, beans, oatmeal, milk, and a small cot in the barn. They also paid me five dollars a week for chores like fi xing the roof and shoveling cow manure. But the Anglos in town gave them a hard time for letting a Mexican live with them. They did not allow me in restaurants, stores, the church, or in the town theater. The only people who would speak to me were the couple and their two sons. As time went by, little by little, the people began to nod their heads at me, but during the seven years I worked for them, I stayed pretty much in the barn or in the back of the house where my meals were served.

The earlier periods of exploitation and racism continued into the early twentieth century, though with decreasingly violent forms of racism and

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12 Introduction

Figure 0.3. These girls are separated by hair color, culture, ethnicity, school, and living space. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

exploitation. We call the four most recent periods the segregation era, the post–World War II era, the Chicano era, and the post-Chicano era.20 The Segregation Era (1900–World War II) We refer to the direction of ethnic relations in South Texas between 1900 and World War II as “the segregation era,” or the effort by Anglos to keep Mexican-origin people in South Texas in subjugation. Initially during this period, Anglos made few efforts to anglicize Mexican Americans and social institutions were set up to keep them separate and “in their place.” Most cities in South Texas had a so-called Mexican town and separate Mexican schools.21 Sara Hinojosa recalled what it was like. We, the Mexican Americans, were the undesirables in town. We knew what they thought of us. Everyone called our school “la escuela de los burros” [the donkey school]. Our teachers were all Anglos except the principal’s helper. Some students who had been held back many times were eighteen years old. I was thirteen then and had many problems with those older boys. They had ideas about sex and things that I hadn’t even had time to think about.

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Introduction 13

The Post–World War II Era (1945–Late 1960s) Following World War II, things began to change. Though the goal of Anglo society remained largely segregation, schools and other institutions increasingly tried to force Anglo culture on Mexican Americans. More Mexican Americans began attending Anglo schools, though not as equals. Schools strongly enforced a no-Spanish policy through the 1950s, forcing many Mexican American children to avoid speaking Spanish, at least on school property. In addition, teachers often anglicized the names of their Hispanic students. Frequently such practices caught students between their parents and the schools. Roberto Salinas used to wonder why he wasn’t allowed to speak Spanish at school. But instead of asking why, he did what they told him because he knew his parents would punish him even harder at home if he got in trouble at school. He said, My father would always tell me to obey my teachers, but when I did, he became angry with me. One of my teachers told me to write my name “Robert” because we lived in the United States and not Mexico. When my father saw that I was writing “Robert” on my school papers, he got mad and made me put an “o” at the end of my name on every school paper.

The Chicano Era (Late 1960s–Early 1980s) With the coming of the civil rights movement in the United States, Chicano activists rejected segregation and fought for socioeconomic equality, a form of structural assimilation. They saw cultural pluralism rather than cultural assimilation as the way to achieve it. One man who was interviewed, Juan Antonio Diaz, exemplifies this position. He recalled, I once had a friend who said, “In the eyes of an Anglo, you’ll always be Mexican. No matter how much money or education you have, you’ll still be Mexican.” I didn’t like it, but to a certain extent he was right. We might get accepted but only to a certain extent. But I can live with that. I’m glad my father came from Mexico to give his family a life here that he couldn’t even dream of in Mexico. Will I ever assimilate? Not me. My culture tells me who I am. I might have been born here, but I’m proud to have Mexican ancestors. Every time I hear my dad tell me about the toys he had to make for himself because he was poor, I get chills up and down my spine.

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14 Introduction

Though the basic goal of Mexican Americans during the Chicano movement was social equality with Anglos, cultural pride and cultural pluralism were generally seen as primary means of achieving it. Bilingual education and the push for multiculturalism were manifestations of this combination. Mexican Americans also began a strong push for equal representation in the other institutions of society, in politics, government, and economic enterprises. The Post-Chicano Era (1980s–Present) As many Chicano activists began moving into the middle class, the push for cultural nationalism began to subside.22 Many among the upwardly mobile began to minimize their insistence on cultural pluralism, though they continued strongly advocating structural assimilation. For Mexican Americans several generations removed from the initial immigration experience, both forms of assimilation became increasingly common. Still, many Mexican Americans resisted full assimilation. One of our student interviewers described conflicted feelings this way: Being a Mexican American is like being pulled in a tug of war. Losing some of your cultural values is part of the package of being Mexican American. You can’t be all American because you sure aren’t white, and you can’t feel exploding pride when the Mexican national anthem is played because you’re not Mexican. It’s hard to decide which culture to be loyal to.

Often, the changes are gradual. Angélica Ortiz still clings to her Mexican culture. She frowns upon Mexican Americans who have adopted Anglo mannerisms and culture. Nevertheless, she now celebrates the US holiday of Thanksgiving, though with Mexican dishes, and her Christmas celebrations have lost many traditions she grew up with in Mexico. A similar change seems to take place in relation to the importance of maintaining Spanish. In our Cultural Practices Survey, 64 percent of Mexican respondents said it was very important to their parents that they spoke good Spanish, double the 32 percent of Mexican Americans with this response. In fact, a few Mexican American parents said their children should drop Spanish altogether. Being pulled both ways can be very painful in the South Texas border environment, as one of our student interviewers wrote.

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Figure 0.4. Blanketed on either side by the Mexican and US flags, the three children represent what they have to forget and adopt to be accepted into another culture. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

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16

Introduction

I did this assignment to understand and illustrate the stigma of being Hispanic and not being able to speak Spanish. I too am a pocho [Americanized Mexican]. Because of not being able to speak Spanish, my relationship with my grandparents is lost. My father will never ask me to drink a beer with him and my uncles, so I have become an outsider in my own family. In the Rio Grande Valley, being bilingual is a necessity. It has left me as well as those I have interviewed bitter and uncomfortable in our own community.

Understanding Social Inequality and Racial and Ethnic Relations in South Texas Today One intriguing aspect of this history of racial and ethnic relations in South Texas is that despite the repression and dispossession experienced during the nineteenth century, South Texas Hispanics today have not mounted any serious effort to declare an independent republic, to secede from the United States, or to extract some form of revenge against Anglos. Some scholars, politicians, and talk-show hosts, however, would have the public believe otherwise. The Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington in 2004 grossly overstated this sentiment: “Mexican-Americans . . . argue that the Southwest was taken from them by military aggression in the 1840s, and that the time for la reconquista [reconquest] has arrived. . . . Conceivably this could lead to a move to reunite these territories with Mexico.”23 Despite bitter maltreatment of Hispanics by Anglos in the past two centuries, South Texas Hispanic respondents in our surveys and ethnographic interviews appear to be remarkably loyal to the United States. Except for many first-generation immigrants, they responded, when asked, that they identified with and felt great allegiance to the United States. Indeed, in our Cultural Practices Survey, only 19 percent of Mexican-origin respondents said they liked the lifestyle of Mexico, 26 percent claimed to like Spanish-language television, and 18 percent identified themselves as “Mexican,” even though 26 percent of respondents in this sample were born in Mexico.24 Throughout the book we will argue that structural bias has become the primary means by which South Texas, as a geographical and political entity, and South Texas Hispanics, as minority-group individuals, experience inequality of treatment. While Hispanics are a minority group within the United States, Hispanics in South Texas are a numer-

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Introduction 17

Table 0.2. Types of discrimination most prevalent in society Degree of intentionality Harm is direct and mainly intentional

Harm is indirect and mainly unintentional

Cultural and personal attitudes and beliefs

Bigotry

Cultural bias

Society-wide structural systems and arrangements

Exploitation

Structural bias

Source of harm

ical majority, but as we will explain more fully, because of their somewhat subordinate socioeconomic position they would still be considered a minority group. We illustrate this point by describing what we see as four types of discrimination: bigotry, cultural bias, exploitation, and structural bias (table 0.2). Harsh bigotry and exploitation were very common in the times of Cortina and the Texas Rangers. Most nineteenth-century Anglos and Mexican elites then had no qualms about stating and enforcing their presumed superiority over low-income Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans of the area. Bigotry, racism, and exploitation not only were common but seemed morally justified to those who perpetrated them. Anglo Texans had no problem with stealing land and cattle from Mexicans but reacted with extreme hostility when Cortina dared do the same to them. We argue that today, however, the predominant forms of discrimination are more indirect and unintentional—in the forms of cultural bias and especially structural bias. Regulations get imposed that may unintentionally hurt the poor and powerless, but unlike their middle- or upper-class contemporaries, the poor lack the power to block such rules or policies. In this regard, the lack of power is a quintessential feature of structural bias.

A Demographic Profile of Our Geographical Focus The Nueces Strip is the geographical identifier for the area that is the subject of this book: the border region of South Texas. It is a land bor-

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18

Introduction

dered by two rivers and the Gulf of Mexico but is also a distinct historical and cultural region. The geographer Daniel D. Arreola calls it the Tejano homeland and asserts that “Mexican South Texas is a distinctive borderland, unlike any other Mexican American subregion.”25 To underscore its distinctiveness we will briefly describe the South Texas border region that is the primary focus of this book, from Laredo in the west along the border to Brownsville near the Gulf Coast in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV). While most of the Spanish settlements along the lower Rio Grande were on the southern bank (Matamoros, Reynosa, Camargo, and Mier), Laredo was originally settled in 1755 mostly on the northern bank. In 1846, Zachary Taylor led US troops into Laredo and declared it part of the United States. When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war with Mexico in 1848, the Rio Grande was finally established as the southern boundary of Texas. Residents of Laredo who did not want to be Americans moved across the river into Mexico and established Nuevo Laredo as a separate though connected city. As a result, the cities of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo not only border each other, as do Matamoros and Brownsville and other South Texas–northern Mexico communities, but consist of many residents who share common family lines. One key distinguishing feature of Laredo is that it has remained predominantly Latino, with an entrenched Hispanic elite. Though Anglos arrived after the Mexican-American War, they mainly intermarried with Hispanic families. Throughout the book, we use the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” interchangeably. We also distinguish between Mexicans and Mexican Americans and use the term “Mexican origin” to refer to all individuals of Mexican ancestry. McAllen and Brownsville in the LRGV, in contrast, were established by Anglo elites who marginalized the Mexican-origin residents. As a result, Latinos in LRGV communities struggled for many years, only gaining significant political power in the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century. The US-Mexico borderlands are among the most culturally rich areas of the world and the center of some of the most vibrant social and historical issues of our times. This particular stretch of the border, especially the Rio Grande Valley, widely known as just “the Valley,” has become one of the major entry points for legal and undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America.26 It is also a point of cultural contact between highly traditional cultures and those more assim-

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Introduction 19

ilated into the wider Anglo society. In this and other respects, the Valley is a microcosm of the entire US-Mexico border and in some ways reflects Hispanics, especially of Mexican origin, more broadly across the United States. This portion of the Texas-Mexico borderland is more than a backwater of industrialization, farming, and transit routes, just as border residents are more than victims of neglect and powerlessness. In actuality, South Texans are innovators and problem solvers on the forefront of change. This cutting-edge aspect of the border is reflected in a second meaning of the Spanish term for the border. La frontera, besides meaning “border,” also means “frontier.” The border as a frontier symbolizes the leading edge of changes that will eventually extend elsewhere. Vastly different cultures meet at the border to blend, adapt, adopt, and merge in a kaleidoscope of colors and combinations. In this sense, the border is on the forefront of massive social forces whose effects may be felt elsewhere long after border residents have found solutions and made necessary adjustments. According to US Census Bureau figures for 2011–2013, Hispanics were the largest ethnic group in South Texas. They comprised more than 91 percent of the population of the Rio Grande Valley.27 In the region, Anglos made up around 7 percent of the population, and African Americans and Asian Americans each comprised slightly less than 1 percent. South Texas is home to three of the fastest-growing metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the nation. Between 1999 and 2014 the population of the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission MSA grew 50 percent, from 555,875 to 831,073. The Laredo MSA population grew from 189,014 to 266,673 people, a 41 percent increase. Not too far behind these two was the Brownsville-Harlingen MSA, where the population grew 27  percent, from 330,277 to 420,392. The population of Texas as a whole during this fifteen-year period grew 31 percent. This rapid population growth has been accompanied by concomitant employment growth in the border metropolitan areas. The McAllen-Edinburg-Mission MSA had 54 percent growth in nonfarm employment from 2000 to 2015. The Laredo MSA had 46 percent growth in nonfarm employment, and Brownsville-Harlingen MSA nonfarm employment grew 33 percent in this same period.28 Though such rapid population and job growth is generally associated with rapid economic development, these border areas have been plagued

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20

Introduction

Chart 0.1. Educational attainment of South Texas adults twenty-five years of age

and older, 2014 Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2011–2014.

historically with poor socioeconomic indicators. For instance, according to census figures, 37 percent of Latinos in the LRGV population lived below the national poverty level in 2014. The comparable rate for Hispanics in Texas as a whole was 17.7 percent and only 15.6 percent for the entire United States.29 Similarly, the Latino median household income for LRGV counties in 2014 was $33,293, though that was considerably below the median household incomes for Texas and the United States of $52,576 and $75,591, respectively.30 These dismal income figures are related to other characteristics of the South Texas border population. In the United States as a whole, 13.1  percent of the population in 2014 was foreign-born. In Texas, the comparable figure was 16.5 percent. Along the border, however, 27.4 percent of Webb County, 32.5 percent of Starr County, 28.9 percent of Hidalgo County, 24.7 percent of Cameron County, and 16.2 percent of Willacy County were estimated to be foreign-born by the 2010–2014 American Community Survey produced by the US Census Bureau.31 Having a large percentage of foreign-born residents does not, in itself, produce poverty. When a large foreign-born population arrives in the United States with minimal levels of education, however, the results are predictably dismal. Chart 0.1 shows the percentage of adults twenty-five years of age and older in the five border counties who in 2014 had com-

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Introduction 21

pleted high school or higher education. It also provides comparable data for Texas and the United States. While high school and college completion rates for South Texas are lower than for Texas and the United States, the gap is largest within the ranks of the college-educated. The effects of this education gap are predictable. The three South Texas MSAs ranked at the bottom of MSAs in Texas in 2015 hourly wage levels. While the average hourly wage for the rest of Texas in 2015 was $24.40 and $25.26 for the United States, the 2015 average hourly wages in the Brownsville-Harlingen MSA were $15.29, in the Laredo MSA $18.03, and in the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission MSA $16.23. This amounts to a regional wage penalty of 26 percent or more compared to Texas and 29 percent or more compared to the United States.32

Research Projects and Methodology Much of the ethnographic data reported in this introduction and the subsequent chapters are from the Borderlife Project, a research endeavor at the University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV, formerly UT– Pan American) and housed in the archives of the UTRGV library in Edinburg. From 1982 to 2010, faculty under the direction of Chad Richardson trained embedded student interviewers to investigate social situations in the South Texas–northern Mexico borderlands. Borderlife Project participants have completed approximately 10,000 in-depth ethnographic interviews and more than 6,000 survey interviews from a variety of populations on both sides of the border. Students were taught interviewing skills and how to detect patterns in their findings, then given help to write high-quality accounts worthy of publication. Most generally, individuals selected for their interviews were identified by means of “snowball sampling”—using social networks to fi nd individuals willing to share their stories. This process is illustrated by the following account of a student who chose to interview undocumented maids and their employers: The first maid I interviewed works for a very good friend of mine. I asked her to help me fi nd other maids like herself who I could interview. She introduced me to her sister, Rosario, and to Rosario’s employer, Gracie. Gracie introduced me to her neighbor’s maid named Cruz. Later, I interviewed my cousin’s maid named Silvia and her sister Margot. Margot’s employer Sonia was my fi nal interview.

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22

Introduction

Most research topics began as in-depth ethnographic descriptions. Throughout the project, students were allowed to choose their own topics from a list of suggestions or from their own initiative and interests. The patterns revealed in these anecdotal accounts suggest questions that were built into in-person survey interviews. The basic purpose of Borderlife was to help students develop an appreciation for their own culture and place. It was also designed to give voice to the distinct populations of South Texas, many of whom receive little notice or often harsh and stereotyped attention.33 In the current volume we have substantially increased the explanatory element related to our fi ndings. We also have utilized survey research to propose and test select hypotheses, leading to greater in-depth understanding of this borderlands environment. This methodological approach allows us to paint a broad picture of life on the South Texas border, focusing on many populations and topics, as opposed to a single issue or phenomenon. The Borderlife Project has been the foundation of this revised and greatly expanded edition of Chad Richardson, Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados: Class and Culture on the South Texas Border, first published in 1999 by University of Texas Press. That first edition was followed by two other volumes: Chad Richardson and Rosalva Resendiz, On the Edge of the Law: Culture, Labor, and Deviance on the South Texas Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), highlighting traditional cultural practices, displaced and undocumented workers, drug and immigrant smuggling, cross-border property crimes, the Mexican criminal justice system, and school dropouts; and Chad Richardson and Michael J. Pisani, The Informal and Underground Economy of the South Texas Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), with a focus on documented and undocumented participants, occupations, welfare recipients, informal housing communities (colonias), and cross-border interactions in the informal and underground economy. In part 1 of the present volume we continue to describe migrant farmworkers, colonia residents, undocumented domestic servants, maquiladora workers in Mexico, and Mexican street children. In part 2 we look also at racial and ethnic relations in South Texas schools and among such diverse South Texas groups as Latinos, Mexican immigrants, Anglo newcomers and winter visitors (“snowbirds” or, preferably, “winter Texans”), Asian Americans, and African Americans. The vast quantity of the ethnographic accounts in this volume come from the in-depth interviews derived from the Borderlife Project, fo-

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Introduction 23

cusing not only on the years 1999 to 2010, but including some accounts from 1982 to 1999. Our surveys also cover the entire 1982–2010 period, as detailed in appendix A. These include our Cultural Practices Survey of 2001–2002 with 433 respondents, Winter Texans Survey of 1995 with 326 respondents, Informal and Underground Survey of 2006–2009 with 526 respondents, 2000 Maids Survey of Laredo with 391 respondents, and Consumer Informality Survey of 2010 with 357 respondents. Secondary data sources include the Cross-Border Utilization of Health Care Survey by Dejun Su and colleagues, the Latino National Survey by Luis R. Fraga and colleagues, the US Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), and various reports from the Pew Research Center and the US Census Bureau.34 In the chapters that follow, survey and secondary data will provide a quantitative portrait, while the qualitative ethnographic accounts by students give contextually richer descriptions of these life situations. We are greatly indebted to the students and the people who opened their lives to them for the richness of detail that these stories provide. The names of the students whose accounts were used in this book are listed in appendix B.

Explaining and Understanding the Patterns Reported We consider our audience for this volume to include not only scholars and colleagues but also students, laypersons, policy makers, and those whose lives we have sought to document. Many of the last group may be unfamiliar with the intriguing explanatory concepts of sociology and other social science disciplines. In addition to the three aims previously discussed, we add, as a fourth aim in this volume, to show that what happens on one side of the border profoundly affects life on the other side. In this regard, we hope to provide scholars and policy makers, particularly those from outside the region, a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the uniqueness of this South Texas–northern Mexico borderland and its commonalities with and importance to the rest of the US-Mexico borderlands. We believe real and effective public policy comes from a clear understanding of people most affected by those policies. This book is written not only to demonstrate these concepts but to help readers understand the “why” questions raised in the book. Throughout the text, we hope to accomplish a fifth aim: to help the reader become familiar with and understand what we call the sociolog-

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24 Introduction

ical perspective, one that is shared by many of the other social sciences. The first aspect of this perspective is the importance of the power of the social situation, or the idea that the way societies and groups structure social situations can have powerful impacts on human behavior. A second aspect, the power of the definition of the situation, helps explain how collective definitions or interpretations of situations likewise powerfully affect human behavior. Although we do not ignore factors such as personality, moods, and biological impulses, we propose that even intrapsychic motivations are themselves affected by the nature of different social situations and the understandings we collectively share about them. Perhaps one rather famous example will illustrate. In 1961, Stanley Milgram began a series of experiments whose results surprised virtually everyone, including himself. He wanted to determine how much pain people would inflict upon strangers if someone in authority told them to do so. Obviously, experiments in which dangerous pain is actually administered would be legally prohibited, so Milgram decided to make people think they were inflicting pain. He designed an apparatus that looked very much like an electrical shock control panel. He then told students at Yale University he would pay them to participate as teachers in a scientific experiment designed to measure the effects of punishment on learners. Each student was told that a person in another room was connected to the electrical apparatus. If this learner made an error in memory recall, the teacher was to give that person a shock by flipping a switch on the control panel. Actually, the person in the other room was an actor who never received any real shocks, although he acted as if he did. As the actor kept on making errors, the teacher was told to keep increasing the voltage of the shocks up to a level marked “450 volts” on the fake control panel. As the shocks reached increasingly higher levels, the actor would act as if in great pain. If the student assistants protested, they were told to go on, that the experimenter would take responsibility. Most of these student assistants protested, but fully 65 percent of them went on to give what they believed was a 450 volt, potentially lethal shock, with the learner screaming or begging for them to stop. Even the one-third who refused to go to the supposed 450 volts administered what they thought was a shock that could cause considerable pain and suffering.35 Do these results mean that Yale University students have personalities inclined to torture others? Obviously not. Almost all of the subjects, including ordinary individuals in similar experiments off campus, tried

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Introduction 25

to stop the experiment. But the participants were told to go on, that it was essential for them to continue, and that they would not be held accountable. Many became extremely agitated but continued when repeatedly told to do so. We understand more about these results by examining the situation Milgram created as opposed to studying the personalities of his subjects. And what was the social situation that had such a powerful effect on them? A respected authority in a lab coat, at a respected university, told them he took responsibility. They had given their prior consent, as paid volunteers, to participate. Their role was that of a teacher helping a learner improve. They were made to believe that each new shock was only a little greater, 15 volts, than the previous one they had administered. Finally, the farther removed teachers were from seeing or hearing the learner’s suffering, the more willing they were to go on. Milgram learned, in other words, that certain conditions in the social situation of the experiment, more than personality variations of the student volunteers, could be set in place to get people to do things they found highly objectionable. Clearly, the sociological perspective does not encourage manipulating social situations to get people to act against their will.36 It simply encourages us to look for variations in our social situations that can help us understand why people behave as they do. As we will show in the chapters that follow, we fi nd some very interesting patterns of behavior on the South Texas border and some profoundly important social situations that help us understand the behavior of the individuals and groups involved. For a 2009 episode of the BBC science documentary series Horizon, the Milgram experiment was replicated.37 Of the twelve participants, only three refused to continue to the end of the experiment. Speaking during the episode, the social psychologist Clifford Stott proposed that many individuals go along with potentially harming others because Western culture puts a high value on science, with the belief that it will produce beneficial findings and knowledge that can be helpful for society, providing some social benefits. These examples help us make two important points about the sociological perspective that will be more thoroughly examined and illustrated in the chapters that follow. The first is the importance of the power of the social situation. In the preceding example, Milgram structured his experiment in a way that powerfully affected the behavior of the Yale students.

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26

Introduction

The second point, which we have called “the power of the definition of the situation,” is also demonstrated in these experiments. In the BBC replication, it was observed that the importance modern culture puts on science is a collective definition of science and experimentation as collective values that strongly influenced the behavior of participants. We will use these two ideas as we attempt to explain the intriguing patterns we observe among residents of the South Texas border.

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CHAPTER 1

Migrant Farmworkers With Jua nita Va ldez Cox

Dear Dr. Richardson. My son, a student at UT Pan Am, bought me your book Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados because I had read about it in the newspaper. I started reading it this afternoon after work but had to stop because I couldn’t read without crying. My daughter-in-law noticed and wanted to know what I was reading. I explained that my parents started migrating when I was 15 years old. I went with them for only two years because I got married and moved to Illinois. My sisters and brothers continued migrating. They worked very hard under very diffi cult conditions. My father remembered that while on the road in West Texas in the 1960s, they would send my uncle Joe, who had a light complexion and had blue eyes, into the restaurants because no “Mexicans” were allowed there. Our father would make a competitive game of working in the fields. He was not abusive, but he did instill in us the drive to be the best at whatever we did. I can’t even talk about your book without crying, and I never suffered most of the things the rest of my family went through. I do remember, though, living in corrugated metal barracks on our first time up in West Texas. A m pa ro Vasqu ez, 20 06

Who Are America’s Migrant Farmworkers? Though this mother of a UTPA student only migrated for two years, the depth of her feelings about what her family suffered provides a glimpse into the hardships experienced by migrant farmworkers. In the first edition of the Batos book,1 we documented the problems they experienced, how things had changed over the previous forty years, and their efforts

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30 Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados

to deal with hardships, discrimination, and abuse. So why write a completely new chapter on the migrant farmworkers of South Texas? First, to show that these workers, though absolutely essential for the well-being of individuals and the nation, continue to be largely undervalued, ridiculed, and often denigrated. An incident described by Irma illustrates the humiliation migrant farmworkers may have to endure, as she recounted her most recent trip up north to work in the fields with her family. I remember going into the Laundromat to help my mother and sisters wash the clothes. Our work clothes had become permanently stained green and red because my family picked tomatoes. Even if the clothes were washed over and over, the stains would not disappear. I remember walking into the Laundromat and hearing some Anglo women make awful remarks as we walked in. They said things like, “Look at how dirty they are. Don’t they ever bathe? They are so disgusting!”

The student who interviewed Irma recalled, “I could still hear the pain in her voice. She told me that though their clothes were stained, they would bathe at least once a day. She was very hurt and sounded like she was trying to convince me—as though I was the one who made those awful remarks.” A second reason for a new chapter is because this topic was so absorbing to our Borderlife students that an even larger number elected to conduct interview research for this topic than had selected it prior to 1999. The information and stories they gathered add significant insights and updates that make their contributions well worth an updated chapter. Finally, we show that much has changed since 1999, though not always for the better. Texas is still home to approximately two hundred thousand migrant and seasonal farmworkers; most of them live in the Rio Grande Valley, with the second-largest number residing in what is called the Winter Garden area, just north of Laredo. Though the total national number of migrant farmworkers has decreased, a large proportion of those who continue to migrate call South Texas home. Many of them are either undocumented or have family members who are. Their annual migrations—and the undocumented status of many—continue to make them one of the most vulnerable and hardworking populations in the entire United States. In this chapter, we let them describe their work and their life experiences, and we explain, using their accounts and

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Migrant Farmworkers 31

Figure 1.1. Migrant farmworkers harvesting squash in Ohio. Photo by Francisca

Flores; © F. Flores, used by permission.

other research, how these conditions have changed over the years. We do this not only using their stories, but also with secondary survey research mainly gathered by the US Department of Labor in the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) conducted annually since 1989. Categories of Farmworkers According to the Farm Labor Survey of the US Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, in 2012 hired farmworkers made up one-third of more than three million individuals who worked on farms. The other two-thirds were the owners of the farms and their family members.2 The number of hired farmworkers decreased from approximately 1,142,000 in 1990 to 1,063,000 in 2012; the number of farms remained stable over the same time frame. Of these hired farmworkers, about 56 percent worked in crops, while the remaining 44 percent worked in livestock.3 When we first published Batos in 1999, only about half of hired farmworkers were settled, that is, those who lived near or on the farms where they worked. The rest were migrants who “follow the crop” (FTC); they

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Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados

Chart 1.1. Number of migrant and nonmigrant US farmworkers, 1989–2012 Source: US Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), authors’ calculations.

not only migrate from homes quite far away but tend to work on more than one farm, as their labor is needed. This category includes “shuttlers” who move back and forth across national borders, largely from Mexico. Those identified as “newcomers” are hired farm laborers who are just starting in farmwork and are almost always migrants, at least in the first year. The changing composition of the hired farmworker category in the United States from 1989 until 2012 is illustrated in chart 1.1. As chart 1.1 shows, the percentage of farmworkers who migrate (follow-the-crop and shuttlers) declined from roughly half of farmworkers in 1999 to slightly less than 20 percent in 2012. Why such a dramatic increase in the nonmigrant (settled) category, with a corresponding decrease in the number of those who migrate each year? In part this is because migrants have become more able and willing to remain yearround at or near their places of employment. Many dream of getting year-round work so they can stop migrating. Many don’t want to have their children miss school or to have to shift from a school up north to one in the Rio Grande Valley after the school year has started. Those international shuttlers who cross the border as undocumented farmworkers find it much more difficult today because of tighter immigration and border enforcement, and in response they are more likely to stay in the United States at arrival rather than risk crossing the border repeatedly. Finally, large corporate farms increasingly need or perhaps prefer workers who can remain more than three or four months, favoring, as they do, agricultural production methods such as greenhouse work that permit either year-round employment or longer seasonal work, for six to eight months. One of our student interviewers interviewed members of her own family who previously were all migrants.

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Migrant Farmworkers 33

Three of my uncles established themselves and their families up in Ohio, where they previously migrated each summer to work. Then they found work at a tomato packing-canning factory and kept their families in Ohio. They said they did it to be able to get a better education. But none of them have pursued a college degree. They only managed to get a high school diploma.

This student’s uncles, like many settled farmworkers, were not initially hired year-round up north. Their work in the tomato packing plant was still mostly seasonal, though longer than just the summer months. Chart 1.2 shows that the number of full-year hired farmworkers has remained rather steady since 2007 after declining from higher numbers in 1990 and 2000. The largest group is agricultural service workers. This category consists almost entirely of undocumented workers provided by labor contractors (sometimes referred to as “crew leaders”) who actually hire the workers and subcontract the labor, thus allowing farmers to avoid the risk of employer sanctions because they do not directly hire these workers. Though many labor contractors are fair to their workers, others take advantage of the laborers’ undocumented status or inability to speak English. Vincent remembered clearly the potential risks that labor contractors posed. One year at a gas station on the way to Ohio, my father met a man named P.J. He promised my dad the best working conditions and the highest payment possible. So we followed him. When we got to the

Chart 1.2. Average number of full-year and part-year hired agricultural workers,

1990–2012 Source: Adapted from USDA, Economic Research Service, “Average Full- And Part-Year Hired Farmworkers and Agricultural Service Workers, 1990–2012.”

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Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados

Chart 1.3. Legal status of all US farmworkers, 1989–2012 Source: US Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), authors’ calculations.

farm, we couldn’t believe the number of workers already there. The fields were huge. We slept in a small house with lights and water. It was great. It was almost better than our own home in Texas. The next day the contractor told my dad that we would be paid at the end of the day depending on how much we were able to pick. At the end of the day, he told my dad that each of the four of us had earned just $25 for the twelve hours we each had worked. My dad was furious. Then P.J. told him that he was deducting the fee for good housing, free meals, and getting us the jobs. We stayed in the good house for a week. Then he moved us to the other house, a huge metal barn with ten families already living there. After two more days, the contractor fired us. It took us four weeks to fi nd more work. It was late in the season, and jobs were hard to fi nd by then.

This pattern of farmers using labor contractors to subcontract undocumented workers is reflected in chart 1.3. It shows that since 1996, undocumented workers have made up approximately half of all hired farmworkers, though the citizen category has grown considerably since 1999. Rather than repeatedly risk border crossings, then, many undocumented farmworkers have settled down in the farming communities where they work for at least part of the year. They make themselves available for other low-skilled labor jobs when they are not working in agriculture. This allows many of them to surreptitiously bring their families to live with them and their children to go to school in the United States.

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Migrant Farmworkers 35

Undocumented Farmworkers Another reason many shuttlers remain in the United States is the difficulty of maintaining reliable transportation over such great distances. The Fuentes family is especially affected by this problem. The father, Sergio, is an undocumented shuttler from Chihuahua, Mexico. He migrates to Colorado each year with his wife and two sons. Sergio, who drove an old Chevy pickup that frequently broke down, related, I wish I could afford a newer truck for my family, but every time I save enough money it breaks down on me and I have to spend money for repairs. Without a vehicle you just can’t do what needs to get done. And it always leads to other problems. There are times when I barely have enough money to fi x the truck, but then I may not have enough money left to feed my family.

His interviewer recalls, “He stopped there and put his head down. He wanted to stop the interview, so I did.” Sergio, like other shuttler migrants, fights a constant battle to get ahead. Unlike many, however, he provides his own transportation, unreliable as it might be. The pattern of subcontracting the labor of undocumented workers and the abuse contractors sometimes infl ict on them is illustrated by an interview that a student did with one of these labor contractors. Esteban hires workers in Mexico to work on US farms. Esteban stated, “I’ve lived through many hard times in order to get to where I am today. Era pordiosero [I was a beggar] before I crossed over at the age of fifteen to work in the fields. My mother was a single mother, and we needed the money in order to survive. Me pongo a jalar o nos morimos de hambre [I had to work, or we would have died of hunger].” When asked if he could describe how he treated his workers, he was evasive but said, “I was one of them once, too. Sometimes I feel bad, but I have a family, and no one else will give these undocumented workers a job.” Another labor contractor, Aurelio, subcontracts a “coyote” to smuggle field hands into the United States. He brings them to a house with five bedrooms in South Texas until he is ready to transport them up north. He related, “Sometimes there are up to thirty people in that house. Hay veces que parecen sardinas [Sometimes they look like sardines].” He admitted that even though the house wasn’t furnished, they still have to pay rent. “If they don’t want to live there, no one is stopping them from renting an apartment. I am doing them a favor because most likely they would not be able to get an apartment or a job on their own.”

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Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados

When asked what brought him into this kind of job, Aurelio stated, “Ya te dije [Like I told you], I was there once, and it’s a job that someone has to do. De eso vivo yo [That’s how I make a living]. I have to provide for my family.” When asked if he ever thought of changing careers, he said, “Esto es mi vida y no sé que mas podría hacer de mi vida [This is my life, and I don’t know what else I could make of my life].” Because of increased border security in recent years that has made it more difficult for shuttlers to move back and forth across the border,4 many shuttler migrants decide to permanently move to the United States, which also helps to explain the overall decrease in the number of migrant farmworkers. Where possible, they bring family members or send for them to come with human smugglers, though that is a choice fraught with danger. One couple, Abel and Cecy, were among those who decided to leave Mexico and try to make a life in the United States. Cecy remembered when her fiancé, Abel, told her, “If you don’t come with me and my family now, you probably won’t see me again.” She recalled, “I had to leave behind my family to follow him. From time to time, I manage to send my family some money to help them out.” Cecy’s move required a great sacrifice. Abel longed for a house of his own. “I always heard of living the American dream,” he said, “and I wanted that also for my family. So I began to work, and life for us has been better than what we remember in Chihuahua. Pero ahora no con estos gringos que siguen tercos con aventarnos pa’tras a Mexico! [But not now with these hard-headed gringos who want to throw us back to Mexico].” Abel and Cecy remembered the hot weather on their way through Arizona the first time they came. “We were hot, thirsty, and hungry,” Cecy said. “We will never forget the little boy who suffered heat stroke on that trip. We had been traveling for days with almost no water. It was too late by the time we reached our destination. The little boy had died.” For those undocumented farmworkers like Cecy and Abel who give up shuttling across the border and manage to get their families with them in the United States, life becomes a bit easier. Invariably, their children learn English in the schools. Romy, a student at UTPA, recalled that she and her sister often had to help their father, who did not speak English, to negotiate with crew leaders and farmers. Romy stated, “I remember when I was only thirteen, my parents counted on me to work out deals with the contractor. . . . I would negotiate the price until both my father and the contractor agreed on a deal.” She adds, “I was al-

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Migrant Farmworkers 37

Chart 1.4. Ethnicity of US farmworkers, 1989–2012 Source: US Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), authors’ calculations.

ways sure to start high, because I knew the contractor would lower the price from there.” She thought back and realized she played a big role in her family’s economic situation even though she was only thirteen. Over time, some undocumented farmworkers manage to become legal (“authorized”), and some of those even move on to become citizens. Some states have modest numbers of black and even a few Anglo farmworkers. But by and large, the occupation of hired farmworkers is largely made up of Mexican-origin individuals, as reflected in chart 1.4.

Constancy amid Change In 2003, Alicia Valdez returned from working up north convinced that she would never return to the fields again. She had raised her eight children as migrants. She and her husband came to the United States from Mexico many years earlier in search of the American dream. When she returned to the Valley to stay, she was very unhappy with some of the changes she experienced in her last years as a farmworker. They have this new system, and we no longer fill the sack in our row and the young guys come by to load it onto a truck. Now we wear this band around our forehead. The band has a code on it, and we have to take our heavy buckets to the truck, crossing many rows of cucumbers.

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Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados

Now every time they’d emptied my bucket, they’d scan the band on my forehead. I felt like a cow.

It seems likely, however, that the band on the forehead, as part of the detached, computerized system of accounting of each worker’s production, was more a fi nal straw than the main reason for Alicia’s decision to stop migrating. Her interviewer said many of Alicia’s family members returned to the fields up north the following year without Alicia. One thing that has not changed much is the nature of the work itself that farmworkers do. Many have to work bent over for ten to twelve hours a day. Beatriz, a sixty-seven-year-old retired migrant worker, recollected the long, hard hours and harsh working conditions. Working in the fields was hard work. I worked in the fields since I was a small child. I will never forget the backaches and how it felt like every part of my body was in pain. We stopped going up north when my husband turned sixty-five years old. I remember we used to get up very early in the morning, make everybody’s lunches, and then go to the fields. When we would get out there it was still dark and there was a lot of serreno [dew], and our clothes would be wet until the sun came up and dried our clothes. We would not get that many breaks, but we would try to rest a little while we were working. In earlier years, if you needed to go to the restroom you would usually have to fi nd a small brushy area or tree or something because they didn’t have portable toilets out there. We would fi nish late in the evening, and we would be back home by 8 p.m. It always felt so good to get back home. I would be so tired that all I wanted to do was go to sleep, but I had to take care of the kids and get them ready for bed. Sometimes someone would have dinner ready when we got to the camp, but that was mainly up to me.

One student confirmed from his own mother’s story how hard farmwork can be. His mother, Guadalupe, worked from an early age to help her parents. She related this description to him: Son, I started working in the fields when I turned twelve years old and worked until I was twenty-four. I remember the work we had to do was the worst ever. We had to pick cucumbers on our knees in muddy fields which were almost a mile long. I also remember how we had to de-tassel corn. The cornstalks would be wet and full of insects. We had to walk through them not knowing what we could run into because they were so

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Migrant Farmworkers 39

Figure 1.2. The work

seemed endless. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

tall that we couldn’t see the way forward. When we came out, we were soaking wet from head to toe and covered with insect bites. Then the sun would dry our damp clothes, but this made us smell bad.

Many younger farmworkers, especially those who are US citizens or legal residents, say that some positive changes have taken place in recent years. Sandra said, “We have portable toilets at a lot of the workplaces now. Not every place but at least most places have them.” Sandra’s observation matches with survey data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey, which indicates a vastly improved situation with regard to the availability of toilets in agricultural worksites (chart 1.5). Similar trends over the 1989–2012 survey period were uncovered with respect to the availability of clean drinking water and water to wash hands. Frank said, “We also get breaks more often from some of the nicer farmers, but sometimes they think you are an illegal and they just expect you to keep working without a break because they think you are

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Chart 1.5. Provision of toilets and water to wash hands at agricultural worksites,

1989–2012 Source: US Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), authors’ calculations.

used to working hard.” Many migrants agreed that working nonstop was usually what the farmers expected, but the workers would sneak in small breaks if they got the chance. Not everyone thinks things have improved. One young farmworker replied, It was terrible. I remember we always ate the same thing for lunch every day. My mom would bring a can of Spam, a loaf of bread, a tomato, and a knife. I got tired of it after a while, but I never complained. We had to eat fast. My poor mother would have to make sure we were all fed before she fed herself. We had bigger problems than what we had for lunch.

How much has the pay that hired farmworkers receive changed over the years? Chart 1.6 shows that around 1996, hourly wages began to rise above $9.00 an hour (calculated in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars), reaching $10.80 an hour in 2012. The chart also shows how the wages of hired farmworkers compare to all nonfarmworkers and to leisure and hospitality workers, another low-paid category, over the same period. Not shown in this chart are the wages of noncitizen farmworkers. Throughout this period, US citizens and US residents averaged significantly higher 2012-adjusted average hourly wages for their last reported farmwork than did other farmworkers, both authorized and unauthorized (table 1.1).

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Migrant Farmworkers 41

A US Department of Agriculture report in 2008 revealed several factors accounting for the relatively low earnings of farmworkers, including a high proportion of unauthorized workers, who have fewer options; the use of farm labor contractors who reduce the hourly pay of hired farmworkers in exchange for arranging employment with growers; and in the case of small farms, exemptions from federal minimum wage laws.5 Though the data presented in chart 1.6 and table 1.1 represent some-

Chart 1.6. US average hourly wages of hired farmworkers, leisure and hospitality

workers, and all hired nonfarmworkers, 1990–2012 Sources: US Department of Agriculture and US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation-adjusted to 2012.

Table 1.1. Average hourly farm wages of last agricultural job, by degree of documentation, 1989–2012

Documentation type US citizen US resident Other authorization Unauthorized FTC/shuttler

Average hourly gross wage (in 2012 dollars)

Number in category

9.66 9.68 9.03 8.76 8.77

13,825 10,626 2,077 22,147 19,588

Source: US Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), authors’ calculations.

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what of an improvement over earlier years, money earned has to last migrant farmworkers all year long after they return to South Texas, where farmwork—or any other work for this group—is sporadic at best. Generally, Texas migrant farmworkers cannot find year-round work, resulting in very low incomes. Indeed, 90 percent of Texas farmworker families make less than $30,000 annually, with almost half of them (47 percent) making between $10,000 and $19,999 annually.6 As a result, many are forced to apply for food stamps or other assistance, albeit with some resistance from welfare officials. Lola and Antonio hated getting welfare but ultimately found they had no choice. Lola explained, A couple of years ago I had our newborn with us while we migrated to work in the fields. My baby needed to eat, but I could not breastfeed any more. My breasts would bruise, and it was just too painful. To make matters worse, it had rained for days and we were unable to get into the fields to work. It was only a week after we arrived, so we had not been paid. Antonio and I went to a food kitchen, where we got in line. When we reached the front of the line, we were ignored. Even those who came in after us, mostly blacks, were served before us. We had to wait until the end, and all they gave us was rice. They did not want to waste good milk on us. That night some of the other women in the camp told me that we always take care of one another. They said that we did not need the government’s help. An older woman showed me how to squash the rice into a milky form. Oh goodness, my baby ate, and I cried with joy.

Many of the farmworkers interviewed, especially those who are undocumented, are the victims of a fairly widespread stereotype that migrant farmworkers are all on welfare and that the ones who are undocumented came to the United States just to get on welfare. One respondent, María, commented, “¿Cómo van a pensar que nada mas vengo para recibir ayuda? [Why would they think I only came to get welfare?]. Don’t they understand that if I ask for help, I can never become legal?” Maria does not ask for government assistance even though several of her children, those born in the United States, are US citizens. Like María, 99.2 percent of the 24,129 undocumented farmworkers and their families identified in the NAWS from 1989 to 2012 had not received any form of general government assistance or welfare over the preceding two years. Many undocumented farmworkers experience hostility by a substan-

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tial proportion of the American population. The great majority continue to live in the shadows, hoping for legislation that will enable them to legalize their status. These farmworkers perform work that their critics would never do, under conditions that are not only harsh but often illegal. The agricultural industry needs them. Americans live better because of them, but farmworkers, especially undocumented farmworkers, continue to put food on our tables and clothes on our backs in the shadows of the American economy.

The Migrant Cycle Using interview data from the Borderlife Project, we address two key questions: What is life like for migrant farmworkers, and how have life conditions and the treatment of farmworkers changed over the past sixty years? Using incidents related by migrant workers in South Texas, we follow them as they prepare to leave home, take to the road, fi nd work and housing, work in the fields, interact with people in towns and schools, and return to the Lower Rio Grande Valley on the South Texas border. Preparing to Leave Emilio, a sixty-two-year-old migrant worker, remembered his parents taking him out of school a month or two before summer vacation. I hated leaving my friends and knowing that I would not see them until the following school year. Many of my friends were also migrant students, and I knew that many of them would stay until the end of the school year, so I always asked my parents why we couldn’t stay until the end too. They would give each other a look and then change the subject. The year I most hated leaving early from school was my seventhgrade year. I had my first girlfriend, and I wanted to spend as much time with her as possible before having to leave. When my parents signed me out of school, I asked them again why we couldn’t stay until the end of the school year. They sat me down at home and explained, “We can’t leave later because we don’t have a contracted job up north. If we wait until school is out for the summer, we will be left with the last pick of jobs and leftover housing.” That’s when I realized that I had to sacrifice my personal life to be able to help my parents; that was the last year I complained about having to leave early from school.

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Figure 1.3. Migrant children leaving school early to go to work up north. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

The number of migrant students in Texas—nearly all of them Hispanic—was estimated to be more than one hundred thousand in the 2003–2004 school year; the number had declined to just under fifty thousand by 2008–2009, in part due to definitional changes.7 Nevertheless, the number of migrant children is large, with the Rio Grande Valley supplying most of the migrant child labor from Texas.8 As Emilio’s story indicates, not all migrant children leave school early. Some parents wait until school is out to head north. This works moderately well when a family knows a particular farmer who will save them a job. Otherwise, leaving after the start of summer vacation means getting the last pick of jobs and fi nding only less acceptable housing. It also means a lot less money for a family struggling to survive. So the neediest parents take their children out of school early and return them late in the fall, making it even harder for them to ever break out of the cycle of poverty and migration. Paula, a senior in high school, is one of the few migrant students who have succeeded. Migrant students may drop out legally at the age of sixteen, but Paula took advanced-placement courses and was about to graduate from high school with some college credits as well. Before she mi-

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grated each year, Paula got permission from her teachers to finish early by doing her assignments ahead of schedule. Paula’s family was very proud of her. She said, I didn’t think I would have made it this far. My older sister ran off with some guy when she was a junior [in high school] and just dropped out. I didn’t want that, and I was more determined than ever to fi nish school. Now I am not only fi nishing school but also will have twenty-four college credits! It is scary to think of going on to college, but I know I can do it. I am going to go to UTPA because it is close to home and I can still help my parents during the summer by migrating.9

On the Road When it is time to begin the trip north, children and parents must put thoughts of school aside and prepare for the trip. Everyone has to pitch in to make it work. One migrant, now a grandmother, recalled, “I remember making dozens of tamales and cookies to eat on the way to Oregon. In the early days, we made our own food. We simply couldn’t afford to eat in restaurants.” In earlier decades, holding down trip expenses was only one reason migrants prepared their own food. Another, revealed by in-depth interviews, was outright discrimination by restaurants that refused to serve migrants. This pattern was especially pronounced during the years we call the segregation era, when the now older migrants were children. Rosalinda Lopez remembered a trip in 1957 to Indiana. We were packed like sardines in a big truck, thirty adults and twelve children. The journey was three days of pure hell because the driver wouldn’t stop except for gas. On one of those stops I needed to get some hot water for my baby’s formula. The restaurant had a sign that read, “No Mexicans, No Negroes.” We just wanted water, but we had to wait till an Anglo lady came and got it for us. She made us pay fifty cents for a ten-ounce bottle of hot water.

Though such experiences with outright racism today are rare, migrants occasionally endure a more subtle form of discrimination while on the road. Romelia remembered attempting to use the restroom at a service station.

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Figure 1.4. Refused

service. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

The person at the counter seemed very friendly. She even pointed to where the bathrooms were. But halfway there her boss stopped me. He said that I couldn’t use the bathroom unless I bought something. I was confused, because the lady said that it was okay. He got upset because he thought that I didn’t understand English and just grabbed the key from my hand. I felt bad because everyone saw how he treated me. I ran to the car and just cried. My father was really mad, but he couldn’t do anything, so we just went on our way. My whole family remembers that experience as a very embarrassing day.

Another problem migrant farmworkers face is breakdowns of their vehicles. Juan remembered when his truck stopped working just forty miles short of Brownfield, Texas, their destination. I will never forget that day. We were almost there when suddenly the truck stopped and the engine would not start. My dad was already frustrated with the long trip, and we had no place to go. So we asked for a ride, and a nice man stopped for us and dropped us off at a gas station. Nearby was a place where they fi xed trucks. We were lucky that the owner drove us all the way back to get our truck. We had to pay two hundred dollars to repair the truck. I thank God for sending us an angel to help us that day when we needed it.

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“When your car broke,” recalled one farmworker organizer, “you had to find someone to fi x it. That could take several days, and you could only guess what the fi nal bill would be. You had to fi nd a place to park and hope the police wouldn’t run you off. The people in those towns always let us know we were not welcome to stay in public places.”

Housing Problems Since 1999, housing conditions for migrant farmworkers have improved, though only somewhat. There are more regulations, but they are often poorly enforced. Some governmental agencies provide housing, yet it is a small portion of what is needed. Some migrants manage to get government-subsidized housing. Joanna and her family managed to fi nd such accommodations during a recent summer season. Joanna said, The small home provided was over fifty years old and was falling apart. The cement floors were cracked. The plumbing system was broken, and the water would leak constantly underneath the sink. In addition, water would get clogged up and make a horrible rotten smell. We were not able to drink the tap water. The house was small and we lived like sardines in a can, with the whole family having to all sleep in one room.

In recent decades, the primary form of housing for migrant farmworkers has been a single-family home. Also common are mobile homes and apartments (chart 1.7). While chart 1.7 illustrates the type of housing occupied, it does not shed light on the quality of the housing. How migrants pay for housing is depicted in chart 1.8. After a peak in the mid-1990s, employers have been less likely to provide rent-free housing. Migrant housing comes in three basic types. The first, described by Joanna above, is the labor camp. Several small houses share showers and certain other facilities. Often, a government agency runs the place, and it is supposed to be only for farmworkers. Conditions in the camps vary from adequate and comfortable to dangerous and degrading. Thelma described staying in a labor camp. It used to be an old Army base. The houses weren’t too bad, but the bathrooms were outside, just one big building divided into two areas, one for the men and the other for the women. We didn’t have to pay rent

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Chart 1.7. Types of migrant farmworker housing, 2001–2012 Source: US Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), authors’ calculations.

Chart 1.8. How migrant workers pay for housing, 1989–2012 Source: US Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), authors’ calculations.

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because my dad was a foreman. It was nice there. I had a different experience the second year that we went, though. We got there late in the season and couldn’t fi nd a house. So the people that we were going to work for let us stay in a little storage building. We were tired from the trip and we just wanted to sleep. The next morning, to our surprise, we discovered that the building was used to store pesticides and bags of something else that smelled nasty. The place was falling apart. But as time progressed, we found something better and things started to improve.

Housing provided by individual farmers is another type. It can be anything from a converted shed or barn to a regular home. Occasionally, it is barely livable. A farmworker organizer comments, “Farmers often spend more money on fi xing their equipment than on housing their workers. Often, we got worn-out mattresses and broken-down refrigerators or stoves. You never know until you get there.” A third type is a house for rent, though many landlords refuse to rent to migrants not only because of stereotypes but because the workers will only occupy the homes for a short time. Selma remembered one really bad experience. We had barely arrived up north to work when we started looking for a house for rent. After a long search we couldn’t fi nd anything available. The next day wasn’t any better. We had very little to eat and couldn’t even take a bath. At three in the morning, we decided we had to park our truck along a road to get some sleep. After a few hours the police arrived and asked us, “What are you Mexicans doing here? You can’t stay here.” They were very rude. At seven in the morning we fi nally found a house, but in poor condition, no air conditioning, no refrigerator, and no water connected. On top of that, we had to pay five hundred dollars a month for rent. We had to accept those conditions because we needed the house to start working and get some money.

Not all the government-subsidized housing facilities for seasonal farm labor are in poor condition. Gaby remembered living in a new, nice, and spacious home. It was a set of duplex houses for seasonal workers. She said, “Our home had three bedrooms, a playground, and a day care center for the migrant workers’ children.” She also appreciated a farmworker camp where they previously stayed. She said it was built in 2002. “I guess it’s all about luck. I don’t know why,” said Gaby, explaining how they obtained that temporary housing.

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50 Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados

Mario Osequeda mentioned that migrant farmworkers have difficulties renting apartments or houses. Some landlords require migrant farmworkers to provide references from employers or friends who live in the area. If they are there for the first time, they won’t know anyone in the area. Many of them hope the farmers will have housing available, though that is unlikely on smaller family farms. If they have to find their own housing, they must earn enough to pay high rent. Jaime recalled an occasion when, a couple of years earlier, he and his family rented a house in Frankfort, Indiana, along with other migrant families. They divided the rent among themselves. Each migrant farmworker paid approximately $25 per week, and a total of ten workers lived in the house. That came out to $1,000 per month, so they believed they were being overcharged. The house was in poor condition. In 2013 the nonprofit Housing Assistance Council, based in Washington, DC, reported a survey of farmworker housing throughout the country and found that “farmworkers are among the worst-housed groups in the United States.” Excluding dormitories and barracks, which were built for high occupancy, almost 85 percent of all units were crowded. Of farmworkers living in the crowded units, more than 50 percent were raising children.10 Hired farmworkers, particularly migrants, face barriers to obtaining housing in the local private housing markets. Small rural communities may not have enough rental units available, or they may be unavailable to migrant farmworkers because the workers cannot provide deposits, qualify for credit checks, or make long-term rental commitments. Approximately 50 percent of farmworkers live in housing they rent from someone other than their employers. Private housing is not subject to federal regulation. The private housing designated for migrants tends to be substandard and often expensive.11 Together, these barriers are a form of structural bias that make work and life for migrant farmworkers more difficult. According to a 2012 report issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, many of the financial barriers faced by rural residents also work against farmworkers. Like the agricultural work they perform, their housing needs tend to be seasonal or temporary. Despite great seasonal demand, many US Department of Agriculture–funded housing facilities throughout Texas are struggling to stay solvent because they are vacant for large portions of the year. This disrupts cash flow. Because of farmworkers’ low annual incomes, it is not surprising that they occupy some of the worst housing in the state.12 Because of the seasonal scar-

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city of housing in farming communities, migrants are often forced into crowded facilities, a prime example of structural bias. Sometimes, doubling up creates even more serious problems. The Salinas family went to work for a farmer in Georgia who put them in a two-bedroom mobile home with a father and his three teenaged sons. Sylvia Salinas described what they encountered. We soon found out that they were involved in drugs. My eight-year-old child was constantly in fear because of the yelling and screaming every night. We didn’t know them and were scared of what they might do. One night, we woke up to loud screams and banging on the wall. All we could do was pray to God to protect us. We couldn’t leave because it would mean searching for a new job, and we needed the work just to survive.

Sometimes, people ask why farmworkers put up with situations like this. One organizer tells them, You can’t know what it means to have nothing to fall back on, what it means to tell your prospective employer that you don’t like the housing he’s offering. With no other housing, no money, and your car barely running, you simply can’t shop around. You have to work. You have no choice. Sure, you can complain about the mattresses. You can complain, and he can tell you to leave. Then you won’t have a job, and he might just call other farmers and tell them you’re a troublemaker.13

Work-Related Problems Iliana had been a farmworker for many years. She said she was used to hardship. She had to work out in the cold weather without bathrooms and with people who only wanted to take advantage of her. “I can remember working in the fields as my hands bled from the sharp edges of the cotton plant,” she said. “I also remember working in the onion fields and badly cutting my finger with the sharp shears and being unable to get any medical help.” Iliana said she knew what it is like to struggle. Migrant work is very hard on a person’s soul. It takes something out of you when you have to work so hard for so little. Then, after all that sacrifice, we have to listen to fancy social workers who put us down for asking for even a little help. It is almost too much to bear. The best thing a

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young woman today can do is get out of the fields, get an education, or get a rich husband.

One of the problems farmworkers face is the uncertainty of how they will be paid and whether they will be paid in full.14 When they work for family farmers with few employees and small farms, they are not even guaranteed the minimum wage. Also, some farmers choose to pay by the hour, while others prefer to pay for an entire job. And farmwork is exempt from laws requiring employers to pay for overtime. These farmworker employment conditions are a form of structural bias in a system that permits no pay for overtime work, less than the minimum wage, and worksites far from medical care and regulatory oversight. Lourdes remembered a different system of pay. “Our wages were based on how many acres we fi nished,” she said. “Usually it was sixteen dollars an acre, but we did pretty well because we cleared the weeds off real fast because there were a lot of us.” Lourdes was working alongside her parents, two sisters, and six brothers. “Sometimes,” she explained, “they would give us fifty or a hundred acres, and we would try to get it done in two days. So for fifty acres we would get eight hundred dollars, and it was only two days of work.” Still, the best pay they ever got was a job they finished in three days and got a total of three thousand dollars. While this sounds like a lot, it works out to less than ten dollars an hour per person for each of the eleven family members working twelvehour days. Nevertheless, Lourdes and her family members were so excited that they even took pictures of themselves fanning the money outside a restaurant where they went to celebrate that evening. One of the major problems migrant farmworkers encounter is the uncertainty of work from year to year. They may arrive up north and have great difficulty finding work. Or they may work for only a week or two and have to move on once a particular task is finished. So, many look for farmers who treat them well and provide decent housing. Then they try to arrange to work there year after year. Edna said, “There was a farmer in Ohio who always had work for us and he paid us well too. Dad always tried to get us work there because the farmer knew him from all the times we had gone before.” Relationships with Farm Owners Having a good relationship with a farmer does not always guarantee reemployment. Lionel Garcia enjoyed working for a particular farmer for thirty years. He thought he had a good relationship with this employer.

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He came to believe that they had become very close. They had always gotten along well. I felt as if I was treated as part of the family. I would eat with Tom, and he would discuss his personal life with me. But then I don’t know what happened. One day, an undocumented Mexican came and asked for work. The farmer hired him immediately and told me that I was no longer needed. I thought we were close friends. But then he replaced me with someone who would work for less money but who didn’t understand any English. I guess the farmer thought he could manage because he had learned a lot of Spanish from me.

The availability of ever-cheaper labor, in this instance through employment of an undocumented farmworker, reflects the structural bias inherent in the farmworker labor market. Like Lionel, other migrants develop long-term bonds with particular farmers or employers, though, unlike him, the results are more positive. Amanda stated, Though our work conditions were not always predictable, it helped if we could fi nd work each year with employers who would contact us at harvest time to tell us they needed us and to get there early. When that happened, we felt a bond and a sort of obligation to them. Therefore, we continued summer after summer working in their fields as migrants.

Her brother Kaleb also commented, “Sometimes you can’t help but feel good about yourself when your employers beckon you to return to work their fields, acknowledging you as a good worker. This instilled pride in our work and in a way planted this seed of self-worth within us.” Though migrant farmworkers have a generally favorable view of farmers for whom they work, most of those we interviewed reported at least one experience of farmers treating them harshly or unfairly. A seventy-year-old man, Eliseo, described his own such experience with friendly treatment that turned out to be exploitation. I worked in the fields for twenty-one years and never realized I was being taken advantage of until I turned sixty-five years old. Each year we would go back to the same farmer. He knew us and always had a job waiting for us by the time we got there. We didn’t have to look for jobs like others because he knew what type of work we did. I really liked him, and he liked me, or so I thought. Each year, he would always take

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money from my paycheck to pay my Social Security. But when I was sixty-five, I tried to apply for Social Security but was denied because they said no money had been put into my account. We were left without any retirement. He was pocketing my money this whole time.

Working Conditions of Farmworkers Farmworkers are at a greatly increased risk for heat-related illness. They work outdoors in direct sunlight where humidity levels are often quite high. The very strenuous work they do tends to generate increased levels of body heat, especially since they often wear full work clothing and use heavy tools. Heat can lead to dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, neurological impairment, multi-organ failure, and death.15 A study published in 2008 found that in the previous fifteen years, 423 workers in agriculture and non-agricultural industries died from heat exposure. More than two thirds of those fatalities were workers employed in the crop-production or crop-production support sectors.16 In a study conducted with 300 farmworkers in North Carolina, 94 percent of respondents reported that they worked in extreme heat, and 40 percent reported having had symptoms of heat illness.17 Ruben Quintanilla, a fifty-year-old migrant originally from Mexico City, traveled to work the fields in Michigan for fourteen years. He stated, Every day we suffered from fatigue because we worked all day in the sun. My body felt so weak after a day of work. Many times, we were not allowed to get a drink of water because they said the work had to be done in a certain amount of time. The sun really drains you. One time, my body just gave out on me at the hottest time of day. I just fell flat on my face from being so dehydrated.

This often occurs to farmworkers when they lack safe and sufficient drinking water, contributing to dehydration and heat strokes. This is not as common today, as data from the NAWS demonstrate. According to a 2011 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the US Department of Labor, agriculture is one of the most dangerous industries in the United States with some of the highest rates of occupational injury and illness.18 The National Center for Farmworker Health notes, “Farmworkers face workplace hazards similar to those found in other industrial settings, such as working with heavy machinery and hard physical labor. They also face unique occupational hazards specific to farmwork, including pesticide exposure, skin disorders, infec-

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tious diseases, respiratory problems, hearing and vision disorders, and musculoskeletal injures.”19 Accidents happen all too often among migrant workers as well. According to the National Center for Farmworker Health, in 2011 there were 557 fatal occupational injuries in the agricultural industry. Agriculture had the highest rate of fatal occupational injuries: 24.4 injuries for every 100,000 workers. The agricultural industry also has a high number of cases involving nonfatal occupational injury and illness that require either time off from work or job transfer and restriction.20 Children in agriculture are especially at great risk. The US Department of Agriculture released a report in 2009 that recorded 15,876 injuries to youths under twenty years of age who lived on, worked on, or visited farms. Youth ages ten to fifteen incurred the highest number of injuries, at 6,912. Even children under age ten were reported to have had 4,111 injuries.21 The dangerous nature of farmwork is another manifestation of harm resulting from structural bias. Pesticides and Other Chemicals Farmworkers are frequently exposed to pesticides through direct contact with the chemicals, residue on treated equipment and crops, or drift into their homes and other untreated areas. Simon recalled a coworker’s injury from chemicals. One day they asked us to clean a storage place and some chemicals had spilled all over the place. There were many people working at that time, and I remember that one lady got some of that stuff in her eye. I remember her screaming. Then a supervisor came and accused her of looking for an excuse to stop working. I can only imagine what that poor woman was feeling. On that day I realized that no matter how hard we work, nobody appreciates our efforts. What made it worse was that the lady refused to go to the hospital because she couldn’t afford it and she didn’t want people to think that she had done it just to receive government assistance.

One migrant farmworker remembered when a crop-duster plane sprayed close to where she and fellow workers were: “The farmer said that we shouldn’t worry. ‘It’s safe,’ he told us, ‘just medicine for the crops.’ Even if someone went to the hospital, farmers would refuse to admit that their spraying contributed.” A study conducted in eastern North Carolina polled three hundred farmworkers regarding pesticide safety and training and reported that 75 percent of the workers had wa-

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Figure 1.5. The wafting of sprayed pesticides is a health hazard for farmworkers. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

ter available for hand washing, but only 44 percent were provided soap; 51 percent were told when it was safe to enter fields after pesticide application; 51 percent were told when pesticides were applied; 35 percent reported being provided pesticide safety instruction by supervisors; 28 percent worked in areas adjacent to fields where pesticides were being applied; 25 percent were asked to enter fields before it was safe to do so; 16 percent worked in fields while pesticides were being applied; and 15 percent were provided with pesticide safety equipment.22 Problems of Health and Welfare Belinda remembered a time when her daughter was six years old. We had just arrived to the migrant camp and did not know anyone there. The crew leader was a good man and was always trying to help

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people. I asked him if he knew where I could take my daughter because she had a big sore on her one of her legs. He was not sure if there was a doctor in town. I went to town with a friend and found out that there was no doctor. The lady at the gas station said there was one in a town about forty minutes away. When we fi nally arrived at the doctor’s office [it] was a two-room place. We had to fill out a long form. I panicked when the receptionist told me that I would need to pay fifty dollars for the initial office visit. I only had twenty dollars in my purse. My friend looked in her purse for money and we came up just five dollars short. The receptionist said that she was sorry but that I would have to come back later. I was so mad. When I asked for an appointment, she said that there were no appointments until next month but I could come as a walk-in, with no guarantee to be seen. I cried all the way home. One of my neighbors gave me a home remedy to take care of the sore, which healed in time.

The suspicion of welfare abuse is a misconception that haunts farmworkers. Ruth, fifty-four, a former migrant and current home health provider, proudly and emphatically stated that she had never received any federal assistance and that what she had, she earned with her own hard work. Many farmworker families, especially migrant families, earn annual incomes below the poverty line (chart 1.9). Even though most farmworkers fit the eligibility profile for assistance programs such as Medicaid and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Social Se-

Chart 1.9. Percent of farmworker families below the poverty line, 1992–2012 Source: US Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), authors’ calculations.

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58 Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados

curity Insurance (SSI), relatively few actually obtain benefits. This is because of enrollment and eligibility standards that are not designed to accommodate people who must move frequently to find work or whose incomes may fluctuate dramatically even though their annual wages are below the poverty level. Sadly, as chart 1.9 shows, the percentage of migrant farmworkers below the poverty line in 2012 was essentially the same as it was twenty years earlier (and consistently higher than the poverty rate for all farmworkers).

Dealing with Townspeople After a hard week, migrant workers look forward to a trip into town. Irene and her brothers got off work just before dark one day and needed some groceries for dinner. With no time to clean up, it was a quick stop on the way back to camp. “In the store,” Irene remembered, “some Anglos started staring at us. I heard one of them say, ‘Look how filthy they are! How can they live like that?’” Irene told them, “We look dirty because we just got off work. We’re sorry we don’t look the way you want us to.” The women were stunned as they showcased their class bigotry. Apparently, none of them thought Irene could speak English, perhaps as a function of the cultural bias that assumes all farmworkers are Mexican. Not everyone treats migrants as outsiders. Luis, a student at UTPA, remembered living in Iowa when he was ten years old. The farmer who employed them was unable to provide housing, so they had to live in town. People there were quite friendly. We played with the neighbor children, and their mother would invite us over for cookies and milk. Once she even gave us a party. They would send over pies or cookies, and Mom would make tortillas to send back. . . . One of our neighbors was a retired couple with no kids. They loved having us over. Every Christmas until 1983, our families would exchange gifts through the mail. That year, they died in a car accident. My mother gets tears in her eyes every time we talk about them.

Younger farmworkers report getting some stares and whispers but not as much as the older farmworkers seem to have experienced in earlier times. Karla remembered an experience when her parents took her and her brothers and sisters to eat at a McDonald’s.

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We were all very excited, but all we had to travel in was our old pickup truck. We all piled in the bed and enjoyed the ride to McDonald’s. We didn’t want to call any attention to ourselves, so we all waited outside in the truck while my brother went in and ordered for the whole family. My brothers would always eat a lot, especially since going to McDonald’s was a rare treat. When he placed the order, some of the customers and most of the employees rushed to the windows to see what kind of family had ordered all those burgers. On this occasion, they just stood there and laughed hysterically. I remember feeling very embarrassed. Maybe they were laughing at all the food we bought. Maybe they were laughing at our old pickup truck. Maybe even at our clothes. I don’t know. All I know is that they were laughing at us.

This account appears to be an example of cultural bias—harm that is possibly unintentional but arises from cultural differences and/or stereotypes. We propose that cultural bias disposes well-meaning people who are not bigots to do harmful things to minority groups. In this case, the bias involves class-related differences (as opposed to ethnic differences) that are part of a stigma of inferiority American culture tends to associate with people perceived as lower-class.

The Stigma of Inferiority Most puzzling to many migrant farmworkers is this stigma they often run into that holds that they are lazy, dirty, or of low intelligence. Lisa remembered, Young girls can say cruel things. I have learned to deal with that since I entered school. My shoes were always dirty from walking to and from the bus stop, sometimes in the mud because our street was not paved. I didn’t have many clothes and what I had were all hand-me-downs. But they were clean and decent. Here in the Valley there were some who made fun of me because I did not dress well. “Mojada” [wetback, undocumented] is what the other Hispanic kids called me. But I was not born in Mexico. I am an American citizen—just a poor one. Up north, I was not really made fun of, but I still remember how my teacher would call attention to us with the other kids. “I want all my migrant students over here,” she would say, making it clear we were different. My classmates would then do the same thing.

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Figure 1.6. Children

may experience cultural bias from teachers, elders, and others early in life. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

Though bigotry might have been at work among Lisa’s peers, her teacher’s behavior seems more like cultural bias—unintentionally (we suspect) harming migrant students by separating them from regular students. Lisa’s account illustrates how people often assume migrants are low-class or have less academic ability—and treat them accordingly. This includes not only a class-based stigma of inferiority migrants often face but also the automatic assumption (by many) that they are undocumented Mexican immigrants because of their migrant status. Ana’s experience was much the same, though she had a teacher who was more understanding. She said, The other kids made fun of me all the time when I was in elementary [school]. My parents could not afford to buy me shoes for school, so I would use my brother’s tennis shoes, even when I wore dresses. I remember one year on picture day, I did not want to take my picture, and my teacher asked why. I told her because I was wearing boy’s shoes with a dress. She made me laugh when she showed me a spaghetti stain on her shirt and said, “Your shoes will not show in the picture, but everyone will see my spaghetti stain.” So, I took my picture and came out with a big smile.

As painful as being made fun of can be, a greater danger arises when migrants internalize the stigma and the feelings they often associ-

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ate with it. One migrant woman, Rosa Morales internalized the stigma without realizing that the term “migrant” referred to people like herself. For years we had been traveling to West Texas to work the cotton crop. I would hear people always talking about “esos migrantes” [those migrant workers]. “Look what they did; look how they left this place; they’re so dirty; you can’t leave anything out while they’re around, etc.” I had heard these remarks so often that I thought they were talking of gang members or people in trouble with the law. One day my husband was talking of some trouble, and I said, “Oh, it was probably esos migrantes.” He looked at me and asked who I thought migrantes were. So, I told him. When I had fi nished, he told me, “Mamá, nosotros somos migrantes” [we are migrants]. I felt so ashamed and dirty that I cried. I said, “You mean all those times people talked of me and my family as if we were no good?!”

Rosa cannot understand why people think of farmworkers like herself as lazy and shiftless. She knows they work twelve- to fourteen-hour days in brutal heat or freezing cold, bent over a hoe, for most of their lives. Like Rosa, many farmworkers are puzzled by the harsh stereotypes. They do backbreaking work, expose themselves to dangerous work conditions, and risk their children’s safety every time they pack them into an old car or the back of a truck on those long, brutal trips up north. They sacrifice so much for so little return. In light of such conditions, it is hard for them to see how many Americans have come to regard them as lazy or worthless. Though it is tempting to think of such stereotypes as cases of bigotry, much of the harm migrants experience may arise from cultural bias. This happens when widely shared cultural beliefs lead to unintentional harm. In the United States there is a widely held belief that poverty is due more to a lack of effort than to conditions beyond one’s control.23 So they are led to assume that poor farmworkers must be responsible for their poverty. Many of these same people believe that the poor prefer to get welfare rather than work. In a 2015 Pew poll, 45 percent of Americans agreed that “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”24 As a result, migrant farmworkers are often regarded not only as being responsible for their own poverty but also of cheating on welfare. Regardless of whether such victim blaming arises from bigotry or from cultural misunderstandings

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(cultural bias), the pain caused can be just as real from one as from the other. Migrant children become aware of this stigma of inferiority at an early age. One middle-aged man recalled with some pain his experience in elementary school. Each year in April, as his family prepared to go north, his friends would ask where he was going. He was too ashamed to tell them that he worked in the fields, so he would say, “I’m going to visit my grandmother in California.” In the fall, he made up stories about his summer with Grandma. “Years later,” he said, “I realized that the other kids were also migrants and that they also lied about what they did during the summer.” Sadly, it is hard for many migrants to continue to feel good about themselves against the backdrop of the generally negative stigma others have of them. In many cases, the stigma is as much about being poor as about the type of work they do. Sara commented, I don’t remember being made fun of in elementary [school], but high school could be rough at times when everyone else was preparing for dances and asking me why I was not going. I also remember one instance where my math teacher asked the class to purchase graph paper for an exam. I didn’t want to ask my parents for money because we were going through a rough time just buying food. When I showed up for my exam, my teacher asked me why I was unprepared and told me to ask a classmate for a sheet. When no one would give me one, I knew they were just being mean to me because they knew why I couldn’t afford to buy the graph paper.

But because most migrant farmworkers are of Mexican origin, the stigma may also have a racial element. Roberto Romero, though a Mexican American, has fair skin and blue eyes. He said, I remember when my parents went to an open house at my school. I was in the fourth grade and was excited that my parents were going to see the work I was doing at school. My father was fair-skinned and had blue eyes like me, but my mother was darker, with black hair and brown eyes. When some of the boys in my class saw us together they laughed and told me I was lucky I wasn’t a dark Mexican like my mother.

It is important to understand that the negative stigma—this societal definition of migrants as inferior—is not simply based on misinforma-

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tion, even though there certainly is a great deal of misinformation about migrants. When it is accompanied by strong emotions of hostility, revulsion, and hatred, we would label it bigotry. Similarly, the stigma regarding migrants evokes strong emotional reactions among its targets, such as deep hurt, embarrassment, and fear. This is especially likely when the targets are children. Sara said, Up north, I remember playing with the only friend I had made outside of our migrant camp. One day when her mother arrived at school during lunch to pick her up early, she saw us playing together. In front of me, she told her daughter that I was dirty and she did not want her playing with me again. I have since then forgotten that little girl’s name, but I will never forget her mother’s words.

Some migrant children may internalize these hostile stereotypes and the strong emotions they feel as part of their images of themselves. After one farmworker organizer read the stories from the interviews, she said, When I worked as a migrant in the seventies, I felt like a burro in school because I just couldn’t keep up with the other students. It was somehow our fault that we were so slow. They never allowed us to feel proud that we put food on the nation’s table, that we did necessary and dangerous work that was worthy of respect.

The theory of cumulative causation, often referred to as the “vicious circle of inequality,” illustrated in chart 1.10, helps us understand that the stigma of inferiority regarding migrant farmworkers has multiple causes as well as multiple effects. Thus, the stigma is not the sole reason migrant children have higher than normal rates of accidents, illness, dropping out of school, unemployment, welfare utilization, run-down housing, and a host of other social ills, nor does it have a single cause (as the arrows inside the circle in chart 1.10 indicate). Each of these factors can be seen both as a possible cause and effect of each of the others (as the inside arrows indicate). We should point out that racism and class bigotry, as well as the stigma of inferiority and cultural bias, are part of the societal culture. All the other elements of this circle operate together to form what we call “structural bias,” the manner in which inequality has become built into society’s structures and institutions. They act cumulatively, along with the cultural elements, in a circular pattern. Without a good edu-

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Chart 1.10. The vicious circle of inequality (theory of cumulative causation) related to migrant farmworkers

cation and with the added burden of the stigma of inferiority, migrants have a hard time finding well-paying jobs. Continuing around the circle, the cumulative effect of the stigma plus a bad education and a lowpaying job means they will likely live in substandard housing. All of these factors together will put them in situations of higher risk of injury and illness. These factors combine to limit their political power, since many of them cannot or will not vote, so politicians pay little attention to them in setting policies and allocating resources. And together, all of these cultural and structural elements work to perpetuate or foment race and class bigotry. Though cultural bias and structural bias are prominent types of discrimination today, migrants still continue to experience bigotry and ex-

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ploitation. Hector experienced a painful case of bigotry while working and going to school up north. The students there would make fun of my clothes. Even the teacher made fun of my broken English. I was the only Mexican student in the school. One day, a group of football guys grabbed me and took me to the boys locker room and forced me into the shower while they were pouring shampoo all over me. They told me that I was dirty and that I smelled bad. When my father found out, he was upset and said he would not allow his son to be treated that way at school, so I dropped out of school, even though I was only fifteen at the time.

As he was telling his story, he just looked down at the floor and kept wringing his fingers. His interviewer said, “I could not fi nd the words to console him. No one should have to endure such ridicule and abuse.” Hector’s story illustrates another important concept from social psychology, “the definition of the situation.”25 Essentially, this concept posits that as large numbers of people come to believe that a situation is real, their actions based on this belief often work to make their belief become real in its consequences, even when it is a mistaken belief. In relation to migrant farmworkers, many people who witness the structural conditions of migrants—lower education, poor jobs, substandard housing, poor safety and sanitation conditions, and low levels of political power—accept the stigma of migrants as inferior. They fail to realize how all four forms of discrimination have contributed to these conditions. While the belief is in itself not real or true, it may become real in its consequences. This can happen in three major ways: people who believe the stigma will treat them as incapable or inferior, thus limiting their opportunities; while a migrant may have equal or even superior natural abilities, he or she may become convinced that these other people may be right—and may quit trying; and over time, their place in the vicious circle creates ever-greater disadvantages for achieving success in life. As a result, the social definition of migrants as inferior, though erroneous to begin with, will have become real in its consequences. Though our interviews of migrants did turn up individuals who seem to have internalized the stigma of inferiority, thus coming to believe in their own incapability, the majority did not reach that point. Many, however, showed evidence of being made to feel uncertain about their abilities. One respondent, Marco Antonio, related,

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In McAllen, it was really hard to hide the fact that you come from a migrant family. Everyone knew who was. Even though we were happy to go up north to help our families get a car, new clothes, or to add a room to our house, kids in school made it hard to feel confident about ourselves when everyone labeled us as poor migrants.

While being uncertain about one’s abilities is not as bad as being convinced of being incapable, it still presents a heavy burden for migrants. With all the cultural and structural obstacles of the vicious circle with which they have to contend, uncertainty created by the prejudices of others is a major handicap. This is especially true if individuals who are significant in their lives, like teachers and friends, believe the stigma. Esperanza stated, One time one of my friends asked me if we liked being poor. I asked her why she was asking me such a thing, and she said that it seemed like we enjoyed being poor. She told me that her parents had told her that it was nobody’s fault but our own if we were poor. I couldn’t think of anything to tell her because I felt so embarrassed for the condition in which we lived. Now, years later, I believe that the ignorant ones were her parents because they failed to see past their prejudices.

Though the friend’s parents were certainly biased, we might consider this a case of cultural bias. They had uncritically accepted the widespread cultural belief that the poor are to blame for their poverty. Nevertheless, the harm of cultural bias can be just as real as if it were caused by outright bigotry. Sometimes, even well-intentioned teachers contribute to the stigma of inferiority regarding migrants. Hugo said, I always tried my best. I just needed to study a little more than the others. I was not stupid. I had discipline and worked hard for my grades. That is how I always got good grades and stayed on the honor roll. Before that, my teachers here in the Valley did not push me much. I think they felt sorry for me when they would say, “¿Estás cansado? [Are you tired?] It’s okay if you don’t finish your work, poor thing.” I did not want them to make it easy for me or feel sorry for me. I could do my work and fi nish even if I was tired. Up north, some teachers were nice and took into consideration that we worked after school and were needed at

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home. But they still expected us to do our work. I remember one teacher staying after school to help me fi nish a class assignment. She said we would work together until I understood and could do it on my own. That made me feel good because I knew she believed in me and wanted me to succeed with my education.

Migrants don’t want people to feel sorry for them. They, more than almost anyone, know how to work hard, despite difficult circumstances. The Valley teachers described in Hugo’s story were not bigoted but were practicing a form of cultural bias—in this case, paternalism, the sort of relation that results when someone in a dominant position accepts the cultural definition that individuals in a subordinate position like migrants are incapable of doing things for themselves. But as with other forms of cultural bias, the harm, though not intended, is real. Paternalistic teachers expect little or nothing from migrant children, essentially treating them as a parent would treat a child who is believed to be incapable of doing things for herself. The teachers who expected little of Hugo weren’t helping. Indeed, they were buying into the cultural stereotype that migrants are incapable of meeting the same standards as everyone else. The role of migrant parents in creating confidence in the face of the stigma their children bear is critical. One of our student interviewers reported her own experience in school. Migrant students carry a stigma up north, that they are dumb or lazy or both, so they must prove their teachers wrong. I remember the fi rst year my parents and I arrived in Minnesota. The schools there were so big and clean. I was intimidated by all the Anglo girls; they were all dressed so pretty. When my mom took me to enroll in the fifth grade, she caught me looking at them as we walked to my first day of school. She said, “Mi hija [My daughter], remember it’s up here [pointing to her head] that counts—not how you look.” Those thoughts stayed with me and kept me from hanging my head low. That year, my teacher was surprised to see how quickly I picked up her lessons. She even asked me if I had already passed the fifth grade. I was proud to be a migrant student and also one of the best spellers in my class. Each year, when we would return to the Valley, I would spend my time practicing my schoolwork that I had brought with me from this teacher’s class. I wanted my teachers to be proud of me when I returned to school in Edinburg, and they were.

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Isabel, a thirty-five-year-old former migrant, relates a story that illustrates another important point about the stigma of inferiority—how it can have bigoted racial overtones. We were up in Ohio and school had already started, but we were not leaving back to Texas because there was still a lot of work to be done in the fields. So I started going to school in Toledo. I was going to school with Peter, one of the sons of the farmer that had hired my family. I was new there so I didn’t know anybody but him. Well, one day a whole bunch of Anglo kids had cornered me and were yelling, “Mexican, Mexican, smelly bean Mexican.” I was trying to defend myself as best I could. But they wouldn’t listen. Then Peter came to my defense and told them to all shut up. He then told them that they were all stupid because I wasn’t from Mexico but from Texas. I thought what Peter did was very courageous because he was a shy, quiet boy and he was able to stand up to people of his own race and defend me and not be embarrassed.

Heading Home As the season ends, migrant workers begin returning home. For many, it is a time of happiness. They are returning to family. If they managed to lay aside extra money, they can buy clothes and perhaps even a television set or some other special item. For some, farmers provide a special touch, as Gonzalo discovered. The farmer threw a party for all his workers. “There was plenty of food for all,” he said, “but the biggest surprise came just as we were getting in our car to head back to Texas. He showed up at our place and gave us money for gas and twenty dollars extra to spend on the trip home.” Not all farmers are happy to see their workers leave. Some prefer to keep migrants in positions in which the employers can exploit them. David, a former student at the University of Texas–Pan American, recalled such an attitude his employer expressed in the summer of 1987. We were in Michigan picking [bell] peppers. In August, I had to return early to register at the university. When the farmer heard I was leaving, he became angry. “A good picker doesn’t belong in college,” he said. “You’ll be wasting your time in school.” I paid no attention to him and went ahead with my plans to leave. All my family wanted to see me off at the bus station. When the farmer heard about it, he told my family

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they had to work. My father got mad and went to the union to look for another place to work. Luckily, he found one.

Breaking Out Not all migrants return home at the end of the season. Some find yearround work with farmers up north. This is illustrated by the Gomez family. They found a farmer they really liked. He paid them well and even let the older kids work in the packing sheds. Martín Gomez, then a student at UTPA, explained, Later, we decided not to migrate any more. We stayed year-round with the farmer. We grew up with his children, sharing all the holidays and going to church services in town with them. After a while we moved to the city because we had started high school. Now I live with relatives here while going to the university and only see my family up north during the summer.

Some learn basic skills such as construction or auto mechanics and switch to these other occupations, often for part of the year, returning to migrant labor only if there is little work in those other occupations. Ben is fifty-six years old and resides in Elsa, Texas (near Edinburg). While growing up, he learned carpentry skills by working on the family’s home. Because of his skills, he was able to find work with a construction company in Harlingen, where he learned new skills including plumbing and electrical work. Though there were weeks or days when his boss didn’t have any work for him, he managed to stop migrating altogether. Then he decided to create his own company with his own crew. Over time, the business grew, and he began working on commercial buildings. Between trips up north, many migrants look for work in the Valley. Many start working in the informal economy, for example, selling items in the flea market, making and selling tamales on the street, or buying used clothing or other items in the United States and selling them in Mexico. Some of them become established enough that they are able to stop migrating. Many of the stories of informal workers which we published in the third book of the Borderlife series (Richardson and Pisani, The Informal and Underground Economy of the South Texas Border) were of people who had started out as farmworkers and were able to establish in-

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Figure 1.7. Informal entrepreneurs in Río Bravo, Mexico. Photo by Xena Luna; © X. Luna, used by permission.

formal enterprises, or businesses that operate without government permits or otherwise skirt regulations. For most migrants, education is the golden door out of the vicious circle, if not for themselves then at least for their children. While few migrants have to contend with parents who can’t see the value of a good education, they must still overcome considerable obstacles to get it. Marisa said, I hated being called a migrant, but couldn’t do much about it until I got older. That’s when I decided to become a nurse. Each day after eight to ten hours in the sun, I’d rush home to see if my nursing and biology books had arrived. All of that hard work in the fields taught me to work hard and now I’m a nurse. It’s a shame that everyone can’t be as fortunate as me.

Getting a good education, being able to speak English, and becoming documented are very important steps out of the vicious circle. This advantage is reflected in the percentage of farmworkers who were born in the United States. Chart 1.11 shows that since 1989, the percentage of farmworkers born in the United States dropped from around 40 per-

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cent in 1989 to around 20 percent in 2010. Since then, it has increased to around 30 percent. Still, about 70 percent of farmworkers were born outside the United States, reflecting a strong tendency for the children of farmworkers to move out of this occupation. Migrant farmwork is still largely an occupation for undocumented Mexicans, with their children generally moving on to something else. Two of the values children of farmworkers internalize very deeply, however, are the desire to work hard and the importance of family. Often, these values can affect the careers of those who manage to break out. Angélica had been a farmworker for many years. She said she always taught her children the importance of working hard and getting an education. She acknowledged that she may be simple and lacked a formal education, but she understood how hard it is to break the cycle of poverty. Her youngest child was attending college and told her that she dreamed of one day building a house for Angélica’s retirement. My daughter wants me to stop working so hard and enjoy my golden years, watching my Spanish novelas [soap operas] surrounded by my grandchildren. I tell her to fi nish her education and make a decent life for herself and to stop worrying about me. I am old and I don’t have too many years left. But as long as my daughter is successful, I will die happy.

Happiness for migrant farmworkers may also be enhanced by better public policy. Initiatives that facilitate educational attainment (such as flexible scheduling, interdistrict cooperation and coordination, targeted

Chart 1.11. Country of birth of US farmworkers, 1989–2012 Source: US Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), authors’ calculations.

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support), comprehensive immigration reform, and occupational safety and security (such as housing, higher minimum wages, provisions for pensions) are central to improving the lives of migrants. Above all, the recognition of the dignity of farmwork is paramount to bridging the divide between these food producers and us as food consumers.

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CHAPTER 2

The Colonias of South Texas With Dav id A rizmendi

Janie is the mother of three children. They live in a colonia near McAllen. The year before her interview, her husband was killed in a car accident while driving to Illinois as a migrant farmworker. At the time she was interviewed, Janie had been receiving food stamps, in Texas known as the Lone Star card,1 and Medicaid for only four months. She said, One time I went to HEB [grocery store] and paid for my groceries with the Lone Star card. This couple behind me made gestures and whispered to each other while I was paying. Then they followed me home. They must have thought I lived in a mansion. Imagine their surprise when they saw I live in a small wood-frame colonia home with only two bedrooms. Still, I love my house. My husband and all of us worked hard to build it. It’s our home.

Janie sees something to love about her colonia house that most outsiders fail to see. She loves it because she and her family own it. Each year, they saved a few dollars for lumber, wiring, and concrete blocks. They built it with the help of family and friends. No contractor ever set foot on their property. The neighbors, though poor like her, unite to help each other in times of need. It is also a way of remembering working together with her deceased husband. So, while it has certain defects, it is the fulfillment of the American dream of homeownership. Therefore, for Janie and others like her, it is a nice home. In contrast, some reporters and government officials seldom see anything good about colonias, the unincorporated rural settlements along the Texas-Mexico border. A report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas calls them “unincorporated and impoverished subdivisions that

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Figure 2.1. Colonia home in Donna, Texas. Photo by Richard Coronado;

© R. Coronado, used by permission.

flourish along the state’s border with Mexico . . . [where] 400,000 residents struggle daily with living conditions that resemble a Third World country—ramshackle dwellings, open sewage, lack of sanitary water and drainage, dusty unpaved roads, and no plumbing.”2 Unfortunately, most reports on colonias tend to focus on the rural slum aspects of colonias. Though this characterization does bring out such colonia problems as exploitation and the lack of a basic infrastructure, it distorts colonia life in at least two ways. First, it fails to convey the positive aspects of colonias and their potential strengths as a form of low-income housing. Second, it fails to emphasize the special character of colonias as a US-Mexico border phenomenon. The descriptions of colonia life in this chapter come primarily from three sources. The first is a series of in-depth qualitative interviews conducted by UTPA students from 1985 to 2010 as part of the Borderlife Project, seeking to describe what it is like to live in a colonia. The second is our Consumer Informality Survey, administered in 2010 to 357  respondents. The third is our Cultural Practices Survey administered in 2000–2001 to 433 respondents. These projects will be discussed later in the chapter in relation to various aspects of colonia life. The Texas Secretary of State website defines a colonia as “a residential area along the Texas-Mexico border that may lack some of the most

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75

basic living necessities, such as potable water and sewer systems, electricity, paved roads, and safe and sanitary housing.”3 Colonia residents know that their homes are often in poor shape. They know their water supply may be contaminated, and some even have to use an outhouse. It is hard getting into town, and they get tired of dust and pesticides from nearby fields blowing into their homes. They also know their homes can flood when it rains heavily. Still, many colonia residents see advantages in their housing situation that outsiders often miss. Pati relates, Ever since I moved into this colonia, my neighbors have been very supportive of my family and me. We all help one another. We take care of each other’s children; we lend all kinds of food and supplies when needed; and on many occasions we also help each other build or add onto our homes. In this colonia, we seldom buy building materials. We just build with whatever materials we have available, sometimes sharing wood and scrap metal.

When we published the first edition of Batos, in 1999, we reported that border colonias in Texas had experienced enormous growth over the previous forty years. Since then, the Office of the Attorney General of Texas has coordinated efforts to “remedy the conditions in existing colonias and to prevent new colonias.”4 At the same time, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has made it much harder for undocumented Mexicans to cross the border, so many of them find colonias both affordable and a good place to hide out and still be close to Mexico and other undocumented Mexicans. It has become difficult to maintain a continuous count of colonias and colonia residents since this earlier period, however. The counting previously done by the Texas Water Development Board under the Economically Distressed Areas Program (EDAP) initiated in 1989 by the Texas state legislature was merged in 2002 with a system of the Office of the Attorney General of Texas. The new system changed the official definition of colonias and began to count all economically distressed areas, even those in cities, towns, and near but not on the border, thus including counties not previously counted. What emerged over time was the EDAP that includes border colonias and distressed nonborder areas throughout Texas that are primarily characterized by a lack of basic infrastructure, particularly in the areas of potable water acquisition and wastewater disposal. In 2002 the new definition yielded 2,333 distressed areas along the US–Mexico border with 484,892 residents; most

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Table 2.1. Texas border colonia populations for selected counties, 1996–2014 County Cameron El Paso Hidalgo Maverick Starr Webb Total

1996

2006

2010

2014

38,839 72,754 124,010 13,969 33,844 16,353 299,769

47,606 77,864 156,132 22,459 34,742 21,022 359,825

47,681 86,472 156,527 22,588 34,742 20,997 369,007

56,005 90,582 150,235 23,295 34,143 15,222 369,482

Sources: Texas Secretary of State, Tracking the Progress of State-Funded Projects That Benefit Colonias, 2010, 2014; Ward, Colonias and Public Policy.

of these areas were in Texas. Of these, 1,404 were listed as having inadequate water or substandard wastewater treatment facilities. As we will show, most colonias now part of the EDAP are in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Table 2.1 shows the growth—and in three South Texas counties the recent decline—of Texas border colonia populations from 1996 through 2014. While colonia population growth leveled off and dropped in the South Texas counties of Hidalgo, Starr, and Webb, colonia population growth continued in Cameron County. Colonia figures for two additional border counties with large numbers of colonias—Maverick County (upriver and adjacent to Webb County) and, at the far tip of West Texas, El Paso County—are included in the table for comparison. Willacy County is omitted due to a lack of comparable data; it is also not adjacent to the border.5 Over this time span, the population living in colonias within these six counties decreased from 17.2 percent of their total populations to 15.1 percent. This decline in the proportion of South Texans living in colonias is exemplified by Hidalgo County (chart 2.1). In 1996, nearly one in four residents of Hidalgo County resided in a colonia. By 2014, however, fewer than one in five county residents lived in a colonia.6 The quality of life in colonias has improved somewhat in recent years. Various agencies working together within the state government of Texas developed a color-coding scheme—red, yellow, and green—to depict the health of colonias with regard to such fundamental services as access to potable water, wastewater disposal, and paved roads. Red signifies a basic lack of access to fundamental services, yellow indicates an intermediate

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level of service access, and green reflects primary access to fundamental services.7 In 2014, the majority of South Texas colonia residents lived in colonias coded green. This improvement, however, is a very recent phenomenon (table 2.2). Much more work still needs to be done to improve basic services in South Texas colonias. This is especially true for Starr

Chart 2.1. Hidalgo County population, total and in colonias, 1996–2014 Sources: Texas Secretary of State, Tracking the Progress of State-Funded Projects That Benefit Colonias, 2010, 2014; Ward, Colonias and Public Policy.

Table 2.2. South Texas colonia descriptions, by color code and county, 2006–2014 Percentage of colonia population, by color code and year 2006

2010

2014

County

Red

Green

Red

Green

Red

Green

Cameron El Paso Hidalgo Maverick Starr Webb

16.8 6.1 11.5 44.0 36.5 45.6

49.1 72.2 27.4 26.7 42.1 28.6

13.3 6.5 8.3 11.7 33.8 25.2

49.0 70.3 47.3 55.3 50.8 32.4

12.6 4.2 8.6 2.2 34.9 10.7

66.9 69.7 50.5 56.1 51.7 46.3

Source: Texas Secretary of State, Tracking the Progress of State-Funded Projects That Benefit Colonias, 2010, 2014.

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County, where the reduction in red-coded colonias has come to a standstill. This is of particular concern since Starr County has the lowest per capita income of these six counties.8

Colonia Beginnings Before the 1950s, colonias were little more than worker camps on some larger ranches and farms. Typically, residents were the poorest of the working poor, priced out of the traditional real estate market. Then some landowners found they could subdivide poor farmland, especially areas that flooded, and grade some roads, put in occasional electric lines, and sell lots. Farmworkers and Mexican immigrants were willing buyers. By living outside city limits, the new owners could get around loosely written and poorly enforced building codes. Here, they could build whatever house they could afford. Generally, they purchased lots at 14 to 16 percent interest on “contract for deed.” Such contracts gave buyers no equity in their properties until they made the final payments. Buyers were unable to use their land as equity on home loans. Worse, they could lose everything if they missed a single payment. The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs estimates that in 2013 there were still 5,451 active contracts for deed in Cameron, El Paso, Hidalgo, Maverick, Starr, and Webb Counties, though the previous predatory practice was rendered illegal going forward under state laws promulgated in 1995 and 2001.9 This same report notes that the cancellation—essentially, foreclosure— rate for contract for deed sales was 45 percent in Maverick County, highlighting the precarious and punitive nature of making payments under this scheme. Today, an average colonia lot in the RGV can cost from $20,000 to $30,000 depending upon the area, though prices widely vary. Victor Quiroga, a colonia resident, was relying on a contract for deed to purchase his property. “The payments are cheap enough to afford,” he said. “We pay no more than two hundred dollars a month for our half-acre lot. The man who sold these lots told us that with only a hundred dollars down, the lot would be ours. Then we found out that because it is owner-financed we will not really own it until we fi nish paying for it.” Despite this difficulty, Victor really liked the idea of not having any restrictions on how or what he will build. “Someday,” he said, “I will build our dream home on this lot. Right now we are just renting a nearby home. It is pretty run-down, and we don’t even have a refrigerator. When it rains, we often get flooded.”

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Another colonia resident, Belinda Rodriguez, was wary when she bought her lot in what was deemed a “rural subdivision.” She checked to make sure the area didn’t flood during heavy rains. In fact, her colonia had paved streets and even an occasional light pole. She was thrilled because her children would not have to go to school all muddy on rainy days. The developer told her he would install water and sewer lines within six months at no extra cost. A year later, however, nothing had been done. She and her neighbors found out that he had sold all the lots and moved away. County officials told her they didn’t have the personnel to control developers. “If you can fi nd him,” they told her, “take him to court.” The human face of colonias consists of families that have endured living without basic services because their only alternative was homelessness. They are among the poorest families in the nation. Historically, the people living in Rio Grande Valley colonias have been farmworkers who migrated to other states for employment. The Valley is still home to the largest migrant farmworker community in the country. These extremely poor people often earn less than the minimum wage, especially after the advent of NAFTA. We examine the positive aspects of colonias, however, before we detail their problems.

Potential Strengths of Colonia Housing Colonias are essentially owner-occupied communities. According to the Housing Assistance Council, the homeownership rate of rural colonias along the entire US-Mexico border as of 2009 was estimated at 72.7 percent. The homeownership rate for the United States as a whole during the same period was 66.9 percent.10 For Texas it was 64.8 percent.11 This is particularly significant, considering that high rates of homeownership are generally associated with community stability and high rates of civic participation. Nevertheless, though homeownership rates are relatively high in colonias, home values are much lower than in the rest of the United States. In the rural US border region, nearly 25 percent of homes are valued at less than $50,000, compared to 8 percent nationally, and about 50 percent of rural border region homes are valued at more than $100,000, compared to a national figure of over 75 percent.12 Originally, many of these homeowners chose to live in a colonia because they could build their own homes without having to obtain permits or pay for and pass inspections. In recent years, however, building codes or permits have been tightened and can no longer be easily

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avoided or ignored. This began in the late 1980s when the state of Texas began to concern itself with the need to be involved more closely with the development of colonias. In essence, the general public became more aware of the existence of colonias as highlighted in news media accounts of Third World living conditions. Hence the power of embarrassment prompted the Texas state legislature to respond by blaming developers and passing laws prohibiting the proliferation of colonias. This development—or “remediation,” in the vernacular of the Office of the Attorney General—primarily was directed at providing foundational services such as potable water. In turn, the state sought to reduce and ultimately prevent colonias, especially in counties along the Texas border with Mexico. From 1987 through 2001, at least ten major legislative codes and acts were adopted, in aggregate aimed at “(1) requiring subdividers to provide basic infrastructure (water, sewer, roads, and drainage) when creating (or ‘platting’) new residential developments; (2) restricting the advertising and selling of lots that are not platted or that lack water and sewer; (3) limiting connections to utilities in substandard areas; and (4) mandating certain disclosures and protections when lots are sold through contract for deed.”13 It is important to recognize that colonia residents are generally hopeful and determined people. Although they move to colonias out of necessity, they do so with every intention of improving their lot. Their settlement in colonias does not mean they have settled for anything less than the American dream. They dare to dream of a better future under circumstances that would have caused many others to give up. Their immigrant spirit drives their efforts to improve their lives and the lives of their families. Their concept of poverty and prosperity extends beyond simple economics; it includes how they see themselves and their future. In other words, many colonia residents believe in themselves and their communities, and they work consistently to achieve their goals. The evidence of this is that most colonias are not deteriorating or disappearing. These communities are constantly in a state of improvement and repair. Frank Dávila, a university student from the Rio Grande City area, exemplifies this spirit. He lives with his family in the small colonia of Garciasville. He describes how he and his family built their home. He said, Since I was a little kid, we’d go to certain neighborhoods that are close and ask for discarded lumber, scrap metal, and materials. My dad, who

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works in home construction, sometimes would bring home leftover pieces of lumber. Our house is not the prettiest house in the world, but we take pride in it. Our family does what we can with the little money we have to add to our home.

Improvements to their home are made bit by bit, as their financial situation allows. But with time, their home has taken shape. Frank’s sixteenyear-old sister, Gloria, who was present for the interview, said, “We only have two bedrooms and one bath to share between our parents and my two younger siblings.” Colonia residents continue the frontier tradition of building their own homes using whatever materials and help they can muster. As a result, many feel a sense of investment and accomplishment. The Luna family put a small mobile home on their lot while they built their home. “When my son got sick,” said Mrs. Luna, “we couldn’t make the payments, so they repossessed the trailer. Fortunately, we had four walls and the roof up, so we moved in.” Her husband said, “We didn’t know much about building, so we just did what seemed natural and watched our friends work on their houses. In some places we messed up, but at least we have our own house. All our brothers came to help us on weekends, and one of them who knows about electricity put in the wiring.” Mrs. Luna comments, “It was hard work, but we built it together, and it was worth it.” Family stability tends to be strong in colonias. A 2011 study of 610 adult women selected randomly from colonia households in Cameron and Hidalgo Counties confirms this picture: 60.0 percent of the women were married, and 14.7 percent of households were found to be headed by single women.14 The rate of marriage is 3 to 6 percent higher and the rate of single-female headed households is about 6 percent lower than the overall Cameron and Hidalgo Counties averages during the same time frame. These figures contrast with the high percentages of single-parent families in most low-income areas. The formation and persistence of dual-parent households may be strengthened by economic necessity. Colonia residents have a predominant belief in family. Many move to colonias to be close to family members.15 Mario Garcia and his four married sons purchased five adjacent lots in their colonia so they could live near one another. All contributed to make the $2,000 down payment, and each alternately makes the monthly payments. In their 2014 study of colonias in Starr County, colonia scholars Noah Durst and Pe-

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ter Ward suggest an average lot price of nearly $7,000, or about $1 per square foot (adjusted to 2012 values).16 Nevertheless, while tight family solidarity is a definite plus for most colonia residents, it can also detract from a wider sense of community. When relatives live nearby, some colonia residents exclude nonfamily neighbors. One resident said of nonrelative neighbors, “We don’t bother them and they don’t bother us.” Those who characterize colonias as rural slums also commonly ignore the special character of colonias as a border phenomenon. Colonias are not just another case of rural poverty—an Appalachia on the border. While rural poverty exists elsewhere in the nation, colonias do not. They are tied to the Texas-Mexico border in ways that make them unique. For most low-income colonia residents, owning a home close to the border has distinct advantages. They have a wide choice of Mexican radio, television, movies, and other entertainment. Rural land close to border cities is cheaper in Texas than in Mexico. Homeownership allows most colonia residents who have relatives in Mexico to receive visitors who might stay for weeks, months, or even years at a time. Landlords seldom allow such extended visits in urban rental housing. In many ways, colonias are emblematic of the aims presented in the introduction—colonias are border places where resilient people who eke out an impoverished existence tell their own stories, sociologically contextualized. Flor Medina commented, When family members from Mexico used to come to visit, we always made space for them to sleep while they stayed with us. Since that left us very crowded, we decided to enlarge our humble house with materials we had available. We couldn’t afford to buy the needed materials at the store. My husband and eldest son have been making modifications ever since. They have done a nice job. Now when family members join us they can enjoy having their own part of the house.

The flexibility of living near the border can be a matter of survival for many colonia residents. Many can’t afford medical treatment, especially those unable to get health insurance, so they go to Mexico for lower-cost medical treatments there. In Mexico, they can purchase prescription drugs without a prescription. Though self-prescription can be dangerous, people on low incomes often have no choice but to rely on it to save the cost of visiting a doctor just to get a prescription. The border environment provides needed flexibility for those whose employment status is highly unstable. The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs reported in a survey of 1,200 colonia resi-

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dents that a majority of colonia families earned $1,600 or less a month, resulting in annual incomes less than $20,000.17 A broader analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas shows that median 2011 household income in Texas border colonias was $28,958.18 To help make ends meet, many residents work or sell things on either side or both sides of the border. Many of the individuals who sell items at flea markets live in colonias. Likewise, having family on both sides of the border provides a safety net during periods of unemployment. Being able to have many income-generating options (often in informal markets) is a matter of survival for those at the bottom of the social ladder. Some undocumented colonia residents work in local fields and packing sheds, and some are reluctant to migrate north because of secondary immigration checkpoints.19 Some get occasional jobs in construction. Others are self-employed, offering such services as lawn mowing and gardening. They sell used articles at la pulga (the local flea market) or find odd jobs in the area. Colonias commonly house many informal service providers such as shade-tree mechanics, maids, and vendors selling tamales and other traditional Mexican foods from their homes or on the street. Some take articles like used clothing to Mexico for resale. Others even have jobs or small businesses in Mexico, commuting daily or weekly using a border-crossing shopping card known as the “laser visa.”20 American consulates in Mexico issue this border-crossing card to Mexicans living near the US border, permitting them to come across the US border area to shop. Though it is valid for only up to seventy-two hours per trip, many individuals regularly overstay the card to live in Texas colonias in a quasilegal status, having entered legally but lacking authorization for long-term stays or employment. To this category we might also add those colonia residents who have fraudulent documents or documents borrowed from friends or relatives. Some colonia residents, especially the young who learn English in the schools, can easily pass for American citizens. Roberto Zavala crossed to the United States without legal documents at an early age. In school, he learned to speak English as well as the locals, so no one knew he was undocumented. His mother’s friend used false documents to get him across the border when he was twelve years old. He said, This friend passed me off as her grandson. She brought two of her own grandchildren and passed me off as a third by using someone else’s birth certificate. She even brought a set of clothes for me to put on. As we drove up to the agent at the border, I was scared. The agent didn’t even

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Figure 2.2. Street vendors in Río Bravo, Mexico. Photo by Xena Luna; © X. Luna,

used by permission.

question her, however, so we made it safely. I was very happy to be reunited with my mom.

Children of undocumented parents born in the United States are by law full American citizens. As a result, many colonia homes have a mixture of citizens, legal residents, and unauthorized residents. A 1988 Texas Department of Human Services survey found that 71 percent of household heads in Valley colonias could not speak English,21 a proportion that indirectly supports these conclusions.22 Colonias become home for many migrant farmworkers who settle down and live in the borderlands for prolonged periods. They are also a stopping-off place for migrant farmworkers who shuttle across the border and the country and pause only briefly before moving on farther north.

Physical Problems Related to Colonia Housing The same lax subdivision codes that enabled many families to buy lots and build homes also created enormous infrastructure problems. Some

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colonias still lack potable water. Most are not connected to sewer lines. Poor drainage is a problem for many, as is the lack of paved and lighted streets. The occasional lack of governmental oversight can often lead to exploitation by unscrupulous developers. Besides these, colonia residents have many social problems associated with poverty and marginal social status. Problems of Poor Infrastructure We have indicated that as colonias have become more regulated, more of them are acquiring the basic necessities of infrastructure. Still, as we will show, even in colonias classified as “green,” some residents continue to lack basic elements of infrastructure.23 In the following sections we look more closely into the condition of water supply, drainage, roads, and wastewater and solid waste collection in colonias.

Pota ble Water, Wastewater Tr e atmen t, a n d Tr ash Collection As of 2014, 13.1 percent of the population of the six South Texas colonias previously presented lived in colonias coded “red,” meaning they lacked adequate access to potable water and forgo needed wastewater treatment (table 2.2). While this condition is improving, 277 colonias in the region still lacked basic water services. The family of Joaquin Talvarez went without potable water for many years. Some residents of their colonia obtained water from a nearby canal. Others used barrels or tubs to store water. Most of them eventually got cement or metal tanks in their backyards that could hold a one- or two-week supply. Colonia residents who owned flatbed trucks brought water from the city water pump for their neighbors. Finally, with government funding, a water supply corporation brought water lines to their colonia. Colonia residents like Joaquin have discovered that some living conditions are improving. In 1989 the Texas legislature, through the Economically Distressed Areas Program, made it more difficult for developers to start new colonias without providing water, paving, drainage, and adequate sewage disposal systems. In addition, federal and state agencies have allocated funds to bring some infrastructure to existing colonias, though red tape keeps many colonias in the planning stage. From 2006 to 2014, 102 South Texas border colonias in those counties moved from no access to potable water or wastewater treatment to having access to potable water and disposal of wastewater.24 Yet, water insecurity, defined

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as “having adequate, reliable, and affordable water for a healthy life,”25 remains a critical element of everyday life in many colonias. In a recent comprehensive study of seventy-one colonia households in Hidalgo County, 90 percent reported some level of water insecurity, with 24 percent reporting severe water insecurity. In this same study, water insecurity was also found to be directly tied to low income levels.26 Even when electricity, water, and wastewater lines do arrive, however, some residents cannot afford to pay the fees for the connections. With the increased authority of Texas border counties to implement and enforce building codes, some colonia owners cannot pass inspections to connect to water lines, sewers, and even electricity. So, though these amenities may be available, they may not be affordable.27 Some residents temporize by connecting extension cords and garden hoses to the lines of compassionate neighbors. Armando Garza, a San Juan city official, states in a New York Times article, “You need a permit for this, a permit for that. It’s so expensive; it’s out of reach to connect to sewer, to water, even when it’s available.”28 When no city water is available, some colonia residents put in their own wells. Because these wells do not usually go very deep, however, they can produce brackish or even contaminated water. Julio recounted what it was like having a well. “At times,” he said, “the water was so salty that we could not drink it and had to buy bottled water. When we had car problems, we could not go out and buy bottled water. But we would get sick if we drank the well water.” Another young colonia resident, Margarita, said, “To get water, a neighbor would let us get water from their faucet. But sometimes there was no pressure on the faucet and we could be without water for days. There were times when my brother and I had to go to school without showering and having to wear the same clothes. It was tough. The students and the teachers would tease us.” Sewage disposal is another major challenge. The 1988 Texas Department of Human Services study found that fewer than 10 percent of colonia homes in the Rio Grande Valley were connected to sewer systems; 70 percent had septic tanks, 12 percent had outhouses, and 8 percent had cesspools.29 The Gonzalez family has tried all of these systems except the municipal sewer. Mrs. Gonzalez commented, We’ve had many problems from not being connected to a sewer. The smell gets really bad in our neighborhood, and we always have fl ies. At first, we had an outhouse, but I hated it. Keeping it clean was impossi-

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ble, and it always smelled bad. I was always afraid one of the kids would fall in or would get bitten by spiders or snakes. My kids were afraid to go at night, and I never let them go alone. My husband dug a cesspool, but that was almost as bad. Finally, we were able to afford a septic tank.

Some colonias are too far away from cities to connect to municipal sewer systems or to benefit from other municipal services such as trash collection. Since many cannot afford expensive trash collection services when such services are available, they burn their trash. Marilu Saenz said that around five o’clock in the evening, everyone closes their doors and windows, even when it is hot, because of the smoke from burning trash. Even when pick-up services are affordable and available, dogs often run loose in colonias and tear up the bags, and then the wind blows trash all over the neighborhood. To avoid problems associated with burning their trash, some colonia residents haul it to remote areas and leave it. This not only dramatically increases litter but adds to health problems from decay and contamination. In 1998, Colonias Unidas secured the Texas Governor’s Environmental Excellence Award for its community environmental campaign. This nonprofit organization recruited 250 volunteers to stop garbage burning and illegal dumping.30

Dr a inage a n d Flooding Flooding is a frequent problem in colonias that lack adequate drainage or in those that were built on a floodplain. Susana vividly remembered when it rained for days. The [unpaved] roads were muddy and covered with water. My grandmother and I both knew that my uncle’s car would get stuck if he hauled the water for us like he usually did. We were getting desperate for clean water. I knew I had to go, but my grandmother was afraid that snakes or rats forced out by the rain might bite me, so she went with me. That night, while we were gone, my grandfather got very sick. By the time we got home, his fever was so bad that we had to take him to the hospital.

Many colonias are built in floodplains and areas prone to flooding. Just more than half (54.5 percent) of colonias in Starr, Hidalgo, and Cameron Counties are located in areas where even small rainstorms may cause flooding.31 And when a tropical storm or hurricane blows through these areas, the flooding and concomitant devastation can be alarming.

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Maria, a university student, remembered when a friend from the university gave her a ride home after class. It rained a lot that day. Because our colonia has no drainage, our street flooded. On the way to my house, I warned my friend to stop and let me walk, but she wouldn’t let me out in the water. It came up past the car floor, but she made it without stalling. Later, I found out her ignition system shorted out after she took me home. I was so embarrassed.

Antonio Garza hated the flooding for another reason. “After a few hours of rain,” he said, “the yards became covered with water. The worst part, though, is that it stays there for days because there is no drainage or sewer system in our colonia. It not only turns brown but smells awful.” And with the water come mosquitos. Alejandro Cabrera remembered a few years earlier when it rained for a whole week. After the rain stopped, he went out to drain the water. “I fi nally had to quit,” he said, “because I was covered with mosquito bites. A few days later, I got a fever that kept me in bed for a week with fatigue and aching muscles.”

Roa ds Residents of colonias with no paved roads suffer in other ways. Lydia said that when she was in junior high, “they did not allow the bus drivers to drive into the colonia on rainy days. They would drop us off on the paved road outside the colonia. We had to walk four blocks in the rain and mud. Our shoes would stick in the mud. I remember my mother waiting for me at the door with a clean pair of shoes.” Paved streets not only help residents avoid the mud but also hold

Figure 2.3. Dry shoes await colonia kids after arriving home through the rain and muck of their colonia’s unpaved road. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

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down the dust. Martin Morales says, “We moved out here because this is all we could afford. People here are good neighbors, and we help each other whenever we can. But with no paved streets, everything we touch is covered with dust. It’s on the furniture, the clothes put out to dry, and even the food we eat.” Sometimes, the problem is caused by dishonest developers. Juanita Tovarez reported, When we moved into our colonia, the developer promised us and the other residents a paved road. Whenever we would contact him, he said he was in the process of getting it done, though it never happened. Finally, we all got fed up and collected money to get help from a lawyer. After a year, we fi nally got our paved road. I am so grateful for the people in our colonia for being so united.

Health Problems in Colonias Colonia residents don’t need another cause for poor health. Many poor infrastructure conditions cause health problems. Contaminated water contributes its share, as do flooding and poor sewage disposal. Mayetela Rodriguez said, This house is all I can afford. I don’t spend a lot of money on it because I have to buy food for my children. I also try to save money by buying them clothing at the flea market. I regret living under these conditions. Almost every year the canals across the road get flooded and contaminated by outhouses. The land where I live is so low that the water will stay many days after it floods. My children and I sometimes have to walk through that pestilence. One of my children once contracted hepatitis. I spent a lot of time asking the city of Pharr to help me fi ll the land with dirt, but they never did anything.

Because of conditions like these, colonia residents have rates of illness such as hepatitis A and B, diphtheria, salmonellosis, shigellosis, and tuberculosis much higher than those of the general population. Even diseases that have been eradicated elsewhere are not uncommon in Valley colonias. Shigellosis is caused by the shigella bacteria and is primarily transmitted through unsanitary cleaning of diapers or inadequate child toilet training. It is an intestinal disease that typically results in bloody diarrhea, fever, and stomach cramps. Small children are the most likely to get it, as it is often transmitted in contaminated food and water. On

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the Texas border, the rate of shigellosis was more than twice the national rate in 2003.32 While there is no vaccine for shigellosis, treatment includes the administration of antibiotics. Full recovery may take several months. Basic food safety precautions, frequent hand washing, and use of clean water are preventive measures against it. And the rate for tuberculosis along the border in 2003 was more than twice the national average.33 The increased emphasis on vaccination in recent years has produced even more promising results. The incidence of hepatitis A fell from 25 per 100,000 people in 1998 to fewer than 5 per 100,000 in 2003 within the border region, yet even this rate is nearly double the national rate.34 To make matters worse, most colonia residents have no health insurance, in part because policy makers in Texas refused to extend Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.35 This is an example of structural bias in a system that works against access to health care for those most in need. The Texas Medical Association proclaims Texas “the uninsured capital of the United States.” Fully 11 percent of Texas children, ages 0 to 18 were uninsured in 2014, as were 25.7 percent of Texas adults ages 18 to 64. Along the border and especially in colonias, the situation is even worse. The highest rates of uninsurance in Texas in 2014 were in Cameron, Webb, and Hidalgo Counties, at 32 percent, 31 percent, and 32 percent uninsured, respectively.36 And there is not a single public hospital in the entire Rio Grande Valley, with its 1.3 million residents. Residents who need emergency medical care must go to private hospitals or health clinics.37 With high medical costs and no insurance, some colonia residents rely on home remedies. Eliseo Guajardo says his wife uses household remedies to cure their children’s illness because there simply isn’t enough money left after paying the bills. For many, the cost of regular doctors is exorbitant. “All they want is your money,” said one resident, “and they don’t care if we get better or not. They’ll tell us to go back for another checkup and another and another so that they get every cent we’ve got. The only thing that gets better is their wallets, not our health.” Another colonia resident said she trusted doctors but explained how other costs are involved. We only have one car, and my husband takes it to work. If a child needs to go to the doctor then, he’ll miss a whole day of work if I call him because they make you sit all day at the clinic to see a doctor. To take a bus, I’d have to walk two miles to the bus stop, carrying a sick child all

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Figure 2.4. There is a ready availability of health care just across the border; the photo was taken in Río Bravo, Mexico. Photo by Xena Luna; © X. Luna, used by permission.

the way. Usually, we just wait to see if the illness goes away. Sometimes we go across to Reynosa, but transportation is a problem. Most of the time I just pray to get better because going to the doctor is expensive and a lot of trouble.

Socioeconomic Problems in Colonias Problems of poor health are related to poverty in colonias. Illness or injury can deplete resources needed for food and other living expenses. Alicia remembered a night when her little brother got very sick. The family had to choose whether to use their grocery money to take him to the emergency room or just wait to see if he got better. Knowing that they would have very little food, they chose to seek medical attention. With great emotion, Alicia said, “Teníamos que sacrifi car para nuestro hermanito; la comida no tiene el valor de su vida [We had to sacrifice for our little brother; our food isn’t worth his life].” For people who live on the economic edge, almost any emergency can bring disaster. Sickness, the breakdown of the family car, losing a

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job, and a septic tank overflow are not only more serious for colonia residents but are also more likely to occur. When funds are low, repairs to home and vehicles as well as health needs of family members are put off until they become full-blown emergencies. Often, they have no safety net of insurance, a second vehicle, or savings. As a result, colonia residents learn to live with a great deal of uncertainty. As we have seen, public services that most of us take for granted, such as clean water, sewage disposal, drainage, and well-maintained roads may be available only with great effort. Without savings or insurance, the health care system is undependable. Employment is often seasonal and temporary. Attitudes of residents in nearby cities are unpredictable, as is police and fire protection. Living on the economic edge, oftentimes in an environment of uncertainty, is a clear form of structural bias. Employment By conventional definitions, the unemployment rate in colonias was about 11 percent in 2011.38 Such figures, however, are deceiving. Many colonia residents work in construction—work that is sporadic and temporary for many workers. Others earn incomes in the informal and underground economies.39 In colonias, we suggest that unemployment and temporary employment conditions are a form of structural bias. For colonia residents, farmwork is also seasonal, often leaving those who do it unemployed during winter months. In our Consumer Informality Survey in 2010, we asked our 357 respondents how many were employed, either part-time or full-time. Of colonia residents in this survey, 18 percent were self-employed, working at jobs either part-time (4 percent) or full-time (14 percent). That compared to only 2 percent of low-income city residents who were self-employed. Such data would suggest that colonias facilitate selfemployment, much of which seems to be informal, or off the books. Farmwork affects colonia life in many ways, including how residents talk about their occupations. Anglo society usually asks, “What kind of work do you do?” In colonias, it is often, “¿En qué trabajas? [What do you work in?]” The common response is something like “Trabajo en el tomate . . . en el pepino, etc. [I work in tomatoes . . . in cucumbers, etc.]” to describe not only field labor but the specific type of crops they follow. As we have pointed out, most migrant families do not have steady

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year-round incomes. Often, while they are in the Valley, they fi nd temporary work in local fields, packing sheds, construction jobs, janitorial positions, or warehouse labor. They need these jobs to help pay for the trip north. For others, farmwork is what they do when other occupations fail to provide sufficient or steady income. Beatrice had been unemployed for about six months. “I was working for a supermarket in McAllen,” she said. “I only worked for two weeks before they laid me off. The Employment Commission had nothing for me, and I have not found anything on my own. My father says I need to help him pay the bills, so I guess I’m going to have to go back to the fields.” Even with several members of a household working, disruptions in employment are a serious matter. A young mother said, “We were all working when, all at once, I lost my job and couldn’t fi nd another. We couldn’t do many things we were planning, like getting a television set or occasionally eating out. We did grocery shopping only when we had to. Luckily, no one had to go to the doctor. We would not have had money for that.” Still, colonia residents are very resourceful. A young couple with three young children lives in a two-room house in Las Milpas colonia. He does odd jobs, but she is presently unemployed. She wants to work but can’t fi nd a job. Besides, she can’t fi nd day care in the area, and she has no way to get to and from a job. So, she sells food items that he brings from Mexico. The only time they go out together is to shop and to make their weekly visits to his family in Reynosa, Mexico. In such cases, many colonia residents turn toward survival self-employment, establishing microbusinesses such as auto repair and small-scale retail stores (tienditas) and food vending, to earn extra income.40 This is particularly true for female entrepreneurs when the burdens of family responsibilities like child rearing and food preparation converge with income-earning opportunities.41 Many of the new microbusiness concerns are informal, established without the recognition of or compliance with the government. Francesca had worked in the fields all her life but at sixty-five was too old to do farmwork; she then began earning some income by selling charcoal firewood from her colonia house. She said she needed another source of income after leaving farmwork and found out about the demand for firewood through friends in her colonia. “It helps out a lot,” she said, “because the only other income that we receive is from my husband’s Social Security check.”

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Poverty in Colonias The median household income in Texas border colonias in 2011 was $28,928 a year, compared to the Texas median household income of $50,920 and the national average of $52,762. Most colonia families were either in poverty (42 percent) or near poverty (19.4 percent). The comparable rates for Texas were 17.2 percent and 10.9 percent, respectively; for the United States as a whole, the rates were 14.2 percent in poverty and 9.2 percent near poverty.42 These very high rates of poverty and irregular employment are reflective of structural bias faced by colonia residents. Those who come from Mexico and their children generally do not consider themselves poor. Hortencia said her life is much better than it was for her parents in Mexico. Raising us was hard for my parents. When we came here, both of them had to work in the fields. One day my dad got sick. He had to put food on the table, though, so he went to work feeling pain and tightness in his chest. There in the fields, he collapsed and died. I’ll never take food for granted. My father died for us, his children, to survive. Fortunately, it’s been a lot easier for my husband and me to feed our children.

Because many colonia adults grew up in Mexico, life in a Texas colonia may be much better by comparison. A Mexican immigrant said, In Mexico, when kids in your neighborhood get hungry, you have nothing to give them. They’ll eat whatever they can fi nd. I’ve seen children eat an onion as if it were an apple, or an uncooked jalapeño. Because they are so hungry, anything tastes good. Things are really bad in Mexico. People are too poor, hungry, and sick. Here I have it much better.

In 2010 we conducted our South Texas Consumption Informality Survey of 357 consumers in South Texas, using embedded student interviewers to determine purchase patterns with regard to more than 120  select informal and underground goods and services.43 We found that colonia residents reported the highest levels of weekly purchases of informal household goods and services. Typical goods and services included fruits and vegetables, tamales, food plates, clothing, auto repair, hair styling, music, DVDs, and cross-border medical and dental care

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in Mexico. In all, more than one-quarter of surveyed colonia residents purchased 25 percent or more of their weekly consumable goods in informal market exchanges, often from neighbors in their colonias. This consumption behavior reveals the income-stretching strategies of colonia residents living in an environment of poverty. It doesn’t help that many jobs for colonia residents provide no benefits such as sick leave or health insurance. Many jobs don’t even pay minimum wages. Often, work is temporary, so the workers are not eligible for unemployment compensation. In addition, certain federal benefits may have regulations that exclude some colonia residents. Still, many people in colonias don’t think of themselves as poor. Though they might not be able to buy their kids toys or snacks, they see other families in worse shape. Many preschool colonia children think of themselves as middle-class because some families in the colonia are better off and some are worse off. This perception tends to change when they are bused to schools in urban areas.

The Stigma Associated with Colonia Residents The belief that colonia residents are not only poor but socially undesirable is often expressed in Valley cities. A student who interviewed seven colonia residents reported that every one of them experienced some form of teasing, name calling, or bullying. Often, those who teased them lived in a Valley city but were little better off economically than the colonia kids. Paula, a young woman who lived in the large colonia Las Milpas near Pharr, reported, “Whenever I would tell any of the other students where I lived, they automatically assumed I was a gangbanger or a troublemaker. They would refer to me as a ‘milpera’ [pejorative term for a resident of Las Milpas]. Now that I am in college, I find that many people at UTPA assume the same thing.” Since Mexican Americans are often the perpetrators of such stereotypes, much of the prejudice against colonia residents may be more a matter of class or rank than of ethnicity or race. Another colonia resident said Anglo and Mexican American students in the McAllen schools think that anyone from a colonia is a mojado, an undocumented immigrant, or belongs to a gang regardless of immigration status. The respondents to our interviews in colonias reported less discrimination once they left the public schools. Perhaps this is because they

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don’t spend much time outside the colonias. One woman said she commonly experiences stereotyping by Mexican Americans who believe that colonia residents are illegal Mexicans who come to take away jobs or to get on welfare. In the survey we did for the first edition of Batos, we reported that 8 percent of colonia residents felt that people in Valley cities discriminated against them “frequently,” while another 20 percent said they did so “occasionally.” The in-depth interviews we have conducted since that time suggest that not much has changed in this respect in subsequent years. Often, the stigma has economic consequences. A young man from a colonia north of Edinburg recalled a job interview in McAllen. I dressed up very professionally because I knew you have to look good for those jobs. I was on time and they took me in right away. The young man interviewing me asked where I lived before asking about my experience or education. When I told him, he wanted to know did I ever use drugs? Did I have an alcohol problem? Had I ever been in a gang? Did I have gang members as friends? Was I a convicted felon? These questions insulted me, but I thought they were part of the interview. But then he said he needed a person with class and good manners and that people from colonias don’t usually have these qualities. I just got up and excused myself. I couldn’t believe what I had heard.

As with any racist stigma, the class-based stigma associated with colonias can also affect the self-image of colonia residents. Another young colonia resident recounted an experience that illustrates this process. I was talking to some of my friends when they introduced me to a female friend. We were having a nice conversation until I mentioned the colonia where I lived. Suddenly, she backed off and said she had to go. I knew why she left. She got scared of me. It’s happened before. It’s hard to make friends when people get scared or turned off just because you’re from a colonia.

It is also hard for colonia residents, especially young people, to feel good about themselves if such reactions occur frequently and come from people whose opinions matter to them. Over time, this image of self can become painful, even causing them to avoid situations in which they fear they might experience pain or embarrassment.

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Chart 2.2. Reported frequency of five forms of deviance in four categories of neighborhoods in the Rio Grande Valley, 2001–2002 Source: Perceptions of Deviance Survey, 2002–2003.

Crime in Colonias As the preceding accounts illustrate, colonia residents are often stereotyped as gang members, criminals, or people in trouble with the law. As with many stereotypes, there may be some truth to this image. Colonias do have problems with crime and gangs. Nevertheless, colonia residents are less likely to experience such criminal activities than residents of low-income urban neighborhoods in South Texas. This is reflected in our Perceptions of Deviance Survey administered in 2002–2003 to 424 respondents. In this survey we asked a question that allowed us to determine whether Valley respondents lived in colonias or in low-income, middle-income, or upper-income urban neighborhoods. We also asked respondents how often certain forms of deviance or crime happened in their South Texas neighborhoods. The results of this analysis are presented in chart 2.2. An examination of chart 2.2 shows a significant and consistent pattern on the first four variables when responses are compared by neighborhood

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type. In each of these four forms of activities or deviance, colonia residents report higher levels of involvement than middle- or upper-income neighborhoods but lower than low-income urban neighborhoods in the frequency of all four forms of neighborhood crime problems. Indeed, pressure to buy and use drugs was not much greater in colonias than in middle-class urban neighborhoods. Together, these fi ndings support the proposition that colonia residents experience less crime and deviance than the alternative—low-income urban neighborhoods. Colonias are vulnerable to crime in another important way. They have only minimal police protection. Carmen discovered this when she saw some kids breaking into her neighbor’s house. She called the police, but they wouldn’t come because she lived outside the city limits. They told her to call the sheriff. When she did, it took more than an hour for a deputy to come. “Now I’m always afraid to leave my home,” she said. “How are we going to go up north if gangs are going to vandalize our house?” It’s hard to blame the sheriff. Indeed, this situation is better explained as a form of structural bias pushed by the failure of formal systems in which not nearly enough public resources are devoted to serve colonia populations. In 2013, almost one-third (31.1 percent) of Hidalgo County’s more than 800,000 residents lived outside incorporated city limits. In 2014, the sheriff’s office had only ten officers per shift to cover 1,500 square miles.44 The location of colonias widely spread through Valley counties, more than bigotry, likely explains this result. Nevertheless, some degree of bias may be involved. The sheriff holds an elected office, and colonia residents tend to have a low voter turnout rate. As a result, they may not be given high priority in responding to calls or offering protection. Perhaps these factors explain the reaction Graciela Sosa got when she called for help after finding her home burglarized. She called the sheriff’s office and said it was an emergency. Deputies didn’t come until two hours later. “I asked them why they took so long,” she said, “but it looked like they weren’t listening to me. Here I was, devastated, calling for help, and having to wait two hours, just so they can ignore my question.” Because of the difficulty of getting reliable police protection, many colonia residents find their own solutions. According to a student interviewer, “Every house has at least one dog, not because it’s man’s best friend but because it is the poor man’s best security. Every Sunday, one neighbor goes to his backyard and fires thirty-two rounds with his .22

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rifle. He doesn’t do it for practice but to warn his neighbors that he has a gun and is ready to use it.” Others, like the Rivas family, rely on family. “Now when it’s time for us to go up north,” Mrs. Rivas said, “my husband and the boys go, and I stay here with the girls.” Thus, colonia residents not only lose their possessions from burglary or vandalism; they also lose income when wage earners have to stay home to guard the house. In one colonia, residents got together to put up a few security lights. A resident said, With the lights, we don’t have many gang members walking around looking to see what they can get their hands on. We also help each other out in other ways. If my neighbor is going out of town, for example, he’ll tell me and I’ll watch his house to make sure nothing unusual is going on. Our colonia is very united and peaceful. That’s what I like about it.

In sum, the vicious circle of inequality (chart 1.10) aptly applies to the many challenges faced by colonia residents. Socioeconomic challenges associated with low-paying jobs, school attendance and educational attainment, structural unemployment, informality, and poverty are connected in many ways to citizenship status and low levels of political power. Also, physical problems of poor infrastructure, such as inadequate access to potable water, lack of proper wastewater treatment and trash disposal, improper drainage, and unpaved roads, create an environment ripe for health crises, a stigma of inferiority, and so on. And each element of the vicious circle reinforces the next.

Why Colonias? A Preliminary Analysis In our 2012 book, The Informal and Underground Economy of the South Texas Border, we proposed that colonias exist for three basic reasons. First, colonia residents are pushed into this kind of informal housing by the failure of formal systems such as banking, municipal government, and public utilities to support low-cost housing for the poor. When formal systems fail, the poor respond with off-the-book, innovative, informal solutions. Second, colonia residents are pulled into or attracted to informal housing because colonias make it easier to hide economic informality. And third, colonias attract residents because they provide

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many of the cultural and social benefits Mexican-origin people along the South Texas border appreciate. A brief examination of each of these three factors will illustrate. The Attraction of Colonias as Places to Conduct Informal Economic Enterprise Mauro Granados, a migrant farmworker, described how trying to follow formal systems can push low-income Valley residents into informality. I remember working very hard and staying long hours under the hot sun. I wanted something better for my family and thought I could get a loan to get a small business started. As I walked into the bank I felt my stomach turn and my ears burn. If looks could kill I’d be dead. I told myself it must be the old shirt, my secondhand slacks, and my working shoes. I didn’t think it could be the color of my skin because most of the employees in the bank looked Mexican just like me. I proceeded to the loan department, where I was told to sit in the waiting area. I sat there for five hours. Finally, the janitor told me it was time to go home. I went early the next morning and sat there for three hours before they fi nally called me in. After only a minute or two of listening, the banker made me feel like a complete loser and told me my business ideas would never work. “You would never qualify for a loan with us,” he told me. “Our requirements are very strict.” I asked him what the requirements were and he said, “There are so many, I don’t have the time to go over them.”

So, in Mauro’s case, perhaps the loan officer did not want to meet with him because of class bigotry associated with Mauro’s looks and dress. One the other hand, perhaps structural bias could explain the aborted business relations because Mauro likely had no collateral to offer in real asset form to secure a loan; his home was under a contract for deed and not yet titled to Mauro. Typically, banks in the region require securitization for most types of loans. A car loan is secured or collateralized by the vehicle. A business loan may be secured by recognized personal assets such as a home or existing business. In Mauro’s case, it was most likely assumed that he did not have any assets of value or assets with formal value. That is, his assets were most likely owned in an unrecognized or unregularized manner, with no legal or paper proof of homeownership. These assets are held in deficient form from the perspective of the formal banking com-

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munity. Hence, the bank officer likely did not even bother to inquire as to Mauro’s assets. This view by the banking community about South Texas colonia residents is common and sometimes appalling. It illustrates that structural bias, though perhaps unintentional, is not unavoidable. Developing nations have innovated ways to overcome many formal limitations to enterprise finance for low-income people through the introduction of microcredit. Few such innovations exist, however, for poor colonia residents in South Texas outside of self-help groups known as tandas. The attractiveness of colonias to many low-income residents, especially the undocumented, is the advantage the communities offer for economic informality. This is supported by our examination of the fifth variable in chart 2.2, the presence of undocumented people in each neighborhood; here we observe a considerably different pattern from the other four variables. The percentage who reported undocumented residents living in colonias is substantially higher than all the other neighborhood types, including low-income urban neighborhoods.45 This supports our finding that colonias offer a relatively safe place for undocumented residents to hide but also make it possible for them to engage in informal microenterprises. Cultural and Social Benefits of Colonias Perhaps the most attractive feature for colonia residents is the sense of community, family, and sharing that many of our respondents identified. When Jovita Acuña was asked what she liked most about living in a colonia, her response was immediate: “What I love most is that everyone in our colonia is so friendly. Whenever we need something, like an ingredient to make a meal or other types of material, our neighbors help us out, and we always try to help them when they are in need.” Maité Hernandez provides another example, telling of a time when her daughter turned fifteen. She wanted a quinceañera [a special coming-out celebration], but I didn’t have the money. My neighbors collected about three hundred dollars. The one with the nicest home in the colonia decorated it for the party. My sister brought the cake, and my daughter’s madrina [godmother] bought her a dress. Others brought music. All the ladies helped make tamales, rice, and potato salad. Another neighbor took the pictures. It turned out really nice, and my daughter was very happy. Later that

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year we did the same for another neighbor whose daughter was getting married.

People with a common background or those who speak the same language often share a strong sense of community. Ysenia Valdez said, “When I first came here from Mexico, I didn’t make many friends at school. It was the kids here in our colonia that made me feel welcome. Aquí, todos son como yo [Here everyone is just like me].” A related strength of colonias is family solidarity. Colonia children learn early the importance of family, as an interviewer discovered inadvertently. As she talked with a young boy outside his family’s small home, she could tell he was hungry. “I offered him an orange I had in my purse,” she recalled, “and I’ll never forget what he did with it. He divided it among his brothers, instead of eating it all himself. I asked him why he did that and he replied, “Son mis hermanos y lo que yo tengo es para ellos tambien [They are my brothers; what I have is theirs also].” In spite of problems, many colonias have a strong sense of solidarity. With a strong sense of community, colonia residents can more easily endure—and organize to oppose—the lack of basic services. A resident recalled when her neighbor needed surgery. Tenchita’s family is very poor. They didn’t have insurance, so we had some meetings and did bingo and raffles to help her out. After that, we kept working together on other things. We got the county to give us better drainage systems and even got them to pave our roads. The feeling of unity is what I really like about this colonia.

Despite all their problems, colonias foster certain cultural and structural situations that can produce a strong sense of community. Their typically small size makes it easier for neighbors to know each other. The high level of homeownership provides stability and an economic stake in the colonia. Cultural, economic, and language similarity also provide the basis for a shared sense of identity. The need to fi nd solutions to common problems has the potential for bringing neighbors together. Even the fact that many colonia residents have similar occupations provides the potential for a strong bond.46 Other cultural and structural factors, however, pull in the opposite direction. A few colonias are new, so those residents often don’t know their neighbors. It is also hard to get to know the migrant neighbors who are gone for several months a year. The strong emphasis on family in Mexican culture can produce clannishness among extended family

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members to the exclusion of neighbors. In addition, most colonias are just groups of homes. Potential gathering places like schools, churches, or markets are usually outside the colonia.

Community-Based Initiatives Having extended family members living in the colonia is important. Nonetheless, entire colonia communities need to work together to get water lines installed, roads paved, drainage improved, and sewerage systems that don’t contaminate the water they drink. Some organizations have been successful in organizing entire colonia communities. Valley Interfaith, for example, is modeled after Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. Its members pressure public officials to meet the needs of some larger colonias and have been effective in training colonia leaders, especially those close to the cities. In 2015 this organization helped organize one of the largest colonias in South Texas, Las Milpas, to pressure the city of Pharr to pave the streets. Las Milpas had endured a generation of unpaved roads. The community activist Monse Martinez told an interviewer, “I moved here five years ago [in 2010] and people told me the roads had not been repaired for ten or fifteen years before that.” Valley Interfaith has been organizing these residents to get them to vote using political pressure through the ballot box to improve colonia infrastructure. The Reverend Edouard Atangana of Valley Interfaith is quoted in a 2015 local news article saying, “We want our people in this part of Pharr, especially, to vote. Our population is almost half of the entire city.”47 In late 2015, La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) and A Resource in Serving Equality (ARISE), community-based organizations working for colonia improvements, helped secure a pilot project with the unanimous support of the Hidalgo County commissioners to bring street lighting to ten colonias in Hidalgo County.48 The first streetlights were installed in January 2016 in the colonias Goolie Meadows and Mi Sueño, allowing residents to feel more secure, children to play outside at night, and emergency services to find specific locations when necessary.49 One program that has shown promise is Proyecto Azteca, a lowincome housing initiative started by the United Farm Workers of America. It builds up to twenty-five affordable pier-and-beam homes in poor neighborhoods each year, using the sweat equity of prospective homeowners. The program lends construction tools to families, provides construction guidance, and sets up a $25,000 no-interest loan so that each

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family can purchase building materials. The loan also pays their closing costs, insurance, taxes, utility setup, septic tanks, water, and electrical connections. Proyecto Azteca supervises groups of qualifying families, and each group builds six homes. The need for affordable housing in Hidalgo County far outstrips what Proyecto Azteca can provide, with four thousand people on its waiting list.50 Some advocacy organizations work mainly with colonia women to help them develop networks within the colonia to advocate for needed changes. Often, such organizations must overcome formidable obstacles when they begin their work in colonias. Colonia residents are often unfamiliar with the bureaucratic channels of American systems of government. Few are registered voters or have any real skills in working with politicians. Coming from backgrounds of poverty and speaking little or no English, many feel intimidated in approaching government agencies. They also know that public officials and people in nearby cities don’t really want to deal with colonia residents. Although progress has been made to improve colonias, the fundamental issue of lack of affordable housing in the RGV region remains unsolved. Population growth and continued low wages perpetuate the conditions that prompted early colonia development. Many colonia residents have been priced out of the housing market in Valley cities. Moving to colonias was their only viable choice. Many choose to believe, however, that with a determined self-help approach and hard work, they will succeed in someday providing decent housing for their families. They are modern-day pioneers who believe they will accomplish their goals in the not-too-distant future. Their hopes and dreams are passed along to their children. Similarly, the children begin to believe that their own hard work in school will someday pay off. Policy makers need to complement the valiant efforts of colonia residents by making greater efforts to enhance the quality of life in colonias. When colonia residents work together to bring water, paved roads, or street lights to their colonias, policy makers need to build on this momentum by supporting other basic infrastructure projects. These would include wastewater disposal, garbage disposal, accessible and affordable health care, flexibility in construction regulations, and timely response from emergency services. Finally, policy makers at the national level need to remove the most significant of all obstacles to colonia development by enacting comprehensive immigration reform. Perhaps this more than any other policy change would bring colonia residents out of the shadows and allow them to realize their long-range economic dreams.

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CHAPTER 3

“Only a Maid”: Undocumented Domestic Workers in South Texas

I was invited to a party, but my employers wouldn’t let me go. I overheard Mr. Garza tell his wife that I was too young, that I might fall for some guy and run away. I felt so humiliated I wanted to leave. I couldn’t because my family in Mexico needs the money. Lucí a H er na n dez

Since our account of the situation of undocumented maids was published in the first edition of Batos, their employment situation in South Texas has not changed much. Most South Texas maids today earn about the same amount, in inflation-adjusted dollars, as they did in 1999. And like Lucía Hernandez, they can still do little about the conditions of their work or the requirements employers thrust on them. Now as then, undocumented maids occupy one of the most powerless employment positions in America. On the other hand, the immigration situation for many of them has deteriorated substantially since 1999. Despite all the rhetoric about President Barack Obama not doing enough to secure the border, US immigration controls significantly tightened during his administration. Today, illegally entering the United States is much more difficult than it was in 1999. Carmen, a fifty-seven-year-old mother of college-age children and a US citizen, remembered illegally entering the United States repeatedly from Tijuana, Mexico, when she came to work as a maid at the age of sixteen. Carmen early in her career as a maid moved from Southern California to South Texas. She stated, Back then, there wasn’t much danger or stress in trying to cross the border. The immigration laws were not nearly as strict as they are now. Today, it has become much harder to get in without papers, and the Border

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Patrol has to verify everyone they let in. But when we fi rst came in 1975, we could cross the border illegally right under their noses!

Domestic work is nearly the exclusive domain of women.1 The sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo describes paid domestic work as characterized by a network of two women, employer and employee, typically of very different class, ethnic, and citizenship statuses, who meet in worksites isolated from outside observation.2 Another sociologist, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, suggests the domestic “work itself is transitional in that it incorporates features of both unpaid family labor and paid employment. The work takes the woman outside her own household, where she sells her labor for wages. Yet it retains key features of unpaid household work: it involves no capital investment, little division of labor, and a low level of technology”; produces a perishable service that cannot be resold outside the home; and “takes place within a separate women’s sphere, where relation between employer and employee are personalistic and work arrangements are casual and unregulated.”3 Domestic labor has been described as an occupational bridge that may foster acculturation and social mobility of immigrants and migrants from traditional societies on the one hand, to an occupational dead end that traps and exploits them, on the other.4 In South Texas, we find examples at both ends of and all along this occupational bridge.

The Research The research for the first edition of Batos included two fi xed-response surveys in 1993. One, the Undocumented Maid Survey, consisted of 162 face-to-face interviews with undocumented maids and a similar survey of 136 employers of undocumented maids, our Employers of Undocumented Maids Survey.5 To invite open expression, we avoided interviews with either a maid or her employer if we had already interviewed the other. Finally, if maids were afraid to talk about their current employers, we gave them the option of discussing previous employers. Shortly after the publication of Batos, we undertook a new survey of undocumented maids and their employers in Laredo, 150 miles upriver from McAllen. In this study conducted in the summer of 2000, we surveyed 195 maids and 194 employers, providing baseline data for Laredo.6 Since 1999 and following the 2000 investigation in Laredo, Borderlife students have conducted 317 additional in-depth interviews of undocu-

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mented maids and 28 in-depth interviews of employers of maids in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. As in the first round of ethnographic interviews, the interview experience was eye-opening for these student interviewers. A student noted, “While I conducted my interviews, some of the undocumented maids cried—some due to happy memories—and others who recalled tragedies they had suffered. But after the interviews they all thanked me for listening to them. One said, ‘You have given us the opportunity to discuss things that no one seems to care about.’” Letting them tell their own stories is, again, one of our major aims in this book. In 2006–2009 we conducted our Informal and Underground Survey, using purposive sampling to interview 526 people engaged in informal economic enterprises, 40 of whom were undocumented or quasidocumented maids. Finally, in 2010, we conducted our Consumer Informality Survey of 357 individuals in South Texas who paid for informal economic goods or services, 35 percent of whom indicated that they had employed maids to work for them. Hiring an undocumented maid is illegal, as has been highlighted by “Nannygate” instances of politicians being exposed for having hired undocumented domestic help.7 As a result, employers and their undocumented maids alike tend to shun interviews. These factors rule out random sampling techniques, and so our interviewers used snowball sampling. Sixty-five percent of students who interviewed maids approached friends, relatives, or neighbors to arrange introductions. These interviewers then asked individuals they interviewed to recommend others to whom they could speak with confidence.

The Migration Patterns of Undocumented Maids One day eight years ago, Antonia came home from school in her Mexican town, a happy thirteen-year-old. She recalled, When I walked through the front door, my mother was crying. I asked her what was the matter, but she just said to ask my father. At fi rst, he didn’t look me in the eyes. He just asked if I wanted to work in the United States. I said no, that I couldn’t leave my family. He said, “Well, get your clothes ready because you’re leaving tonight.” I felt like someone close to me had died. Tears came to my eyes, but I bit my lip. I begged him to fi nd me some work nearby, but not to send me so far

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away. I’ll never forget what happened next. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “We have no choice. We need the money and that’s that.” I was crying real hard. Then, for the first time in my life, I saw my father cry.

Why They Come What factors would push a young girl like Antonia to leave family, friends, and the only home she had ever known, travel to an unknown country, live with strangers who speak a different language, and have to hide from authorities? Though the answer “economics” may be correct, it fails to convey the complexity of the factors that influence a decision to migrate. The most common response to this question in our 1993 Survey of Undocumented Maids (29 percent) was from women who said they came to help their parents fi nancially. This response was also quite common among maids in our most recent in-depth interviews. Juana related that she “got tired of feeling hungry” and even worse, watching her parents and younger siblings being hungry. “It’s an awful feeling,” she said. María also felt the responsibility to help her family financially. “My dad and my three older siblings worked, but still the money was never enough,” she said. “We were a family of ten, which meant a lot of mouths to feed. Mexico’s economy was bad and continues to be.” A third young woman, Consuelo, mentioned that being of Mexican descent makes people feel responsible for helping their families: “We know that whenever the family is in crisis, we all have to do whatever we can to help.” Another 25 percent of our survey sample said they came to help their husbands support their families. For many, that is still the case. A maid interviewed in 2005, Pricila Montez, said, “Life was really hard in Mexico, especially with two teenage sons. They are still in Mexico with their father. It was very difficult for me to come and work as an illegal maid, but I felt I had no choice. I really appreciate my husband’s support, but I really miss him a lot.” Another maid, Alicia, said “I miss my children in Mexico so much. My little girl called me on my birthday last week and sang a song to me. My heart was breaking.” In the 1993 survey, 23 percent said the lack of work in Mexico was their main reason for coming. Things do not seem to have changed much since then.8 Marisela is from a rural area in Zacatecas, Mexico.

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Figure 3.1. Mexican

women on both sides of the border are frequent victims of exploitation. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

She describes the scarcity of work available in rural Mexico. Throughout the interview, Marisela kept explaining her decisions, such as saying, “My family needs me. That’s what I am here for—no matter what kind of work I must do.” Later in the interview, she admitted, with considerable embarrassment, “I no longer work in homes but have become a barmaid. I earn good money for just sitting with men and drinking a beer with them, an occasional kiss on the neck at times, but that is all.” When asked if she was not afraid of possible abuse, she said, “Yes, but that is the risk I have to take.” She went on to explain, Two years ago I tried to go to California, where my cousin had promised me a better job. But I was caught as I tried to get past the secondary checkpoint near Falfurrias and was sent back to Mexico.[9] After great difficulty, I was able to enter again but could not fi nd any work as a maid. I was desperate because my family had almost nothing to live on. I needed to make money fast to send back home. That is when I took the job as a barmaid.

In the 1993 survey, only 5 percent of the maids interviewed said they came to escape bad personal experiences in their homeland. In more re-

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cent interviews, however, we detected that this reason was relevant for a larger percentage of those interviewed. The reason Pamela came to the United States was because of the abuse she experienced by her mother. She said, When I was fifteen, my mom just beat me up really bad. I could barely move. When I turned sixteen, I decided to leave and never go back because every time she beat me, she would say she would not do it again. I got all my things together and asked my dad for money so I could cross to el otro lado [the other side of the border]. He gave me enough to pay for the bus ride to the border, meals, and to pay someone to get me a fake laser visa.

A student interviewer found that two of the maids she interviewed each had decided to leave Mexico for compelling personal reasons. Felicitas grew very serious when asked why she came. She responded, “I came because my stepfather would abuse me. He wanted me to do things that I knew were very wrong. When I got the courage to tell my mother, she accused me of lying and that I only wanted her to leave him. That’s when I decided to leave. He wasn’t going to stop.” Some demographers underestimate the complexity of the decision to enter the United States to work illegally. In discussions of migration theory, they often employ a “push-pull” model of analysis. They ask what factors push migrants out of their home environments and which factors might pull them to the new locations. Often overlooked in the migration literature, however, are a second set of forces—those that work to hold individuals in their current geographical locations and those in the prospective locations that might repel such moves. These competing factors are illustrated in table 3.1. Push factors might include high regional unemployment, poverty, extremely low wages, the need to help support one’s family, or an abusive situation in the home. Pull factors might include higher wages in the United States, the chance for steady employment, the desire to join family members already there, and a desire for education. But much more is involved in decisions to migrate than just push and pull factors. Many, like Antonia, who was forced to migrate, strongly prefer to remain in their homeland. They must also take into account factors that might hold them there along with still other issues in the United States that might repel their migration. Some of the hold factors might include strong family ties, love of one’s native country, strong attachment to

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Table 3.1. Factors affecting illegal migration Location of factor Impact

Home country

Receiving country

Encourages illegal migration

¡ Push

Pull ¡

Difficulties or costs of remaining in home country

Benefits of moving to receiving country

Discourages illegal migration

Hold —

Repel —

Benefits of remaining in home country

Costs of moving to receiving country

friends and neighbors, and obligations to children or other family members. Similarly, there might be many accounts they have heard about life in the United States that tend to repel their migration. These factors could include not knowing the language, the fear of getting caught, dangers of crossing the border, stories of poor treatment of others who have gone, or aversion to the culture or lifestyle of the United States. Crossing the Border Certainly one of the strongest repel factors is the danger and uncertainty of crossing from Mexico to the United States.10 As we have mentioned, getting into the United States illegally has become much more difficult for many women who seek to become undocumented maids. Still, it can be somewhat routine for those who manage to get laser visas. Though the laser visa does not authorize the bearer to work in the United States, those who possess it can come and go with minimal risk. If one is caught overstaying the time limit or using the laser visa for employment, border officials can confiscate it without a hearing. But laser visas are not easy to get. They are usually only issued to Mexican citizens who live fairly close to the border and use them to shop in US border cities. Generally, US consular officials in Mexico require someone to show economic self-sufficiency in Mexico (steady job, homeownership, bank account, and so forth) before issuing the permit. This is illustrated by the case of Matilda and several of her friends who live in Ciudad Mier and cross daily to jobs in Roma, about sixty

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miles upriver from McAllen. When asked why she doesn’t just live on the US side to avoid the risks of a daily commute, she stated, I could never do that. Most of my family has lived in Mier for many years. We need each other during hard times. After a long day of work, I need to return to the tranquility of my own house in a place I love. I don’t understand why they make such a big deal about us working with the laser visa. We work really hard for a lot less money to do work that American women don’t want to do. One day, my friend got stopped by an immigration officer who found a US-based cell phone in her purse. He asked her if she was going to work in the United States. She answered, “Yes.” When I saw her the next day in Mier, she told me that they had taken away her laser visa and told her she would never be able to get another one. She cried all the way back to Mier.

As this story illustrates, otherwise undocumented maids who have laser visas have a much easier time crossing the border to work and to visit their families. The danger of frequent crossings, however, is seen in what happened to Matilda’s friend. If officials suspect the laser visa is being used to work, they can take it away. And they become suspicious if they notice the same individuals crossing the border more frequently than would be needed for occasional shopping trips. When Chela first crossed to work with a laser visa she was frightened. “It must have been obvious,” she said, “when the officer asked to see my border crossing permit I was trembling. He snatched my purse away from me and dumped everything out on the table to look for American addresses. He wanted to make sure I was not planning to work and that I would soon return to Mexico.” In our 1993 survey, about half of the maids surveyed used the “mica,” an early version of the laser visa, or some other form of entry document to cross the border.11 The other half entered without documents. In recent years, as border security has increased, anecdotal evidence suggests that fewer women are crossing into the United States without appropriate documents than did so in 1993. Nevertheless, we estimate that about half of illegal entrants still come through ports of entry rather than swimming the river.12 Our 2000 survey of maids in Laredo found that 53 percent of maids possessed cross-border shopping cards. This hardening of the border has been going on for many years. Indeed, smugglers and those who sell fraudulent documents profit from the increased border security and the cartel extortion rackets. Every-

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thing that makes it harder to enter the United States without documents means more business and higher fees for them. On the other hand, women in general—and especially those who don’t live near the border or have family residing there—are in greater danger of being apprehended or even kidnapped without the ostensible protection of these criminal enterprises. Ramona is a single, twenty-nine-year-old woman originally from Veracruz who came to live in Reynosa for several years before she decided to come to the Valley. She stated, Even though I didn’t trust coyotes [smugglers], my uncle helped me fi nd one that he trusted. Even with his help, I was caught the fi rst three times. But each time the Border Patrol returned me to Reynosa, he tried again the next day without charging me more. Finally, we were successful. Though it was hard, it was much easier for me than for those who don’t know anyone in the Mexican border cities.

But using a smuggler can sometimes pose an even greater risk. Many of those who come from cities and countries far from the US border risk being snatched off trains and buses by Mexican cartels or by the Mexican police. Those who make it to the border with no family there to help them often have difficulty finding smugglers they can trust, in itself often a very risky proposition. Isabel was a twenty-four-year-old woman who came to the United States illegally from a small town in the interior of Mexico. She recalled, Our neighbor told my parents that their daughter sends them money weekly by working in a town named Edinburg. He told us, “I know a coyote that will cross you, give you papers, and have work waiting on the other side.” So my dad borrowed the money from this neighbor and off I went. I was afraid but relaxed when I discovered that the coyote was a woman. She looked harmless, but as soon as I was alone with her, she constantly tried to touch me inappropriately.

Her interviewer commented, “Isabel sobbed for a moment. When I asked her if she wanted to stop the interview, she said, ‘I feel a lot better when someone knows what I went through.’” Isabel continued, “The coyote violated me, yet she still crossed me over. Needless to say, there was no one waiting for me on the Texas side of the river. I am in constant fear of being caught and sent back to Mexico.”

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In our Undocumented Maids Survey, we asked the 162 maids, “Have you ever hired a coyote to help you enter the US?” Only 30 percent of the respondents at that time said yes. In our 2000 survey in Laredo, about one-third had used a coyote in the past. The percentage climbed to nearly one-half for live-in maids, those who resided in the homes of their employers. Of the total 417 undocumented maids who were interviewed in the ensuing years, about half of those who described how they crossed said they had used coyotes. Those who had not hired coyotes tended to live near the border or have family members there. Their greatest fear—more than being caught by the Border Patrol—was being caught by drug cartel operatives who prey on undocumented crossers. These criminals insist that anyone entering the United States illegally pay them for the privilege of crossing their proclaimed territory. They are prone to punish those who don’t pay—with extortion, robbery, rape, or other violence. Besides fear of cartels, some women are more afraid of police in Mexico than of the Border Patrol. Rosa came from Guatemala in the 1990s and found a low-paying job. She said, One winter day, I went to buy some warm clothing. Unfortunately, when I saw the migra [Border Patrol] I got nervous and gave myself away. They took me in, but I convinced them that I was from Chiapas, Mexico, and had relatives in Reynosa. I didn’t want them to send me back to Guatemala. They made me promise never to return and released me at the bridge. I wandered around in Reynosa looking lost and hungry. The Mexican police stopped me. They knew I was not Mexican and took me in to search for drugs. They undressed me and found my money. They took it and fi nally let me go. A kind person in Reynosa found me. Because I was sick, she took me to the doctor. Later, I crossed again and found a job with my current employer.

Today, the factors that push young women and children to enter the United States illegally have become much more compelling. South Texas has seen a dramatic increase in the number of Border Patrol apprehensions since 2012 of Central American migrants, primarily children.13 Violence, crime, extortion, and even kidnapping in Mexico and the “northern triangle” of Central America—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—have increased dramatically in recent years. At the same time, the level of violence against those making the journey northward has grown much worse. As a result, those who do manage to get

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Figure 3.2. As Rosa’s

experience shows, being detained by Mexican police may be far worse than deportation. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

into the United States are often so frightened to return home that they may go years without seeing their children or their families in Mexico or Central America. This is especially true for those women who came from the interior of Mexico or from Central America. A recent report estimates that at least eighteen thousand northbound migrants are seized in Mexico each year by human traffickers, often with the participation of police; the traffickers then try to extort ransoms from their impoverished families.14 The Zetas and other criminal cartels have discovered that wholesale kidnappings can net them greater profits than smuggling narcotics. Often, the most vulnerable of those seized, women and children, face the horrors of rape, violence, or being sold into prostitution when the extortion demands are not met. Increased border security, corrupt Mexican police, and vicious criminal cartels have gotten so severe that many women and other migrants are persuaded to hire human smugglers. While this strategy may offer some security, occasionally these smugglers become traffickers. That is, human smugglers transport people for pay, and traffickers hold people against their will for ransom. Furthermore, traffickers hold their cargo

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in stash houses on both sides of the Mexico–South Texas border and then contact relatives to extort ransoms for the captives’ safety. All this reflects a new reality—that since 2013, the main entry point for smuggling these migrants into the United States has switched from Arizona, with its harsh efforts to frighten migrants, to the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.15 Generally, however, smugglers, though expensive, are reliable. Indeed, since they cannot advertise, they must rely on the reputations they gain from safely delivering those who hire them into the United States. Many have learned to protect themselves and their cargo from the cartels by paying a portion of their profits to the cartels or police agencies that control specific points near the border, allowing them to pass through the claimed territory. Finding Work Francisca was only fifteen years old when she came to the United States. A friend in her hometown promised they would look for jobs together. As they were crossing the Rio Grande late at night, the current separated them and her friend apparently did not make it across. Francisca was terribly frightened and tempted to go back, but her fear of the river and the thought of her destitute family made her decide to go on. Some people at a church gave her food, use of a shower, some clothes, and a place to sleep the first night. The next day, she wandered the streets, scared to death of the Border Patrol. In the next two days, she slept on the streets and ate from restaurant garbage bins. An owner of one of the restaurants saw her and invited her inside. She begged him not to call the Border Patrol, saying she only needed to work. He offered her a job cleaning his house. When she discovered that in return he expected sexual favors, she sneaked away. So many circumstances of undocumented maids who come to work in the United States seem to depend on luck—staying out of the hands of extortionists and police in Mexico; finding a good coyote; not getting caught by the Border Patrol; finding a place to stay while looking for work; and finding employers who do not abuse them. But much more than luck is at work. Indeed, one primary takeaway from the hundreds of maids we interviewed is that women or girls who lack the help of networks of effective social capital in Mexico or in the United States are those most likely to have horrible experiences.16

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An undocumented maid, Amanda, reported great difficulty because of not having a social network. I came here to work when I was fifteen. My family was very poor, and we needed more money to survive. But when I came here I was on my own. I didn’t know if I could fi nd work. For several weeks I slept in old, abandoned buildings. Looking for work was the hardest thing I had ever had to do because I didn’t know anyone here. I had to go door to door, hoping that someone was looking for a maid. Finally, one day I found a family who offered me good pay and a roof over my head.

Sometimes employers are the ones searching for undocumented maids. One of our student interviewers found such an individual. “I had a rare opportunity to interview a close relative about how she searches for a new maid,” the student reported. She then relayed what the relative told her: I wait until my house is a mess, and then I call those who respond to an ad on a Valley radio station to come for that day. Their first day on the job determines the maid’s quality of work and capacities. If I like the way she works, she stays. If I don’t like it, I drop her off where I picked her up with no pay or half of what I said I would give her.

The student interviewer continued, “I was appalled to hear that one of my own family members would exploit women who are going through what our own grandmother did decades ago. I couldn’t resist asking her why she was doing this. She replied, ‘I don’t want them to take advantage of my kindness.’” According to our 1993 survey results, most undocumented women— 62 percent—relied on friends and family to find jobs, while 15 percent found out about jobs through other maids. Clearly, at that time, most undocumented maids used informal channels and networks of friends or relatives to fi nd work.17 Our 2000 survey in Laredo and our subsequent in-depth interviews also suggest that only a small proportion of undocumented maids acquire their first job through door-to-door solicitation, with the remainder using networks (social capital) to find employment.18 For most undocumented domestic workers, an essential element in the search for work is finding not only employment but places to live— ideally, in the homes of the employers. Some maids will become day maids, living somewhere else. Those who have places to stay apart from

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their employers (live-out maids, or day maids) tend to have set schedules of when they come to work and when they can go home. Additionally, most of these day maids, unlike most live-in maids, have the documents necessary to freely transit the South Texas border.19 But day maids incur the additional costs of housing, transportation, food, furniture, and so forth. Though live-in maids don’t usually have to pay for these necessities, they are often expected to be available during their off time. And many employers fi nd it tempting to add to their duties and give them less free time. Though employers might demand more of live-in maids, they often expect to pay them less since they are providing room and board. Others justify low pay by saying they pay more than the maid would get in Mexico. That is the reasoning of an employer who in her interview said, “They are used to working for close to nothing in Mexico. I at least give her more than double what she would earn over there.” Nevertheless, even live-out maids are not guaranteed protection from the whims of some employers. Ana became a day maid because she brought her young son with her. Because most prospective employers prefer not to have maids with children living with them, she found it necessary to move in with relatives in a nearby colonia. They helped her find her first job with a teacher. Ana had to cook and look after two kids when they got out of school. Then, at 6 p.m., she was free to return to her colonia home. But after a few months, that changed. She said, My boss had recently divorced, and she was dating someone new. So now I had to look after the kids at night while she went out. Although she required me to work extra, I was still getting paid just seventyfive dollars a week. Then she put me in charge of washing and ironing all the clothes, including the clothes of her new boyfriend. One day, she came home very angry and told me I couldn’t go home that night. When I told her I needed to go home to my son, she threatened to call the Border Patrol. She also said I was lucky to have this job and that if I left, nobody would hire me. I left anyway and never returned. My son is more important than that job.

Ana finally found a job in an off-the-books home for the elderly. She said, At first, my new boss didn’t trust me. She would leave important things around to see if I would steal them. But as time went by, she came to trust me. My job is to feed, bathe, and take care of the elderly from

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Figure 3.3. The threat of being turned over to immigration officers is often used by employers to take advantage of their maids. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

eight in the morning until seven at night. I’ve been working for her for five years, and now I get paid 150 dollars a week. I love my job. We live where I work, and now my boss considers my eleven-year-old son and me a part of her family.

With so much seemingly out of the control of undocumented maids, many believe that fate or luck leads them to good or bad outcomes. Though they correctly perceive that they don’t have much control over the ways they are treated, something besides fate or luck is generally responsible. Factors in the social situations of undocumented maids, more than luck or destiny, generally produce these results. To illustrate, we will use examples from hundreds of in-depth interviews and our surveys, of undocumented domestic workers and of employers.

The Range of Treatment of Undocumented Maids The sociologist Mary Romero writes that domestic workers and their employers are caught up in a complex interaction in which they create and re-create the organization of housework.20 The employer in

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this case has the advantage in a large imbalance of power in which her employee has little control over the work relationship. This dynamic brings to the forefront the ability of sociology to provide greater insight and perspective. Several of the preceding accounts like Ana’s illustrate how each maid may experience both bad and good employers. But they also show that, when possible, they prefer to leave employers who abuse them and to look for those who will treat them better. The range of treatment is very wide, with some employers coming to treat their maids as family members, while others exploit and abuse them. We even found some extreme cases of outright cruelty. We will examine each form of treatment before we consider why it might most likely occur. Exploitation and Abuse: An Outsider in the Home Many employers fail to recognize that the maid has a personal life. Claudia relates, “I felt very lonely when I first came to the United States. I was desperate because I didn’t know where I was going to live or if I could get a job. It feels terrible not knowing anybody and feeling that there is no one you can trust.” Undocumented live-in maids often get the message that they are not only outsiders but people whose needs and aspirations need not be seriously considered.21 Even her room is not really hers. Nearly 30 percent of respondents in the employer survey said that at least occasionally they went into the maid’s room to see if they could find something they suspected she had taken.22 Thirty-nine percent said they didn’t trust the maids around jewelry or personal items. “The hardest part of this job,” reported one maid, “is when your employer accuses you of taking something. If something is missing, blame the maid—go to her room and rummage through her things.” Another maid, Cristina, related, Once I worked for a woman who had a thirteen-year-old daughter. The daughter would constantly use her mom’s items and would frequently misplace them. One day the mother’s expensive perfume was missing. The first thing she did was to blame me and search my room. I felt that she had invaded my privacy. She was certain that I had taken it. But when she couldn’t fi nd it, she said nothing. I wanted to leave the job, but I knew that my family needed the money.

Because living in an employer’s home does create opportunities for a maid to take valuables, many employers become suspicious.23 But that is

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only one problem. There is no clock to punch, and many homes have no fi xed working hours. Because the maid is present during her off hours, she is often expected to be available around the clock.24 Lupita recalled an incident a week prior to her interview when “la señora” (female employer) summoned her at 2 a.m. to come into the couple’s bedroom. “Her husband had too much to drink,” she said, “and had vomited all over their bedroom. She refused to clean it up, so they called me. It made me feel like their slave. They have no respect for my feelings. But I can’t leave until I get another job because I’m sending money home to my family.” In our maid surveys, we asked maids to specify the duties for which they had primary responsibility. Their responses showed that maids are expected to do most of the housecleaning, laundry, and child care. About half said they were primarily responsible for cooking, and small percentages said they were expected to do yard work, shop, and babysit someone else’s children.25 Often, employers forget that the maid has a life outside their homes.26 One maid, Ana Maria, related, Friday, I was excited because I was going to visit my family in Mexico. But my boss asked me to stay for the weekend. When I told her it would be very hard to change my plans, she made faces and got upset. She had made plans to go out with her husband. I would have stayed if she had offered to pay me more, but her husband refused. Now, on my weekends off, I go to a friend’s house where I can relax. If I couldn’t go there, I would be a slave for my boss during the weekends, too.

Most undocumented maids can’t return home to Mexico very frequently and don’t have refuges to which they can escape. Many go weeks or months without visits home. Seventy-five percent of employers surveyed said they had asked their maids to stay during a scheduled day off. One employer was indignant when her maid refused to stay the one weekend a month she was allowed to go home. “I became ill with the flu,” the employer stated, “so I was expecting her to offer to stay that weekend. But she refused, saying that she had arranged to see her kids. I told her she could take the next weekend off instead. I expect her loyalty. I told her if she left she would have no job to come back to.” Some employers expect a lot from their maids but give very little in return.27 We found no employers who paid their undocumented maids at least the legal minimum wage.28 Despite a wide variability in weekly pay, we found that prior to 1999, the median weekly salary was approx-

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imately $65. But according to the employer survey, 59 percent of maids were working ten or more hours a day. Half of them also worked six or seven days a week, so most were putting in sixty-five-hour weeks. That made the average pay only about $1 an hour. If they were expected to be available during the night, it was even less than that. Since 1999, the most commonly reported salary for a live-in maid seems to have gone up to around $75 to $100 a week, depending upon duties, with day maids earning from $20 to $50 a house, perhaps double if two houses are cleaned in a day—meaning that since 1999 the rates have remained rather constant, just about keeping up with inflation.29 Some maids would not complain if they knew they would get paid on time. Seven percent said they “frequently” were not paid on time, while another 17 percent said that “sometimes” they got paid late. Isela Lopez described how the Castillo family expected her to clean the house, do the laundry, iron, cook, and take care of the kids. They never pay me on time. At first, I was supposed to get paid weekly. Then they said it would be every two weeks. Sometimes I had to wait a month. They always have excuses, like “The car broke down,” “The light bill was too high,” or “The kids need new clothes for school.” I have a family too. I’m always on time with my work. But if I ever complain, they make threats.

The most troubling danger, however, is the possibility of sexual assault or harassment. Twenty percent of the maids surveyed said they had experienced sexual threats or harassment in at least one of the homes where they had worked. Elena is seventeen years old. She came to the United States after her family was killed in a car accident in Monterrey, Mexico. A Mexican couple with two children currently employs Elena. Her interviewer relates, “As I interviewed her, I asked if her employer ever mistreated her. She said she does not feel at all comfortable with them—especially with el señor.” She tearfully explained that she tries to keep her distance from him, but some nights he has come into her bedroom and forced her to have relations with him. “I want to leave,” she explains, “but I have nowhere to go. I tried to talk to his wife but she completely ignored me.” Her interviewer continues, “As I interviewed Elena, she started crying and confessed to me that she thought she was pregnant. I asked her why she did not go to the authorities since she is under age. She told me that el señor has severely threatened her if she tells anyone he is the father.”

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Frequently, abuse is more verbal than physical. Adela’s boss asked her to serve drinks to his friends. She said, They had no respect for me at all. They got drunk and said all kinds of things to me. My boss just let it happen. One day I confronted him about it. All he said was, “Don’t take things too personally. I’ll talk to them the next time they come over.” I didn’t wait for that to happen. I just packed my bags and left when they weren’t around.

In the survey of maids, we asked, “Have you ever been verbally abused or insulted by an employer?” One-fourth of the maids answered affirmatively. In addition, 13 percent said their employers had, at some time, threatened to report them to immigration officials. One of the Family Cruz, as a maid, said she felt not only accepted but trusted. She said her employers respected her opinions, and they let her discipline their children as she saw fit. She felt that she was an essential part of the family and took pride in her job. “This is the only home I have ever known,” she said. “Since I started working, my employer has given me a raise every year. They make me feel part of the family. When my children come to visit, they also play with their kids.” For some undocumented maids, such good treatment comes as a surprise. Areceli started working for an Anglo employer who could hardly speak any Spanish. She said, Every Friday night, they would take the children out to eat if they had behaved well at school. Of course, when I learned that, I didn’t think I was going. So when la señora asked me if I was ready to go, I thought she meant I was fired. With the little Spanish she spoke she explained to me that I was now part of their family so I would join in all family activities. I felt so happy; it helped me not feel so homesick.

Some employers seem to take pleasure in making the maid feel part of the family. Maribel smiled when asked if her employers treated her like family. She responded, The people I have worked for have all been very good to me. One year, for example, I didn’t tell my employer it was my birthday because I

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didn’t want them to think that they had to do something for me. But somehow they found out. On the day of my birthday my boss’s sister invited me to go shopping with her. We had a blast. She bought me some new clothes and some shoes. When I got to my boss’s house I saw that there were a lot of cars but I never imagined that they were there for me. When I walked inside everyone yelled, “Surprise!” I was excited that my boss had thrown me a surprise party. That was the best year of my life. She made me feel part of her family.

Though some employers want to be friendly with their maids, they may resist becoming friends. They want the employees to feel included but not really like members of the family.30 Others, however, go beyond such boundaries. Martina had worked as a live-in maid for a family of five for more than fifteen years. She said, The first day I walked into their house, I felt at home. Not once did they treat me as an outsider. They eventually included me as part of the family, and I became close to each of them. Two years ago, one of the children was killed in a car accident. I felt almost as if he were my own child. On the day of the funeral, they included me in the funeral arrangements. I’ll never forget that feeling of belonging.

In light of the vulnerability of undocumented maids generally, it is somewhat surprising to find that many employers grow close to their maids. In the Undocumented Maids Survey and subsequent Employers of Undocumented Maids Survey, we asked questions about how included in key family activities maids felt. About half the maids and close to half of the employers said the maid was treated like a family or friend, was generally included in family celebrations and in many leisure activities, and would often eat with the family. While interviews with maids conducted in the years since 1999 did not include standardized questions similar to those in the previous surveys, almost all the 317 maids interviewed since then reported at least one employer who treated them well.

How the Sociological Perspective Helps in Understanding the Range of Treatment As we have seen, though some undocumented maids are horribly abused and exploited, most are not. Many are treated with consideration and

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kindness, and some are even taken in as members of their employers’ families. How can we best explain this wide range of treatment? Many people explain abuse or good treatment in terms of personality or character.31 According to this point of view, harsh or uncaring individuals are abusers, while kind people treat vulnerable individuals well. Though there is some truth to this intrapsychic point of view, it fails to consider the sociological context within which maids and their employers work. This sociological context includes cultural and structural factors that affect behavior. We will first examine one major cultural explanation— the ethnic backgrounds of those who employ undocumented maids. Then we will examine from the sociological perspective how one might take into account the structure and culture of this particular social situation to explain the behavior of individuals who find themselves in the maid-employer relationship. The Social Class and Ethnicity of the Employer as Possible Explanations Undocumented maids respond to word-of-mouth reports from each other about the treatment they can expect from different types of employers. In our initial surveys, we wanted to determine what beliefs they had about how employers from each ethnic group treated their maids. In the maids survey we asked which ethnic group, Anglo, Mexican American, or Mexican, was most likely to pay the best, trust their maids the most, respect their maids’ privacy, overwork their maids, and be the friendliest to their maids. We found that Anglo employers had the reputation for paying the most and for working their maids the hardest. Mexican American employers were seen as being the most trusting, the friendliest, and the most likely to respect their maids’ privacy. Mexican employers, on the other hand, were judged most unfavorably in all categories except for overworking their maids, in which they ran a close second to Anglo employers. Though it is tempting to consider Mexicans and Mexican Americans as belonging to the same ethnic and class category, sociological research has identified some rather profound differences between them. This issue, which we will treat in greater depth in chapter 6, has accumulated a modest research base that demonstrates some pronounced walls between these two groups.32 Many antagonisms are related to the frequent perception by Mexicans that Mexican Americans are pochos—giving up real Spanish, losing their loyalty to Mexico, or abandoning important

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aspects of Mexican culture. But the social class differences between rich and poor in Mexico are also very strong. Wealthy Mexicans there often regard themselves as vastly superior to lower-class Mexicans and treat them condescendingly. Well-to-do Mexicans living in the United States often bring with them these strong ethnic and class-based perceptions in dealing with their undocumented Mexican maids. But many of the maids interviewed had never worked for an employer from each ethnic category. So we redid the analysis to include only the responses from maids who had actual experience with each particular ethnic group. In doing so, we found that more than 70 percent of maids who had actually worked for Anglos believed that Anglo employers paid the best, a substantial increase over the percentage of all maids with that opinion. Anglo employers were also judged by those with actual experience of working for one to be most likely to respect a maid’s privacy. Those who had worked for Anglos still judged them to be more likely than Mexican American employers to overwork their maids but less likely to do so than Mexican employers. Mexican American employers were seen by those with experience with them as being the friendliest, the least likely to overwork their maids, and the most trusting. Finally, Mexican employers were judged by those who had worked for one as the worst employers in all five categories. Why would Mexican maids rate employers of their own national origin as the worst employers in every category? In part, we believe it is because well-to-do Mexicans now living in South Texas likely had maids in Mexico, where employers customarily pay domestic workers very little and are preconditioned by cultural bias there to view maids as lowerclass people. Also, many of the wealthy in Mexico are reputed to have a strong class bias against the poor, considering their language, intelligence, and mannerisms to be inferior or even vulgar.33 We call this form of bias “class bigotry.” Some of the accounts we have received since 1999 give credence to the allegations of rather extreme class bigotry among Mexican employers. Francisca, the woman who had to eat from restaurant garbage to survive, described how she found work as a maid in the home of a Mexican woman married to an Anglo husband. Francisca recalled, She treated me as someone far below her own station, humiliating me in front of her wealthy Mexican friends. I cried every night, wishing I could just go home. But my family would be devastated if I did, so I just kept working for the vieja miserable [terrible old woman] for a year. I fi-

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nally quit when I found a new job in their same neighborhood. That family treats me very well. I only wish I had met them sooner, I would feel very differently about the United States.

Another undocumented maid, Adriana, works for a well-to-do Mexican family. She said, I work all week long from 6 a.m. until my bosses go to sleep. We Mexicans have dinner at late hours, so they go to bed pretty late. They only pay me fifty dollars a week, and sometimes they don’t pay me on time. I’ve been working with them for two years already, and they have never increased my pay, though somehow my duties have increased. I’m already eighteen and I have never had a boyfriend. They don’t let me go out. They say I’m too young and they don’t want me to become pregnant. That makes me so mad. They think they know what’s best for me. Sometimes I wish I could tell them off, but then they would probably fire me or call immigration.

In Mexico, more prominently than in the United States, class and social definitions of the situation are paramount to one’s identity, defining how different social classes should relate to one another. These definitions of the employer-maid relationship spill over into South Texas, where wealthy Mexican immigrants display their status in form and expression.34 This is not to say that some maids did not report good experiences with Mexican employers; some did, but they seemed to be more the exception than the rule. And often, those reporting better experiences tended to work for Mexican employers who were more workingor middle-class than wealthy. The Power of Culture and Structure as Explanatory Variables Though ethnicity has relevance, it does not adequately explain the range of treatment among employers. We found that the nature of the employer-maid relationship—specifically, the structure of their social situations–and the cultural definitions of this situation—produced much of the variation in the results we have outlined. We will briefly illustrate the power of this particular social situation to influence the behavior of maids and their employers. Marta is a maid who several years before she was interviewed became documented. She is now a legal resident alien. She is also not a live-in

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maid. She works eight hours a day, alternating among several employers. Then she goes home. When one employer tried to pay her less than the amount agreed upon, she went to the Texas Rural Legal Aid office and, with the staff’s help, made the employer pay the full amount. Now, she writes out contracts detailing what work she will do and how much the employer will pay. She hardly sees some of the employers, and that is fine with her. None of them treats her like family, though some are friendly, but then, none of them abuses her. As far as she is concerned, she is an employee, but that ends each evening when she walks out the door. Though Marta’s personality and those of her employers certainly affect how they treat her, the social situations of undocumented maids may be more important. Unlike undocumented live-in maids, Marta is here legally, lives in her own home, and has many friends and family in the United States. She is not afraid to get help from the courts or police if she is mistreated. Undocumented live-in maids, on the other hand, are relatively powerless; have unclear schedules and work assignments; live in their employers’ homes; and, as foreigners, are often cut off from family and friends. These and other situational factors explain much of the abuse of undocumented maids. Still, as we have shown, many maids in this difficult situation get treated well—many even like family. The Contact Hypothesis Perhaps much of the answer to questions about differential treatment can be found in the “contact hypothesis,” a sociological theory of how certain structural arrangements and cultural understandings can lead people from very different backgrounds either to come to like each other or to develop animosity. Its roots go back to around 1950, a time of great turmoil surrounding race relations in the United States. Several sociologists realized that the way relations between the races get structured can increase or decrease prejudice. Their investigations of relations between black and white soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II revealed that when American soldiers were locked in fierce battle fighting for a common cause, the prejudice between them declined remarkably.35 At about the same time, two sociologists—first Robin Williams Jr. and then Gordon Allport—determined that when blacks and whites interacted under conditions of relatively equal status in close and personal contact, not only did prejudice decrease, but friendships across racial

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lines emerged.36 Other sociologists, among them Marilynn Brewer and Norman Miller,37 determined that another contributing factor to crossracial friendship occurred when the boundaries of group membership— essentially, who belongs and who is an outsider—were minimized. In the 1980s the researchers Donald Chu and David Griffey examined how friendships emerged on mixed-race athletic teams.38 Specifically, they discovered that when black and white teammates were given relatively equal status, had to cooperate with each other to defeat their opponents, and experienced close and personal interactions across racial lines, strong cross-racial friendships emerged. Such results were depicted in 2000 in the movie Remember the Titans, which was based on an actual case of the 1971 racial integration of a southern high school football team.39 In essence, the contact hypothesis proposes that “liking” (friendly feelings) among people from highly different backgrounds can be increased by intergroup contact that is sustained, long-lasting, and intense, not just occasional or casual contact.40 But the form in which the interaction takes place is very important. For it to produce positive feelings, the interaction must be organized along certain structural and cultural lines. Structurally, liking is increased when the parties have relatively equal status; their interaction is more cooperative than competitive; boundaries are limited so that neither party feels excluded; and interaction is close and personal, not formal and distant. In essence, the contact hypothesis is another way of looking at the power of the situation. Many iterations of the contact hypothesis include two cultural variables: whether the contact tends to reinforce or to break down stereotypes each group has of the other and whether the intergroup contact is supported or opposed by authorities and by the wider community. Stereotype-breaking contact and contact supported by law and authority are hypothesized to increase liking, while the opposite forms tend to increase prejudice and adverse feelings. These variations are summarized in table 3.2.

Soci a l Dista nce Live-in maids interact with their employers in the most personal family setting—the home. Seventy-six percent of the respondents in the maid survey worked as live-in maids. This finding was very close to the employer survey, in which 77 percent of employers surveyed reported having live-in maids. These maids are in the employers’ homes twenty-four

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Table 3.2. Variations in key structural and cultural dimensions of the contact hypothesis in relation to maids and their employers

Variable type

Positive variations (those Negative variations that produce liking and (those that produce good treatment) dislike and abuse)

Structural variables Social distance

Close and personal relationship

Distant, formal, or one-sided relationship

Boundaries

Boundaries that Include maid in family and foster feeling of belonging

Boundaries that exclude maid from family and make her feel isolated

Ranking of roles

Equal status contact (few reminders that maid is subordinate to employer)

Unequal status contact (strong emphasis on subordinate status of maid to employer)

Division of labor

Shared tasks, cooperate in performing duties; also clear limits on duties

Separate duties or a lack of clarity about maid’s duties

Stereotype reinforcing vs. breaking

Maid’s role fails to reinforce negative stereotypes

Maid forced to act according to negative role stereotypes

Support for relationship by  law, community, or authority

Positive support for good treatment by law, community, or authority

Lack of support for (or opposition to) good treatment of maid by law, community, or authority

Cultural variables

hours a day, often seven days a week.41 The employer-employee interactions are usually personal and intense and cover an extended duration. The live-in workers usually eat with the families, sit down in the evenings to watch TV with them, and help raise the children. Such activities can produce highly personal relationships.42 Some employers, however, take steps to keep their maids at a distance. One employer said, “I have to let them know they are only here to

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work and not be in my personal life. I don’t like anyone in my business or to know all my life or my family’s life.” A maid who experienced isolation reports, From the first day I started working for them, I have been miserable. They don’t let me eat with them. They hardly talk to me except to give me orders. Sometimes, they make fun of me to each other in English, knowing that I can’t understand. One day I am going to pack the few things I have and just go back to Mexico without telling them. Maybe then they will appreciate everything I do for them.

In the employer survey, most respondents said they do try to get close to their maids. With some, however, such close and personal interaction leads them to treat the workers in a paternalistic fashion, more like children incapable of managing their own affairs. Paternalistic treatment is treating the maid like a member of the family, though more like one of the children. In such cases, they get involved in the maid’s life, but she is expected to maintain a certain distance. Several employers said their maids were incapable of handling their own financial affairs. These workers were in situations similar to that of Adriana, who worked for a Mexican family that refused to let her date because she might become pregnant. While some concern for protecting them might be understood in the case of teenage maids, paternalism clearly demeans older women. When Julisa Montoya got paid by her Anglo employers, they would hold back a portion “to manage her monies.” At this time Julisa was married and had one child in Mexico. This infuriated her husband, Eduardo. She said, “He would tell me, ‘Why don’t you tell them you don’t need them worrying about you? That’s my job.’” Julisa stated further, “If I was younger, what they do might have helped. But now I don’t need another parent because I am a grown woman.” Another problem that arises when a maid, as a single female, comes to live with a family in their home is the potential for jealousy. Fiftythree percent of the maids in our survey were single.43 Thirteen percent of them said that the señora in at least one house where they had worked acted suspicious that something was going on between the maid and her husband. Patricia experienced this when she began working for a young couple. One day the husband asked her a question that she now can’t even recall. She said, “I answered him, and his wife got upset with me. Later, she told me to go to the store with her. But instead of the store,

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she took me to Reynosa and dropped me off saying, ‘The next time you feel like flirting, do it with someone who’s not married.’ She was jealous, but what could I do but answer his question?”

Bou n da r ies One of the means by which some employers keep social distance in their relations with the maids is to set up artificial boundaries. Boundaries are social devices that delineate which categories of people are insiders and which are outsiders. Most undocumented maids start out as outsiders. They are working illegally, from another country, speak a foreign language, and come from a social class much lower than that of their employers. But interaction in a close and personal environment, the home, often tends to relax those boundaries. Some employers establish artificial boundaries to keep maids in their place. They do this by saying such things as “Those are your belongings, and these are ours. You have your part of the home, and we have ours.” In effect, they are saying, “You are an outsider and not one of us.” By such boundaries, the maid remains an outsider inside the home, and feelings of attachment are less likely to develop. This seems to be a preferred arrangement of many wealthy Mexican employers who come from a highly class-conscious society in Mexico. There, lower-class servants don’t generally mix with their higher-class employers. That is what Nora’s first employer did. She said, At first, they said I couldn’t eat in the dining room with them but had to go to the kitchen after they had fi nished eating. Then they told me not to watch TV with them. They provided an old [television] set for my room. I was not supposed to come out of my room when they had company. Next, they told me not to use their restroom or shower but to use the one provided for me. The señora also gave me my own spoon, glass, plate, and fork so I wouldn’t use any of theirs. I felt so bad I cried every night. I had no choice because my father was out of work and my mom was sick.

Because undocumented maids come from these same class-conscious societies, they are often not prepared to be included by Anglo and Mexican American families. Some employers are surprised to fi nd their maids reluctant to join them in family activities. An Anglo employer said, We think the world of Janie, but she keeps her distance. She insists on calling us Mr. and Mrs. Smith and only recently have we been able to

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get her to eat dinner with us. I can tell she isn’t real comfortable with it, but I just want her to feel like she belongs. I hear so many people say that their maid is “just like a member of the family.” I don’t know. It’s hard to have someone from a completely different culture fit in as if they had lived with you forever. We do appreciate the importance of a dependable, trustworthy employee, though.

Many Anglo and Mexican American families, like the Smiths, prefer to be on a first-name basis with their maids, though about half of the employers said that they did not allow their maids to call them by their first names or that they allowed it only occasionally. But Anglo Americans often experience unintended boundaries that Mexican American employers usually do not have. Families that don’t speak Spanish can unintentionally isolate their maids. Josefi na has been the Camps’ maid for a year and a half. She said they treat her well. Still, both she and they are frustrated. “When they want something done,” she said, “they have to use sign language or call their Hispanic neighbor who can translate for them by phone.” Because most Mexican American employers in South Texas speak Spanish, they don’t experience a language boundary. Perhaps this helps explain why maids in our survey tended to regard Mexican American families as the friendliest.

R a n k ing In general, the status of undocumented maids in relation to their employers is subordinate. Undocumented maids generally speak little or no English, are considered illegal, and don’t understand local ways. Since they are often single women cut off from family and afraid to seek police protection, they are very vulnerable to exploitation.44 In relation to their ranking, undocumented live-in maids generally have little control over their work, pay, or time. They have practically no recourse to law when they are exploited or abused. In addition, their status as women, aliens, and poor, unskilled laborers contributes to their powerlessness. For live-in workers, even their places of residence are not their own, as employers can enter to search for lost items. So it is not surprising when some undocumented maids are treated essentially as nobodies by their employers. Alma recalled, One night I was sound asleep. Around 2 a.m., my boss came in and shook me awake. “You’ll have to go outside and fi nd a place to sleep for the night,” she said. “I have some business to take care of.” When I got up, I saw three couples kissing and carrying on in her living room.

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Figure 3.4.

Language, class, and culture are important boundaries that keep many maids from getting close to la señora. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

I knew it was her home and she could do as she pleased, but it was really cold outside. I spent the night sitting on a concrete block in the alley.

Many would find this to be an extreme example of “rankism,” abuse or exploitation of someone because of their lower rank in the social class hierarchy. It is a term we will later compare to racism and ethnocentrism.45 We would not expect to fi nd a case of a maid who has equal power to her employer, much less one in which the maid has superior ranking to her employer. But this is not to say that undocumented maids are powerless. Some employers treat their maids relatively well because they know the workers can leave them, often without notice. A Mexican American employer said she is now careful to treat the maid as a friend. She explained arriving at this conclusion. One time a while back I had a very good maid who worked well and who took really good care of my kids. But one day I came home very upset about something and I just exploded. I said many things I should never have said. When I realized that I had deeply offended her, she just excused herself and quit the job. From then on I decided that I should always treat my maids not only with respect but as a friend because, after all, they can always go fi nd work with someone else.

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In our 2000 survey of maids in Laredo, we found that nearly 60 percent of displaced maids believed they could find new positions in seven days or less, reinforcing the idea that not all power rests with the employers.

Di v ision of L a bor One of the key variables of the contact hypothesis—one that has been found to produce liking—is the transformative power of cooperation in the division of labor. This is illustrated by the case of Linda, who said, I loved my Mexican American boss. We did everything together such as cook, buy groceries, and go to the Laundromat. Whenever they went to a party, they always took me along. I worked with them for four years until I got married. All their family went to my wedding in Reynosa. When my first son was born, I asked them if they wanted to baptize him and they said yes. We went from being employer-employee to being compadres. My son is now thirty-four years of age, and we still keep in touch with them.

On the other hand, hostility is apt to arise if competition develops between a maid and her employer. Zoila remembered a family that assigned her to take care of the kids but did not expect the children to come to love her. She said, I took care of the kids day and night. The parents were never home, so I treated the children like my own. I taught them Spanish and they taught me English. When they got home from school, we’d eat together, they’d do their homework, and then we’d all sit and watch TV. At night, I would sing to them and put them to bed. One evening their parents returned from Hawaii and the kids didn’t pay much attention to them. The next morning, my employers called me into their office. They accused me of trying to take over. I said I was just doing my job. Still, they fired me. First they tell me to take good care of the children, and then they fire me for doing a good job.

Another aspect of the division of labor that can lead to abusive treatment is a lack of clarity in what labor the maid is expected to perform. One of our interviewers reported on her interview with a day maid, Vianey. She relates, “When I asked Vianey, ‘What is the toughest part of being a maid?’ she responded, ‘La señora not being clear about what duties I have. I’ve learned to be clear from the start. My sister, my mom,

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and I make it clear that we have children and we have to leave by three o’clock and the cleaning will be done—but I will only iron what I can by that time.’” Thus, the lack of clarity in the division of labor, as much as personality differences, produces much of the work-related abuse that undocumented maids suffer.

Ster eot y pes Because there are so many undocumented women seeking work in US border cities, many families that have never had a maid fi nd they can afford one, especially when the maid also provides child care, thus enabling both parents to be employed. Because this situation is new to many, they may come to this relationship with few cultural understandings of the role of an undocumented Latina maid. This, however, is not the case for wealthy Mexicans living in the United States. They come from a tradition in Mexico of great class differences and well-established understandings that servants are never to be regarded as members of the family. One of our interviewers is the son of a doctor from Mexico. He remembered his father telling him that maids could never be trusted. He said, I learned to suspect the maid any time I lost something. One morning, for example, I lost my wallet. I decided she must have taken it, so I went to her room and searched. I found nothing. Later that day I found it in the laundry. As I look back, I can see how I must have made her feel. I had learned to think of her as nothing more than a servant.

The stereotype initially taught to this young man by his father was that maids were dishonest and had to be carefully watched lest they steal something. Some families set up interactions with their maids that reinforce such stereotypes, while others, like this young student, come to see maids quite differently than portrayed by the stereotypes. In general, the preceding structural variations in the employer-maid relationship that tend to break such stereotypes are close personal relationships, boundaries that include relatively small differences in power, and a division of labor that is collaborative.

Support of L aw or Au thor it y Since current laws of the United States not only make it illegal for undocumented women to work as maids but for US employers to hire them, it is easy to presuppose that law and authority in the United States

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oppose hiring undocumented maids. But perhaps more telling is the fact that few employers of undocumented maids ever get prosecuted.46 In 2011, a Texas lawmaker introduced a bill to enhance the punishment for those who knowingly hire unauthorized immigrants—except those employers who hire “for the purpose of obtaining labor or other work to be performed exclusively or primarily at a single-family residence,” such as hiring maids.47 While the bill did not become law, it illustrates the acceptance of undocumented maids as a part of the fabric of life in Texas. By mid-2016, only seven progressive states—California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and Oregon—had approved some form of a domestic workers bill of rights.48 For maids in South Texas, national policy changes may be the most expedient path to leveling the playing field between the maid and la señora. The general reaction in South Texas is one of widespread tolerance for those who choose to hire maids. We found in our 2010 Informal Consumption Survey that more than one-third of respondents had at one time or another employed maids off the books. The practice of employing a maid is essentially ubiquitous in South Texas, with just about everyone knowing an undocumented maid or a family who has employed one.

Comparing the Treatment of Undocumented Males and Females In our surveys, almost half of undocumented maids as well as their employers reported that the maids were treated like friends or members of the family. Though the other half of maids often reported abuse and exploitation, we found the favorable results surprising, especially in light of the essentially powerless position of undocumented maids. We hypothesized that the social situation of live-in maids, particularly as it conforms to the contact hypothesis, may have produced these results. So we used a 1997 survey we had conducted of undocumented workers, almost all males, to compare the treatment of undocumented male workers, almost none of whom resided in the homes of their employers, with the treatment of undocumented maids, the majority of whom reside in their employers’ homes. Only 24 percent of the males reported that their employers frequently treated them like friends or family members, compared to 48 percent of the undocumented maids who reported such treatment. This result adds support to the central thesis of the contact hypothesis—that working cooperatively in an enduring and highly personal setting such as the home can produce liking between

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groups from vastly different backgrounds, especially when few boundaries are imposed on the weaker party. The contact hypothesis also helps explain the more discriminatory treatment that undocumented maids reported at the hands of their Mexican employers in South Texas. Wealthy Mexicans tend to come from a culture in which multiple boundaries are firmly set in place to distance themselves from their servants. The inequality inherent in class divisions in Mexico is greater and strongly reinforced by a cultural divide of different language patterns, unequal schools, and entrenched stereotypes of the poor.49 In addition, wealthy Mexicans are taught to avoid any work that is seen as the work of servants, so a cooperative division of labor is not likely to emerge. Though there are exceptions, contact in such settings not only fails to produce liking but reinforces stereotypes and facilitates abuse and exploitation of servants.

Always a Maid? Often the most serious difficulty of living illegally in the United States is the strain it puts on relations with the maid’s own family. Twenty-six percent of maids said they could go home only once a year or less. Sixtyone percent said they visited once a month or less. Vicky is a twentytwo-year-old maid who left her children with her mother in Mexico. She was gone for two years before being able to return. “I was so happy to see my children,” she said, “that I just cried and hugged them. What really hurt was that they hardly knew me. They were even calling their grandmother Mamá. I’m really scared I’m going to lose my children.” Many, however, manage to endure the hardships and hang on. Those who plan to stay in the United States are often young, unmarried women who have learned to adjust to life here. When we asked the women whether they preferred life in the United States or in Mexico, 43 percent preferred the United States. Sylvia is one of them. “My parents have a hard time accepting my independence,” she said. “Being responsible for a home and children has made me mature. When I go home, however, my parents still expect me to ask for permission to go out with my friends. I love the freedom girls have here in the United States, though some of them don’t respect that freedom.” She has tried explaining this to her family, but they just don’t seem to understand. The mothers of several student interviewers had worked for a time as

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undocumented maids. One of the students said she can relate to these stories. My mother worked for a family in an Anglo middle-class neighborhood for several years. She did her job with pride and always had a positive attitude toward our future. Maids will always have a special place in my heart and will be treated with respect in my home. As a child, I used to go with her to a nice neighborhood. While she worked, I would sit there and dream. Because of her, I now have my own home in that same nice neighborhood.

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CHAPTER 4

Social Inequality on the Mexican Side of the Border

Marta Alonzo, whose mother worked for a very wealthy Mexican family, relates, “The family treated me all right, but they made sure I knew my place. Every summer, as their children came home from Europe, they’d have lots of parties. Once I met a friend of their son. At the time, I was wearing some nice American clothes my mother had bought at the flea market. I thought he might be interested in me. But later, he saw me helping my mother prepare for the party. I was so ashamed. I had never thought of myself as poor before. I cried that whole summer when I realized that, because of my mother, I was poor—just like people in the streets.” Some students who participated in the in-depth interview project chose to explore class differences on the Mexican side of the border. Many of the well-to-do Mexicans interviewed referred to lower-income Mexicans and even poor Mexican Americans as “nacos.” “People of the lower class have bad taste in clothing,” said one. “In addition, their hairstyles distinguish them from us.” Another said, “Nacos use slang terms and bad grammar that set them apart from us. They also lack culture, education, and social skills. It would be very difficult for them to be accepted in the upper class even if they had the money to move up. They will always retain their background.” As we have seen, it can be difficult for the poor to overcome disparaging stereotypes about themselves. Some migrant children attempt to hide that they work in the fields. Colonia residents sometimes feel ashamed to admit they live in a colonia. Undocumented maids can be made to feel undeserving of respect and fair treatment. Not everyone, however, allows their self-concept to be so heavily in-

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Figure 4.1. Frustrated by inequality. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

fluenced by the negative stigma others have about people in their class position. A former campesino said, When I wasn’t working in my field, I would sell corn on the cob on the streets. I wasn’t lazy. I was always working. One day, I passed two welldressed men drinking refrescos [soft drinks]. When they saw me with my corn cart, one of them said, “Mira el pobre diablo vendiendo elotes [Look at the poor devil selling corn].” I pretended I didn’t hear and kept walking. I felt I was better than them because at least I was working.

Some people in Mexico’s poor economic situations break out of poverty. A few overcome the harsh treatment. Occasionally, the cycle of powerlessness, stereotyping, and internalized feelings of inadequacy is broken. For most, however, it is not. Social class becomes fi xed by means of internalized self-definitions and through externally imposed powerlessness and stereotyping. Class position is perpetuated from one generation to the next almost as surely as if it were genetic. In this chapter, we will first examine social class by looking across the border into Mexico. We do so in reference to the fourth major aim of this book—to show that what happens on one side of the border profoundly affects life on the other side. We will use two phenomena, the

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maquiladora industry and Mexican street children, to examine how social inequality affects the lives of border Mexicans, especially those at the bottom of the class order. In the conclusion to part I, we will examine how social class on both sides of the border affects all the groups we have examined in the first four chapters of this volume.

Wealth alongside Deprivation on the Mexican Border Valley residents on the Texas side of the border have two stereotypes of Mexicans. The first comes from wealthy Mexicans who frequent the upscale clubs or malls in McAllen and the classy hotels, bars, and nightclubs on nearby South Padre Island. In good times, they provide almost half the retail trade of cities such as McAllen. Realtors like them because they buy investment homes in well-to-do sections of town. Bankers cater to them because they bring huge deposits to local banks whenever violence in northeastern Mexico erupts or rumors spread that the Mexican peso will be devalued. Still, some store clerks and waiters say wealthy Mexicans treat them like servants, have spoiled children, and seldom tip. The second typical South Texas stereotype of Mexicans is that of the peasant—undocumented, poorly educated, dark-skinned, and eager to work. This is the image American tourists get when they cross the international bridges into Mexico. At the very bottom of this group are impoverished Mexican street children who try to sell them gum or trinkets. Some of them are limosneros (beggars), though the majority try to sell products or services. If you drive to a Mexican border market, young men might swarm over your car to wash the windows. If you go off the beaten track, out to the industrialized maquiladora parks, you might even see the nearby shantytowns. Unlike poverty in the United States, it is not hidden in Mexico. The rich and the poor of Mexico live in two very different worlds where they seldom interact. They get their (mis)information about each other from within their limited social circles and from the stereotypes they might see in Mexican soap operas. Those who have no access to TV sets can only dream. Juana is a six-year-old girl with an older sister and brother who both go to el centro (downtown) to juggle oranges. “I want to go with them,” she explains, “but my parents think I’m not old enough. Sometimes I dream that I will go with them and a rich lady will take me to live with her because I have beautiful eyes.”

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Mexico’s Super Wealthy Social class affects life in Mexico at least as profoundly as race does here. Carlos, a Mexican student studying at the University of Texas–Pan American, recalled life in Mexico City. When I lived there, I never went into McDonald’s. Only the preps went there. When my friends and I would pass by, we’d always want to go in, but we didn’t dare. We didn’t have the right sweaters. You know, all of the schools in Mexico have a uniform or a sweater, so it’s easy to tell who’s rich and who’s not. The rich kids would stare and make us feel very uncomfortable, so we stayed away. When I came here, I saw that it didn’t matter who went into a McDonald’s. Still, the fi rst time I went to one, I was afraid to go in. I still don’t think I could go to one in Mexico City.

The extent of social inequality in Mexico is partially illustrated in chart 4.1. This chart compares how household income was distributed in Mexico in 2012 with the distribution of income in the United States in 2013.1 As shown in the chart, the best-paid one tenth and one fifth of Mexico’s population receive a percentage of income considerably greater than the top tenth and fifth in the United States. The current overall income gap between the rich and poor in both countries is larger than in 1970, though since about 1990 the degree of income inequality has remained stable.2 Still, data like those shown in this chart fail to reveal the enormity of the divide between rich and poor in Mexico. According to the economist Gerardo Esquivel Hernandez, Mexico is among the top 25 percent of countries in the world with the highest levels of inequality.3 While the number of Mexico’s millionaires increased by 32 percent from 2007 to 2012, the number of millionaires in the rest of the world decreased by 0.3 percent during this same period. In 2013, Mexico had 145,000 individuals with a net worth greater than $1 million each. They represented about 1 percent of the population, yet their total combined wealth was $736 billion, approximately 43 percent of the country’s total wealth.4 Meanwhile, by 2012, more than half (52.3 percent) of Mexicans did not earn enough to afford even the basic requirements for food, health, education, clothing, housing, and transportation.5 In Mexico, as in most societies of the world, people at the bottom can

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Chart 4.1. Percentage of household income held by each portion of the class

hierarchy in Mexico (2012) and the United States (2013) Source: World Bank, Gini index.

change their class position only with great difficulty. Mexico’s wealthy have their restaurants, schools, parks, and even churches. The Spanish they speak is quite different, as are their clothing, lifestyles, and recreation. All of these differences serve to maintain class lines. Well-todo Mexicans teach their children to maintain their presumed place in a highly stratified social world. As a result, people like Carlos have deeply ingrained fears of crossing class lines to even enter a McDonald’s.6 But members of Mexico’s top 1 percent probably would never dream of entering a McDonald’s—and the McDonald’s crowd would feel the same fear of entering the posh clubs, restaurants, resorts, and spas of the super-rich. One’s social class depends on more factors than just how much money one earns. In Mexico and elsewhere, people’s class positions depend on how much wealth they control, how important they are considered to be, what clubs they belong to, what families they are from, and how much power they wield. These marks of class in Mexico are also, like income, very unevenly distributed. Mexico is a land of extreme differences between the top and the bottom. The young adult children of the very wealthy set themselves apart from those beneath them. Many below them on the social scale see them as spoiled brats who rely on the wealth, power, and prestige of their papis (dads) to attend the best schools, wear only certain designerbrand clothes, frequent only certain nightclubs, and even use a distinctive vernacular. Many of their detractors take to calling them “fresas,” “papis,” or “los junior.” If they get in trouble in Mexico, their papis not

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only will get them off the hook but may show their power by extracting vengeance against any who have accused their children of wrongdoing. In an era of social media, however, this show of power might be instantly uploaded and ridiculed on the Internet. A 2013 incident illustrates this, when the daughter of the head of Profeco, the Mexican watchdog consumer agency, went to lunch at a trendy restaurant with her friends. When she was denied her table of choice because fifteen other diners were ahead of her on the wait list, she threw a tantrum, taking to Twitter to decry the “dreadful service,” and threatening to shut down the restaurant.7 Indeed, several hours later, agents from Profeco arrived and closed the restaurant for “irregularities” in its reservation system and other alleged failures. But because other diners had captured her tantrum and showed it on social media, her father was eventually forced to apologize for her behavior. Other diners of high social status posted and ridiculed her tantrum, demonstrating that some upper-class individuals in Mexico consider such behavior boorish. Then, to show his dismay, he suspended the agents who had closed the restaurant—but would not consider, “even for a moment,” his own resignation.8 In South Texas locations like South Padre Island and McAllen, the wealthy—especially from Monterrey—come to vacation, hang out, dine, and shop. Many expect the same deferential treatment they receive in Mexico. Some expect to be waited on first and otherwise indulged. They may become rude if the predominantly Mexican American sales staff speak pocho (Americanized) Spanish. And because cartel violence and kidnapping began increasing in Mexico, many wealthy Mexicans have been moving their families to Texas cities such as McAllen, San Antonio, and Dallas. Many experience culture shock when they find that wealthy Americans are not as likely to share their sense of aloofness. The journalist Alfredo Corchado interviewed a wealthy Mexican man who had moved his family to Dallas.9 When the man’s brother visited him from Mexico City, he wanted to show him something “very unusual.” Together, they drove through his upscale neighborhood until they saw a neighbor who was taking out his own garbage. The man told his brother, “That man owns 29 Ferraris.” Then, he said, “we just stared, shocked.” They could never imagine themselves doing something like that in Mexico. Along the border, these class lines profoundly affect individual lives. Marisa, who moved to South Texas, recalled an incident from the private colegio (school) she had attended in Mexico.

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One day, my friends started making fun of a low-income classmate attending on a scholarship. I felt bad because she was crying. I told them to stop. They accused me of not being loyal and called me a “naca” [lowlife] just like her. For several days, they completely isolated and ignored me. I couldn’t stand it, so I went along with them, though I felt bad doing it.

Life at the Bottom of Mexican Society On the Mexican side of the border, poverty is more widespread than on the Texas side. Campesinos have been pushed off their ejidos (communal farms) by a combination of government edicts and legislation, overpopulation, and drought. Massive migrations have brought them to large cities and the border. As a result, Reynosa and Matamoros, the border cities facing McAllen and Brownsville, respectively, together have grown by more than 550 percent since 1950. Such rapid growth is a boon to developers but often hurts those at the bottom.

The Maquiladora Export Manufacturing Program Part of the growth is due to the border industrialization program that spawned maquiladoras. This initiative provides employment for Mexicans through the introduction of assembly plants on the Mexican side of the border. From the start, these maquiladora (or “maquila”) assembly plants received preferential tariff treatment for the labor value they added in assembling materials made in the United States.10 In subsequent years, the importance of maquilas as an export sector grew and mushroomed to more than 1.3 million Mexican workers, especially with the implementation of NAFTA in the 1990s.11 Since 1999, the maquiladora sector has gone through a transition with the emergence of China as a global manufacturing power and with economic contractions like those of 2001 and 2008–2009. In many ways, global economic turmoil and Chinese manufacturing repositioned Mexican export manufacturing away from the low-end manufacturing to the middle and upper rungs of the global factory.12 In addition, the economic downturns of 2001 and 2008 and competitive pressures from China changed the employment dynamic to a situation of potential workers having to add their names to long waiting lists for employment.13 With an abundance of job seekers, the starting pay for maquila workers re-

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Figure 4.2. Caterpillar in Reynosa is one of the many US maquiladora firms

with facilities in Mexico just south of the border. Photo by Ovidio Cavazos; © O. Cavazos, used by permission.

mains very low, around $1 an hour in take home pay, which has remained nearly constant for two decades. In early 2015, Mexico had nearly 2.3 million workers employed in more than five thousand export manufacturing establishments, approximately one fifth of which were in the Mexican border states of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas, across the border from South Texas.14 Mexico has certainly gained by adding manufacturing jobs, increasing export earnings, and acquiring technological and managerial knowledge, especially in the burgeoning automotive sector.15 And Mexico still has competitively low wages that attract corporations from the United States. For example, Mexican autoworkers in 2016 earned one fifth or less of their US autoworker counterparts. But while low wages may attract companies to Mexico, many of Mexico’s maquiladoras have moved beyond low-technology assembly operations toward advanced manufacturing.16 And even though Mexicans are assembling and manufacturing products that require more skills than before, they continue to work at about the same hourly wages that they and their predecessors received twenty years ago. This wage gap continues to widen as US workers, through their unions, oftentimes negotiate

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higher wages. Mexican workers also lose relative income every time the Mexican peso weakens against the dollar.17 The Mexican border industrialization program began in 1965 with the objective of providing employment for Mexicans returning home from the United States at the end of the Bracero Program. The USsponsored Bracero Program (1942–1964) brought millions of contracted guest Mexican workers into the United States during and after World War II to initially fill primarily agricultural jobs vacated by the war effort. Mexico sought to relieve potential unemployment pressures with the closure of the Bracero Program by opening the maquiladora program, which introduced offshore assembly plants or factories into Mexico. From the beginning, Mexico’s policy makers permitted maquiladoras only along the border with the United States to be fully foreign-owned, a policy not permitted elsewhere in Mexico.18 A maquiladora also could be formed by a joint venture with a Mexican firm or through a shelter company that subcontracted production to local enterprises. Most important for foreign investors was the full control over production in an environment with competitive wages, a docile, job-hungry, and impoverished workforce, and favorable tariff treatment, all next door to the United States. An enclave economy, with assembly of goods imported from the United States and some local production in Mexico and reshipment back to the United States, characterized the early years of the maquiladoras. With the presidency of Miguel de la Madrid (1982–1988) and the Mexican economic crises of the 1980s, Mexico’s national policy on maquiladoras transitioned from promoting local employment to growing an important source of foreign exchange for Mexico. Mexican economic planners thus welcomed foreign investment, increased exports, and boosted value-added production of the assembled maquiladora products shipped to the United States. The full implementation of NAFTA in Mexico meant that the Mexican government no longer distinguished between maquiladora investment and other foreign direct investment; as such, the Mexican government stopped keeping separate statistics on maquiladoras in 2007. Legacy maquiladoras and their successors continue to be a vital part of the Mexican economy and manufacturing footprint. Borderlanders, nevertheless, commonly use “maquiladora” as a term to differentiate foreign-owned export-oriented assembly plants situated in the northern border of Mexico from similar Mexican enterprises.

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The Precarious Position of Maquiladora Workers Also in the beginning of the maquiladora industry, women formed a majority of the workers, constituting more than three-fourths of the hourly workforce in 1980. In later years, the large initial gender imbalance began to level out.19 Today, as in the past, many female workers live in precarious economic circumstances, making them vulnerable to unsavory advances from male supervisors. One of these workers, Nora, recalled, “My supervisor constantly harassed me. He would say sexual remarks and would invite me to his place. I complained, but nothing was done.” Another worker, fifteen-year-old Sonia, was raped by her supervisor when her group met to celebrate a coworker’s birthday. What had begun as a happy occasion turned into a nightmare for Sonia. Afterward, Sonia was threatened. “Say nothing,” she was told, “or you will suffer the consequences.” When asked why she had not reported the incident, Sonia responded, “We have no choice. We must help our parents financially. This is a secure job, and as long as you do your job without complaint, your job is safe.” Because of low pay and other disincentives, worker turnover remains relatively high in maquilas.20 Hector, a crew leader from a top electronics firms, said, “The average time they [new hires] last is about six to eight months. Then they finally give up (or get laid off) because of production lapses, terrible wages, poor treatment, and, in some cases, sexual harassment.” For some workers, poor conditions and low wages lead to resignation and despair.21 For most workers the main concern is low pay. Monica, a very young worker from rural Veracruz, stated, “I feel like a slave. Nothing motivates me because when I get paid, I only get enough to pay what I owe. It feels like I cover some holes by digging others. It also makes me wonder if my life is worthless.” Another worker, Yolanda, said, “My pay is never enough. I’m doing the best I can, but I’m already forty years old. I might have trouble finding work elsewhere because of my age. I know that if there were no maquiladoras there would be no money.” In this low-wage environment, the continuous search for better pay often leads maquila workers to switch firms, when possible, for incremental pay increases. While a majority of maquila workers are nominally unionized, few workers receive meaningful help from their unions. In the maquila industry, labor unions exist, for all intents and purposes, for the benefit of almost everyone except workers.22 Indeed, many unions are either “paper unions” that exist on paper only or subordinate unions that work

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to protect the employer; the latter are called “sindicatos blancos” (white unions) in Mexico. Almost all have been created without the participation or, in some cases, the knowledge of the workers.23 Often, the Mexican government undermines legitimate unions to keep wages low to attract more maquilas, investment, and jobs in Mexico. A few unions do try to negotiate on behalf of the workers or to at least inform them of their rights. Gloria said, I remember one time when I spent several months looking for a job in a maquiladora. Then my cousin encouraged me to go to the union leader and tell him directly of my problem. I was new in town and didn’t know I could do that, but she assured me that he would help me out. The next morning I went and talked to Don Agapito.[24] I would never forget his instant response to my situation. He called in his secretary to take my information and instructed me to report the next morning. The next day I was sent to a worksite. It’s not like that anymore. Now hardly anything gets resolved.

Many other workers complained that maquila work lacks opportunities for advancement in pay or skill development. Esmerelda said, “Working in a maquiladora doesn’t give many opportunities. To have opportunities, one needs to study and go to school. There’s just no time or money for that.” Another worker, Irma, said that while her job was “very easy and tranquil,” there were “a lot of limitations, not only in pay but also opportunities,” with “very few chances for advancement.” Maquila assembly-line employment in Mexico has been compared to fastfood employment in the United States—stable, full-time employment with some benefits but low wages and little promise of career or life advancement.25 In spite of the low wages, some maquila workers consider themselves fortunate. At twenty-eight years old, Andrés had worked in maquiladoras for twelve years. He said, It took me that long to become a supervisor. I see maquiladoras as a blessing for our economy. Here you have a secure job and good benefits. I know many people who want to work in the maquiladoras because their only other choices are to work in the fields, sell tacos on the street, or work in town where the hours are longer and the pay is worse. At least the maquiladoras provide cafeterias with microwave ovens and a choice of foods. I have managed to save enough money for a car. It’s not

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new, but it is a decent one. My three brothers and two sisters also work in the maquiladoras. Together, we have been able to build a concrete block house for our parents.

Working and Living Conditions of Maquila Workers Though maquilas are generally safe places to work,26 the use of heavy stamping and other equipment can pose risks to workers, especially if such equipment is not adequately maintained. A 2013 feature story in the Texas Observer told the account of a maquila worker from Reynosa, Rosa Moreno, who lost both her hands at the wrist while operating a two-hundred-ton press that stamped out the backs of large-screen televisions.27 The shift workers present at the time blamed the horrific accident on faulty and deferred maintenance of the press. Company officials said Rosa was tired and not paying attention and that her injuries were self-inflicted. They also denied the company’s responsibility to pay the hospital bills and only proposed a dismemberment settlement of $3,800, though Mexican law required a minimum settlement of $14,400. Three years later, the case was still not settled, with Rosa on the verge of losing her house because of her inability to pay her mortgage or earn a living. Rosa is without a husband and has six children living at home, where her $200 a month government-issued disability benefits barely feed the family. Without effective worker unions, maquila workers like Rosa have little recourse against the power of these multinational companies. Working in a maquila presents other challenges, such as scarce housing, difficult transportation, inadequate medical care, and problems in maintaining one’s family. Armida and her husband came from San Fernando, Mexico, to work at a maquila in Reynosa, about ninety miles north of their home. They lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment with their two children and his mother. “We would move to a bigger place if we could,” she said, “but there’s no housing available. Our rent constantly goes up because the landlord knows the apartments will not stay vacant for more than a couple of days. He raises the rent because he knows someone is always willing to pay more.” For a limited number of workers, the Mexican government housing program Instituto del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores (Infonavit, National Workers Housing Fund Institute) makes homeownership possible. Manuel Ochoa explained, “If it were not for this job and Infonavit’s help, I would not have a house right now. When I was growing up, we lived in a shack. So now I am helping my parents get a decent house.”

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Figure 4.3. Transportation for maquila workers in Reynosa, Mexico. Photo by

Ovidio Cavazos; © O. Cavazos, used by permission.

Because most maquiladoras are located miles from the city, transportation is a problem for many workers. A few maquilas provide transportation for their workers. Alejandra reported, “A [company] bus picks me up close by my house and takes me directly to the maquiladora.” She felt blessed that she did not have to worry about taking the pesera (public minibus) in the early morning. Being out late at night or early in the morning, however, puts many women workers at risk. Cecilia said, When I’m ready for work, it’s at least 5 a.m. and it’s still dark. There are always many men standing around who have been drinking. They seem to be looking for a victim to rob or rape. Luckily, they have never raped me, but I have been robbed. Once, after my husband had given me a watch for my birthday, I was going to work early. As usual those men were staring at me. One of them wouldn’t take his eyes off me. As I waited to get on the pesera, he grabbed my arm, pulled the watch off, and ran the other way.

In spite of the low pay, maquila plants do provide workers with such benefits as health care. A few companies even go beyond the required minimum effort to help their workers. Gaby described receiving medi-

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cal attention for a nonwork injury at no cost to her. “I was sitting down resting, quietly waiting for my husband to come home from work,” she said, “when suddenly a car with a drunk driver crashed into my house. I was hurt and was quickly transported to the hospital and treated there. My company took care of my medical expenses and repaired my damaged house. They gave me disability pay while I recuperated.” Other workers, however, are not so fortunate. Amparo, age twentytwo, relates, One day, I forgot to take my medication and fainted on the job. Someone took me to el Seguro [the social security hospital]. I was treated and was on disability for a week. The hospital covered half my expenses but the plant paid nothing. When I came back to work, they told me I no longer had a job because I was disabled. They were afraid I wouldn’t be able to produce as many straps as before. But now, how was I going to afford my medication and other expenses?

Often, survival requires the effort of many family members. Berta Rincón and her husband both work at American maquila plants. Berta said, I have to get up at 4 a.m. to get my kids dressed and take them to my parents’ house. Often, I don’t get back to pick them up until around 11:30 p.m. My husband also works long hours and rarely has time to see them. It’s sad to see my children coming to think of my parents as their mom and dad. I have to remind myself that I’m working for their wellbeing and that they’re safe.

Not all maquiladoras are owned by US-based multinational enterprises. One of our student informants, Sandra, later worked in both a South Korean maquila and a US maquila for several years in Reynosa. While the stress of meeting production quotas was similar in both maquilas, Sandra noted contrasts in the firms. With the Korean firm, Sandra stated, “a good employee is the one who stays overtime without receiving anything in return. I had to spend many weekends without pay.” As a woman, Sandra felt she had to be submissive to her managers. As part of the company culture, Sandra also reported socialization practices from cleaning restrooms and chanting slogans to participating in a long-distance run.28 At the top of the organization were only South Korean men, shutting out Mexican nationals from the highest rungs of management. In contrast, her experience in the US firm meant slightly better pay and no unpaid overtime. Mexicans there were also able to

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compete for the highest rungs of management, contributing to intense rivalry among mid-level employees. Do Maquiladoras Exploit Workers? Many of the maquila managers we interviewed did not see themselves as exploiters of Mexican workers. George Harvey, the plant manager at a US-owned maquila, shared his thoughts. I don’t feel I’m exploiting the Mexican workers because we offer an incentive bonus, which puts them far above the average worker in Mexico. As long as we have people that want to work for us, we don’t think it’s a problem. In the United States, it is hard to fi nd good workers even if we pay them above the minimum wage.

Lucy is the daughter of a maquila human resources manager. Lucy and her father are Mexican by birth but live by choice in McAllen. Her father drove to work, crossing the international bridge to Reynosa, crossing the city, and reaching the plant several miles from the city center. Lucy, then a student at UTPA, wanted to explore what her father did in a maquila and what maquilas do. Lucy said, I felt awkward in interviewing these people. The younger ones were just like me but lived in another world. They knew I wasn’t one of them. I found it hard to look at them in the eye when I told them I was only doing research for a class. The maquiladoras are not in deplorable conditions, but they could be much better. I liked this [interview] project because it opened up another world. I have become more critically aware of the workings and struggles of people in relation to those in power.

Mexican Border Street Children If Lucy had interviewed Mexican street children, she would have discovered a world even more different than that of her father and the maquila workers. One of our students who did interview Mexican border street children writes, As soon as you cross the bridge to Mexico, you are beset by hungry kids, extending their hands to beg for money. A short distance from the bridge, other children carry boxes of gum or candies to sell to pedestri-

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Figure 4.4. Kids on the street in Progreso, Mexico. Photo by Ovidio Cavazos;

© O. Cavazos, used by permission.

ans and tourists. Farther still, we fi nd youngsters on major crossroads waiting for a light to turn red in order to clean car windshields, sell flowers, juggle balls, or perform magic tricks. Some even risk their lives and their health by “swallowing” flames. Before the light turns green, these kids rapidly advance, asking people to give them at least one peso.

One student came across a group of twenty-six kids living under a bridge. One of them, Luis, was seventeen years old and had lived on the streets since he was ten. His parents abused him until one day he went to school and never returned home. “It was difficult at first,” he said, “but then I met other kids like me and started hanging out with them.” He showed his interviewer a makeshift shrine to the Virgin Mary that they had erected. “She is our only mother now,” reported Luis, “and we feel warmth and love from her that our own mothers did not or could not give.” On the altar they have set out flowers and candles for her. These scenes today may not seem very different from how things were for street kids in Mexican border cities in 1999, when we published the first edition of Batos. But there have been some profound developments. The drug cartels often wage open warfare in these border cities with Mexican military forces and among themselves, especially the Gulf

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cartel and Los Zetas, both of which operate in Tamaulipas, the Mexican state that borders most of South Texas. The national death toll attributed to the drug wars in Mexico is horrendous, upwards of one hundred thousand people killed from 2000 to 2014.29 Street kids have been among the most adversely affected. Street children are often enticed by the drug cartels to serve as lookouts, informants, carriers, or even assassins. In one notorious headlining case, teenager Edgar “El Ponchis” Jimenez Lugo was arrested and convicted of brutal murders related to drug violence. It is reported that El Ponchis began his criminal life at age eleven.30 Recently, Mexican street children have been joined by huge numbers of unaccompanied kids from Central America trying to get into the United States or who have been pushed back across the border into the Mexican border cities.31 When large numbers of Central American children crossed the US border in 2015, the US government pressured Mexico to interrupt the migration at Mexico’s southern border.32 The Central American children come in response to an escalation in pov-

Figure 4.5. Street children are especially vulnerable to Mexican police. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

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erty and extreme drug and gang violence in Central America, particularly in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.33 In addition, the cartels have found human trafficking—including kidnapping children and forcing some into prostitution—very profitable.34 Mexican border cities are much more dangerous places for street children now. Anita is a casualty of the border wars. When she was born, her father abandoned her and two older sisters and their mom. In later years, corrupt Mexican police were replaced by soldiers. Exactly one year before her interview, her mother and sisters where accidently killed by Mexican soldiers. She recalled, While we were walking home from the corner store, there were several men robbing a house. The soldiers started shooting, so I ran and hid behind a car. But my mom and sisters were too scared and just froze. Bullets hit their poor bodies and they died instantly. From that day on, I’ve been without a family or home.

The Two Major Types of Mexican Border Street Children Calling all the children who sell, beg, or perform on the streets “street children” masks some important differences among them.35 One criticism of applying this label too broadly is that it makes it appear that all these children live on the streets, when in reality many of them have homes to go back to after working. Some even live with relatively stable families. Many Mexican border families need the economic help that the children can provide by selling, begging, performing, or doing menial services on the streets. So, some of the children seeking to earn money are home-based street children; they live at home with their families. Others are street-based; they live without family on the streets.

Home-Based Str eet Childr en Pepe and Meme are home-based street children. They have strong educational aspirations that their parents have nurtured. “Siempre han hecho todo para apoyarnos [They have always done everything to support us],” Pepe asserted. Meme agreed, “Our parents always emphasize the importance of education. They do everything they can to get us our school supplies and uniforms. One year, my father sold his coat in order to buy our books. We both cried, because we knew the sacrifices our parents were willing to make so that we can become something someday.” Unlike Pepe and Meme, many home-based children come from

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single-parent families. Mateo and his two brothers sold gum near the Rey nosa international bridge. Mateo said, Three months ago, my mom got pneumonia. I am the oldest of five, and my dad left us a year back. Until she got sick, my mom would work so we could go to school. When she got sick, I had to earn money so we could eat and pay for her medicine. I feel very lucky because the first day I started selling gum, I sold ten boxes. That was one hundred pesos [about ten dollars] for my family. Since then I feel God is always helping me. My mom always gives us a blessing before we go out to sell.

One home-based child, Patricia, commented that both her parents worked at a neighboring store. Two boys standing nearby, José and Miguel, also mentioned that both their parents sold on the streets. The children explained that their parents didn’t earn enough money and that they worked so they wouldn’t have to ask their parents for school money. Patricia mentioned that she could only earn from five to ten dollars a week. While she worked, she watched her younger brother, who was only two years old and stayed nearby while she was being interviewed. He played on the sidewalk until their grandfather showed up to look after him. Many home-based street children try to stay in school while they work. Apolonio went out to sell immediately after school. Often, he worked until midnight. He said, One day, I had not done my homework and my teacher asked me why. I told her I had been working all day and I didn’t have time to do it. She didn’t believe me and made me stay after school. When my parents found out, they were angry because I didn’t start selling right after school. I have a hard time paying attention in school. Sometimes I even fall asleep during class. At times, I just want to stop going to school.

In Mexico, school for the first eight years is supposed to be free. Nevertheless, children have to pay for uniforms, books, and supplies. Some schools add on certain fees. Often, these expenses mount up until the children’s families can no longer afford them. Sergio quit school in third grade. He recalled, One day, the teacher told the class that we were going to have a bailable [folk dance] for Mothers Day. To participate, we had to buy a traje de charro [Mexican cowboy outfit] to dance a polka. I wanted to participate,

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but I knew we couldn’t afford such an expensive suit. When the teacher asked me if I would participate, I answered, “No.” Another boy started saying I was poor and that my parents wouldn’t even come to the dance. I got angry, even though I knew it was true. I got up from my desk and hit him in the face. The teacher went out to call the principal. While she was gone, I ran out of the school. They never found me because nobody even knew where I lived.

In a few cases, these children have abusive fathers in the homes. Paco recalled the night his father beat him and his mother. He spoke of the events that led to the abuse. My mother and I had been out on the street selling all day, but we had not made any money. We went home empty-handed. Papá was home, drunk, and asked for his supper, but Mamá had nothing to offer him, so he beat her. When I tried to protect her, he beat me too. Now, we never go home without something to give him, even if we haven’t eaten all day ourselves.

Some fathers are disabled and cannot provide much economic support for their families. Germán reported, My dad had an accident on the job when I was eight years old. Since he was no longer useful at his job, they fired him. My mother stays at home and cares for my two baby sisters, while my dad and I go out every day to bring back money. When he lost his job, my dad told me that since I was the only boy, I too had to be a man of the house and help out. So I had to quit school to be out selling with him. I really miss school. If I could have stayed in school longer, I could have become a doctor. My mother always says, “Dios aprieta pero no ahorca,” which means that God gives us difficulties but not impossibilities. Through my mother’s faith, we will survive.

Str eet-Based Str eet Childr en Some children, like Joaquín, live on the streets with other children. He recalled, When I was younger, my dad would come home drunk and hit me a lot. Because of his drinking, he could never hold a job. What I hated the most was coming home to fi nd my dad drunk and violent. Since I

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am the oldest, he always blamed me for his ruined life. One day I just couldn’t take it any more. So I didn’t go home. I met some other kids, and I’ve been with them ever since. It’s been two years and I still miss my mom and brothers.

Some street-based children have been abandoned. Guillermo relates, About a year ago, I went to the place where my mother worked. But I didn’t fi nd her in the corner where she always sold things. She just left me. For several days I walked around alone. One day, I met three other kids like me. I began to hang around with them. When they felt they could trust me, they gave me gum to sell. Since then, we help each other. You need others to make it here. I don’t have my family, but I have them.

Some of these children try, at least for a while, to make it on their own. Joel, a thirteen-year-old boy, sold Chiclets gum and worked in a local store packing bags for the customers. “I sometimes stay at an abandoned house in a poor colonia,” he said. “It only has walls and a roof, but no windows. I once got caught in there by some neighbors, and they told me that they didn’t want to see me there any more. Now I still go, but I try to leave before anybody sees me and calls the police.” Some street children without families become victims of the sex trade. A student interviewer was appalled by her last interview. She wrote, I found this particular tiny girl wearing lipstick who grabbed my attention. I asked myself, Why in the world would a small girl like her be wearing lipstick? When I approached her, she gave me a huge smile. I could see some of the red lipstick on her teeth. As I mentioned how much I liked the color she responded, “Que bueno, porque a los señores tambien” [That’s good, because the men like it too]. I was unsure what she meant, but as we got into our interview, she said different men frequently come to pick her up. “They pay me twenty pesos if I don’t cry or complain,” she related. “All I have to do is lay still and do as they say.” She must have noticed the anger on my face and started crying. Not because she was scared but because she felt the same way. “I hate when they touch me,” she cried, “but it’s the only way to survive in the streets here in Reynosa. My parents abandoned me. Every day I pray to la Virgen de Guadalupe [the Virgin Mary] that my parents will come back for me.”

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Other street children get introduced to the trade by family members. Natalia was a young prostitute. She recounted, My stepfather was the first man I had sex with. One night he came home drunk and took advantage of me. When my mother found out, she just left me with him. He was already in the business, and a couple of girls were already working for him. I hate what I do, but I don’t have a choice. One day we tried to escape, but it only took him a couple of days to fi nd us. He brought us back and brutally beat us. Then he had his way with both of us in the most hurtful and forceful way possible.

Sadly, many of the men who seek out and sexually exploit these children are from the United States.36 What angered most of our interviewers who found abandoned and exploited street children was that there seemed to be little or no protection by the police or public agencies. One agency of the Mexican federal government that is charged, in part, with child protection is the DIF (Sistema Nacional para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, National System for Integral Family Development). The DIF is a political government program typically headed by the first lady; its purpose is to strengthen and develop the welfare of families. In Tamaulipas, DIF emphasizes good nutrition through school-based food programs—a program that misses those not attending school.37 The DIF does take in some children who are begging in the streets, often against the will of the children, though its agents seldom interfere with children who are working, even those under fourteen, the legal age for working. Local officials generally allow children to work as late as midnight. After that, the children report, police threaten to take them to “el DIF.” The DIF being used to threaten the children leads one to believe that most of the street children see it more as a threat than as a protection. DIF officials say they do try to help, but few children stay in the program long enough to be adopted or be put in foster homes. As these street-based children get older, some get involved in criminal activities such as theft and prostitution or become carteristas (pickpockets). A police officer reported that he seldom has major problems with these children and feels pity for them. He recalled one time that he was not in uniform and a small boy about eight years old kept asking him for money. At first he said no and finally asked the boy why he needed the money. The boy responded that he was hungry, that it had been a couple of days since he had eaten. So he bought the little boy a

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meal. This officer said, “I could see he was hungry. He did not even seem to chew—just to swallow.” This officer said it made him sad to see such situations and that he believed the government should try to do more for these unfortunate children. The youngest of the street-based children often hold out hope of escaping their situation. One of them, Beto, said, Even though I know I don’t have anyone to count on except for my few friends, I hope that one day I can better myself and learn something that will make some money. Then, with that, I want to go to the United States to make money so that I can go back to San Luis to fi nd my family. I want to have something to offer them so that they can be proud of me.

Over time, street children tend to get street smart. An interviewer observed, “They learn to handle both Mexican and American money, including giving the appropriate change, and making calculations of the value of each in relation to the other. They manage to know how much to pay for the roses, chips, and gum they sell and how much to charge to make the maximum profit.” They understand who will pay the most for their products or services, who constitutes a threat, and whom they can turn to for help. Important Relationships for Street Children Many street children avoid the police.38 Eleven-year-old Ángel sold gum near his father, who sold corn on the cob. Ángel said that one day, two years before the interview, a police officer came up to him and told him that he and his father couldn’t sell because they didn’t have a permit. My father had tried many times to get a permit from the municipal office, but they never gave us one. When the policeman saw me trying to sell a while later, he came up to me and knocked the gum out of my hands and threw me against the wall. I hit my head and started bleeding. After that, all he did was yell at me and try to scare me.

The children who experience the greatest problems with the police, however, are those who live on the streets with other children. The police usually do not let homeless people sleep in public places, so they keep the children moving until some of them end up sleeping in dumpsters or under cars. These children often report abuse at the hands of

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the police. One child, Panchito, said, “The police sometimes take our gum and candies. Sometimes, they even take our money.” They may also take these children to jail or to the DIF. Gabriel, who is homeless and orphaned, was ten years old when he got caught stealing. He thought he would be going somewhere better than the streets. Instead, he spent the next two years in a juvenile detention center. Gabriel related, “The woman who ran the home regularly beat the kids. She kicked us in the genitals, slapped us, and cut off our hair in fits of rage.” Gabriel said she told the children, “Se van a podrir en este lugar [You’re going to rot in this place].” Gabriel came to believe it. Ramiro said, “Sometimes, the mafiosos give us money. Once, a mafioso gave me twenty dollars. With it, my friends and I ate for almost four days. We also bought some medicine for one of my friends who suffers from migraines. He never has anything to cure the pain.” Many street children find an avenue to immediate survival by getting involved with the drug trade. Drug cartels sway street kids through small payments, a sense of belonging, and an assurance that kids cannot be prosecuted; this last point is incorrect, though children under fourteen face a more lenient judicial system. In return, the cartels, for a relatively small price, actively use children as pawns in the drug war, sending them out on the front lines as disposable foot soldiers.39 In the past many border cities have experienced extensive problems with police, many of whom are corrupted by the drug cartels. The Mexican government, in some of these cities, has sent in military units to replace the police. A student interviewer reported, “Right in the entrance of Nuevo Progreso, visitors can see members of the Mexican army posed around the area.” He interviewed Félix, a street boy there, who said that contrary to common belief, many business owners and workers, including many of the street children, are happier now that the military is near. “They do not bother us like the police,” he reported. “And they also have been able to stop much of the violence.” When asked if this had slowed down business, he said that it had at the very beginning but that the tourists were coming back and business was getting back to normal. Almost uniformly, the street children interviewed felt that they received the best treatment from American tourists—especially the retirees, or “winter Texans.” Maribel said, Not every one of them is nice, but most of them are. They give us their extra change, buy items from us, or just talk to us. Some know a little Spanish so they practice on us. Some of them even bring us clothes, toys, and shoes. Others buy us food like tacos or hamburgers. One lady

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comes every now and then and brings me clothes. She has a granddaughter in the United States who is a year older than me. When she grows out of her clothes, she brings them for me. She is my friend. If she does not see me one day, she’ll keep the clothes and come back another time. Her name is Diana and I like her a lot.

Some of the Americans who feel compassion lose it when American cultural bias leads them to buy into stereotypes of these children. Katy Pimentel, an Anglo woman married to a Mexican American man, said that when her husband took her to Mexico to shop, they always encountered street children. The laws of Mexico should do more to protect these children. When I moved to South Texas from Atlanta, I felt sorry for them. Some of them have gum; others have flowers; and some don’t have anything to sell, so they beg. I was constantly giving them money. Finally, I realized that their parents just used them to get money for alcohol or drugs. After that, I now just tell them to go away.

Occasionally, some local Mexicans show compassion. Eight-year-old Santiago lived on the streets of Reynosa with his older sister. He recalled, Once, I was crying because I hadn’t eaten in two days. I didn’t have any money to buy gum to sell. An older man came by and asked what was wrong. I told him I was very hungry and couldn’t work because I didn’t have anything to sell. This old man, who I now call Abuelo [Grandpa], bought me some food and gave me some money. Since then, I go to his house when I’m hungry. He always gives me food.

Still, many of the children report unfriendly relations with well-todo Mexicans. Carla remembered when she went up to people in a nice car from Monterrey and asked them to buy some gum. “They asked for all my six packs,” she said. “Then they just rolled up the window and laughed, making fun of my stupidity. I kept asking myself, ‘How can they do that and just laugh about it?’” Omar recalled a similar encounter with a woman in a nice car. I was once waiting for some friends, when all of a sudden this lady started yelling at me, “You—muerto de hambre! [skin and bones]—Why did you steal my antenna? Give it back or I will report you to the police.” I was scared and didn’t say anything because no one had ever

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talked to me like that. I explained that I had no use for her antenna, but she insisted that I had already sold it. The lady got in her car, but she kept threatening me.

Kayla was eleven years old and peddled small items on the street where her parents also sold goods. She said sometimes it was hard because she could be out all day and make hardly any money. She attended school and wanted to be a teacher. Her interviewer asked if her friends ever offered her drugs. Kayla said, “I would be scared to take them. One of my friends, though, lives on the streets. She does take drugs and now she sells herself to men to pay for the drugs.” Though many children use their earnings for food, clothing, and help for their parents, some, like Kayla’s friend, use the money on inhalants, drugs, or alcohol. Doroteo spent half his earnings on Resistol, an intoxicating shoe glue containing toluene, and gave the rest of his money to his mother. When asked if his mother knew about his addiction, he replied, “Yes, she knows. At first, she would cry and hit me if she saw me high. But after a while, she lost hope in me because now she doesn’t say anything. Sometimes, I wish she would. Now, the only time she pays attention to me is when I give her money.” An interviewer wrote, “The street has taught these children to be strong and withstand many of the problems that children or adults, in a better-off situation, couldn’t. One boy told me, ‘Sometimes when I feel sick I drink a lot of water so I can feel better and not worry my mom. I know that if I get sick, she’ll try to sell things that we need, and I don’t want her to do that.’” Sometimes these children discover other ways to get help. Rubén said, “The Cruz Roja [Red Cross] has helped us many times. Sometimes when we get sick, they treat [us] as well as if we were not from the streets. One time when I had nowhere to sleep, I told them I had a strong abdominal pain. They let me spend the night there and offered me dinner. I ate every thing that they gave me.” Observing the lives of Mexican street children has had a profound impact on our student interviewers.40 One said, “It is sad that I live only five miles from Mexico and never gave any attention to the situation— or maybe I just turned the other way.” Another reported, “Of all the homework I ever had in college, this assignment was by far the best. I interviewed these children weeks ago, but I fi nd myself thinking about them all the time. Doing this project made me thankful for the things I have in life. Even more, I have come to appreciate what these children have to do to survive.”

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CONCLUSION TO PART I

Social Class on the South Texas– Northern Mexico Border

The most defi ning characteristic of the South Texas–northern Mexico border is not so much its poverty as its enormous range of inequality between those at the top and those at the bottom. As a related aspect, we find this great inequality accompanied by extensive discrimination against weaker groups. Some American farmers and townspeople have such low regard for farmworkers that they see no absurdity in seeing them as “lazy.” Colonia residents, with so much less public and private wealth than city dwellers, are virtually invisible. Undocumented maids have so little power in relation to their employers that outright rape and theft are often not even reported. Similarly, maquila workers assemble some of the most complex electronic devices at nineteenthcentury wages. Finally, at the bottom are Mexican street children. With no wealth, no power, and low prestige, they are regarded by others simply as beggars. Poverty and inequality exist elsewhere in the United States but not with such wide gaps between rich and poor, served and servants, elites and the underclass. In the United States, laws that protect workers in all other segments of the American economy strangely exclude migrant farmworkers. Their union is often ignored or busted by corporate growers. In Texas also, state laws that require developers to pave streets and install water lines in colonias were not enforced for many years because public officials lacked the power, resources, or will to do so. On the Mexican side of the border, the maquila industry is vastly more powerful than the workers. The government of Mexico promotes the influx of dollars and the jobs but does little to protect workers. Mexican labor leaders often side with management against the workers. As a result, when American companies cross the border to Mexican border cities,

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the power of unions and government that could counterbalance them is largely lacking. And at the border, one of the richest and most powerful economies of the world abuts a nation where more than half the population lives below the poverty line. Though Mexico’s population is now about 40 percent of the US population, its gross domestic product (GDP) is only one thirteenth of that of the United States. This results in the largest income gap in the world between any two contiguous countries.1 The economic inequality between the two countries creates a powerful magnet for Mexican workers to enter the United States. With severe US restrictions on legal immigration, however, undocumented entry becomes the only real possibility for most Mexicans to fi nd work in the United States. Though the consequences for being caught are generally not severe, undocumented workers are isolated from and even set at odds with American workers in a similar class situation. Undocumented Mexican workers are effectively stripped of protection by police or judicial agencies. Law enforcement officers become the unwitting allies of employers who themselves violate immigration laws by illegally hiring undocumented workers with impunity.2 As a result, employers who should pay a minimum wage and honor a work schedule seldom give their undocumented workers those supposed luxuries. For most undocumented workers, work in the informal, or off-the-books, economy is the only viable option for survival.3 In 1952, the economist and public servant John Kenneth Galbraith proposed that in industrialized nations, massive abuse of one economic or political entity by another would be avoided by the emergence of “countervailing power.”4 Unions would gain enough power to counter the domination of workers by management. Government power would counter the economic power of banks and multinationals. Wellinformed consumers and voters would counter the power of political and economic elites. To some extent, this has happened in the major industrialized nations of North America and western Europe and in parts of Asia. Though workers and consumers have not achieved full equality with industry, blatant abuses like those seen in the early stages of industrialization have been largely curbed. Servants cannot be beaten with impunity. Workers have rights. Buyers have some protection by law and in the courts from unscrupulous vendors. Very lopsided relations, however, exist at the border. Maquila workers in Mexico have exceptionally uneven relations with their American,

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Asian, and European employers. They have gone nearly twenty years without a meaningful pay increase. They get little or no help from the unions, in part because the Mexican government controls and even selects their union leaders in order to hold down wages, fight inflation, and make maquilas a competitive resource within the global market for labor. Even some sympathetic American managers can be of little help. They answer to the home office that moved their operations from the United States to Mexico mostly to reduce labor costs. Even competition for good, steady workers is reduced when local maquila associations hold each other back from increasing worker pay. Maquila associations are typically region-based groups that promote the interests and network of the owners, investors, and managers in the first order and local development, often binationally, in the second order. If one plant raises wages, the others would have to follow suit or lose workers. So these associations keep each other in line, enabling all of them to report even larger profits to their home offices. This result, of course, doesn’t hurt the record of managers hoping to be promoted up and away from the border. Maquila managers argue that they do not exploit Mexican workers. In our experience, most managers we have interviewed are decent individuals who respect their Mexican workers. They point out that their industry is a major part of Mexico’s economy and provides direct employment for more than a million workers. They can pay Mexican workers less than a living wage because competition for these jobs is intense in Mexico’s economy, where comparable jobs also pay less than a living wage. Maquila managers, influenced perhaps by widespread cultural bias, justify the low pay by pointing out that the plants provide many noncash benefits to their workers, though such benefits do not meet the needs created by wages that fail to meet even essential needs, even by Mexican standards. Still, it is interesting to ask the American managers how low the pay could go before they would consider it a form of exploitation. Most don’t have an answer. They haven’t had to think about it. They are used to wages being determined by the countervailing forces of the market, union negotiators, or government regulations. The term “exploitation” introduces moral considerations with which they have not had to deal. The more balanced power situation in the United States makes considerations of what is morally right largely unnecessary or irrelevant. On the border, however, letting the market devoid of moral considerations determine pay rates invites abuse and exploitation of workers. While the Mexican maquiladora program preceded NAFTA (the

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North American Free Trade Agreement) by nearly thirty years, maquilas are part and parcel of the economic integration process and project deepened by NAFTA. However, NAFTA is an incomplete economic model. For the economies of North America to be truly rationalized would also require the free movement of labor. Until North American labor can move as freely as it does within the European Union, workers, especially in Mexico, will continue to suffer a form of structural bias at best, and exploitation at its worst, from foreign investment in Mexico.

Abuses on the Texas Side of the Border Employers of undocumented maids in Texas cities run into a similar quandary in deciding how much to pay the women. Farther north, families who employ maids don’t have to worry much about it. Such matters are well established by minimum-wage laws, a tight market for household help, or even tradition. The phrase “I don’t do windows” reflects a degree of countervailing power of documented domestic workers in the United States. If undocumented workers had some form of countervailing power on their side, abuse would be far less common and people would be inclined to behave morally. Tomasa’s case illustrates the point. She came from Guadalajara at the age of fourteen with her mother, who found work with a judge in Edinburg. When a local schoolteacher was looking for help, the judge recommended Tomasa. At first, she was only supposed to clean the home. She said, The first day, my boss was surprised at how fast I worked. The next day she asked me to paint all three bedrooms. I fi nished them in one week. The next week she asked me to paint the fence. On payday, she said she was going to give me used clothes instead of money. My mother told the judge. He called the teacher and told her to pay me what a painter would have charged. That was about triple what she had agreed to pay. I got my money, but I had to fi nd another job.

This account is unusual not because of the abuse but because the maid was able to summon power to counteract it. Most undocumented maids don’t have powerful allies who can make people behave honorably. Their lack of power also comes from the failure of the US Congress to provide a meaningful worker authorization and protection system. So, Mexican workers, who are vital to the US economy, have to

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work in the shadows and can seldom appeal to governmental agencies that might protect their rights. This is evidenced by the significantly lower pay undocumented workers earn compared to fully documented workers doing the same jobs.5 Migrant farmworkers also lose bargaining power when the job market is constantly glutted with undocumented workers from Mexico and beyond. Similarly, an increased demand for cheap housing in South Texas, often from Mexican migrants, plays into the hands of unscrupulous colonia developers. Maids and other undocumented workers are subject to exploitation when dominant cultural bias causes many to view their illegal work as more criminal than employers who illegally hire them and pay them wages far below the poverty line. As we shall see, the inequality of power, more than prejudice and racism, keeps Mexican immigrants, and especially those who are undocumented in the broken US immigration system, and Mexican Americans at the bottom of the South Texas class system.

Bigotry and Cultural Bias as Forms of Domination or Discrimination in Relation to Social Class In the introduction, we proposed that there are four types of domination and discrimination (table 0.2). Much of the discrimination experienced by migrants fifty or more years ago was based on bigotry, intentionally harsh treatment of a group related to prejudice or racist attitudes. Migrant students also experienced bigotry in the classroom. Luisa recalled the bigotry of Anglo students when she attended school in the 1960s. We were very poor and almost never had sandwich bread, except for Daddy’s lunch. The rest of us ate tacos made with Mom’s handmade tortillas. But I wouldn’t dare take my tacos to school because I would have died of embarrassment. The Anglo kids would have called me a “beaner,” like they did with other Mexican kids. School food wasn’t free back then. If you wanted to eat in the cafeteria, you had to work for it. I washed dishes in the cafeteria during recess just so I could have lunch at school. The Anglo kids still laughed and called me names. I never could understand why. I was working for my food.

Bigots like the ones mentioned by Luisa seldom tried to hide their bigotry since the prevailing culture of the time held that racial and class in-

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equality were a legitimate fact of life. As a result, even some public facilities were segregated. The sociologist Joe R. Feagin attributes most of that bigotry to a “white racial frame,” a way of looking at the world based on a centuriesold assumption of white superiority.6 In part II, we will examine racial and ethnic bigotry, especially an Anglo cultural frame and the white racial frame, more carefully. As we conclude part I, however, we wish to convey that social class also has a powerful influence on how people categorize, judge, and treat others from a dominant-class frame, the underlying assumption of the superiority of dominant social classes over lower classes. We submit that this frame is so pervasive that it is hard for anyone to escape its influence. In its unintentionally harmful form we call it class bias. Its form of intentional harm we call class bigotry. As the accounts given in these first four chapters illustrate, it affects how we feel about ourselves and our beliefs and stereotypes about different social classes and our feelings about them. This dominant class frame even predisposes us to treat individuals of a supposedly superior rank with deference or submissiveness—and to treat those of lower rank with paternalism, condescension, and contempt. Howard Newby, a British sociologist, describes his experience of investigating the deprivation and exploitation of British farmworkers. Newby interviewed humble farmworkers and their employers—mostly titled members of the English aristocracy. He writes, I found myself—and I hated myself for it—being obsequious and deferential in the presence of the aristocratic farm owners. . . . As time went on, I became interested in the deference of farmworkers to the aristocratic farm owners. One, a Colonel Todd, conformed to all the characteristics of a paternalist employer. There was no doubt in my mind that even workers like Jack Hector deferred to Colonel Todd. This puzzled me because Jack Hector was not only a trade union member but also a radical. But on several occasions, I observed him give obvious deference to Colonel Todd, in his manner of talking to him, or in touching his forelock as he spoke.7

In this account, Jack Hector, Colonel Todd, and even the sociologist, Howard Newby, acted in accordance with the dominant class frame, with its culturally biased expectation of deference toward individuals of higher rank. Some forms of the dominant-class frame promote intentional bigotry (like upper-income Mexicans calling those of lower rank

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“nacos”). Other forms, like the cultural expectation that we show deference to those of higher rank, appear to be less direct—and without intentional harm—and hence more likely seen as forms of cultural bias. We observed a similar form of cultural bias in many of the interviews our students conducted. One student described her own family’s maid as being excessively shy. “She always looks down when she talks to us,” the student said. “My mom has talked to her about it, but it’s a hard habit for her to break.” The family apparently does not realize that in many parts of Mexico, looking down when addressing a person of higher rank is considered the correct way to show respect. But this dominant-class frame affects not only people from Britain and Mexico. People in the United States are also expected to show deference: students, to their professors; employees, to their employers; attorneys and others, to judges in courtrooms; and so on. And, as we have shown in the preceding chapters, US farmworkers, colonia residents, undocumented workers including maids, Mexican street children, and maquila workers often experience a stigma of inferiority and disparaging stereotypes as well as discriminatory treatment by those who consider themselves of a superior social rank. Lest we consider ourselves blameless, we should ask how often we make or laugh at jokes in which groups of lower rank are stereotyped or called offensive names. Many individuals engage in such behaviors among others of their own social rank, in “backstage” situations away from the offended group, without considering the behaviors as class- or sex- or race-based bigotry. Even some who engage in “frontstage” behaviors of in-person name calling, stereotyping, and bullying often fail to see their own behaviors as bigotry.8 Like bigotry, cultural bias is discrimination based on beliefs and attitudes. Unlike bigotry, with its element of an intent to harm, cultural bias has less obvious, intentional, or direct causes. Cultural bias also arises when members of one cultural group have to live by and be judged in accordance with the rules, stereotypes, and conventions of another. As a result, those not familiar with (or able to measure up to) the subtleties of the other culture are at a disadvantage. One migrant worker experienced this as a boy when he enrolled in first grade in an Iowa school while his parents worked in the fields. “It was really hard,” he said, “because I didn’t know much English. I survived by imitating the other kids. Sometimes that didn’t work. I waited in line for the cafeteria, for example, only to be told they couldn’t serve me because I hadn’t paid in the classroom.”

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Cultural bias gives indirect advantages to the group or social class whose culture is dominant in society. It functions like playing a game when some players are not familiar with the rules. In such situations, members of the nondominant culture will probably lose no matter how fair the referee might be. Bigotry, in contrast, is like having a biased referee who breaks the rules to make sure the targeted players lose. Bigotry involves intentional harm based on biased personal beliefs or cultural stereotypes, while cultural bias involves less intentional harm based on a minority group’s unfamiliarity with the culture of the dominant group (or with a society-wide frame that suggests their supposed inferiority). While a bigot thus has a distorted view of what a group is like, culturally biased individuals tend to judge more evenly but use biased standards or stereotypes that favor their own group or social class. Bigotry and the dominant class frame cause one to regard minorities as inferior, while cultural bias applies widely accepted—and seemingly harmless— stereotypes and unfamiliar cultural standards that put weaker groups at a disadvantage. Cultural bias also keeps minorities from advancing by marking them as low-class. For example, people in Mexico may judge the Spanish spoken by South Texas residents as inferior. And Mexican Spanish likewise may be judged as inferior to Spanish spoken in Spain. Groups in a more powerful class position often manage to identify their culture with education and refi nement, standards that always relegate others to an inferior position. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu presents an insightful analysis of this phenomenon, which he terms “culture capital.” He asserts that the top classes of society not only manage to make their culture distinctive but use it as capital, ensuring that whoever masters it will possess greater advantages for themselves and their children. They further increase or maintain its economic value by making it hard for lower classes to gain access to it.9 Though Anglos on the border are a numerical minority and don’t often speak Spanish, the most commonly spoken language of the area, they usually have the power to minimize their cultural disadvantage. The scarcity of applicants for highly technical jobs, as an example, means well-educated Anglos can get hired even if they do not speak Spanish. They can always get someone to translate for them. Similarly, Anglo maquila managers who do not understand Mexican culture and commit cultural blunders may be embarrassed or even corrected but experience little harm. An American maquila supervisor discovered the

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great importance Mexican culture puts on saving face after he corrected workers in front of others. He said, I didn’t yell at them. I have always believed in being frank and correcting problems when and where I see them. I never had any real complaints in our US plants. Here in Mexico, however, the workers sent a representative to talk to me. He told me, “You have an office with a door and a lock. We Mexicans believe that workers need to be respected. We can put up with the low pay but not with you not respecting us.”

After he made the adjustment, that was the end of it.

Exploitation and Structural Bias Nonetheless, much of the domination and discrimination suffered by minorities is related less to attitudes and cultural beliefs than to the way societal relationships are structured. As indicated earlier, the main factor keeping the poor on both sides of the border from moving up is their relative powerlessness in the structure, the established social arrangements, of society. This happens in two ways, which we have called exploitation and structural bias. Exploitation, like bigotry, is a direct and intentional form of discrimination in which the powerful use their position to take unfair advantage of those with less power. A farmer who deliberately attempts to keep his workers uneducated to maintain them as a cheap source of labor would provide an example of exploitation of workers. Octavio Zamorra experienced this one summer many years earlier when he was working in Colorado. He said, It rained a lot that summer. Some of us thought we could attend some classes in adult basic education on the days we weren’t working. The local community college even set it up for us to learn English or work toward a GED certificate. The growers gave them hell at the college, though. They claimed they might need us at a moment’s notice. One farmer flatly refused to let us go, stating, “Education ruins a good picker.”

In this and preceding chapters, we have seen examples of exploitation. Farmers or crew leaders who cheat poorly educated Mexican workers

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are guilty of exploitation. So are land developers who sell flood-prone colonia land without putting in the required water lines or drainage. The employers who wouldn’t let their undocumented maid go to a party also exploited her, if they did so to keep her dependent on them. We have already mentioned that maquila managers resist the idea that they exploit their workers. Low pay, by itself, is not the issue. American maquilas generally do pay somewhat better than their Mexican counterparts.10 They also provide workers additional noncash benefits that similar Mexican companies might not. But if American corporations work with the Mexican government to diminish the power of unions and get unions to take their side against workers, they can get away with paying the employees less than a living wage. Maquila managers are likely to respond to this by asserting that there is a glut of applicants for maquila jobs. True. But if it is exploitation for merchants to sharply raise prices during a natural disaster, then taking advantage of Mexico’s economic crisis to pay less than a living wage could also be considered exploitation. This introduces another important aspect of both bigotry and exploitation. Both involve practices considered illegitimate. Today, it is generally considered wrong to harm someone based on prejudice against the person’s race, class, religion, or sex (bigotry).11 It is also considered wrong to manipulate structural arrangements to hold someone down so that one can take advantage of the person (exploitation). The problem, though, is that definitions of what is legitimate change over time, place, and context and can be manipulated. In early US history, slaveholders were generally not seen as bigots or exploiters because social definitions of the time held that slaves were inferior (racism) and that slavery was actually a favor (“white man’s burden”). Today we find such beliefs patently absurd and entirely illegitimate. Something similar happens with the groups we have been discussing. Some managers consider paying maquila workers less than a living wage legitimate if they see themselves helping the Mexican economy or if jobs in Mexico are scarce. Migrant farmworkers can, in the same sense, legitimately be housed in primitive conditions and paid poverty wages if they are undocumented and less educated and can’t speak English. Colonia residents can be blamed for their problems if they buy land without improvements and don’t even register to vote. People similarly legitimize the exploitation of undocumented maids if they label the women “illegal aliens.” Indeed, this term legitimizes both bigotry and exploitation. In essence, it says that people who break the law don’t deserve protection. It also says that those who don’t belong (aliens) can’t expect

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equal treatment. This example illustrates another point. One structural advantage of higher class positions is the ability to shape definitions of legitimacy. Wealthy Mexicans can assert that their form of Spanish is correct and any Mexicans who speak Spanish associated with the lower classes are nacos. As damaging as the three preceding types of domination might be, the fourth type, structural bias, is arguably the main impediment to minorities breaking out of poverty today. Structural bias happens when the normal operation of arrangements and relations in a society produces harmful side effects to powerless groups and individuals. Job security, for example, is often based on seniority. That means the last people hired will be the first ones let go when layoffs occur. Whoever is lowest in seniority, the last ones hired, will be the first ones fired when the economy turns bad or jobs go overseas. Thus, a structural arrangement rather than bigots harms the newer workers, often members of minorities. Because such treatment is seen as unintentional, it is often considered legitimate. Other examples of structural bias are presented in previous chapters. Colonia residents have a fraction of the police protection of people in the cities because the sheriff’s department lacks a taxation system that would provide equitable fi nancing. The children of farmworkers fall behind in school because their migration takes them out of class early and moves them from district to district and often state to state. In addition, basing school funding on property values creates an educational system that gives school districts where the poor live about half the dollars per child as property-rich districts enjoy. Table CI.1 not only reintroduces the four types of discrimination presented earlier but expands each type in relation to our discussion of them throughout part I. Again, it compares these types of discrimination in reference to the source of harm (cultural attitudes or structural arrangements) and the intentionality of the harm (direct and intentional or indirect and unintentional).12 As table CI.1 shows, bigotry and cultural bias both result from cultural and personal attitudes and beliefs. Exploitation and structural bias, on the other hand, are the results of inequities in the structural arrangements and systems of society. Feagin uses the term “systemic racism” to encapsulate all the racial inequities built into society. We submit the term “systemic rankism” as a parallel form of class-based inequalities built into the institutions of society. Exploitation involves the intentional use of these inequitable systems to take advantage of powerless

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Table CI.1. Four types of discrimination in relation to race, ethnicity, and social class Degree of intentionality

Source of harm

Harm is direct and generally intentional

Harm is indirect and generally unintentional

Cultural and personal attitudes and beliefs

Bigotry (class/cultural/ racial bigotry)

Cultural bias (class/ ethnocentric/racial bias) —Cultural capital —Paternalism

Dominant class frame, Anglo cultural fame, white racial frame: Each includes a related stigma of inferiority about target groups. Each can produce both intentional and unintentional harm (and a denial of responsibility for that harm). Society-wide structural systems and arrangements

Exploitation

Structural bias

Systemic racism/systemic rankism (including structural elements of the vicious circle of inequality). Each can produce both intentional and unintentional harm.

groups or individuals, though for reasons of personal gain rather than prejudice. Structural bias is indirect and seemingly unintentional, as it derives from systems and structural arrangements that produce harmful collateral effects on powerless groups. As we have discussed, the two on the left in the table, bigotry and exploitation, are generally regarded as illegitimate, at least in today’s society. In contrast, the two on the right, cultural bias and structural bias, are often seen as legitimate forms of treatment since the resulting harm is generally unintentional, though perhaps no less damaging. If we accept this perspective, we would consider treatment by American maquiladora managers as a form of exploitation only if they deliberately manipulate the system to take unfair advantage of workers. If maquila managers systematically bribed government or union leaders to prevent workers from gaining better pay or working conditions, one could make a good case for exploitation. Since most American maquila managers avoid any payment of mordidas (bribes), however, little evidence exists to support such a claim.

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Still, there is little doubt that some exploitation does take place. Some American managers do pressure Mexican female workers into sexual liaisons with threats or with offers of special favors.13 Similarly, some maquila associations hold meetings on US soil to hold down pay increases in Mexico. Such practices might be considered collusion or price setting except that the workplaces are outside the United States and not governed by US law. Similarly, a few US manufacturers have taken plants to Mexico to avoid stricter environmental and labor law enforcement. To the extent that systems are deliberately manipulated to take unfair advantage of workers, such practices would be considered exploitation. Though some exploitation of maquila workers does take place, it may be more the exception than the rule. Many maquila plants provide more than the required benefits, and most American supervisors seem to treat their workers with respect. American managers also generally try to maintain high standards of health and safety. The harm suffered by most maquila workers appears to be more the result of structural bias than exploitation. Nevertheless, this is little consolation to poorly paid workers. When a truck runs over someone, it only helps a little to fi nd out it was unintentional. From the outside looking in, it may seem that poor or ethnic minorities never gain indirect advantage from cultural or structural understandings and/or arrangements. Since Spanish is the predominant language of South Texas, Mexican Americans should experience a positive form of cultural bias. They should get an “easy A” in Spanish classes, for example, and should have preference in jobs dealing with Mexican customers or clients. Though Mexican Americans do experience some occasional advantages, cultural and structural biases work against them far more often than in their favor. Because English is considered the dominant language in the school system, children whose native language is Spanish find themselves at a disadvantage in English-speaking classes. Then when they become bilingual, their ability to speak Spanish is often denigrated as “border Spanish” or “Tex-Mex.” Likewise, Spanish classes are often geared to writing rather than conversational skills, so much of their advantage disappears. To make matters worse, many Mexicans—especially those from the upper classes—who visit the area often call local Hispanics “pochos” or “nacos,” each an unflattering reference to their social class and inability to speak standard Spanish. It is not just the mixing of Spanish and English that bothers the Mexicans. It is the use of archaic expressions and the Spanish of the poor. “It drives me crazy,” said one Mexican student,

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“to hear educated people here in South Texas say ‘mi mueble’ instead of ‘mi carro’ [my car]; or ‘asina’ instead of ‘así’ [so].” This student would probably be shocked to discover that in Spain those who say “mi carro” instead of “mi coche” (my car) would also be regarded as uneducated and that “asina” was once the correct term that later became abandoned except in isolated rural areas. In essence, cultural and structural biases seldom work to the advantage of the poor and minorities because those with more power can use it to block changes that might disadvantage their own groups. The more powerful can also promote cultural or structural arrangements to their advantage, as well as cultural definitions of these modifications as legitimate. The Spanish invaders of Mexico rendered pre-Columbian Aztec and Mayan cultures meaningless or even savage. Similarly, early in South Texas history the culture and language of local Hispanics were labeled inferior. Until the mid-1970s, many schoolteachers and principals severely punished children for speaking Spanish. Ludi recalled what that was like. When I started school back in the 1950s, I didn’t speak any English. The only people I ever came in contact with were folks on the ranch, and they all spoke Spanish. One day, I went up to the teacher and asked her in Spanish if I could go to the bathroom. She paddled me for speaking Spanish. I remember standing there, tears running down my face and not knowing what I had done wrong. I felt so embarrassed, so ashamed and hurt. My parents couldn’t understand why it was so terrible to speak Spanish. They said, “If we are not ashamed of our language and our background, why should they take it away from us?”

This is the whole point. Minorities become powerless when others make them ashamed of their cultures and reinforce their class positions with stereotypes and power inequality. Structural inequality leads to inequality of culture, which in turn leads to internalization of the stigma of inferiority and great difficulty in breaking out of the vicious circle of inequality. As we’ll see in part II, Valley schools have played a key role in perpetuating the inequality of the South Texas borderlands.

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CHAPTER 5

The Pain of Gain: South Texas Schools Then and Now With Da niel P. K ing

There was a place on the playground with benches and an outdoor stage where the poor mexicanos usually ate their lunch. Every day, you could see them with the bolsas de papel, todas arrugadas [wrinkled paper bags]. You know, they had to use the same bag all week long. They would pull just enough of the taco out for one bite, and then they would hide it back in the sack. Some would even try to cover it with their hand. Of course everybody knew they were eating bean or potato tacos. We made them feel like their food wasn’t as good as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. M a rt i n V ill a r r e a l, 1990

Martin, like many Mexican Americans educated in South Texas schools, uses the Anglo pronunciation of his name (MAR-tin), rather than the Spanish version (Mar-TEEN). At an early age, he distanced himself from the low-income mexicanos. He lived close enough to the school to walk home for lunch. Also, his parents were not farmworkers. When he went away to a private school, he realized he had sided with the Anglos in discriminating against the low-income mexicanos. Martin attended school in the 1960s. Twenty years earlier, few Mexican Americans attended South Texas schools, and fewer still had Anglo classmates. Ethnic struggles in South Texas schools are part of the larger struggle of Mexican American and Anglo relations covering the past 150 years. These relations, documented by such writers as Oscar Martínez, David Montejano, Jerry Thompson, and other scholars,1 reveal a pattern of continuous interethnic confl ict, with an eventual period of accommodation and educational gains.2 Our primary concern in this chapter is with the gradual and ongoing struggles of Mexican

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Figure 5.1. Hispanic students were made to feel embarrassed and isolated for eating traditional Mexican food at school. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

American children, including the children of migrant farmworkers, in South Texas schools over the years 1945 to 2015.

The Research The topic of ethnic relations in South Texas schools has been a favorite for students conducting in-depth interviews for the Borderlife Project. Indeed, students have conducted an additional 180 in-depth interviews on this topic since 1999, when we published this book’s first edition.3 Many chose to explore situations they had experienced themselves. One student, for example, stated, “I thought researching ESL (English as a second language) programs would be fascinating. When I came here from Mexico at age six, I discovered I spoke the wrong language. The elementary school I had attended allowed me to interview six teachers and observe one class. I discovered they separated the ESL students from the rest of the students, thereby placing a label on them as ‘different.’ One teacher told me,

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The regular students think the ESL students are slow learners. One ESL parent even came in and demanded that her child be put in a regular class—and not with “the dumb kids of the ESL program.” She knew how the regular students treated her child and said that the ESL students seemed to do no “real work.”

Christla Brown, in a 2015 report for the Migration Policy Institute, argues that discrimination against Latino youths by their peers for not speaking English or not speaking it well in the classroom remains a serious challenge.4 In this book’s first edition, we presented findings from our Former Students Survey of 243 participants.5 Each interviewer found and interviewed five individuals—one who would have been a high school senior in each of five distinct time periods from 1945 to 1994. In that survey, we chose to use purposive sampling to select subjects because of our use of embedded researchers and due to the sensitivity of the topic. This approach fostered trust and openness, something that randomized interviews might not have achieved. In order to include the time covered by that publication and to show how things have changed since, we will present some of the findings of that earlier survey and compare them to research conducted from 1999 through 2015. This will include ethnographic accounts from the 180 Former Students Exploratory Interviews conducted from 1999 to 2010 and other sources that we identify as we present them. In a third strategy related to our research on South Texas schools, we compared data from the two preceding components involving former students with data extracted from high school yearbooks. In this subproject, we counted the number of Hispanics in a variety of categories of high school activities, showing changes in their proportional representation over the years. These three sources allowed us to identify and describe patterns of interethnic relations in Valley schools from the end of World War II through 2014.

The Historical Context Until the end of World War II, the social dominance of Anglos over Mexican Americans was so deeply ingrained throughout Texas that Anglos only occasionally needed force to sustain it.6 As a result, many

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Mexican Americans did not understand that they were victimized. One woman who attended school during this time said she could not recall a time when an Anglo teacher treated her badly. “As for Anglo students,” she said, “I couldn’t say, because I never associated with them. I vividly remember my tenth-grade English teacher. She was a wonderful person who inspired me to be the best that I could be. She would tell me that just because I was a ‘brownie’ didn’t mean I wasn’t intelligent.” Neither the segregation of Mexican Americans from Anglo students nor her teacher’s paternalistic reference to Mexican Americans as “brownies” registered as discrimination to this woman. Many student interviewers reported similar responses among the former students they interviewed. More than half the individuals interviewed who were of school age in the 1940s and 1950s claimed to have experienced little or no discrimination. Much of the evidence now available suggests that the culture of the period so thoroughly legitimized segregation and castelike treatment that even victims of discrimination could easily believe they did not experience it.7 Crispín Araya described an incident in 1930, when he was only five years old. We were living in Los Indios, Texas. One day, an Anglo man came to our house looking for my father. We rarely had visitors at our house, much less Anglo visitors. So when my mother realized who it was, she immediately put her head down and kept her eyes on the floor. I remember seeing her do this, and I followed her example. We both stared at his muddy boots while he asked, in Spanish, to see my father. At that point, my father appeared. I could tell at once that he was very upset with us, but he dismissed us until he fi nished talking to the Anglo. Then he demanded an explanation from my mother. He told her that the visitor was only a man, not a saint. She said, “But Chago, he is an Anglo.” My mother had been made to feel that she was a guest in her own birth country.

Not only had she been made to feel like she didn’t belong, but she had internalized a critical aspect of the white racial frame—that Anglos were superior and were to be treated with deference. The structure and the content of public schools of that time also emphasized this lesson of Hispanic inferiority and segregation.8 Chicano studies scholar Gilbert Gonzalez argues that “during the segregation period, Americanization was the prime objective of the education of Mexican children.”9

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Yet, so-called Mexican schools were physically inferior. Mexican American children used textbooks discarded by Anglo schools. The Anglo children learned a white racial frame that taught them that Mexicans were inferior. Mexican-origin children, in turn, learned that they had to show deference to Anglos (like Crispín and his mother in the preceding account) and had to be kept in their place.10 Mexican children were taught a race-based stigma of inferiority and shown that they were dirty and could not become clean.11 María Sanchez, who attended what was called a “Mexican school” in the 1940s, recalled this process. “Though we were careful about personal hygiene,” she said, “the teachers had a weekly ritual of checking our hair for lice. Every Monday morning, they would line us up and use two pencils to search for head lice. I can still remember the feeling of embarrassment.” Paula attended a small Mexican school briefly in the early 1940s. As with many Mexican Americans of the time, economics rather than segregation caused her to drop out of school. She recalled, Sometimes Mother would not have any money for new shoes, so she cut cardboard to put inside the old ones to make them last. I didn’t learn to read or write while I was young. The Anglos were the only ones in school back then. Most of us Mexican Americans were picking their fields and cleaning their homes, struggling just to make it to the next day.

A watershed moment in South Texas education during the Chicano era of the late 1960s to early 1980s was the Edcouch-Elsa High School student walkout of November 14, 1968.12 The walkout was a response to the tumultuous events of 1968 nationally and the repressive and disrespectful treatment that Mexican-origin students were experiencing. In 1968, Chicano students left their Edcouch-Elsa High School classrooms in protest. Their goals focused on gaining full and equal participation on the student council, learning about the contributions of Mexican-origin peoples as a natural component of the curriculum, and especially having the right to speak Spanish freely on school grounds without punishment. The month that followed the walkout brought student arrests, suspensions, and expulsions, school board meetings, and growing community activism. The walkout culminated in a December 1968 jury trial and settlement whereby the student demands were met and the process

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of ensuring the full participation of Mexican-origin students, teachers, and administrators in South Texas school districts began.13 By the 1990s, many Mexican Americans in South Texas favored educational assimilation. A McAllen father said he did not want his two daughters enrolled in bilingual programs, believing they promoted paternalistic treatment. “These programs tell our children they need special concessions other students don’t need,” he complained. A 1988 study by the Educational Testing Service confirmed the extent of such opposition, though for other reasons. Seventy-eight percent of Mexican American parents responded that they opposed teaching in Spanish if it meant less time for English.14 Such results, however, did not mean that Mexican Americans in South Texas were ready to give up their language or their culture. Most wanted their children to speak both languages fluently. Indeed, South Texans of Mexican origin often criticize Hispanics who do not speak Spanish.

Patterns of Change We get an idea of how much Valley schools excluded Mexican Americans by comparing their representation in the Valley population to their representation among the ranks of high school seniors, teachers, and school administrators over a sixty-nine-year period, 1945–2014.15 Data for this comparison, presented in chart 5.1, come from a 1994 study by Dianne Betts and Daniel Slottje and data from the US Census Bureau,16 as well as our study of yearbooks from ten Valley high schools.17 Chart 5.1 shows that Mexican Americans formed the majority of the Valley population over the entire period. Though they were 64 percent of the four-county Valley population in 1950, they made up only 23 percent of the senior classes in the high schools that year. In 1950 only 7 percent of Valley teachers were Mexican Americans, and not even one of the principals or superintendents of the ten high schools we examined was Hispanic. Mexican Americans were clearly outsiders and generally treated as such. In subsequent decades, the percentage of seniors who were Hispanic caught up with and passed the total percentage of the Valley population that was Hispanic. This is a result of higher birth rates among the Hispanic population yielding more school-age children than other ethnic groups in the region. Recent enrollment data from the Texas Education Agency reveal that Hispanics in 2014 made up 97.6 percent of the students in South Texas schools.18

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Chart 5.1. Hispanic representation in four categories related to Rio Grande Valley

schools, 1950–2010 Sources: High School Yearbook Study; US Census Bureau, decennial census.

According to the data shown in chart 5.1, Hispanic seniors and school administrators in 2010 had come to represent a higher percentage in schools than the proportion of Hispanics in the overall Valley population. While the proportion of Hispanic teachers has increased markedly over time, Hispanic teachers do not yet match the percentage of Hispanic student or South Texas population in the schools. Hispanic high school administrators, though, now exceed the proportion of Hispanic students. While these data suggest that the gap in representation of Hispanic teachers and administrators has disappeared or greatly narrowed, we examine how the treatment of Hispanic students has changed over time. Student-Initiated Discrimination In the 1950s, not all Anglos were segregated from Mexican Americans. Frank’s parents were Anglo, but because they were poor, he lived on the Hispanic side of McAllen. He said, My brother and I were the only Anglos in our neighborhood. The rest were all Hispanics. We grew up with them, played with them, and became good friends. At least that’s what we believed. As we got older, things began to change. One day, a group of us went for a swim at Cascade pool. When we got there, they told us only whites were allowed in the pool. So my brother and I went for a swim while the Hispanic kids waited for us. Bad choice. They called us every name in the book, in-

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Figure 5.2.

Mexican and Anglo schoolchildren swapping food. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

cluding “white trash” and “traitors.” From then on, we were enemies. One day, I was walking home from a football game. One of the kids I grew up with beat me up. It was crazy. The Hispanics didn’t want us because we were gringos, and the Anglos didn’t like us because we lived with the Mexicans. We were outcasts. It’s something I never got over.

The saddest part of Frank’s story, one that he said little about, is how the system of segregation put kids at odds with each other, forcing them to choose sides. This system included segregated neighborhoods, swimming pools, and schools. Such systems make enemies out of childhood friends. In such situations, name calling and fights frequently erupt. The “white trash” label his former friends used suggests that some of the hostility was based on his low class position as well as on his race or ethnicity. In the earlier periods, our ethnographic accounts suggest that Anglo students also frequently ridiculed Mexican food. Some Mexican Americans internalized this bias. María Gaetán recalled a Mexican American boy who wanted to be accepted by the Anglos. “One day,” she said, “he was making fun of a girl because she was eating a tortilla. While he was laughing at her, some tortillas fell out of his own lunch box. He was really embarrassed because everyone could see he was in the same situation.” As time went on, Mexican food ceased being an object of extreme

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embarrassment. Antonio remembered how this changed. “One day,” he said, “some Anglo kids saw my tacos and asked me to trade a taste of their lunch for one of mine. From then on, we traded lunch every day. I’d get a ham and cheese sandwich and they’d get homemade tacos. Those ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread weren’t all that great, but that’s what I wanted to be seen eating”—a rather clear indication of the desire to avoid the stigma of inferiority associated with things Mexican. In the Former Students Survey, we asked the forty to fifty individuals from each of the decades studied how often Anglos made fun of Mexican American food or clothes and called them names. Similarly, we asked how frequently Mexican Americans made fun of Anglos in Spanish and called Anglos names. Responses reflect those who answered “Frequently” for each statement. The results presented in chart 5.2 show how such practices, as remembered by respondents, changed over the years 1945 to 1994. It is interesting to note that the two forms of Anglo-initiated discrimination, which in the 1945–1954 period were the highest, had become the lowest by the 1985–1994 period. In contrast, name calling and ridicule of Anglos by Mexican Americans was reported at virtually the same levels in the last period as it was in the 1955–1964 period. The explanation is likely related to demographic change. Anglo

Chart 5.2. Frequency of cross-ethnic discrimination in Rio Grande Valley schools as

reported by former students, 1945–1994 Source: Former Students Survey, 1994.

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students had become a small minority of all students in the schools by the latter period and beyond. In fact, in some high schools, especially those in smaller towns, one could find few Anglo students by 1994. This is reflected in an interview with a graduate of Pharr–San Juan–Alamo (PSJA) High School during the latter part of the Chicano era. “When I was in high school,” he said, “many of us Mexican [American] students didn’t like the Anglos. If they weren’t smart enough to enroll somewhere else, some of us would pick a fight with them. Most eventually moved to different schools. We only had four Anglos in a senior class of 404 students.” Furthermore, as the setting in South Texas schools changed to reflect more Hispanic teachers, administrators, and school board members, the educational climate also became more accommodating of Hispanic culture and students. In addition, the Migration Policy Institute found that schools with more diversity at all levels within the school—principals, teachers, staff, and students—reduced the likelihood of discriminatory incidents.19 Though some Anglos may experience hostile treatment in Valley high schools today, they do not experience it to the same degree or in the same forms that Mexican Americans did in the early years. The ethnic segregation in those years has largely been replaced by interaction based on social class. In fact, interethnic mixing by 1994 had become rather common, as the survey data presented in chart 5.3 show. The chart, based on recollections of high school students in each of same five periods, reveals a pronounced pattern of increased interaction across ethnic lines. Though all forms of mixing had greatly increased, the most personal forms, such as dancing together and dating, remained somewhat below the less personal forms the entire time. Only if we understand the extent of segregated relations in the earlier periods can we appreciate the magnitude of this change. Dating between Anglos and Mexican Americans in the earlier periods was a common taboo. Enrique Cásarez remembered a girl from Indiana in his English class during the 1960s. “I asked her for a date,” he recalled, “and she said she’d go out with me. Two or three days later, she told me she couldn’t. When I asked why, she flat-out said, ‘My friends told me they couldn’t be my friends if I go out with you.’ I said, ‘Okay, that’s your decision.’” In the earlier years, the segregation in personal relationships was not limited to dances and dating. Mary remembered an Anglo friend in the 1950s who rode to school with her on the same school bus. “One day,” she recalled, “my friend asked me to sit with her. I got up from the back of the bus where we Mexicans were and sat down by her. The bus driver

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Chart 5.3. Frequency of cross-ethnic student interactions between Hispanics and Anglos in the Rio Grande Valley as reported by former students, 1945–1994 Source: Former Student Survey, 1994.

saw us together in his rearview mirror. He stopped the bus and ordered me to get back where I belonged. Humiliated, I went to the back of the bus. I never pulled that stunt again.” Still, charts 5.2 and 5.3 show that some Mexican American students were included during the earlier periods. Nevertheless, such crossethnic mixing almost always was between Anglos and Mexican Americans who were considered high-class. Sam is a Mexican American of light complexion who attended McAllen High School in the 1955–1964 period. He said, I joined the varsity football team and soon became popular with the jocks. I was once almost crowned prom king. I lost by a couple of votes. I felt sorry for the other Mexican Americans. I wanted to be friendly with them, but if I had, my Anglo friends would have ridiculed me. I wish I had done it anyway. A few years ago I went to a class reunion. I felt like a hypocrite because I was the only Hispanic there. I left after a couple of minutes.

One striking aspect of many of the stories of exclusion from the earlier periods is the resignation with which many accepted it. Charlie Martinez said, “You always had a couple of Hispanics in groups like student council. But most of the time the Anglos had all the positions. They could communicate better and had more confidence. Things were just like that.”

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Chart 5.4. Inclusion of Mexicans Americans in student activities in Rio Grande Valley schools as reported by former students or recorded by yearbook count, 1945–2010 Sources: Former Student Survey, 1994, and High School Yearbook Study.

Charlie’s comment illustrates how certain aspects of the white racial frame (and the stigma of Hispanic inferiority) could be accepted as facts of life by some Hispanic students. Similarly, Linda remembered always trying to impress the Anglo girls. “I even tried out for cheerleading,” she said. “This was in 1958. On the day of the tryouts I noticed I was the only Hispanic girl with dark legs. I ran out of there and never tried out for anything again.” Graciela de la Garza, a junior at McAllen High School during the same time, also attempted to become a cheerleader but faced a reaction of bigotry from the Anglo girls. “When I went to the tryouts,” she said, “everyone looked at me like I was weird. Finally, someone came over and told me they didn’t need someone with a Mexican accent ruining their cheers. I felt so bad I just walked out.” Anglos who engaged in such racist discrimination were able to cast themselves as something besides bigots. Though they rejected most Mexican Americans, it was for a supposedly bad accent, too dark a complexion, poor performance in academic subjects, and so forth. The fact that some Mexican Americans were allowed to participate made the exclusion seem legitimate. “If you can only be like the good Hispanics,” they seemed to say, “we would be happy to accept you.” The extent of inclusion of Hispanic students as cheerleaders, class officers, most popular, and football quarterbacks from 1945 to 2010 is reflected in chart 5.4. In this chart, the data for 1945 to 1994 are the results of our Former Students Survey. The results from 1995 to 2010 are derived from a more recent analysis of high school yearbooks. We

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found, when we published Batos in 1999, that the results of these two data studies corresponded quite closely. Hence, we chose to use our analysis of high school yearbooks to extend the analysis to 2010. This analysis leads us to conclude that the pattern of inclusion identified up to 1994 continued and increased by 2010, with Mexican American students being accepted in each of the four categories in numbers close to their actual percentage representation in the schools. The extent and pace of the change are reflected in chart 5.4. It shows how often survey subjects from 1945 to 1994 recall Mexican Americans frequently occupying key student positions. In the 1950 yearbooks, only 12 percent of cheerleaders in the ten high schools examined were Hispanic. By the end of this first period in 1994, the data in the chart had risen to near 80 percent, in increments much like the curve shown in chart 5.4. Similarly, in 1950, according to our yearbook count, only 10 percent of student council officers were Hispanic, with the figure rising to 96 percent by 2010. Teacher-Initiated Discrimination We also asked students from each period to describe how teachers and other school personnel treated Mexican American students during the five decades. Not all accounts were negative. Omar remembered getting home from school one afternoon in the early 1950s and fi nding his mother, who had stomach cancer, very ill. She had run out of medicine. We were so poor that we couldn’t afford a car, and the nearest drug store was several miles away in Weslaco. I was really worried and didn’t know what to do. The next day I told my coach about it. Though he was sometimes a mean person, like all other whites we knew, he offered to take me to Weslaco to buy my mother’s medication. Though my mother passed away a short time later, I have never forgotten his kind act.

Respondents from the Former Students Exploratory Interviews often spoke of how difficult it was to get teachers to pay attention to them. “We needed help,” said Juan Narvaez, “but most of the time we got none. So in time, we learned to stay quiet.” Estela Almendarez, a sixtyyear old woman living in Pharr, agreed. “Back then,” she said, “Mexican Americans were in limbo in the school. Unless you were having a fit, they wouldn’t recognize you. They were trying to reach the Anglos.

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They were constantly hinting to us, the Mexican Americans, that we weren’t the equal of the Anglos.” In the Former Students Survey, we asked respondents from each period how often teachers ignored Hispanic students, made fun of their errors, or punished them more harshly than Anglo students. We also asked how often, when they were in high school, they remembered Mexican American teachers treating Hispanic students more harshly than did the Anglo teachers. The results, by ten-year periods, are presented in chart 5.5. All forms of teacher discrimination except treatment by Mexican American teachers follow a similar pattern.20 That is, declining discrimination from the first period to the second, then a resurgence in the third, followed by a continuing decline in the fourth and fifth periods. The increase in the third period, we suspect, was a backlash against the Chicano movement that characterized this period. Many former students reported that efforts by Chicano students to assert their rights were met by increased harshness from teachers and administrators.21 Only after they had established these rights and increasing numbers of Mexican Americans remained in school did the mistreatment decline.22 The somewhat different pattern of discrimination by Mexican American teachers against Mexican American students shown in chart 5.5 requires a different explanation. Why did it increase from the first to the second period? Why did it decline from the second to the third period while other forms of teacher discrimination were increasing? Two fac-

Chart 5.5. Frequency of teacher discrimination against Latino students in Rio Grande Valley schools as reported by former students, 1945–1994 Source: Former Student Survey, 1994.

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Figure 5.3. In trouble

(again) with the teacher. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

tors seem important. First, teachers who were Hispanic in the early period were the first ones allowed into the previously all-Anglo teaching ranks. No doubt, they were carefully screened to ensure they had the proper view according to administrators. They also knew the Anglos were watching them for any leniency toward Mexican American students. In such an atmosphere, many Hispanic teachers appear to have bent over backward to show no favorites or, conversely, to show preferential treatment of Anglo students. Olga learned this the hard way in high school. She said, On my way to class, a group of Anglo boys started picking on me, chanting, “Dirty, stinky Mexican!” I tried to keep walking, but they wouldn’t let me out of their circle. I looked around for a teacher and saw Mr. Gonzalez. He saw them, but he just kept walking. I felt stabbed in the back by one of my own people. Just then, Mr. Smith stepped in and stopped the boys. He made them apologize and dragged them to the principal’s office. I was grateful for his help but could never understand why Mr. Gonzalez wouldn’t help me.

The Great Divide Even after schools were desegregated, many classrooms remained divided. Increasingly, Mexican Americans of light complexion who could

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speak English without an accent were included with the Anglos. The message was clear: “Start looking and talking like us and we’ll accept you—well, almost.” Ana Valencia was one of those allowed to cross over. She recalled how it felt to be treated as an “honorary white” and the clear white racial framing it communicated. My first-grade teacher liked me and gave me lots of attention. My parents taught us English before we started school. She treated me nicer than the kids with darker skin tone or those who didn’t speak English. She hardly paid any attention to them. One day, she divided the classroom into two groups. On her left side, she put the darker Mexican Americans. On her right were the white students. I was Hispanic, but she put me with the white students. Then she said, “I’ve divided you so I can remember the ones that need the most help.” After that, everyone stayed with their group, on the playground or in the classroom. Our group could roam around for free time, and she was always more helpful to us. For a while, I began to think I was white.

In the first period of our study, from 1945 to 1954, classes were often divided. Alicia recalled having to sit in the back of the classroom in the third grade because that was where the “Mexicans” belonged. We were never to speak Spanish at any time. One day I got caught speaking Spanish to my friend because I hardly knew any English. The teacher came up to me and slapped me across the face and told me never to speak Spanish in her class again. So the rest of the year I kept quiet and never said a word in class again. The following year, I just quit going to school completely. I haven’t set foot in a classroom since.

During the 1965–1974 period, more Hispanic students made it through high school to graduation. Still, few were encouraged to go on to college.23 Roberto Salinas, during his senior year in high school, made the all-district team and was captain over the linebackers. One day, I went to the coach’s office to talk about where to go to college. He said, “Now Roberto, son, you’re a damn good hitter, but that’s all you’ll ever be. Join the service, where they need men like you, or find a good vocational school that will accept you. But, forget about college. It’s too hard for you.” I couldn’t accept that, so I went to a counselor for advice. He told me the same thing! I did join the service, but afterwards, I graduated from college.

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Chart 5.6. Frequency of administrative tracking of Mexican American students in

Rio Grande Valley schools as reported by former students, 1945–1994 Source: Former Student Survey, 1994.

In the Former Students Survey, we asked about the ways Mexican American students were tracked away from college. We asked respondents from each period how often during their school years teachers, counselors, or principals discouraged Mexican Americans from going to college. We asked how often counselors encouraged Mexican Americans to join the military or get a job in unskilled labor. Finally, we asked how often college-prep courses were mainly for Anglos and vocational courses were mainly for Mexican Americans. The percentages from each period who answered “Frequently” are shown in chart 5.6. The responses reveal a pattern strikingly similar to that of treatment by teachers (chart 5.5). There, as here, the percentage of “Frequent” responses on each item declined from the first to the second period, went back up in the third period, and then declined for the fourth period. Demographics and political change may explain much of this pattern of declining discouragement for Hispanic higher education. By the 1956– 1964 period, Hispanics who made it to high school were often the few, usually light-skinned, and well assimilated. They probably did not experience a great deal of discrimination. Desegregation brought many others in the third period who had to be admitted but were still regarded as unsuited for college. By the fourth period, politics made such bigotry unacceptable. In addition, by this time, Hispanic students far outnumbered Anglos in the high schools. In the fi nal period, 1985–1994, around 20 percent of respondents reported that Mexican Americans were still being tracked into vocational courses or away from college. How has this changed since 1994? Though no one has asked the

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same questions either locally or nationally since we conducted our survey, in 2012 Terri Ross and colleagues reported the results of a nationwide study of ninth-graders by the National Center for Education Statistics. The study found that 60 percent of Asian ninth-graders and 51 percent of white ninth-graders had high school guidance counselors in their schools whose primary goal was to help students plan and prepare for postsecondary education. The comparable figures for black and Hispanic ninth-graders were 44 percent and 41 percent, respectively. At the bottom were American Indian and Alaska Native ninth-graders, only 29 percent of whom received similar encouragement and assistance in preparing for college.24

Sink or Swim: English as a Second Language (ESL) A large proportion of South Texas children start school not understanding English. One of our student interviewers, a former ESL student herself, noted, “I came to this country at the age of six to fi nd that I spoke the wrong language. Though I hardly remember my transition into English, I had to go through the programs in elementary school in order to become a fluent English speaker.” Chavela Rincón, a former ESL teacher, lamented the separateness associated with ESL instruction. The program may seem to run well, but even though the classes are in the same school, the children are sometimes made to feel like outcasts. They are not only labeled by the other students but sometimes even by the teachers. When I was an ESL teacher, our children were not included when the other children went on school trips. Those were the little things that would add up.

Eighteen-year-old Veronica had dropped out of school and her ESL program because, she told her interviewer, “I didn’t like school.” Further probing revealed deeper-rooted problems. After she gained trust in her interviewer, she confided, When I was in school they [teachers and administrators] treated me like I was dumb. They couldn’t see that I just didn’t understand what they were telling me. It’s really hard when you don’t understand the language that well. Also the English-speaking kids were really mean and rude. They would call us ESL students “mojados,” the “Mexican” or

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the “Spanish” kids. They would sometimes even tell us to go back to Mexico.

Then: The No-Spanish Rule Before there were bilingual education programs, Texas schools had a sink-or-swim approach. They would put English learners into a class and forbid them to speak Spanish in the class or on the school grounds. This was even done in segregated classes in which all the students were learning English. Advocates claimed that this method helped children become bilingual faster than bilingual or ESL programs. A few of the people we interviewed said they were glad the teachers let them only speak English. “If they hadn’t pushed us, who would have?” remarked one man who went through the English-only system. When asked if Hispanics were made to feel like dunces, he responded, “Not all the teachers were harsh and mean. Some actually cared, and that’s why we never quit.” Nonetheless, in the early periods when the English-only rule was in force, punishments were often extreme. Thirty-eight percent of our survey respondents from the first period said that violations of the rule were frequently punished with physical force, and another 32 percent said physical force was occasionally used. Martha Salazar remembered what these punishments were like. When I was in grade school, the only girl I could talk to was my friend Nelda. At school, we were punished if we spoke any Spanish. We were both embarrassed to speak English, though, because we couldn’t speak it well. So we would talk quietly to each other in Spanish. One day, some girls heard us talking Spanish. They said they were going to tell the teacher. A few minutes later our teacher approached us. She sent us to the office and we each got a spanking. When we got back to our classroom, she made us face different corners. Then we had to write, “I will not speak in Spanish” five hundred times.

Sometimes the no-Spanish rule was used as a cloak for bigotry. Minerva remembered an incident when she was in fourth grade. Our principal hated us Mexican Americans. One day a new boy came to our school. His English was very bad, so he was speaking in Spanish when the principal passed by. He reached out and grabbed the new boy

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and shook him very hard. Then he got a paddle and hit this boy. Then he turned to the rest of us and said the same thing would happen to us if he caught any of us speaking Spanish. The new boy never came back to school, and I never spoke Spanish in school again.

Another consequence of the English-only system was to turn Hispanic children against each other. A former student recalled, “One boy who really wanted to get on the teacher’s good side was always looking for someone to report. One day he told the teacher, ‘Look, Miss, he’s laughing in Spanish.’ The teacher just laughed at his comment, and he felt hurt. Some kids would try anything to be a teacher’s pet, even if it meant telling on their friends.” Perhaps worse was that the English-only rule deprived children of the means to communicate even basic information, leading to confusion and serious injustices. Lupe remembered when a boy who sat next to him had to go to the bathroom. Neither of us knew how to ask in English, but the Anglo kids always said, “May I be excused?” All I could remember was “Beskuse” because I thought that was the English word for bathroom. We weren’t allowed to talk in class, so I was whispering it to him. He kept telling me, “No entiendo” [I don’t understand], so I repeated it louder until our teacher came over and reprimanded both of us. I was upset, so I stood up and pointed to Toño, my friend, and said, “Beskuse, beskuse.” It was evident she didn’t understand, so I tried telling her in Spanish. Then she got even more upset. So we both got in trouble and he ended up wetting his pants. Until junior high, I thought the English name for restroom was “beskuse.”

Lastly, the no-Spanish rule seems to have made many students in those earlier years ashamed of their Mexican heritage, internalizing an ethnic-based stigma of inferiority. A student interviewer, Daniela, recounted the story of her great-aunt Sara, who attended South Texas schools in the 1960s in rural northern Hidalgo County. Sara is predominately an English speaker and will speak Spanish only when it is absolutely necessary. She considers herself not Mexican American, Latina, or Hispanic but rather American. Daniela asked her great-aunt about the no-Spanish rule. Sara recalled, “The no-Spanish rule was around the whole time I went to school. I didn’t know any other way.” Commenting further, Sara said, “I think the rule was good. It taught us a

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better way of communicating. English was what was going to help us in the real world, not Spanish. People who knew only Spanish were the lower-educated. They were the ones working out in the fields. I didn’t want to work in the fields.” This account illustrates an important point. Cultural bias and even bigotry can be learned from the way relationships are structured. In this account, Sara discerned without anyone needing to tell her that people of a darker skin tone were the laborers and the poor. People of a lighter skin tone were the more desirable—the higher-class. As a result, even children may come to see Spanish with a stigma of inferiority, as a language of the poor, without being specifically taught that. When Daniela pressed her great-aunt about ethnicity, Sara stated emphatically, “I was not born in Mexico, nor were any of my relatives. I am an American. I don’t mean to say that people from Mexico are below me. I am just proud of being an American because that is where I am from, not from Mexico.” Daniela confided that she thought the noSpanish rule had robbed her aunt of her heritage such that “she learned to despise anything having to do with Spanish. Spanish was a negative, therefore Mexico was a negative. She calls herself an American to show the separation between her and those that she considers lower than herself—Mexicans.” Now: ESL and Bilingual Education, 1995–2015 Today, almost no students report being punished for speaking Spanish. Most bilingual programs encourage speaking both languages. Because of migration and higher birth rates among Hispanics, 97.6 percent of students in the 2014–2015 school year were Mexican American in the state education system’s Region 1, which is comprised of the seven border counties from Laredo to Brownsville in South Texas.25 Of all Region 1 students, 36.5 percent were classified as “limited English proficient” (LEP).26 Instead of LEP, some prefer the term “English language learner” (ELL).27 By comparison, 17 percent of Texas public school children and 15 percent of all US public school children were so classified in 2014.28 For the South Texas counties of Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, Webb, and Willacy, the rates of LEP residents are 29.2 percent, 31.9 percent, 50.3 percent, 46.9 percent, and 19.8 percent, respectively.29 Federal guidelines forbid schools from using LEP status to segregate students or exclude them from participating in extracurricular activities.30 Because many LEP students either come from Mexico or

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Figure 5.4. Two

Hispanic boys isolated from other students consider dropping out of school—effects of structural bias and class bigotry. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

have parents who are immigrants, separation and exclusion appear to be much more common than federal guidelines allow. Sometimes other students do the excluding. Sergio, a student from Mexico, described what it was like to be a new student and not know how to speak English. I could never understand how kids that looked just like me and had Spanish names just like mine could make me feel so bad about being Mexican. I never knew I could feel embarrassed to speak Spanish. When I came to school here, I would never talk to anybody from regular classes, only to the kids that were in my class, the ones that only spoke Spanish like I did. I didn’t feel embarrassed with them.

Some teachers also treat LEP students as outsiders and reinforce the stigma of inferiority and cultural bias associated with not speaking English well. Ericka recalled when she started school.

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I didn’t like being in my LEP class because the kids that spoke English would always say really ugly things about us. Even worse, some teachers were also mean to us. Once, all seventh graders did well on a test, so they gave us a field trip to the movies. Three of my friends and I had never been to the movies, so we were really excited when we fi nally got on the bus. As we sat down, a teacher asked us what we were doing there. My friends and I just looked at each other. All the kids in the bus stopped talking and stared at us. The teacher told us to get off the bus, so we did. When our teacher, Ms. Fernandez, asked us why we were not on the bus we told her what happened. She was so angry she started to cry. She took us back to the bus and asked that teacher why she had ordered us off. She answered, “They cannot go because they are not in regular classes.” Ms. Fernandez told her, “They will go because they are students of this school and they have been working even harder than the kids in regular classes.” Ms. Fernandez sat with us all the time on that field trip. It felt good to have someone speak out for us, but I was so embarrassed I didn’t even really want to go any more. All the kids were staring at us and whispering things. I will never forget that day.

Emilio, another student from Mexico, at the age of nine was placed in a bilingual classroom specially designed to accommodate recent immigrant students from Mexico. But the program did not work well for Mexican children who had not attended school regularly or at all in Mexico. They not only had to learn English but had to learn to read and write in Spanish first. Many teachers in this program felt overwhelmed by how much time they had to spend with these children. Sadly, some teachers saw it as a waste of time. Emilio spent two years in the program without learning enough English to be moved to regular classes. So, at age eleven, he was put into a special education class. He said, My teacher gave me a paper for my mom to read and sign. Two days later they told me I was going to go to another classroom where I could learn better. When I arrived, I felt sorry for the kids in wheelchairs and others who could hardly speak at all. There was a girl wearing a helmet and other kids were just talking to themselves. I could not understand how I was going to learn more there.31

One of Emilio’s former teachers, Ms. Amado, identified how the system for sorting kids can create cultural and structural bias. She stated,

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There was nothing that wrong with Emilio. He was a bit hyperactive, but he was very bright. They only sent him to special education because they did not want to deal with him. If he had been born here, he probably would have been diagnosed with ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] and given adequate attention and treatment. But he was a kid from Mexico, and they are not treated the same as those born in the United States. They just gave up on him and he dropped out.

High-Stakes Tests: A Texas Obsession? A more subtle form of tracking Mexican-origin students has come about in recent years in Texas because of state-mandated standardized tests. In 1984, the Texas legislature—in part influenced by businessman Ross Perot—passed a bill instituting TEAMS (Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills) testing to make schools more businesslike and teachers more accountable. Students were to be tested every other year and were not allowed to graduate if they could not pass the eleventh-grade test. Then, in 1991, the Texas legislature upped the pressure with TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills) testing, with higher standards and even more tests. Still not satisfied, the legislature made things even more complicated in 2004 with TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills), which required testing for more subjects and students to pass tests for third grade, eighth grade, and eleventh grade before they could go on to the next grades. Teachers complained that huge amounts of their time had to be dedicated to teaching to the test, placing considerable stress on them and their students. A high school counselor said, My job is not fun. I have to tell students who have taken the TAKS three or four times that they still have not passed on their most recent effort. They get embarrassed because of their age and get teased by other students. It is really heartbreaking to see students with potential give up on their education and settle for working at minimum-wage jobs. I had seven students who were in the top of their classes not pass. One test should not be such a determining factor.32

Still not satisfied, in 2007 the Texas legislature mandated a new testing system to replace TAKS. The state commissioner of education announced the development of this new regimen and its name, STAAR

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Figure 5.5. There should be more to school than just testing. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

(State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness), in 2010. It was fi rst administered in 2012. The initial format included fifteen exit tests. The tests would count 15 percent of a student’s grade, and anyone who failed the Algebra 2 or English 3 test would not be eligible to enter any public four-year college or university in Texas. By this time, however, not only teachers but parents were angry. In 2013, facing backlash from parents, the legislature reduced this to five tests. But even with the reduced number of exit exams, upward of twenty-five thousand high school seniors faced not graduating. In May 2015, just weeks before the first graduating class under this new testing system was set to walk the stage— or not—the legislature empowered local school districts to waive up to three of the five tests, but only for the first two years of the test. A high school student, Franco, asked, “What’s the point of trying to pass your courses and get good grades when one test will ultimately decide whether we can walk on the stage with our friends to get our diploma? It’s embarrassing if we don’t pass. I think they should go back to teaching the way it was when my parents were in school.” Texas went way beyond other states in high-stakes testing. But the re-

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sults of this effort do not appear to justify the effort. SAT scores, which determine college readiness, have not improved significantly in Texas over the period covered by these tests. As a result, even many prominent proponents who initially supported the tests as a way to improve accountability turned against them.33 In addition, 80 percent of Texas school boards joined a resolution opposing so much high-stakes testing.34 Together, these initiatives point to increasing evidence that the tests are inclined to measure mainly test-taking ability and to pressure teachers and administrators to abandon real teaching in favor of teaching to the test. Even by 2000 it was obvious that minority and low-income students tended to do poorly on state-mandated exams and that schools with large populations of these students fared badly not only in state ranking but in funding too. By the end of the 1990s, nearly 30 percent of Texas black and Hispanic students were failing the ninth-grade tests, and the cumulative rates of grade retention were almost twice as high for these minority students as for white students.35 To avoid getting an unacceptable rating, some schools started placing limited-English Latino students in special education and other programs in which they were not required to take the exams.36 Students with limited English were often placed in bilingual or ESL classes to exempt them from taking the mandated tests so their low scores would not count against a school’s classification. This increased the likelihood that some such bilingual students would remain in these programs longer than necessary in order to keep the overall scores of their schools high. One ESL teacher said, “The sad part of this situation is that some kids stay in the same classroom and at the same level going over the basics of English year after year because one exam not given in their native language is used to measure their success and ability to learn.” In recent years, however, an immigrant who has been in US schools for longer than three years is not eligible for an exemption from the standardized test under any circumstances.

Changes in School Dropout Rates When we published the first edition of Batos in 1999, the dropout rate for Hispanic students in Texas was higher than 50 percent. Since then the rate has fallen to around 30 percent, as shown in chart 5.7. While the decline in dropout rates is encouraging, the gap between white and Hispanic rates, though narrower now than in 1999–2000, is exactly the

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Chart 5.7. Texas public school dropout rate, by race or ethnicity, 1985–2014 Source: Texas Education Agency, Secondary School Completion and Dropouts and equivalent reports for various years.

same eighteen-point spread that it was in 1985–1986. Many black and Hispanic children are still being left behind. Solid College Preparation and Its Impact on Dropout Rates The decline in Texas’s dropout rates since their high around 2000 perhaps is partly due to the growing awareness that high school is not enough and that college has become increasingly important for upward mobility. Hispanic parents in South Texas in recent years have become strong advocates of college or vocational postsecondary education. Analisa Medina said her parents really pushed her. I really didn’t want to go to college when I completed high school. I thought it would be best if I worked for a while. But my mother nearly tied me up and dragged me to registration at the university after my high school graduation. She told me that I would be the first in the family to get a college education and she wasn’t going to see me pass it up. She was a pre-K teacher’s aide working with a teacher who didn’t speak Spanish in a class where most of the children could not speak English. “Is it fair,” she asked me, “that I do the work of a teacher but get paid less than half as much because I don’t have a piece of paper?” I thought about what she said for a long time and decided that getting a college degree really was important.

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Research indicates that Latino students do have high aspirations for attending college.37 Nearly all Latino parents (95 percent) in a 2004 national survey said it is very important to them that their children go to college.38 Even low-income Hispanic families put great value on a college education and are willing to do more than just give verbal support. Among colonia families in Hidalgo County in a 2010 survey, commitment to higher education was very strong. More than 69 percent of the parents favored raising taxes to support their educational aspiration for their children, and 90 percent said they would commit to volunteering up to five hours per week if it meant that more students in their communities could go to college. More than 75 percent of these colonia parents would support longer school days, and more than 70 percent would support a longer school year if it meant their children would be well prepared to attend college.39 Some Encouraging Results from Innovative Programs One of the greatest obstacles that keeps more Hispanic students from attending college is the belief that they are not college material. One of the largest school districts in South Texas, PSJA, with thirty-two thousand students, set out to change that, with rather astounding results. The PSJA school district initiated the program College3 (College Ready, College Connected, College Complete). The entire curriculum is geared to getting all students ready for college and encouraging them to graduate from high school with college credits. PSJA recruits any dropouts back into the school so they can attend college. Former PSJA graduates are even provided counselling by PSJA at their local colleges. This district is 99 percent Hispanic, serves eighty-two low-income colonias, has a student population that is 85 percent economically disadvantaged and 73 percent judged at risk of dropping out, and 41 percent of its students are classified as limited English proficient. In spite of these difficulties, it has achieved measures of success that are remarkable. From 2007 to 2014 PSJA went from having twice the state average of dropouts to less than half and from 62 percent on-time graduations to 90 percent. Among its two thousand graduating seniors in 2015, 65 percent had earned college credits; 45 percent had one semester of college completed; and 20 percent were certified as having met South Texas College’s graduation criteria, earning an associate’s degree or certificate. And all this has been accomplished in only seven years.40 Another South Texas initiative, the nonprofit Llano Grande Cen-

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Chart 5.8. Migrant K-12 students in Texas and Hidalgo County, 2000–2015 Source: Texas Education Agency, Education of Migratory Children, 2000–2015, authors’ calculations based on spreadsheets obtained by public records request.

ter, in coordination with the Edcouch-Elsa Independent School District has developed an innovative contemporary community-level response to enhance Latino student outcomes. A focal objective of the Llano Grande Center is college preparation and achievement through the appreciation of and commitment to the local community.41 Since its inception in the early 1990s and formalization in 1997, the Llano Grande Center has helped more than sixty local students make it to and graduate from prestigious universities including Yale, Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Tufts, and Stanford. The center encourages students to conduct and record ethnographic interviews with community residents to deepen their appreciation of their region and its people. The Impact of Fewer Migrant Students on Dropout Rates Perhaps another factor contributing to the lower dropout rate among Texas Hispanics in recent years is the truly significant drop in the number of children of migrant farmworkers in Texas schools. Nationwide, it is estimated that 90 percent of migrant children are of Latino origin and that 34 percent are English language learners.42 Chart 5.8 shows their enrollment numbers from 2000 to 2015 statewide and in Hidalgo

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Figure 5.6. Having to decide whether to stay in school or drop out is often an unwelcomed choice. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

County. This notably steep decline from 2003 to 2007 is also a result of a change in the way migrant students were counted in Texas.43 Yet as a proportion of migrant students in Texas, Hidalgo County’s share increased from 27 percent in 2000 to 37 percent by 2015, indicating South Texas still serves a role as the major sending region for Texas migrant students. Traditionally, migrant children have had one of the highest dropout rates of any group in the nation. Indeed, it would be hard to find a more at-risk group of US students. In a 1998 newsletter of the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to assuring educational opportunity for every child, Abelardo Villarreal and Anita Tijerina Revilla report, “Migrant students are perhaps the most disenfranchised group of students in our schooling system.  .  .  . [They] pose challenges that our educational system is minimally prepared to address.”44

Structural and Cultural Bias: Migrant Education as a Minefield Eli’s case helps illustrate the risks they face. He said, I started working in the fields when I was twelve. Then my siblings joined when my dad became sick. We did not have any kind of health

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insurance, so we did all we could to bring home money for his medicine and the other things we needed. I would attend school all day. Then after school, instead of hanging out with friends or doing homework, I would go work in the fields with the rest of my family. I tried doing my homework when I got home from the fields, but I would fall asleep on my books. My teacher would scold me in front of the class, and my classmates would call me names. But I stuck with it until I was seventeen. Then my dad passed away. I had to drop out of school to work fulltime in the fields because we did not have any money. We could not afford even a funeral. I wish I could have fi nished high school, but at the time, my family needed me. I had no other choice. I had to be a provider, and I also wanted my father to be proud of me.

Eli’s problems occurred not only up north where he attended school as a migrant in late spring and early fall but in the Valley where his family worked in local fields after school and on weekends. As we examine the difficulties migrant students like Eli have faced over the past seventy years, some people might advocate that schools need to level the playing field. Perhaps a better analogy would be to clear the minefield. While all children face some obstacles as they get an education, migrant children face a far greater number of hidden mines—unforeseen risks. Eli’s case reveals the risks of exhaustion from work but also of teachers misinterpreting this as a lack of effort, classmates heaping scorn on him for being a “dummy,” and his family’s need for him to work more. To that

Figure 5.7. The frustration of structural bias in the schools. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

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is added the poverty migrant families face, their greater health risks, and their general lack of medical insurance, all of which likely contributed to the death of his father.45 We classify the “mines” that generally are not intentionally set to harm migrants as forms of cultural and structural bias. But these forms, though perhaps unintentional, still represent formidable obstacles for migrant children. So, despite Eli’s fortitude in getting around the initial mines, the final one of losing his father knocked him out of the chance to get even a high school diploma as he became his family’s primary breadwinner. Schools’ Responsibilities to Migrant Students Even if school personnel do not intentionally harm migrant students, the question remains of how much they actively seek to help these children. To answer this, we examine how their school experience has changed over the years. To get at the historical period 1945–1994, we utilize responses to our 1993 Survey of Migrant Farmworkers administered to 260 farmworkers. The survey was administered to five groups of farmworkers, each of which would have been high school seniors in five different decades. We also will use anecdotal and ethnographic ma-

Figure 5.8. Runn Elementary School in Donna serves many migrant students from

colonias. Photo by Richard Coronado; © R. Coronado, used by permission.

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Chart 5.9. Changes in relation of school to work for migrant children over five

decades in South Texas Source: Survey of Migrant Farmworkers, 1993.

terial gathered from 320 migrant students, parents, and teachers gathered since 1999 to get some idea of what migrant children face today. From the more than four hundred in-depth interviews conducted prior to our survey of farmworkers, we selected four questions to include on the 1993 Migrant Farmworker Survey, grouping respondents by when they would have been seniors in each of five time periods. These questions and possible responses were as follows: “Were you in any school migrant programs? (Yes or No)”; “Did schools really try to help migrant children get an education? (Rarely or Never, Occasionally, or Frequently)”; “Did children of migrant workers have to miss a lot of school because of work? (Rarely or Never, Occasionally, or Frequently)”; and “Did migrant children fall behind in school because they had to migrate? (Rarely or Never, Occasionally, or Frequently).” The results are shown in chart 5.9. As chart 5.9 illustrates, the percentage of migrants not in migrant programs dropped over this fifty-year period from 90 percent to around 30 percent. Likewise, the percentage of migrants who perceived that schools either rarely or only occasionally tried to help migrant children get an education dropped, but less drastically, from 85 percent to slightly less than 50 percent. The difference between the first period and the last was even smaller for those reporting that migrant children

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had to miss a lot of school in order to work, from 66 percent to 42 percent. The response that declined the least, however, was the percentage reporting that migrant children frequently fell behind because of the need to migrate, with only a 15 percent drop over the fifty-year period. It appears that the need to migrate and the school problems it creates did not change much during the period studied. The need to migrate and the ways migration interferes with school continue to constitute a major form of structural bias. Additional Forms of Structural Bias against Migrant Students The way that teachers organize their work to accommodate the needs of “regular students” and migrant students represents another possible source of structural bias. Juanita Alvarez, a teacher and a former migrant student, said, Some teachers here in the Valley do not even want to be bothered with migrant students. I have heard some of them complain when the migrant students start arriving that it will only create more work for them. Big deal! They just have to put each student’s missed assignments together and grade them when they are finished. I was a migrant student myself, and I know what it is like to have to come late and leave early every school year. It is tough. So I have their assignments ready by the time they come and also offer to help before or after class or even on Saturday mornings. When I try to give other teachers advice on how to help the migrant students, some of them just complain and don’t accept my offer to help.

Despite migrant students having to work harder than regular students, their hard work and strong ambitions are often not enough to succeed. Estela Vasquez, the director of a migrant lab, stated, I want to give back to society what society gave me as a migrant student. But I feel neglected by the people who are in charge of educating and administrating the school. My migrant lab always falls second to the needs of the science lab. The students who work hard to go back to their regular classrooms are often kept in the migrant lab until all their grades are received from the teachers and posted by the school counselor into the database. Some teachers take one to two months to give them a grade after they receive the packets. The students feel neglected

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by their teachers’ attitude of carelessness and often ask me why teachers take so long to grade their work.

A student in her migrant lab, Abby, was one of the hardest-working students in the school. Estela Vasquez said, She works really hard to exit the lab as soon as possible so she can catch up to her friends from the previous year. Recently Abby got desperate because she had nothing to do in the lab while she waited for the teachers to grade the packets she had completed. She was not allowed to exit the lab until those grades showed she had successfully completed the previous year’s classes. Abby waited five weeks to get her grades, but the teachers still had not fi nished grading her packets. During my regular visits with the teachers, they let me know they did not like to be reminded by a paraprofessional that packets needed to be graded on a timely basis.

Indeed, one teacher asked, “Why do migrant students need to be accommodated, while the regular students who completed their work on time have to wait for them?” Estela recalled Abby’s reaction after she came back disappointed from finding out that her grades still had not been posted: “Stupid viejas [old women]! Don’t they understand they are making us waste time in the lab and falling further behind?” Though some teachers may not understand why migrants miss part of the school year or wish them harm in being tardy in grading their packets, such actions do cause the students to fall further behind. Worse, some school districts see the migrant programs as a cash cow or as a place to dump ESL students. A school in South Texas replaced the certified teacher, Sylvia Pacheco, in its migrant lab, which served about one hundred students, with a paraprofessional, cutting the salary cost from $45,000 a year to just $11,500. School administrators there also put recent immigrants from Mexico who were not migrants into the migrant lab. “These students were pushed into my lab,” said Sylvia. “They could not even speak English and they were so confused.” She was told to provide migrant make-up packets to them. Sylvia said, They could not read or write English, much less complete a whole 150page packet in six weeks for each of four core subject areas. The school principal claimed that teachers could not help these Mexican students learn to speak or write English because they did not have the time. Be-

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sides, they were not certified bilingual teachers. This middle school only has three certified bilingual teachers for the entire school. It’s sad, but our school’s proclaimed mission—to help each student succeed— simply is not true.

Common Sources of Cultural Bias against Migrant Students Though many migrant students today understand that external factors contribute to dropping out, they often blame themselves. Some come to internalize the stigma of inferiority associated with migrants. Still, when asked if counselors or teachers ever tried to get them to stay in school, some responded in the in-depth interviews that no one from the schools cared if they stayed in school or dropped out. We assert that teachers or other school officials who sideline or isolate migrant students, based on a widespread cultural belief that migrants are more likely to drop out or fail, are guilty of cultural bias. Enriqueta related, “My teachers did leave me to the side a little. They really didn’t pay much attention to us migrants. I don’t know if it was because they didn’t like Mexicans or because they knew that we weren’t going to be in their classes for very long and they just wanted to focus on the kids that were.” Another migrant, Vanessa, said, They always put the regular students first—the ones that are really smart. When a migrant student asked a question, the answer was usually short. But if a regular student asked a question, they would take the time to explain it. When we would return to the Valley, many of our teachers would say that migrant students just can’t seem to catch up. Bull! It is not true that we can’t catch up. It’s their lack of response to the academic needs of migrant students.

Students who are from Mexico and have to learn English in order to succeed in school also face significant challenges. This cultural disadvantage is unintentional and perhaps even unavoidable, yet promotes another major challenge for these children. Eduardo Alaniz migrated annually from the Valley to Arkansas starting when he was fifteen years old. He said, I immigrated from Mexico to the Valley with my uncles. Then we migrated to Arkansas. I entered school there but faced many difficulties. On the first day of school the teacher asked me if I was new to the

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school and I answered “No.” She soon found out that I didn’t know English because to everything she asked, my answer was “No.” In the Valley, I had no problem adjusting to school because most of the teachers and students were Latinos.

Teachers who lower their expectations of migrant students because they feel sorry for them may also be guilty of cultural bias. This paternalistic treatment can be quite harmful. One migrant student, Lorenzo, related, There was this program for migrants, but I didn’t want to go there. I found out that the classes there were too easy. I just wanted to be treated the same as other students. The teachers thought we were slow or something. The fact that some of us are learning English doesn’t mean we’re dumb. So I chose to go to regular classes. When I went to my classes I had teachers ask me if I was in the right room. I even had one teacher search me to see if I had a knife just because he knew I was a migrant. When you come back a month late, they know why. But I think we are actually smarter. We leave a month early and come back a month late. We have to take last year’s tests and wait to see if we passed. Then we have to catch up on all the work that we missed. And they call us slow?

We also consider it cultural bias when some teachers and administrators fail to understand why migrant parents take their children out of school early and re-enroll them late. Many of them misinterpret this economic need as a failure of parents to value the education of their children. One student reported, Sometimes the hardest part of migrating was going through the interrogation by our teachers—“Why can’t your parents wait one more month?” “How could your parents just leave without thinking about the importance of school?” or “How can your parents make you work in the fields at such a young age?” These intimidating questions made me feel uncomfortable and angry.

The fact that many migrant students drop out of school, along with the fact that many migrant parents must take their children out of school early and return them late are not by themselves adequate measures of how much migrant students and parents value education. Susana, one of the college students interviewed, explained,

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My parents would push us and push us hard to study! I remember when I was in high school and I would tell them that I was just going to fi nish high school and then get a job. They would get so mad at me, and they would remind me when we were in the middle of our surcos [field rows] of cucumbers that I would never get out of the fields if I didn’t go on to college. That really got me thinking, especially when my back was aching from bending over those crops all day long.

Another former migrant, Sonia, a teacher in a local school district, explains how even the drop in the number of migrant students might contribute to different forms of unintentional discrimination. There is a big difference in the students who migrate up north now than when I was in school. Back then, about 35 to 40 percent of the students were migrants, so I never felt out of place or unwanted by my friends. But nowadays there are fewer migrant students, about 15 percent in the school where I teach. Unfortunately, many of the other kids make them feel different or beneath them.

So, how can structural and cultural bias in the schools be reduced? If a segment of children faces greater risks, it would make sense to provide greater resources, including teachers and administrators who will work with them, to help them overcome the odds. Structural and cultural bias could be reduced through the provision of better teachers and more support resources targeted to migrant students. When schools fund programs for “gifted and talented” students over those for migrant students, they reinforce a cultural and structural bias favoring students with the fewest challenges over those in the most desperate need.46

Reasons for Optimism despite Continuing Challenges While the lower dropout rate of Hispanic students in recent years is encouraging, many other problems remain. Limited English proficiency and bilingual education and migrant programs often fail to prepare Mexican American students for full participation in college-track classes. Standardized test scores for Latino high school students are frequently among the lowest in the state. In 2011 in Region 1, South Texas, 77 percent of Hispanic eleventh-grade students met standard ex-

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pectations on all components (English language arts, mathematics, social studies, and science) of the TAKS statewide exam. The figure was 93 percent for comparable Anglo students in Region 1. While substantial gains, from segregation to incorporation, have been made over recent decades in South Texas schools, much progress still needs to be made to achieve what matters most—equality of educational attainment. One encouraging development is the increasing overall regional population with high school diplomas and college degrees. Others are the truly innovative recent programmatic successes such as PSJA’s College3 initiative and the Llano Grande project. Today the local Hispanic population has greater influence over the educational context and outcomes in the region. The days of “No Spanish” in public schools are gone— replaced with the appreciation and enhanced value of bilingualism and biculturalism. The higher education landscape has also undergone tremendous growth. South Texas College began in 1993 as an institution with 10 certificate programs and fewer than 1,000 students. By fall 2013, enrollment had grown to an astounding 31,232 students, and the college offered 111 degrees and certificates to its students. In 2015, several University of Texas border campuses were combined into the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). This new institution came with a medical school and access to the Texas Permanent University Fund’s $17 billion endowment. It serves nearly 30,000 students from Rio Grande City to Brownsville and beyond. As such it is one of the largest Hispanic-serving institutions in the United States. The Texas A&M University system also became heavily invested in South Texas with Texas A&M International University in Laredo, established in 1969 and joining the A&M system in 1989. In 2000, Texas A&M developed a health science center in McAllen offering master’s-level training in public health. And a satellite campus of Texas A&M University is scheduled to open in McAllen in fall 2017. Still, great challenges remain: closing the K–12 school dropout rate of Hispanic students, shrinking the achievement gap between Hispanic and Anglo students in test scores, and providing better and more meaningful services to migrant and LEP students. One other depressing fact remains. Race and ethnicity still matter. Dark complexion still stigmatizes many Hispanic children as low-class or mojados. Yet, few Hispanics of lighter complexion seem to want to be considered Anglos. Many have developed pride in their roots and an ability to

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stand up to the bigotry that still exists. Gloria, a college student, was one of them. She said, Because of my fair skin and blue eyes, people often mistake me for an Anglo. Once in a cafeteria line at a public restaurant, an elderly retired Anglo man, a winter Texan, leaned over to me and whispered, while pointing to a Mexican family that had just entered, “Don’t you hate dirty Mexicans like that?” I leaned over and whispered back, “No, I’m Mexican, so I hate bigots like you.” His bottom lip fell to the floor. He said, “But you look Anglo.” I smiled [and said], “Surprise.”

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CHAPTER 6

From Mexicanos to Mexican Americans to Americans? With Chrystell Flota

My family moved to Detroit when I was just starting school. The Anglo kids there didn’t like having us Mexican Americans on the bus with them, so they made life miserable for us. They teased me because of my color, my accent, and the way I dressed. My parents didn’t think it was important, but it got so bad I wanted to quit school. I begged them to move back to Mexico. Instead they moved us here to the Valley to be with relatives. I felt a lot better because the people here are mostly Hispanic. But my parents couldn’t stand the way Mexican Americans here have changed their language and their culture to be more like the Anglos. It didn’t bother me because I felt we were all just trying to fit in. So I assimilated into the Anglo culture and raised my children in Anglo ways. Lately, I’ve come to realize that I’ve lost something. I now take my children to Monterrey, Mexico, on weekends so they can get to know their cousins and learn proper Spanish. T i na Mor a les

Tina’s experience is both normal and unique. It is normal in that, like many immigrant children, she missed her home and longed to return. Her experience is also not all that unusual in that she experienced teasing, isolation, and discrimination from Anglo kids. What is most unusual is the way she underwent the assimilation process in a single generation, going from Mexican to Mexican American and fi nally to just American.1 In the process, she discovered she had left something valuable behind. Though few observers are surprised by examples of Anglos discriminating against Mexicans and Mexican Americans, stories of hostility between Mexicans and Mexican Americans do catch many off guard. One of our Mexican student interviewers commented, “It would seem

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natural to assume that the shared usage of our native tongue would on some levels create a sense of unity, togetherness, and common ground between both Mexicans and Mexican Americans.  .  .  . But in fact the ability to speak—or to not speak Spanish—seems to ignite the opposite response.” José Luis, a twenty-eight-year-old undocumented construction worker and day laborer with a family of three, remembered working for an Anglo rancher outside of Austin. His boss’s Mexican friend once called him a “mojado” when he was displeased with José Luis’s work. José Luis recalled how it felt to have a Mexican like himself insult him this way. “I wanted to punch him in the mouth,” he said, “but I couldn’t because I have a family to support. I couldn’t risk losing my job.” Stella Miranda, a Mexican American with a Mexican husband, frequently encountered anti-Mexican bias, even among her Mexican American relatives. “Whenever one of my own family gets upset with me,” she said, “the first thing that comes out of their mouth is ‘Go back to Mexico with your husband!’ They sometimes stereotype Mexicans as shiftless, lawless, thieving, immoral, and violent.” The larger US society, including many scholars, has generally treated Mexican Americans and Mexicans (immigrants and visitors) as if they were essentially of the same ethnic group, ignoring the often confl icted relations between the two groups. The pressures to assimilate into Anglo society—and the resistance to assimilation by Mexican immigrants like Tina’s parents—contribute to but do not fully explain the confl ict. In this chapter we will examine two issues: what explains the often tense relations between Mexicans and Mexican Americans in South Texas and how rapidly Mexican immigrants become Mexican Americans or, eventually, just Americans. We use our ethnographic and survey interviews from the Borderlife Project, 424 interviews conducted as part of the 2002–2003 Perceptions of Deviance Survey, 433 semistructured interviews and responses from the Cultural Practices Survey in 2001–2002, and 250 in-depth interviews focused on cultural practices (1982–2010), as well as results from the 2006 Latino National Survey.

The Struggles between Mexicans and Mexican Americans Though Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the South Texas borderlands have long been aware of their major differences, few academic

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From Mexicanos to Mexican Americans to Americans 225

Figure 6.1. A guitarist in Río Bravo, Mexico. Photo by Xena Luna; © X. Luna, used by permission.

studies have focused on confl ict in their relations. An important exception is the historian David Gutierrez’s book Walls and Mirrors, in which he examines both the differences that divide them (their walls) and the commonalities that bind them together (their mirrors).2 We have identified the walls of these relations by means of 250 ethnographic interviews that our students conducted. In one, Natalia, the daughter of well-to-do Mexican immigrants, told her interviewer, I would never change the way I have been raised. I will never anglicize my name or lower the respect I feel for my parents. They taught me to respect my family and to have strong moral values. I won’t change any of my traditions or customs, either. For example, my father doesn’t allow me to bring any male friends into our house unless the guy comes to ask for my hand in marriage. We also know that whoever we marry must be of our same social class. For my father, that leaves out all the Mexican Americans.

The difficulties Natalia’s father has with Mexican Americans seem to be related more to perceived cultural and class differences than race or skin tone, though we will soon see that all three factors represent

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226 Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados

important walls between Mexicans and Mexican Americans. But the relations between these two groups also are characterized by mirrors that reflect their commonality and promote a sense of common identity. Such unifying mirrors in South Texas are perhaps most common in low-income colonias and urban neighborhoods where Mexican immigrants and second- or third-generation Mexican Americans of the same social class come together as relative equals, working together to solve common problems. One Mexican woman who discovered this is Myra Chavez, who left Mexico after learning that her husband had another wife and family. Her family disowned her for divorcing him, leaving her to raise her children alone. After she found a home in a South Texas colonia, her new neighbors realized she was a single mother and pitched in to help her repair her home, patching up holes in the walls, putting in a new door, and repairing the floor. Her neighbors also helped her get a job. Two of them even offered to look after her two boys on alternating days while she worked. Myra said, It wasn’t long before I had a new family here in my neighborhood. I later found out that my neighbors were at fi rst reluctant to help me when they found out I was from Monterrey, Mexico. They said that they thought I would act superior to them and turn down their help. They could not have been more wrong about me. I am a regular person just like them, and everybody needs help at one point or another. I was and still am very grateful for all the help they have given me over the years.

Antagonisms between Mexicans and Mexican Americans are often related to the perception by higher-income Mexicans that Mexican Americans are low-class or have adopted lower-class cultural characteristics. Some complain that Mexican Americans have assimilated into US culture and lost their Mexican culture, loyalty to Mexico, and what they consider “real Spanish.” A brief outline of major sources of conflict between these groups will illustrate the extent and nature of the divide between them. Social Class Differences in social class represent perhaps the greatest wall in the relations between Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Social class differences divide Mexicans from one another in Mexico, where the wealthy maintain a formidable social distance from laborers, peasants, and the

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From Mexicanos to Mexican Americans to Americans 227

poor in general. In many of the accounts of conflict between Mexicans and Mexican Americans, one can detect a strong carryover of such class differences. Many of the well-to-do Mexican nationals one finds in South Texas are tourists and shoppers from Mexican cities near the border.3 It is estimated that as much as 20–40 percent of the retail trade within South Texas comes from Mexico.4 These Mexicans are business owners and professionals, many of whom come from the wealthy neighborhoods of Monterrey, Mexico.5 On weekends they come not only to shop but to fill the hotels and beaches of nearby South Padre Island. Many of them purchase homes in upscale Valley communities either as a hedge against uncertainties in the Mexican economy or as a place of refuge for their families from the kidnappings and violence in Mexico by the drug cartels.6 Some have even opened businesses or professional practices in South Texas. In such cases, the children of wealthy Mexicans have difficulties adjusting to life in the United States. Yolanda explained, “At school here, you cannot buy your way out of a failing grade. In Mexico, I went to a private school. If I slacked off, I could just give the teacher a fancy gift and it would be okay. At Sharyland High School, however, I got a bad grade and was in for a shock. My parents’ money and influence did not help me a bit.” The most pronounced class-related resentments in South Texas seem to occur as wealthy Mexican shoppers are waited upon by Mexican Americans hired in the malls, restaurants, and dealerships in the Valley. Samantha Almendarez, a Mexican American college student, said, I only knew one kind of Mexican before I started working at Target. They are all really nice and a lot like me. But now I can tell there is more than just one type of Mexican. The rich Mexicans are all conceited in the way they walk, the way they talk, and even the way they look at you. They think they are still in Mexico and that we will do whatever they tell us. They need to learn that here things are different. If they don’t like it, they should just stay in Mexico.

Daniel Salazar also feels hostility toward the rich Mexican shoppers. He tells his interviewer, Dude, I wish we could just send them all back to Mexico. I know they bring a lot of business, but they do not respect us. I know my roots are

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from Mexico, but I don’t feel any relationship to Mexico, especially when I see the way these Mexicans act when they come to shop here. One time, a guy and his mother from Mexico went to the Gap where I work. This guy came in looking all chulo [fancy]. He and his mother asked me to help them. I said yes, but what they really wanted was for me to get everything for them while they sat in chairs and waited for me to bring clothes to them. I had to help them because the manager was there and I couldn’t make a scene.

Not all or even most well-to-do Mexican customers give Mexican American clerks such a hard time. Nelda Garcia told of an incident she witnessed at a department store in McAllen. There were two Mexican women right beside me at the jewelry counter. One of them asked an employee, “¿Qué dice esta pulsera? [What is written on this bracelet?].” The employee asked the woman to repeat her question in English because she didn’t know Spanish. The Mexican woman huffed and threw her hands in the air. She turned away with a look of disgust on her face and started ranting in Spanish to the woman with her. Her companion, however, looked embarrassed and said, “Acuérdate que estás en su país [Remember that you are in her country].”

Hostile treatment between these two groups often includes classrelated name calling. One common derogatory term for wealthy Mexicans is fresa (a stuck-up or pampered person; literally, “strawberry”). In contrast, well-to-do Mexicans in Mexico often use the pejorative term naco (low-life, loser) for poor Mexicans whom they regard as badmannered, poorly educated, or with really bad taste and manners. It is not uncommon for some Mexicans visiting or living in the United States to carry this term over to refer to working-class Mexican Americans. Such name calling is bigotry and really can hurt its victims. Rebecca is a second-generation Mexican American whose parents came from poverty in Mexico looking for a better life for their children. She gave her interviewer the impression that she felt inferior to Mexicans, especially those who presented themselves as upper-class. She said, They treat me like I’m a dumb lowlife. I don’t like to be around them. They don’t know me or my Mexican background. All they see is an American who is unworthy of their time. I especially hate running

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From Mexicanos to Mexican Americans to Americans 229

into them in clubs and other social places. Once, at a club, I saw a guy that I thought was good-looking. Then I found out he was from Mexico. There is like an unwritten rule that Mexicans will not date or go out with Mexican Americans. If I had tried anything, he probably would have just laughed at me.

As might be expected, some Mexican Americans fi nd ways to retaliate. A Mexican UTPA student, Renata, reported, “I remember once when my sister and I went out with some friends to a local high-end nightclub. I was dancing when out of nowhere a girl comes up to me and yells in my ear, ‘Que bonito vestido, fresita. ¿Te lo compró tu papi?’ [What a nice dress, Miss Prissy. Did Daddy buy it for you?]. I felt like telling her that I had bought it with my own money, but I knew that would not make a difference.” While some well-to-do Mexicans may look down their noses at Mexican Americans, some Mexican Americans discriminate against Mexicans of a lower socioeconomic status than themselves. “When I was younger,” reported Analís Blanco, “I never told anyone I was Mexican because I always thought it was so embarrassing. In fact, I remember calling several other Mexican kids ‘mojos’ or ‘mojados.’ I guess I never felt that I was one of them.” Paul, who is half Anglo and half Mexican, remembered how Mexican American children not only excluded low-income Mexican children but contributed to the stigma of inferiority regarding Mexico and things Mexican. We would never hang out with the Mexican kids, and we made fun of them. We would tell them that they weren’t American and called them names like “mojados.” Back then I played along with it and made fun of Mexican children, but now I see how much I hurt them. They would all just sit in a corner and wouldn’t talk to any of us. I think we made them feel really ashamed of themselves.

Elena Lopez is a Mexican immigrant student in ESL classes. Though she has had her share of difficulties with students from regular classes, she said the majority of Hispanics are good people. They like to help us with our English. They ask us in English, “Hey, what’s happening?” And if we don’t understand, they will say it in Spanish. They do this to help us learn. Some friends tell me that if I don’t ask

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them in English, they won’t answer me . . . you know, just to help me learn faster. They have never been bad to me or humiliated me.

Race and Racism Both poor and well-to-do Mexican immigrants experience difficult adjustments when they come to the United States, but the nature of the adjustment is different for each group. Well-to-do Mexicans are much more likely to have light skin tone, often due to their primarily European descent. Low-income Mexicans, in contrast, generally tend to have a more pronounced Indian ancestry. So, though social class may be a primary consideration, race also tends to enter into many social encounters, especially with wealthy Mexicans. Juan Molina, an upwardly mobile Mexican immigrant, recalled, When I fi rst attended a public school in the United States, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Though it was a good school academically, almost 90 percent of the students in my first class were low-class people. They had bad taste in clothing, bad smell, and they were all dark. When I heard them speak Spanish, I was horrified. I seriously wanted to cry.

This remark reveals that Juan Molina tended to identify dark skin tone with low-class people. That attitude is common in Mexico. Those with the lightest skin in Mexico are generally associated with the welleducated and upper-income social classes.7 Current estimates of the white population in Mexico vary a little but generally identify white Mexicans as a wealthy and powerful minority.8 The estimates of the size of the white Mexican population range from 9 to 15 percent.9 In a survey conducted by Cohesión Social in 2007 on a sample of ten thousand Latin Americans, 13 percent of the Mexicans who were surveyed identified themselves as “blancos” (whites).10 The elite status of this group in Mexico is illustrated in a study conducted by Mario Arriagada Cuadriello as a doctoral candidate in comparative politics at the London School of Economics. He is an editor at Nexos, a leading cultural and political magazine in Mexico. Arriagada counted the photos of light- and dark-skinned people appearing in prominent Mexican publications in 2012–2013. In the May 2013 issue of Club, a social supplement to the Reforma newspaper, he counted 529  light-skinned people and only 11 with darker skin. In the March 2013 issue of Caras, published by the Televisa conglomerate, Arriagada

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From Mexicanos to Mexican Americans to Americans 231

found 340 light-skinned people and only four who were dark.11 The headline of a 2013 article by Tim Johnson of the McClatchy foreign staff is “For Dark-Skinned Mexicans the Taint of Racial Discrimination Lingers in Mexican Society.”12 A student who interviewed higher-income Mexicans explained, When I asked them, “What kinds of people are most helpful to you?” they all said, “The gringos are.” They decided this was because the skin color of the gringos was closer to their own and that they also tended to live in the same neighborhoods. They also agreed that people who are light-skinned tend to help out each other. When they reflected on which people had helped them the most in the past, they believed that the majority were light-skinned.

Language Another important point of conflict in relations between Mexicans and Mexican Americans is the way many Mexican Americans speak Spanish. For Mexicans, especially the upper class, the ability to speak Spanish well is a sign of education and national pride. For those who speak supposedly proper Spanish, it is a form of cultural capital. Following sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, we use this term, “cultural capital,” to mean that elites in most societies use culture—in this case, language—as a form of social capital.13 In Mexico, they do this by controlling the definition of what constitutes correct Spanish and then limiting access to it through elite schools, exclusive neighborhoods, and restricted clubs, for example. For those who speak this Spanish well, similar to those in England who speak Oxford English, it can be a gateway to good jobs and prestigious social circles. So, when they see Mexican Americans in the United States losing their Spanish or speaking it poorly, they perceive that what is so valuable to them is being devalued. Such individuals use the term pocho to signify their resentment of Hispanics who have become Americanized and who speak a nonstandard dialect of Spanish often called “Tex-Mex.” Pochos speak a Spanish that includes many anglicized words such as parquear for “to park” and troca for “truck.” What also irritates some Mexicans is the archaic Spanish that workers from rural Mexico bring to the United States and that brands those who use it as backward, or hicks. This includes numerous archaic Spanish words such as asina instead of así to mean “so” or “like that,” órale for “hey,” and mueble for car. Thus pochos anglicize Spanish words

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and occasionally use Spanish words from supposedly backwater places in Mexico that many Mexicans regard as “hillbilly Spanish.” Those who speak this low-class Spanish are likely to also be branded as “nacos.” Mexicans also become impatient with Mexican Americans in South Texas who speak little or no Spanish. This leads some people with the pocho stigma to avoid even members of their own families. Mike said he was reluctant to visit his Mexican grandparents. My parents always ask me to go, and I tell them I have to study or I have to go somewhere else. I love them, but I hate going over there. All I do is just sit there. My grandpa always tries to talk to me and asks me questions. I feel really embarrassed because I don’t know what he’s saying, so I just make up an excuse just to avoid that.

Many Mexicans who are critical of pocho Spanish are unaware of the English-only period of Texas education, so they fail to comprehend that much of the loss of Mexican Spanish was forced upon previous generations of Mexican Americans. Though the historical details differ, one could argue that the English-only rule imposed in Texas was used as a tool of domination and oppression much like the forcing of Indians in Mexico to speak Spanish four and a half centuries earlier. In both cases, Indians in Mexico and Mexican Americans in the United States were stripped of their mother tongue and then made to feel ashamed of it. Mexicans also often fail to see that Tex-Mex has become a form of cultural identity for those who see themselves as neither fully Mexican nor American. Divided National Loyalty Closely related to language differences as a point of conflict is the feeling by many Mexicans that Mexican Americans should maintain some loyalty to Mexico. Josefina is a Mexican immigrant who has lived in South Texas for many years and still maintains a strong relationship with her family in Mexico. She said, “Mexican Americans are confused and do not know whether they want to be American or Mexican.” Her interviewer related, “She gave me the impression that she is a confident and self-assured person. When she spoke of her home her eyes watered, and she had such pride in where she came from. She says she is Mexican and does not want to be Mexican American.”

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Many Mexican Americans, on the other hand, contend that if immigrants cannot acquire loyalty to their new country, they should return to Mexico. Juan Heredia, a Mexican student studying in the United States, recalled a reaction from a Hispanic high school teacher. “One day I walked into class wearing a shirt from the Mexican soccer team,” he said. “The Hispanic teacher asked me if I liked the Mexican soccer team and then if I liked Mexico. To both questions I answered ‘Yes.’ Out of the blue he said, ‘If you like Mexico so much, why don’t you go back?’” (Mis)perceptions of the Cultures of Mexico and the United States It can be hard for some Mexican Americans to appreciate the culture of Mexico. Many of them have never been there. Many have experienced criticism from Mexicans who resent their pocho Spanish and their lack of loyalty to Mexico. In addition, portrayals of Mexico in US media are often very disparaging. As we have seen from many of the preceding accounts, many Mexican Americans come to perceive Mexico and its institutions and culture in undesirable and culturally biased terms. Young Mexican Americans often resist the sex roles they detect among their Mexican relatives. Jessica remembered when she went to visit relatives in Mexico for the weekend. My family, my boyfriend, and I were there at a cousin’s birthday party. We were shocked to see my female cousins all tending to their husbands. Then my Mexican aunt came up and started asking me, “Y tú, ¿Cuándo te casas? ¿Cuántos años tienes? [And you—when are you getting married? How old are you?].” When I told her I was twenty and not getting married soon because I wanted to graduate from college first and get a stable job, she replied, “Then why do you want him for?” Then turning to my boyfriend, she told him, “Listen up, mi hijo [son]. A woman with an education can never be tamed. So I advise you that you start bringing her feet down to earth. A woman’s place is only at home.” That really upset my boyfriend and me.

Mexicans are often alarmed at what they see as moral permissiveness, sexual promiscuity, and incomprehensible individualism in the culture and lifestyle choices of people in the United States. A Mexican immigrant said,

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Life here does not revolve around family as it does in Mexico. Here, family has to adapt to other activities. Time here is money, and you Americans prefer economically rewarding activities over spending time at family dinners, playing with children, or in lengthy visits to your grandparents. For us Mexicans, the US society comes across as materialistic and hedonistic. A successful person here is one who is young or who spends a lot of money to look young and whose contribution to society can be measured in economic terms.

Some Mexicans get upset at the ignorance of Mexico’s historical and cultural heritage they fi nd among Mexican Americans. Paula Lara was shocked while attending a Valley high school to see how little local Hispanics knew about Mexico. She recalled, In my Spanish class the teacher asked if anybody knew the significance of el cinco de mayo and el dieciséis de septiembre [May 5 and September 16, holidays to celebrate Mexico’s defeat of Maximilian’s army and Mexican independence, respectively]. They had no idea of what these historic dates mean. Some of them never even heard of [Father] Hidalgo or [Pancho] Villa. Instead they embrace rap music and fast cars. Somehow, I think they are ashamed of their Mexican origin.

Misunderstood Lifestyle Choices Closely related to cultural differences are lifestyle choices. Benito Arredondo expressed a strong preference for the lifestyle of Mexico. He said, “In Mexico, people are always out in the streets buying and selling things. I may be poor in Mexico, but there’s always something going on. I just can’t get used to how people in the United States just keep to themselves.” Socorro, who came from a city just across the border, expressed similar feelings. “In Río Bravo,” she said, “I feel like I’m somebody. I can go down the street and talk to anyone. Here, I just keep to myself because I hardly know the neighbors.” One of our student interviewers reported, There were only two [of seven] interviewees who said that they did not have any prejudices against people from Mexico. One said, “It is possible for us [Mexican Americans and Mexicans] to get along. Mexicans are nice people. They may not be the most intelligent, but they have bigger problems like providing food and shelter for their family. If you look

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From Mexicanos to Mexican Americans to Americans 235

at where they come from [Mexico], how can you blame them for wanting to come live in a country where most of us are overfed and selfindulged? You can’t blame them for wanting to live here. And if they can, why not let them?”

Interestingly, this student’s statement reflects both a cultural bias against Mexican workers (“They may not be the most intelligent”) and an understanding of why they come (“You can’t blame them for wanting to live here”).

A (More or Less) United Front on Immigration Despite their differences, Mexicans and Mexican Americans have fairly widespread tolerance for unauthorized immigration from Mexico.14 In 2002–2003 we conducted a survey of 424 residents of South Texas, the Perceptions of Deviance Survey. In it we asked respondents to rate how good (from +1 to +5) or how bad (from −1 to −5) several forms of border-related behaviors were.15 We included questions related to undocumented immigration. The results show that Mexican and Mexican American respondents were close to neutral about how good or bad they considered the behaviors related to undocumented immigration. Anglos (non-Hispanics) and Hispanics who chose to be called “American,”16 in contrast, were more condemning of behaviors associated with entering the United States without documents. The greatest difference, however, was in response to a question of how bad it was for Mexicans to illegally enter the United States to work. On that item, Mexicans and Mexican Americans rated it either slightly in the positive range or only barely negative, while Anglos and Mexican Americans who self-identified as Americans saw it as significantly more negative.17 We might compare these results to similar data derived from the December 2002 Pew-Kaiser National Survey of Latinos.18 In that study, all categories of Hispanics took a more favorable view of undocumented immigrants than non-Hispanic whites or blacks did. The results of this national survey are shown in table 6.1. In both studies, the more assimilated Hispanics were, as measured by their acquisition of English, the closer they came to the opinions of US whites and blacks, though the gap was still quite wide between nonHispanics and the most assimilated (English-dominant). On this issue, we conclude, only those who think of themselves primarily as American

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Table 6.1. National responses to whether illegal immigrants help or hurt the US economy

Hispanic respondents

Response They help the economy They hurt the economy

Non-Hispanic respondents

SpanishBiEnglishdominant lingual dominant White (%) (%) (%) (%) 85 10

66 23

51 43

26 68

Black (%) 26 66

Source: Pew Hispanic Center, Hispanics: A People in Motion, 18. Note: Responses are to the question “Do illegal immigrants help the economy by providing low-cost labor, or do they hurt it by driving down wages?” “Don’t know” responses are not shown.

rather than Mexican or Mexican American tend to believe that undocumented immigration is a significant threat to the United States.

Mexicans, Their Descendants, and Assimilation While Mexicans may tend to resent Hispanics who have assimilated, Mexican Americans in South Texas generally fail to see why they should be forced to remain Mexican. Many of them say that Tex-Mex is a viable dialect that gives them a unique identity. Also, many find that some elements of Mexican culture do not work well in the United States. And because those born in the Unites States generally do not have much experience with the actual lifestyles of Mexico, they tend to adopt the generally unfavorable stereotypes of Mexico prevalent in the media and culture of the United States. Chrystell Flota recognizes both sides of this issue. She writes, Traditionally, we Mexican nationals have expressed enormous loyalty to the Republic of Mexico, our institutions, and our national heroes who gave us patria, tierra y libertad [homeland, land, and liberty]. When abroad, we cry at the sound of mariachi music—never mind that the marimba, a type of xylophone, is the more typical musical instrument of my home state in southern Mexico. Since a very early age we were made

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From Mexicanos to Mexican Americans to Americans 237

to memorize key historical dates, stories of our national heroes, and all the wonders of our country. Yet, in our wonderful country, over 40 percent of the population is classified below the poverty level. Worse still, many people have been driven into poverty by government edicts that push them from communal farms, overpopulation, and natural disasters (mostly droughts in the northern and western states and floods in some southern states). Because Mexican institutions and our political/economic system cannot guarantee the possibility of a decent living, every year large numbers of Mexicans from the interior of the country go to the United States in search of a way to make a living. Yet we Mexicans expect them to remain loyal to the country that denied them opportunities for advancement and for subsistence itself. In light of all this, what should be surprising is not that Mexican Americans ignore Mexico’s historical and cultural heritage but that they have managed to retain a few of those cultural remnants in spite of all the discrimination they have endured from Mexicans and Anglos alike.

Not everyone agrees that Mexicans who move to the United States and their Mexican American children and grandchildren tend to assimilate. Indeed, this has been a topic of considerable debate. Essentially, the issue is the extent to which Mexican Americans, the largest group within the US Hispanic population, have assimilated.19 Samuel Huntington, a Harvard scholar, refueled the debate with his 2004 book Who Are We? in asserting that Mexican Americans more than other immigrant groups resist assimilation into American society: “Mexican Americans no longer think of themselves as members of a small minority who must accommodate the dominant group and adopt its culture.”20 Even further, he contends that their resistance to assimilation represents a threat to the American way of life. In the book and an article published in 2007, Huntington implies that because most of the southwestern United States was taken from Mexico by force, Mexicans and Mexican Americans do not identify primarily with the United States and do not consider themselves American. Further, he asserts that their aim is the reconquest (reconquista) of the Southwest demographically, socially, and culturally.21 Many Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Anglos who live in South Texas generally would fi nd such assertions ludicrous. Nevertheless, as we witness the fearmongering against Mexican immigrants by political candidates as we write this chapter in 2016, we are more concerned than amused. Some politicians and commentators who promote such anti-

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Mexican sentiment come across as racists. Peter Brimelow is a former editor at Forbes magazine and past columnist at the conservative National Review. Interestingly, he is himself an immigrant, from England. For Brimelow, immigration itself is not the problem. He insists that the influx of nonwhites is destroying America. Brimelow describes the role of race as “elemental, absolute, fundamental,” insisting that white Americans demand that US immigration quotas be changed to allow in mostly whites.22 Such individuals perpetuate an unreasonable fear that Mexicans will take over part of the United States. But despite Huntington’s extreme position, he does give us a testable hypothesis. In the book he asserts that “the more highly concentrated immigrants are, the slower and less complete is their assimilation.”23 And he contends that “as their numbers increase, they become more committed to their own ethnic identity and culture.”24 Put simply, Huntington proposes that those Mexican immigrants and their offspring who are heavily concentrated along the Mexican border will resist assimilation, allowing it to occur only at a very slow pace if at all. As can be imagined, the response to Huntington’s position has been strong, with convincing evidence that he is wrong.25 We propose that the South Texas borderlands area, where almost 90  percent of residents are of Mexican origin, provides an excellent arena to test these assertions by Huntington and others.26 It also presents a case in which Mexican nationals can exert a tremendous influence on the local population. Indeed, many of the interviews we conducted point to a very strong pressure for Mexican-origin people in this borderland to hold onto or even revive their grasp of the Spanish language, though not their loyalty to Mexico. Freddie, an anglicized Hispanic who grew up in San Antonio before moving to the Valley, stated, “This is the only place that I’ve known where a Mexican American has to know Spanish. A lot of the business down here comes from Mexican nationals, so I guess knowing Spanish is important. I think because Hispanics are 90 percent of the population the Mexican culture here is just too strong.” As we review the process of assimilation and the factors in this borderlands area that promote or retard assimilation, we will also show how the antagonistic relations between Mexicans and Mexican Americans make the prospect of a reconquista largely a figment of the imaginations of right-wing extremists.27 Indeed, it is something that the great majority of Mexican Americans in this border region strongly oppose.28 First, however, we need a way of determining whether Mexicans in this bor-

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der area are becoming Americanized. To do so, we will examine both the pressures toward and the resistance against assimilation among Mexican-origin people living in South Texas. Measuring the Pace of Assimilation with the Generation Score Many scholars who write about assimilation tend to think only in terms of cultural assimilation; some prefer the term “acculturation.” As we will see, it is also important to examine how the positions of immigrants and their descendants in the structure of the host society change with each generation; this we call structural assimilation. It is commonly assumed that both types of assimilation will take place over several generations, with each successive generation more assimilated than the one before. It is also commonly assumed in the relevant literature that by the third generation, most cultural practices brought by the immigrant generation will have largely disappeared,29 especially in cases of ethnic intermarriage.30 This view also hypothesizes that the grandchildren of immigrants will be well on their way to becoming integrated more or less as equals in the structures of their communities and American society. Testing these assumptions is made more difficult by the complexity of measuring a person’s generational status. In its simplest terms, the first generation is generally thought to include the immigrants; the second consists of their American-born children; and the third consists of native-born children of native-born parents. Despite the appealing simplicity of this idea, one does not have to consider very many cases to appreciate how complex measuring generational status can be. For example, most Mexican Americans living in South Texas could claim a combination of generations. One’s father may have been born in the United States, but her mother may have been born in Mexico. In addition, any of the four grandparents could have been born in either country. Some attempts to address such complexity have been made.31 As one reviews them, however, it is clear that a simpler means of measuring this variable is needed. A more useful measure would need to recognize the multiple possibilities for the birthplace of each respondent and his or her parents and grandparents while representing a continuum of increasing US-born ancestry. To accomplish this, we developed a measure we call “the generation score” as a ratio variable that dispenses with the need to name each generation. We calculate this variable by allotting a total of four points to each generation born in the United States.

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If a respondent was born in the United States, for example, she would be given four points. Two points would then be allotted for each of her parents born in the United States and one point for each grandparent born here. This produces a range of generation scores from zero (all foreignborn) to twelve (all US-born).32 Nearly all respondents can accurately and quickly identify their own countries of birth as well as the countries of birth of their parents and grandparents, making this an easy measure to employ. We have emphasized that understanding migration requires us to look at factors that push or pull people to cross a border and those that hold or repel such migration. The same principle, we believe, applies to understanding assimilation. Whether Mexicans assimilate involves pressures to do so (push and pull factors) but also encouragement to resist (hold and repel factors). One possible factor that retards assimilation is transnationalism— how strongly Mexican-origin people living in the United States value Mexican culture and lifestyle and how strongly they desire to hold onto their ties with family and friends in Mexico. Since South Texas is on the border with Mexico, we should be able to examine the duration of these ties in terms of how many generations maintain them and whether they do indeed act as brakes on assimilation. We also identify some potential influences in American culture that repel assimilation or make it undesirable to Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Transnationalism and the Assimilation Process We use the term “transnationalism” to describe how immigrants and their descendants maintain cultural and structural connections with their home country (in this case, Mexico). The sociologists Peggy Levitt and Mary Waters, two prominent authorities on transnationalism, propose that transnationalism will be especially strong in locations where the immigrant population is proportionately large and where migrants and their children are physically close to their homelands.33 Again, the large Hispanic population in South Texas just across the border from Mexico would seem to provide an ideal location to test this hypothesis. Gina’s case might illustrate, on a personal level, the impact of transnationalism. She was born in the United States to Mexican parents. Her husband was born in Mexico. They frequently cross back to Mexico to visit her grandparents and his many family members. One senses, however, that her ties to Mexico are becoming weaker. She related,

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As I visit border towns like Reynosa or Nuevo Progreso or even deeper into Mexico, where my grandparents live, I realize that life in Mexico is very rough. Every time I cross the border, which is often because my husband is from Reynosa, I am shocked at the things I see. It makes me glad that I live in the United States. My husband doesn’t miss his family as much as before, so the trips are becoming less frequent. He does miss the culture of Mexico, however. He thinks life in the Valley is very boring.

It is important to note that transnationalism generally involves more than just frequent trips across the border. For the purposes of our analysis, we will refer to two forms of transnationalism, calling one “cultural transnationalism” (valuing and participating in the lifestyle and culture of the ancestral homeland) and the other “structural transnationalism” (maintaining cross-border visits and contacts with one’s native land). In our Cultural Practices Survey,34 we asked four questions that are rough indicators of these two types of transnationalism. For cultural transnationalism, we asked, “How much do you like the lifestyle of Mexico?” and “How important was it to your parents that you keep Mexican culture?” The two questions used to measure structural transnationalism were “How much contact do you maintain with family or friends in Mexico?” and “How often do you visit family or friends in Mexico?” Supposedly, if transnationalism is a major hold factor in assimilation, we will not observe much change over several generations in how respondents reply to these questions. The results of our analysis are presented in chart 6.1 in relation to the mean (average) generation scores of respondents. As shown in chart 6.1, all individuals who responded “A lot” or “Very much” on all four questions had generation scores (GS) averaging near or below 4, indicating that they were mostly either born in Mexico or had parents who were. Likewise, those who answered “Very little” or “Not at all” on these four questions had mean GS close to or above 8, meaning they and their forebears had been in the United States for two or more generations. Differences across the response ranges were highly significant statistically. In short, it appears that those respondents whose families had been in the United States for two or more generations tended to be well on their way to losing their liking for the lifestyle of Mexico and were less likely to have parents who felt it was important to hold onto Mexican culture. Likewise, these respondents did not keep much contact with family and friends in Mexico and seldom visited them. Among all our

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Chart 6.1. Mean generation score and measures of cultural and structural

transnationalism among residents of South Texas, 2001–2002 Source: Cultural Practices Survey, 2001–2002.

Mexican-origin respondents, only 13.5 percent of this group said they frequently visited family or friends in Mexico, and only 19 percent said they had frequent contact of any kind with family and friends there. However, 34 percent said it was important to their parents that they observe Mexican customs and traditions. The fi nding that only 16 percent said they themselves liked the lifestyle of Mexico a lot, however, suggests that Mexican culture was much more important to their parents than to them. These results suggest that cultural and structural transnationalism decline quite rapidly in this South Texas border region between the first generation and the third. We conclude that transnationalism is not a significant hold on assimilation even here in this highly concentrated Hispanic border population of South Texas. Discrimination and Other Factors of Resistance to Assimilation A factor that could repel assimilation is discrimination and restricted economic opportunity. Though the sociologists Richard Alba and Victor

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Nee found that Mexican Americans assimilate both culturally and structurally, they proposed that this process is slower for Mexican Americans than for European immigrant groups. They reached this conclusion in part because Mexican Americans have reduced economic opportunities and experience greater racist opposition than European immigrants.35 The sociologists Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut likewise emphasize that the slower assimilation of Mexican-origin people could largely be explained by the resistance they experience from Anglos who do not want to include them as equals in the structure of US society.36 The sociologist Douglas S. Massey makes a related point: It’s not that Huntington was wrong to worry about Hispanic incorporation. But the challenge, far from arising from intrinsic cultural differences, is instead of our own making. The principal barriers to progress lie in our own immigration and border policies, which have placed a large share of the population outside of the law, deprived of the most elemental social, economic, and civic rights. Of the more than 11 million unauthorized migrants living in the United States today, the vast majority—around 80 percent—are from Latin America, with a hugely disproportionate share coming from Mexico and Central America.37

This represents an excellent example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who support the thesis that Hispanics and especially Mexican Americans will not assimilate culturally often use this assertion to block immigration reform and keep more than half of Mexican and other Latino immigrants in the shadows and unable to legalize. And that, more than the immigrants’ desire to hold onto their culture, represents perhaps the primary obstacle to their assimilation. Forcing more than half of Mexican immigrant parents to live in the shadows not only decreases their assimilation into the structure of American society but retards their cultural assimilation as well. They tend to remain hidden by living in neighborhoods, such as colonias, where little English is spoken. They stay away from English classes not because they do not want to learn English but because their unauthorized presence might be detected. Similarly, their interactions with Anglos are minimized or limited to dealing with them mainly through intermediaries, such as labor contractors. This is certainly no recipe for getting both the undocumented and the US-born to choose to become Americans.

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Processes and Types of Assimilation Milton Gordon, in a 1964 book, proposes that assimilation is not just one process but consists of several subtypes of assimilation, including structural, cultural, and marital assimilation.38 Marital assimilation takes place when intermarriage between racial groups erases their biological distinctiveness. Cultural assimilation or acculturation occurs when an ethnic group such as Asian immigrants adopts the culture of the host society, embracing the dominant culture’s language and sharing many if not most of its values, customs, and beliefs. Cultural assimilation would be complete when an ethnic group no longer holds onto its original culture and thus ceases to be an ethnic group; in this example, the group would identify as Americans rather than Asian Americans.39 Structural assimilation occurs when a minority group becomes relatively equal to the dominant group in power, wealth, and prestige and becomes fully integrated into its social relations. Asian Americans, after several generations in the United States, are no longer a minority group. Their power and wealth is not that much different from other white Americans’, and by the second or third generation, they are seldom excluded from friendships and other important relationships in their communities. Similarly, we can examine the extent to which Mexicans and Mexican Americans structurally assimilate, becoming equal in power and wealth to the dominant Anglo society and included as equals in the web of friendships and social relationships of the South Texas community. And likewise, we can look into the extent to which and for how many generations Mexicans and Mexican Americans maintain Mexican culture in this South Texas border environment.

Structu r a l Assimil ation The definition we have used for structural assimilation implies that structural assimilation can occur on two different levels, first in close, personal primary relationships and next in impersonal, institutional, and/or society-wide secondary relationships. We included four questions in the Cultural Practices Survey to help us determine how quickly either kind of integration takes place in South Texas. We used two questions to measure primary structural assimilation: “How often are your friends of Anglo origin?” and “How much do you associate with Anglos?” We used two questions to measure structural assimilation at the secondary level: “What was the last year of school you completed?” and

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Chart 6.2. Mean generation score and measures of structural assimilation among Hispanic residents of South Texas, 2001–2002 Source: Cultural Practices Survey, 2001–2002.

“What is your annual household income?” The last two questions were used to determine how much Mexican-origin people increased their levels of education and income from one generation to the next. The responses do not measure respondents’ progress relative to that of Anglos; that measure is addressed separately. Chart 6.2 presents the results of the responses to these four questions in relation to the mean generation score of respondents. Chart 6.2 shows that Mexican-origin respondents in South Texas increased their friendships and associations with Anglos with increasing generational time in the United States. It also shows that their levels of education and household incomes likewise increased with succeeding generations in the United States, as represented by the mean generation scores. Each of these measures manifested a statistically significant relation.40 While the results show definite increases in structural assimilation among Mexican-origin people in South Texas, they do not reveal whether such increases helped them reach parity with Anglos. Indeed, the dropout rates of Hispanics and their levels of educational attainment and of income lag considerably behind those measures among Anglo Americans. Nevertheless, the results do suggest that Mexican-origin people in South Texas had greater frequency of associations with Anglos and advanced in their levels of education and income with increasing generational status in the United States. When we compare the structural assimilation of Mexican-origin

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Table 6.2. Secondary structural assimilation (education and income) of Asian and Hispanic immigrants and their adult children and grandchildren

Level of assimilation

Percentage with bachelor’s degree or Median household more income (in dollars)

Asians First generation (immigrants) Second generation Third generation

50 55 53

65,200 67,500 91,600

11 21 17

34,600 48,400 43,600

Hispanics First generation (immigrants) Second generation Third generation

Source: Pew Research Center, Second-Generation Americans, 30, 34.

people in the United States and in this border environment, however, we find a slower process of inclusion and assimilation. Though there were definite correlations between generation scores and our four measures of structural assimilation, the statistical relations, though significant, were not as strong as those of other ethnic groups. The same pattern holds at the national level. In relation to primary structural assimilation, second-generation Mexican Americans reported that 49 percent of their US friends were from their country of origin, compared with only 17 percent of Asians who reported a home-country nationality of most of their friends. Income and education levels as measures of secondary structural assimilation of second- and third-generation Hispanics at the national level are considerably lower than those of Asians of corresponding generations, as table 6.2 shows. The results shown in table 6.2 are revealing not only in the different attainment levels of Asians and Hispanics but in the tremendous differences in the initial advantages that Asian immigrants bring with

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them to the United States. First-generation Asians have a rate of bachelor’s degrees 4.5 times higher than Hispanic immigrants. Household incomes of first-generation Asians are nearly double those of Hispanic immigrants. Clearly, the United States draws Mexican immigrants mainly in the lower education levels due primarily to the proximity of Mexico to the United States, Mexico’s woeful public education system, and the demand for cheap labor especially in agriculture, construction, and hospitality services in the United States. Because of a largely unresponsive immigration system, large numbers of Mexican immigrants come without documents and have to remain in the shadows of the American economy. Asian countries, in contrast, mainly export individuals with advanced educational credentials who secure employment in more highly paid occupations. Asians and Hispanics see their children and grandchildren do better than themselves, though the increase by Hispanics in the second generation is proportionately greater than the gain by Asian second-generation adults over their parents. Nevertheless, as table 6.2 also shows, the third generation of Hispanics falls behind their second-generation parents. This reversion among third-generation Hispanics is hard to explain. We suspect that a combination of factors is at work, including higher dropout rates, more gang recruitment in low-income urban neighborhoods, familial legacies of mixed citizenship status and having to attend schools not designed for college preparation. We also suspect that many Hispanics in the third generation who do move up educationally and economically cease to identify themselves or to be counted as Hispanics, preferring to be identified just as Americans. If these (usually higher-income) Hispanics are no longer included as Hispanics, the averages for the remainder of the third generation are lower. One methodological difficulty of using survey data from a single point in time to measure change across generations, as is the case in our Cultural Values Survey, is that it gives a cross-sectional analysis rather than following individuals and families over time to see how they change. The most obvious difficulties of conducting longitudinal studies that span several generations are the cost and the time involved. However, the sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz conducted a follow-up study to a Mexican American Study Project done many years earlier, turning it into a longitudinal study of several generations of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio.41 They found evidence of clear cultural and linguistic assimilation, though at a slower pace than

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that experienced by European immigrants. Moreover, they also discovered that structural assimilation into key institutions, especially in educational attainment, occurred rapidly for the second generation but slowed for the third generation and then began to regress somewhat in the fourth and fifth generations.

Cu ltu r a l Assimil ation Most scholars of assimilation recognize that cultural change is inevitable across generations. Most of the debate focuses on how this process takes place and how many generations it requires. Some researchers see the acculturation of immigrants—when they and their children drop their home culture in favor of the host culture—as the predominant process. Others argue that ethnogenesis (the creation of a somewhat new culture that incorporates parts of the new and old cultures and even creates innovations in the new environment) is the dominant process taking place among Mexican-origin people in the United States. This introduces the possibility that Mexican-origin people in this border location may become bicultural, that is, fully proficient in both cultures. Perhaps the best aspect of culture in which to examine that possibility is language. John, who is a third-generation Mexican American, described his own process of assimilation. When I was in high school, I got a part-time job and saved up a few hundred dollars so that I could legally change my name from Juan to John. Everyone was already calling me John for so long, but I wanted it to be official because I was so embarrassed that my driver’s license and other papers still said Juan. I think you have better opportunities in life when people don’t think you’re Mexican.

He further explained, “I don’t speak any Spanish because I don’t want to have an accent like other people from the Valley. My grandparents speak only in Spanish, so I am not able to talk to them. But my parents always taught me and my brothers to only speak in English because they felt that it was the fastest way we would get ahead.” John represents a rather small proportion of Mexican Americans in South Texas who have substituted English for Spanish. It is important to ask over how many generations the ability to speak correct Spanish persists in South Texas, where the concentration of Spanish-speaking individuals is very high. We explored this question in large part when

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Chart 6.3. Relation of mean generation score to frequency of responses on six

measures of language assimilation among South Texas Hispanics, 2001–2002 Source: Cultural Practices Survey, 2001–2002.

we administered the Cultural Practices Survey in 2001–2002 with six questions, as follows: “How much do you speak English?” “How often do you think in English?” “How much do you speak Spanish?” “How frequently do you speak Spanish so that children can learn it?” “How much do you enjoy speaking Spanish?” “How much do you enjoy movies in Spanish?” For each question respondents could answer, “None or very little,” “Moderately,” or “A lot/very much.”42 Chart 6.3 shows how the responses to the six questions are related to the generation scores of respondents. All the items in chart 6.3 exhibit a very pronounced and statistically significant difference in the mean generation scores between those who responded “None/very little” and those who responded “A lot/very much.” Together these results present strong evidence that most thirdgeneration Mexican Americans in South Texas, those we equate with having higher than eight or more points on the GS scale, will think in English and prefer it to Spanish, with some, like John, having given up on Spanish altogether. Nevertheless, only 13.7 percent of our Mexicanorigin respondents in this survey reported speaking little or no Spanish. These results suggest a rather rapid rate (in generational terms) of linguistic assimilation—but more toward bilingualism and Tex-Mex than substituting English for Spanish. These results also fail to support the

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thesis that large concentrations of Mexican-origin people near Mexico will refuse to learn English. Besides language, another important consideration is how long Mexican-origin people maintain practices generally associated with the culture of Mexico. It is commonly assumed in many studies of assimilation that by the third generation, most cultural practices brought by the immigrant generation will largely disappear.43 When Mexican-origin people live near their homeland surrounded by paisanos (compatriots), will they maintain their cultural practices from one generation to the next or will they assimilate into the dominant culture? We have already shown that the bonds of transnationalism seem to weaken within a generation or two and that speaking Mexican Spanish does not appear to last much longer. We might ask if other elements of Mexican culture, especially traditional cultural practices, also disappear in two or three generations in this South Texas border location with a high concentration of Mexican-origin people. According to Israel Cuéllar, few studies have examined specific cultural practices as measures of acculturation.44 Those few that do often ask respondents only to indicate their awareness of a custom—but not the frequency with which they practiced it or whether they thought it was worth keeping.45 By means of approximately 250 in-depth ethnographic interviews we conducted from 1982 to 2001 on cultural practices with Mexican-origin residents of South Texas, we identified forty-three specific practices associated with Mexico. Advancing these ethnographic findings to the 2001–2002 Cultural Practices Survey, we asked the 433 respondents whether they felt that each of these fortythree cultural practices should be kept or forgotten or did not matter. We also asked them to indicate whether they and their family members and friends practiced each of these practices “frequently,” “occasionally,” or “rarely/not at all.” We then assessed the relation of their generational status to each question. Though the results of all forty-three practices cannot be adequately discussed in the limited space of this chapter,46 we should point out that we found statistically significant relations between thirty-three of the items and the generational scores of respondents.47 Three of the cultural practices that were not statistically significant in their relation to generation score are presented in table 6.3. The table also shows the mean generation scores for each of the three response categories, similar to the way they are shown in charts 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3. Finally, table  6.3 shows what percentage of respondents indicated that they and their

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Table 6.3. Mexican cultural practices in South Texas, by mean generation score (GS) How often practiced

Specific cultural practice

Rarely/ not at all

Occasionally

GS mean

GS mean

GS mean

%

Frequently

Respondents who want to keep this Significance practice (%) level

Health-related practices Manzanilla tea for stomachache

8.2

6.7

5.4

53

.000

73

Touching a child to prevent ojo

6.8

6.3

5.9

45

n/s

46

Celebration-related practices Singing “Las mañanitas” at birthdays

7.8

6.0

5.4

54

.000

73

Mariachis for Mother’s Day

8.6

6.9

5.1

41

.000

72

Tamales at Christmastime

6.7

6.8

5.8

77

n/s

86

Piñata for kids’ birthdays

6.9

7.0

6.0

78

n/s

87

Source: Cultural Practices Survey, 2001–2002. Note: n/s = not significant above .01.

friends and family members frequently practiced each custom and what percentage of respondents wanted to see it maintained in their culture. Three items in table 6.3 have strong and statistically significant relations to generational score. These are serving manzanilla (chamomile) tea for a stomachache, singing “Las mañanitas” at birthdays, and hiring mariachis for Mothers Day. These results suggest that these three items (as well as the other 29 cultural practices found to have a statistically significant relation to generation score) over time will be largely lost in the three-generation assimilation process. If we were to make a chart

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for each, this would also be seen by relatively large differences in the GS mean between the “Rarely” and “Frequently” response categories. Our conclusion is supported by many of our in-depth interviews. Irma Arrevelo, a twenty-year-old, third-generation Mexican American, recognized that she had lost many of the customs or traditions of Mexico. She said, Maybe it’s because I’ve lived here [in the Valley] all my life, but I don’t know much about the way of life in Mexico. I don’t have any relatives in Mexico, and I only go over there with my friends to hang out at the Mexican clubs. My parents never really taught us that it’s important to know about how our ancestors lived. Maybe that’s because both of them and even my grandparents were born and raised in the Valley.

The first practice shown in table 6.3, using manzanilla tea, is quite popular, with 73 percent of respondents saying they wanted to keep this custom. Nevertheless, the fi nding of a 20 percent gap between those who said they frequently used it and those who wanted to keep it suggests that despite its popularity, it will largely disappear in two or three generations. This conclusion is supported by the observation that the generation score of those who said they rarely practiced this custom is almost 2.5 points higher on the 12-point GS scale than those who reported frequently observing this custom. The second listed health practice is touching a child to prevent ojo, often called mal de ojo and roughly meaning an illness caused when someone admiringly gazes on a child. According to this tradition, if the gaze is not followed by a touch, the admired child may suffer insomnia, aches and pains, excessive crying, fever, severe headache, or restlessness.48 Because children are seen as particularly susceptible to ojo, our Cultural Practices Survey respondents in 1997 reported it was still common for many Hispanics of South Texas to touch any child they admire. Most of our respondents saw it not as the result of evil intentions but of strong powers transmitted through an admiring glance. Many Anglos moving to the area soon discover that they too may be expected to touch children they admire to avoid bringing harm to the child. Babies are often gently touched, generally on the head, to prevent them from getting ojo. Not everyone, of course, believes in ojo. Anastacio said, “I grew up with my aunts and grandma being into all [those] superstitious beliefs. I was never into that kind of stuff. I would hear all about it, but that was

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it. I recall my grandma rubbing our bodies with a raw egg [in its shell]. She would then break the egg in a glass. If the yolk came out black, then it meant that someone had done ojo to us.” The data in table 6.3 suggest that the custom of ojo is not likely to disappear within two or three generations. We say this because there is only a small (0.9) difference in generation scores between those who said they frequently observed this custom and those who rarely practiced it. As a result, we believe this cultural practice is quite enduring, almost as much a part of the culture of Mexican Americans in this border location as it is among Mexican immigrants, though only 46 percent reported wanting to keep the practice. We found a similar pattern regarding cultural practices related to celebrating special occasions. Seferino Rivas, at ninety-one years old, explained how important it was to him to sing “Las mañanitas” at someone’s birthday celebration. When we celebrate my birthday every July, my children make sure that we have a large party. We invite family, friends, and neighbors to join us. We make a large meal consisting of everything from barbeque to menudo. There’s plenty of rice, beans, and tortillas, enough to last for a week as leftovers. Then they all sing “Las mañanitas” to me.

The same song is also sung on another special day. Many Mexicanorigin people hire mariachis to sing to their mothers on Mother’s Day. One of the interviewers said, All of the people that I interviewed felt that this is a special day, especially for Mexican American mothers. They felt strongly that this is a day when husbands and children actually show how much they appreciate what their wives and mothers have done for them. What most people do is hire a group of mariachis and have them serenade their mothers. One song that is always sung is “Las mañanitas.”

A large percentage of respondents reported that they wanted to keep both of these traditions; percentages that were considerably smaller reported that they practiced them frequently. Indeed, only 41 percent reported frequently getting mariachis to sing for Mother’s Day. In part, this may be because mariachis are not easy to come by in South Texas and often have to be brought over from Mexico. The difference

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Figure 6.2. Piñata maker in Progreso, Mexico. Photo by Ovidio Cavazos;

© O. Cavazos, used by permission.

in generation scores between those who reported frequently practicing this custom and those who reported doing it very rarely was almost 3.5 points on the 12-point generation scale. Food is an important part of many celebrations for Mexican-origin people, and certain foods seem to become identified with certain times of the year. For many Mexican-origin people, this means tamales at Christmastime. Felipe said he loved to eat the tamales his mother and aunts made. Though one can buy tamales any time of the year, he loved Christmas because it was the only time his family makes tamales. “When I was little,” he recalled, “I remember waking up one morning around Christmas to a lot of talking and laughing. I found out that my family was making tamales that day. I remember getting scared when I saw my aunts because they weren’t wearing any makeup. I saw my mom laughing with her sisters. I had not seen her enjoy herself like that in a long time.” And the custom itself will likely be around for many generations, as evidenced by the very high percentages who reported frequently observing (77 percent) and wanting to keep (86 percent) the custom and a “not significant” relation between the frequency of practice and generation status on this item. Another cultural practice that is likely to be maintained for many

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generations, according to data presented in table 6.3, is the custom of having piñatas for the birthdays of children and occasionally even adults. For how many generations do Mexican-origin residents in South Texas maintain basic elements of Mexican culture? Our research suggests that most will remain bilingual even if they become Englishdominant by the third generation or later. Nevertheless, most seem to lose their ties to family and friends in Mexico, with transnationalism largely gone by the third generation. A mixed pattern occurs around the celebration of special days, with singing “Las mañanitas” for birthdays and hiring mariachis for Mother’s Day disappearing rather quickly but having piñatas for birthdays and tamales around Christmas being much more enduring. Such results suggest that some elements of Mexican culture largely disappear over three generations, while others become part of Mexican American culture in South Texas. Those practices that endure, however, often become changed from their original Mexican forms through the process of ethnogenesis. Thanksgiving, for example, is not an important holiday in Mexico and certainly not celebrated on the same date as the US celebration. Many Mexican Americans in South Texas, however, have adopted it as an important day for family celebrations, fi nding a more Mexican way of celebrating it. Hector Gomez focused on family gatherings at Thanksgiving around making and eating tamales. He said, I like these gatherings on Thanksgiving and Christmas because the family is together as one. We are all very close to each other. I think this is very important because I want to be able to share and talk to my children the way my father and mother shared their views with us. It would be nice if more and more families could be as close as our families are.

The ethnogenesis approach helps us understand that some of what we call Mexican culture may have its origins on the northern side of the border. Flour tortillas, which are rare in most parts of Mexico, seem to be more a part of Mexican American culture than Mexican. Tex-Mex is another example of ethnogenesis, as it takes some expressions from each culture and modifies them into a somewhat new way of speaking. A final example can be found in a form of music along the US-Mexico border—Tejano music, a hybrid genre that emerged primarily in the South Texas borderlands, incorporating elements of music from both sides of the border and adding some innovations of its own.49

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Table 6.4. How Latinos identify themselves, by level of assimilation

Level of assimilation Spanish-dominant Bilingual English-dominant First generation Second generation Third and higher generation

By country As Latino or of origin Hispanic As American (%) (%) (%) 68 52 29 68 38 21

27 24 17 24 24 20

3 22 51 6 35 57

Source: Pew Hispanic Center, Hispanics: A People in Motion, 19. Note: The table refers to either the first or the only term that Latino survey respondents used to identify themselves.

Just Americans? Do our findings mean that Mexican Americans will become just Americans in three or four generations? Obviously, some will. Table 6.4 shows research from the Pew Hispanic Center that by the third generation, 57 percent of Hispanics nationally (a group made up mostly of Mexican-origin people) will prefer to be called “American.” Similarly, while 68 percent of first-generation Hispanics prefer to identify themselves by their country of origin, by the third generation only 21 percent would prefer to be called by a term that indicates their ancestors’ country of origin, in this case, “Mexican” or “Mexican American.” When Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley were asked in the 2006 Latino National Survey how strongly they thought of themselves as American, those who responded “Very strongly” had the highest mean generation scores, whereas those who responded “Not at all” had the lowest mean generation scores (chart 6.4). Indeed, 78.1 percent of Rio Grande Valley respondents thought of themselves as “somewhat strongly” or “very strongly” American (whereas just 67.1 percent of the national sample selected those two responses). These fi ndings not only challenge the assumption that Latinos refuse to assimilate but also counter Huntington’s assertion that a highly concentrated border Latino population would assimilate more slowly than a less concentrated one. The extremist assertion that Mexican Americans in areas like the

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South Texas borderlands will refuse to assimilate is clearly not supported by the results we have found. In our in-depth interviews, we found that Mexicans and Mexican Americans are divided, with some Mexicans believing Mexican Americans have turned their backs on their heritage and Mexican Americans saying that Mexicans need to remember they are no longer in Mexico. Similarly, in our in-depth interviews and surveys, very few Mexican Americans of a second or third generation felt loyalty to Mexico. Likewise, the assertion that Mexican immigrants and their children, unlike other immigrant groups, do not think of themselves as Americans is not supported by national survey data. Indeed, in the 2006 Latino National Survey, responses from the Rio Grande Valley reveal that even by the second generation, most Mexican Americans thought of themselves as typical Americans.50 In this respect, they were similar to second-generation Asian Americans, 61 percent of whom also saw themselves as typical Americans.51 In our own surveys in South Texas, we found that self-identification away from Mexico may begin for some even in the first generation. In our Cultural Practices Survey, 26 percent of respondents reported being born in Mexico, yet only 18 percent considered themselves Mexican and said they liked the lifestyle of Mexico a lot. In conclusion, we reject the assertion that large concentrations of Mexican-origin people living on the border near Mexico refuse to assimilate. Likewise, we reject the assertions of those who criticize Mexican Americans for not learning English. When we examined seven vari-

Chart 6.4. Relation of mean generation score to responses to the question “How strongly or not do you think of yourself as an American?” Source: Fraga et al., Latino National Survey (LNS), 2006, RGV respondents only.

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ables measuring the linguistic assimilation of Mexican Americans in South Texas, we found a strong correlation with their generation scores, showing that by the second or third generation the majority were not only speaking English but did most of their thinking in English and preferred English-language music. At the national level, one also fi nds strong evidence of linguistic assimilation.52 A 2013 Pew Hispanic Report focused on second-generation Americans found that 85 percent of second-generation Mexican-origin adults reported being able to carry on a conversation in English. Among Asian second-generation respondents, 82 percent could do the same.53 Nevertheless, Hispanic respondents much more than those of Asian descent saw value in remaining bilingual and bicultural. In the Pew study, 50 percent of Hispanic respondents said they could carry on conversations in their ancestral language, whereas only 18 percent of Asian American respondents claimed that ability.54 Still, even when Hispanics do culturally assimilate, it does not seem to produce the structural assimilation that some say should follow. Some Hispanics blame the problems of many of the third generation regressing to lower socioeconomic levels on the process of Americanization itself. One immigrant said he believed that assimilating American culture had actually worked against him and his family. I am very disillusioned with living in the United States. We moved here because we thought we would improve our lives. Instead, all our sons are in trouble with the law. Our family has fallen apart. Not my brother’s family, though. His children in Mexico got an education and have good jobs there. His two daughters married well. His two sons are still on the farm and are modernizing it. All of his children have a great deal of respect in the community and are very respectful towards everyone. The atmosphere in America is not very conducive towards family closeness. Instead, individualism is the way of life here and morality is very low. The laws call parents abusive if they spank their children. Permissiveness is causing these problems. In Mexico, permissiveness is not so prevalent. The schools are stricter. Parents work with the teachers to make the children behave and follow their parents’ wishes. I really believe that if this were done in the United States, our problems with our children would greatly decrease.

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CHAPTER 7

“Ahí Viene el Bolillo!”: Anglos in South Texas With Jen n y Ch a mber l a in

When we were working in the fields, sometime the only chance we’d have to rest was a water break. On a really hot day, we’d sit for just a couple of minutes to enjoy the water and the break. Occasionally, in the fields, we’d get a sudden surprise of shade when a stray cloud would cover the sun. We’d pause for just a moment to enjoy the cooling shade. Then suddenly we’d hear, “Ahí viene el bolillo!” It meant the gringo boss was coming, and we’d better get back to work. Ru by A lva r ez, 1988

The bolillo that Ruby and other farmworkers had in mind in this account was the Anglo boss. The word actually means a white bread roll produced by Mexican bakeries. Its use is a gentle form of humor along both sides of the Texas-Mexico border. Today, the bolillos who are coming are Anglo newcomers to South Texas. Some come as retirees; others, as teachers and professionals; and still others, as Anglo managers to work in the maquiladora industry in Mexico. Dorothy, a forty-seven-year-old housewife, moved to the Valley fifteen years earlier with her husband. She said, My husband and I moved here from Massachusetts because of the shortage of doctors in the Valley and because we had heard about the beautiful weather down here. Initially, I was shocked when I came here. So many Hispanics—and they were all speaking Spanish. I didn’t know how to approach them or if they knew English, so I remained reclusive for a while. I didn’t know what they were like, whether they were thieves or just what. But then my neighbors started introducing themselves, I saw how nice they really are, inviting us over for barbecues and

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such. There aren’t any minorities in my family. Not that we’re racist, but in Massachusetts we were raised to stay with our own kind.

For Dorothy and many other such Anglos, the adjustment to life in South Texas involves much more than just getting acquainted with Hispanic neighbors.1 One of the most difficult aspects of the adjustment is getting used to seeing so many Hispanic people and hearing so much Spanish spoken. And it is also difficult for many to not regard Hispanics from the white racial frame (or the Anglo cultural frame) with which those like Dorothy are accustomed. When Todd Worthen, a high school teacher, first came to the area, he and his wife went to a local retail store for supplies. “Everywhere we went,” he said, “people were speaking Spanish. I’d never even talked to a Mexican before. I asked a clerk for help and she answered me in Spanish. I couldn’t believe it. Suddenly, I had become a minority just by moving down here.” It appears that most Anglos who move to South Texas make the adjustment and even come to enjoy living in South Texas. In our 1996 Survey of Anglo Newcomers, 61 percent said they liked the traditions, customs, and lifestyles of the Rio Grande Valley “quite a bit” or “a lot.” Only 9 percent said that they didn’t like those at all or liked them only a little. Ken, a technician with five years’ residence in the Valley, illustrates this adjustment. Ken said, I love the people in the Valley. They’re warm and caring. Now I even have my own compadres [close friends; literally, coparents]. Recently, I went back to West Virginia. I went to a Wal-Mart to do some shopping. That’s when it occurred to me that there wasn’t a single Hispanic person in the store. I felt homesick for the Valley. I guess I hadn’t realized how accustomed I had become.

Though some Anglo newcomers immediately love the Valley and its people, most go through an adjustment process spanning months or even years. Many, like Ken, learn to enjoy the area and its people, even modifying somewhat the racial, ethnic, or class frames they brought with them to South Texas. Others feel condemned to a very difficult existence and count the days until they can leave. In this chapter we’ll describe the adjustment process that many Anglos go through and some factors that help determine whether the outcome is positive or negative. We also will discuss which categories of Anglos generally experience the most discrimination and/or problems and what adjustments

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they tend to make. The foundations of our research in this chapter are our Survey of Anglo Newcomers administered to 224 respondents in 1996, our Winter Texan Survey completed by 326 seasonal residents in 1995, ethnographic interviews and accounts from the Borderlife Project from 1980 through 2010, and US census data for recent years.

Anglo Newcomers Adjusting to a Different World Mike Jones was twenty years old and moved to South Texas from Indiana four years earlier. In describing his initial view of the Valley, he said, I thought it was hell. I couldn’t seem to grasp the culture down here. I was being discriminated against because I was white and couldn’t speak Spanish. When I tried to get a job, everyone asked me if I was bilingual. I fi nally started going out with a Mexican American girl, but her parents didn’t like me because I was white. Now I think I know how black people must have felt when I was growing up. I guess that’s a blessing from God to make me open my eyes.

In contrast, Robert Benson, an Anglo maquiladora manager, related, When I moved here from New York, where I had lived for thirty-eight years, I was leery of living in a border town and not knowing a lick of Spanish. But after a short time, I began to notice the beauty of my move and felt that it was meant to be. The people in Reynosa and McAllen still believe that one of the most important assets in life is caring for others. Unfortunately, this trait is lost in New York. People in my company would ask, “Isn’t this a drastic change in cultures for you?” My response was always the same: “Yes—a welcome change.” The people here always take extra time each day to say “Good morning,” shake your hand, and genuinely look you in the eyes to ask how you are. The Mexican culture still believes in respect, religion, and responsibility to others and to their families. They may not have enough to feed their family, but they will invite you in, welcoming you into their home, and share their food with you. This has been one of the most rewarding experiences in my life.

How can moving to the Valley produce such different reactions in these two individuals of the same ethnic status? True, their personality differences and life experiences may account for much of the disparity.

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But the sociological perspective encourages us to examine the power of the situation. In these two examples, the situation of a lower- to middleincome Anglo may be very different from that of a higher-income Anglo. We will show how lower-status Anglos often confront very different situations, with a different class frame, than higher-income Anglos do when they interact—either as newcomers or as lifelong residents— with Hispanics in South Texas. A somewhat more in-depth review of the cases of Mike Jones and Robert Benson can illustrate this point. Mike is from a working-class family that moved to the area several years earlier. As a result, when his parents were looking for a home they could afford, they found that housing prices were lower in Hidalgo than in McAllen. But that meant Mike would attend a school in a district where there were very few Anglos, since most Anglos lived in higher-income areas. When he graduated from high school and looked for work, he found himself competing for jobs with Hispanics who were bilingual. Most jobs for which he could compete required knowing Spanish to deal with the local population and with well-to-do Mexican shoppers and residents. As a result, he had a very difficult time finding a job. His girlfriend’s family was suspicious of him not just because he was white but because he was a lowincome white with meager job prospects and a run-down car. Robert Benson, in contrast, did not have to compete for his job with local Hispanics because the field of local Hispanics with an MBA or other professional credentials was not yet sufficiently large to meet local demand. His company wanted to hire maquiladora managers from within the company. When the company sent him to work in a border maquiladora plant, it offered a bonus because such positions are often hard to fill. As a result, he could afford a home in a high-income neighborhood that was about half Anglo and half Hispanic, including a sprinkling of wealthy Mexicans. He could afford to send his kids to a private school that is predominantly Anglo or to a school in a district that has a high mix of Anglos and well-to-do Hispanics. At work he was treated with respect or even deference because Mexicans and most Mexican Americans are taught to show respect to individuals with high social positions, good educations, and/or high incomes. So, even though Mike’s and Robert’s personalities and life expectations have some impact on how they are treated, their respective social situations have a substantial impact as well. This comparison also allows us to stress the importance of the power of the definition of the situation. As previously explained, this concept proposes that as people define a situation a particular way, they act on

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their definition rather than what might otherwise be true. Racial, class, and ethnic frames strongly influence how people define certain situations. Sometimes, this reaction creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, the very situation the person had misperceived. This can be illustrated by the account of Danny, who had transferred from Oklahoma in the fifth grade and recently graduated from a Valley high school. He said, The teachers here are racist against whites. Some of them used Spanish words in class and then would look at me and say, “If you don’t know what that means, ask a classmate.” I shouldn’t have to ask a classmate. Teachers should teach the whole class, not just the majority. I don’t know any Spanish. Sometimes I felt like they spoke Spanish just so I wouldn’t understand. I felt like they were laughing at me in a way. I also found it hard to trust my Hispanic classmates. I didn’t have a whole lot of friends in school, but the ones I did have were either whites or Hispanics who acted like whites and didn’t speak much Spanish. Why should I try to be friends with people who made fun of me and spoke a language that I don’t know? It’s not like any of them tried to be nice to me. I know they didn’t like me, so I didn’t try to be their friend either.

In Danny’s case, we can see that his defi nition of the situation, in this case his white racial frame, made him think that Hispanics were biased against Anglos and that the teachers and students made fun of him. Acting on this definition, he not only isolated himself from potential friends but came to see himself as a victim of discrimination. His defi nition of the situation essentially led him to create the atmosphere of hostility that he had erroneously perceived. Fortunately, most Anglos who come to the Valley have a much better experience, especially those who are not so negative in how they defi ne the situation—or who are so inflexible in their racial, class, or ethnic frames.

Changes in South Texas since 1999 As chart 7.1 illustrates, one of the changes in the Valley since 1999, when the first edition of this book appeared, has been a rather steady drop in the proportion of Anglos in the general population of the fivecounty South Texas region; this relative decline is part of a longer-term trend. In the five-county region, Anglos represented a weighted average of 21.9 percent of the population in 1980 and 7.3 percent of the population in 2014. Concurrently, the number of Anglos in the same five-

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Chart 7.1. Percent of Anglo population in five South Texas counties, 1980–2014 Source: Authors’ calculations of US Census American Community Survey and other census data.

county region dropped from approximately 140,000 people in 1980 to 117,000 people in 2014, while the region added nearly 1 million people during this time span. The change is significant in other ways. The Anglos who are now living in South Texas tend to be professionals brought by shortages in the pools of qualified applicants. A plurality of university professors in South Texas are Anglo. At Texas A&M International University in Laredo, 46.3 percent of the tenured and tenure-track faculty were Anglo, and only 19.9 percent were Hispanic during the fall 2013 semester.2 At the University of Texas–Pan American for the fall 2013 semester, 32.6 percent of all full-time faculty (tenured, tenure-track, and instructors) were Anglo and 25.8 percent were Hispanic.3 Anglo doctors,4 attorneys, engineers, would-be space explorers,5 and other highly trained professionals, including K–12 teachers,6 are also overrepresented in proportion to the Valley Hispanic population.

Who’s the Minority Down Here? Increasingly, it is quite common for Anglos to feel like they belong to a minority group when they come to South Texas. When we asked An-

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“Ahí Viene el Bolillo!”: Anglos in South Texas 265

glos to describe their initial impressions of the Valley, many expressed surprise and dismay at being in a minority. This occurred for the wife of a Border Patrol agent who was transferred from Arizona to South Texas. The husband was driving a U-Haul truck with his wife following in a car behind him. As they passed through Roma and Rio Grande City, his wife started flashing her car lights, signaling him to pull over. “When I got out of my truck,” he said, “she was really upset. She accused me of having crossed into Mexico without telling her. It took me some time to convince her that we were still in the United States.” As chart 7.1 shows, Anglos in South Texas are definitely a numerical minority, just 7.3 percent of the total population in 2014. But that alone does not make them a minority group. Minority status depends more on the treatment a population receives and how much wealth and power they have. Sociologists generally define a minority group as a category of people who control less power and wealth relative to their population size and who are subjected to negative stereotypes and discriminatory treatment. In this respect, women would be considered a minority group even though they generally make up slightly more than half the population. Though Anglos constitute less than 10 percent of the Valley population, we need to consider whether the treatment they receive is indeed discriminatory and whether they have less power and wealth than Hispanics. Chart 7.2 reveals that Anglos in all five South Texas

Chart 7.2. Median household incomes of Anglos and Latinos in five South Texas counties, 1999 and 2014 Source: Authors’ calculations of US Census American Community Survey and other census data.

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Chart 7.3. Percentage of Anglos and Latinos living below the poverty line in five South Texas counties, 1999 and 2014 Source: Authors’ calculations of US Census American Community Survey and other census data.

counties earned substantially higher median household incomes than Hispanics; Anglos in Webb County received on average $60,781 a year compared to $37,591 for Hispanics, 62 percent of the average income of their Anglo neighbors. In Hidalgo County, Hispanics on average received 67 percent of the median household income of Anglos there. The pattern of higher average annual incomes for Anglos corresponds with another measure of inequality, the percent of each ethnic category living below the poverty line (chart 7.3). In Willacy County, 11 percent of Anglos in 2014 had household incomes that put them below the poverty line compared to around 42 percent of Hispanics in that county living in poverty. In Hidalgo County, 12 percent of Anglos were living below the poverty line in 2014 compared to 37 percent of Hispanics there. Clearly, such data reveal that Anglos as a whole do not meet the criteria of having less average income to qualify as a minority group in South Texas. Nevertheless, income and wealth alone do not determine minority group status. Minority groups also experience significant discrimination. So, we should examine how Anglos are treated by Hispanics and whether such treatment constitutes significant discrimination. We will do so by using our Survey of Anglo Newcomers, conducted in 1996,7

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and in-depth ethnographic accounts of Anglos, conducted almost in their entirety from 1980 through 2010.8 Some Possible Forms of Anti-Anglo Discrimination To answer the question of whether Anglos experience significant discrimination in South Texas, we first formalize our definition of discrimination as harmful treatment of a category of people for arbitrary, erroneous, or irrelevant reasons. This definition has three essential criteria: treatment as opposed to attitudes, treatment that can be shown to cause harm to members of a particular category of people, and reasons for the harmful treatment that can be shown to be irrelevant or arbitrary. For example, if Anglos are refused service in a Mexican restaurant simply because they are Anglo, it would seem clear that they are discriminated against; they received harmful treatment, and their ethnic status or race is irrelevant to whether they are good customers. So we need to examine how well Anglo complaints about being discriminated against stand up to this definition. First, we explore whether bilingualism is a relevant requirement for many jobs in South Texas. This common and potentially serious allegation of discrimination is one often heard from Anglos who claim it is hard for them to get jobs in South Texas because they are not bilingual. Bob is an Anglo mechanic who moved to the Valley when his wife was transferred there from her government job in Houston. He said, When I moved here five years ago, I thought Mexicans were going to be really nice people because I had heard they like having lots of friends and admired white people. When we got to the Valley, I went around looking for work, applying at different mechanic shops. They were all owned by Mexicans who asked me if I spoke Spanish. I told them no. They didn’t hire me because I couldn’t speak Spanish. I still don’t speak Spanish, and I don’t plan to learn. When I was talking to the owners of these shops, some of their Mexican workers were speaking Spanish and looking at me. I think they were talking bad about me.

Bob clearly believed he had experienced discrimination. Being disqualified for a job for not being bilingual seems to be harmful treatment. What he failed to consider is whether the requirement of some shops that he speak Spanish was relevant to the work he would be expected to do. Mexican Americans who are not bilingual also have diffi-

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culty getting jobs in the Valley, particularly in the retail sector. If many of the clients who bring their cars to a repair shop only speak Spanish, then the ability to talk to them about their mechanical problems would seem to be a relevant factor. From his comments, one wonders whether several of the shop owners suspected that Bob came with an attitude of racial superiority. The Anglo student who interviewed Bob related, “I discontinued his interview prematurely because of his crude and racially derogatory remarks about Mexicans and Mexican Americans.” Many Anglos fail to recognize the importance of being able to speak Spanish in many South Texas job situations. Arthur also experienced a problem getting a job he wanted because he is not bilingual. He said, I had heard about a good-paying job in sales. Since I’ve been in sales for over five years, I thought I had a good shot at it. When I went in for an interview, the manager and I hit it off really well. When he gave me an application to fill out, I noticed a question in big, bold letters, “Are you bilingual?” I didn’t pay much attention to it. When I gave it to the manager, he glanced at it and said, “You don’t speak Spanish?” I answered, “No.” Then he said, “Well, I’m sorry. There’s no use in even talking further about the job.” I just said, “I thought we were in the United States,” and I just got up and walked out.9

Even in the professional sector, bilingual ability is an important qualification for many jobs. When Mary Hudson applied for a job teaching second grade in a Valley school, her employers asked if she was bilingual. She said, I had to tell them I wasn’t. Somehow, I got the job anyway. Don’t ask me how. I came down here thinking that I should only allow English to be spoken in my classroom. After the fi rst week, though, it was obvious that I either had to learn Spanish or my students would suffer. Many of them used Spanish phrases I simply couldn’t understand. I always had to ask other students to translate. So I got my husband’s Hispanic parents to teach me Spanish. I feel sorry for my students from that year. I didn’t do nearly as well with them as I have with my classes since I learned Spanish.10

Additionally, a few Anglos suspect that they have been excluded from clubs or activities based on their race. Angela, an Anglo who was twenty-one years old at the time of the interview, mentioned that she

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felt she had been discriminated against when she was in high school. She took dance classes when she was younger and thought she was qualified to make the school dance team. At the tryouts, she noticed that she was the only Anglo girl among the many trying out for the dance squad and that the dance team coach was Hispanic. When she did not make the team and all the girls who did were Hispanic, she decided she had experienced discrimination. “I felt discriminated against just because of my race,” she said. “I knew I did well and had the potential to be on the squad just as much as any of those other girls.” If race was the reason she was not selected, her case would be considered one of discrimination because race is not a relevant criterion for being on a school dance squad. But her allegation that she was not chosen because the coach was Hispanic is weak evidence of discrimination. It is hard to know what criteria the coach used in selecting who made the team.11 Only very rarely did we hear reports that Anglo adults felt excluded from clubs and social organizations. In all the in-depth interviews, only one such incident was reported. Martha Richards was a teacher whose family had lived in the Valley for many years. She said, Because our daughter had become very interested in folkloric dancing when we lived in Spain, we let her join a local folkloric dance club in McAllen. She really enjoyed it and seemed to fit in well with the other children, all of whom were Hispanic. Whenever we went to one of the club meetings, however, the Hispanic parents seemed very cold. None of them ever talked to us, and we felt pretty isolated. They never told us to leave. We just took the hint and quit going.

Another perceived form of exclusion is for bilingual Hispanics to switch to Spanish around Anglos who don’t understand it. This is much more common. A housewife reported, “I was at one of my husband’s business parties and I was talking to the other wives. They were mostly Mexican or Mexican American. They spoke English for a while, but suddenly they were speaking Spanish. I felt totally excluded from the conversation. I know it was unintentional, but it made me feel like an outsider.” We agree that this form of exclusion is generally unintentional and thus represents a good example of cultural bias. It also shows that unintentional harm can still hurt. Such occurrences seem to happen most frequently in work settings when informal conversations take place. Often, Hispanics don’t even realize that they have begun speaking Span-

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ish since Tex-Mex involves frequent switching between languages. Hilda, a speech teacher, said, “Not long ago, I was eating lunch with four other teachers, all of them bilingual Hispanics. We were discussing our students when one of them switched to Spanish. She must have said something very amusing, since they all seemed to enjoy their laughter. Though they probably didn’t even think about it, I felt totally left out.” Heather, an Anglo student, agreed that switching back and forth from English to Spanish is largely unintentional. I was the only Anglo in my class, but I had lots of friends that were Hispanic. Most of my teachers were Hispanic, and I never felt like they were teasing me or anything. I know Spanish, so it didn’t bother me if they switched back and forth from English to Spanish because I generally knew what they were saying. That’s just the way it is down here. It’s like we go from English to Spanish and back to English in a sentence. Who cares? Learn Spanish if it bothers you.

A related complaint from numerous Anglos in our in-depth interviews was that Hispanics talked about them in Spanish, often accompanied with laughing. Many assumed they were being talked about, especially when they knew that everyone in the group could speak English. Sarah was a technician, the only Anglo working in the X-ray department of a local hospital. She felt that local Mexican Americans said things about her in Spanish and then laughed about it. “One day,” she said, “I ordered lunch at the hospital cafeteria. I told the line worker I wanted certain things on my sandwich and she started babbling words in Spanish. When other employees laughed, I knew they were all laughing at what she had said about me. When I asked others what she had said, no one would admit anything.” Monolingual Anglos often alleged that the Spanish that is spoken around them is directed against them. But bilingual Anglos very rarely reported being talked about or ridiculed in Spanish, even if those speaking Spanish did not know they could understand what was being said. Their experience with local Hispanics is vastly different from that of monolingual Anglos. The experience of the two groups with Hispanics is so different that it is hard to believe that they are talking about the same people. So how is it possible that many monolingual Anglos believe that Hispanics are talking about them, while bilingual Anglos report that it almost never happens? When Hispanics switch to Spanish and look one’s way or laugh, it is easy to assume they are having fun at one’s expense.

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Craig was an executive at an electronics firm. He was convinced his workers were talking about him whenever he walked through the warehouse at his company. “Every time I walk past a group of workers,” he said, “they give me funny looks and begin to speak about me in Spanish. Often, not long after I pass, I hear them laughing.” Perhaps the reason his workers were looking at him when they spoke Spanish is because he was the boss and they were being careful about what they were saying and looking at him to see his reaction. A related complaint by many Anglos is that Mexican and Mexican American individuals sometimes speak to them in Spanish. Theresa described how she felt the second day she was in the Valley and went shopping at K-Mart. “I felt like I was in a foreign country,” she said. “Everyone was speaking Spanish. When I went to the checkout, another customer said something to me like ‘Permiso.’ I didn’t know what she wanted me to do, so I went in front of her. Evidently, she wanted to pass in front of me. She got angry and bumped me with her cart.” In many of such cases, the Spanish speaker might assume that the Anglo in question understands at least some Spanish. Bridget Gillson, age nineteen and in her first year at UTPA, reported getting an assignment in her biology lab where the professor’s assistant, a young Mexican woman, was the lab instructor. She said, One day we were told to break up into groups to dissect a crayfish. I happened to be in a group where all the students spoke fluent Spanish. The lab instructor told us to come up to the desk so she could view our specimen. She questioned our dissecting techniques and proceeded in Spanish to explain what we did wrong. I had just moved here from the Midwest and knew very little Spanish. I don’t think that she even noticed that I wasn’t able to understand. I wanted to interrupt and tell her to start speaking in English, but I would have felt embarrassed. From that day on, I felt so isolated from everyone in the class. It was almost as if I didn’t belong there.

Many of the preceding stories might be better considered as examples of cultural bias than of outright anti-Anglo bigotry. Unlike bigotry, when harm is deliberate and motivated by prejudice, cultural bias has indirect or unintentional causes. It arises when members of one cultural group are unfamiliar with, or forced to play according to, the cultural rules and conventions of another group. When we are not familiar with the subtleties of another culture, however, we are at a disadvantage. Cultural bias gives indirect advantages to the group whose cul-

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ture is dominant in that setting. Occasionally, Anglos on the border fi nd themselves at a cultural disadvantage, though when they do, they usually have the power to make the results less harmful. A potentially more serious complaint by local Anglos, one that might be a form of bigotry, is that some local Hispanics call them race-based names or make other race-related comments about them. Bill said, “I am always being referred to as ‘güero’ [white or light-skinned] even when they know my name. Sometimes, they also call me ‘bolillo.’” Paula Dodge, a teacher and head coach of a volleyball program, had moved to the Valley from Wisconsin eight years earlier. She said, It was hard at first because some Hispanics would call me a ‘güera’ [white woman], but after learning the language more through the years, it became easier to relate to my students. Being called “güero” is pretty common. Generally, it is not intended as an insult, so I no longer get offended when they call me that. This term, pretty common in Mexico, generally means a light-skinned person. It does not usually have harsh or racist overtones like “whitey.”

Often, the use of this term can even have overtones of endearment or friendship. If Spanish-speaking friends say something like, “Hey, güero,” it basically translates as “What’s up, white friend?” Nevertheless, when combined with some very harsh expressions, it can be a racist expression, something like pinche güero (f——ing whitey). Güero—or güera for a woman—is not a racist or bad word, as long as it is said with a friendly tone. Though anecdotal evidence is useful in understanding potential forms of discrimination, these accounts fail to show how often the preceding forms of discrimination actually occur. So we included some items in the survey of Anglo newcomers to get an idea of the frequency that Anglo respondents claim they actually occur. The results are presented in chart 7.4. Does chart 7.4 provide evidence that Anglos experience significant discrimination in South Texas? If so, it does not seem to happen very frequently. The item with the most respondents saying “frequently” consists of Hispanics speaking Spanish to those unable to understand it. From our interviews and our own experience, this form of treatment is most often done by Mexican visitors or first-generation Mexican immigrants who are learning English. They often use Spanish, hoping the Anglos will understand. Indeed, 12 percent of our respondents in the

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Chart 7.4. Perceptions of Hispanic discrimination against Anglo newcomers in South Texas, 1996 Source: Survey of Anglo Newcomers, 1996.

Anglo Newcomers Survey said they were either “very fluent” or “fluent” in Spanish. Another 26 percent said they were “somewhat fluent.” Spanish-speaking individuals with little knowledge of English stand a pretty good chance of being at least moderately understood when they speak in Spanish to Anglos in South Texas. The item with the next highest percentage of “frequently” responses was Anglos not being hired because they were not bilingual. While such treatment is often seen as harmful, it is likely not for an arbitrary or irrelevant reason. In response to one form of discrimination presented in chart 7.4, being excluded from clubs or organizations because one is Anglo, only 1 percent of respondents said it happened “frequently” and 5 percent said “occasionally.” Apparently, discrimination of this sort against Anglos is very rare. And the other two items—Hispanics switching to Spanish and using race-based terms to describe Anglos— are reported quite infrequently and, as we have pointed out, are often forms of cultural bias in which no harm is intended. Still, some categories of Anglos do experience more severe and harmful treatment or outright discrimination. This will be clearer through examination of stereotypes Hispanics in South Texas commonly hold of Anglos. Hispanic Stereotyping of Anglos In our in-depth interviews, many Anglos reported that they experienced stereotyping—being mischaracterized by broad and often over-

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generalized beliefs about people like themselves and having Hispanics assume they are all alike. Sam, a university student from California, ran up against a fairly widespread stereotype of Anglos. He said, When I moved here from Southern California, I noticed that people here are a lot poorer than the Latinos in California. Everyone seems to assume that because I’m from California, I must have a lot of money. When my friends and I go out here, they often expect me to help them out. They assume I have a lot of money. I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t have a lot of money, and things are as hard for me as they are for many of them.

Becky, age twenty-three, was an art student at the University of Texas–Pan American. She was born and raised in the Valley. She said, In public school classes I immediately ran into the stereotype that Anglos are super-smart and also conceited. The other students just assumed I was conceited because I was white. Even the teachers assumed that we knew all the answers. The teachers would often tell me, “You probably already know this material but follow along anyway.” People also assumed I was from a rich family because I was Anglo. . . . Friends would say, “So, like, you’re really rich, right? You probably have a huge two-story house, right?” They were surprised to fi nd out that many of them had nicer houses than I did.

Some of the Anglo respondents reported that stereotyping often worked to their advantage. Alex said, “In high school for lunch we had an open campus for honor roll and perfect-attendance students. You received a stamp on your ID every six weeks to prove it. The majority of my white friends hardly ever got their IDs checked by the security guards.” Another Anglo, Jeff, said, “Some places you go, older Hispanic people treat you with a lot of respect because they see you as higher in prestige.”

The Different Worlds of Rich and Poor Anglos in South Texas Diana, a twenty-seven-year-old Anglo, worked as a teacher’s aide at a local elementary school. She discovered that Anglos who did not fit the stereotype of affluence often got treated disrespectfully. She said,

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I really have not been treated badly down here, but once, on my lunch break, I decided I would eat in the teachers’ lounge with everyone else. So I got my things and started walking to the lounge. As I was about to walk in, I heard my name mentioned inside the room, so I listened from the hall. One of the other teacher’s aides was making fun of my clothes. My clothes are faded and old because I have so many bills. I cannot afford to spend money on new outfits. I heard another Hispanic lady say, “Sad. I thought white people gave to Goodwill, not took from it.” I almost started crying, but I walked in and warmed my meal and took it to eat elsewhere. Since that day I never even brought up the incident. I would just rather not associate with that kind of people.

Though Anglos in South Texas in general do have a higher level of income than Hispanics there, chart 7.3 shows that 10 percent of Anglos in Hidalgo and Starr Counties in 2014 had incomes below the poverty line. In Webb and Willacy Counties, that figure was closer to 17 percent, while in Starr County, 30 percent of Anglos were in poverty. While Anglos in general may experience occasional forms of cultural bias, lowincome Anglos and lone Anglo students may experience harsher and more frequent forms of discrimination at the hands of some Hispanics in South Texas. We briefly describe the discrimination they might suffer and present factors that help explain why those in low-income categories are generally more likely to experience discrimination than the more well-to-do Anglos. Low-Income Anglos Though the population of low-income Anglos in South Texas is relatively small, most of the accounts of perceived discrimination in our indepth and survey interviews came from this group. Why? One of the difficulties of being a low-income Anglo is that it goes against the stereotype of Anglos as being fi nancially well off. When they don’t fit this image, some Hispanics see them as “losers” or “white trash.” Audrey, a thirty-one-year-old mother of two, had just moved to the Valley from Austin and worked at a convenience store. She described a case of bigotry that was both race- and class-based. I dread going to the supermarket to buy groceries. If I could afford to buy what we need here at this convenience store, I would. Then I would

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not have to face the dirty looks and rude comments of some people. I am now forced to use food stamps because my income is just too low. It’s funny, but up north the Hispanics saw us Anglos as being a step above them. But down here, I feel they see me as someone at their level. I would rather be treated how I was treated up in Austin. I remember one time I was paying at a South Texas HEB with food stamps, and behind me were some Hispanic high school girls. They carried on a conversation in very good English. You could tell they were either high- or middle-class because they were both dressed very nicely. One girl said to the other, “This is going to take a long while because it looks like it’s food stamp day.” The other girl replied in a low voice but loud enough that I could hear, “What do you expect from white trash?” I couldn’t believe what I heard, but I did not say anything because I did not want to make a scene and my children were with me.

Bart, thirty-three years old, also experienced outright bigotry. He had just moved to the Valley from Austin and was unemployed. He stated, I have had a hard time finding a job down here because I do not speak Spanish and I cannot communicate well when I have questions about the jobs I do get. I remember one time I could not understand what my boss at a construction site wanted me to do. He just got more and more frustrated and started screaming because I had done a job wrong. He said, “¡Gringo baboso! ¡No sabes nada!” [You stupid white man! You don’t know anything!]. All my coworkers started laughing. On another occasion, I left my tools out when I went to lunch. When I came back, they were gone. It’s true, I had been warned not to leave any of my belongings out. But when I asked who had taken them, no one would say anything. So I continued working. Throughout the day, I found my tools, one by one, scattered around the worksite. Every time I would pick one up, everybody would stop working and say, “Look at the poor gringo. He found his cheap tools.” I held onto that job until I could not take any more abuse. It has been hard fi nding other jobs. Some days, it is really hard to live down here. I just hope my luck will change.

One of our student interviewers wrote, “It was difficult to locate Anglos who were willing to admit, first of all, that they were living in poverty and second, who would be willing to admit they were receiving any

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public assistance. I think this is indicative of the extra social stigma associated with being Anglo and poor in the Rio Grande Valley.” Goldie was an Anglo who became poor when her husband, an oilfield worker, died, leaving her with no income and no insurance. She said, I had no marketable skills and no other recourse. When I figured out that my husband had not saved any money, I was really angry. He had always been in charge of the money, so I really had no idea what things cost, how to budget . . . nothing. I tried to fi nd a job, but I don’t know Spanish, so even a job at McDonald’s was out. Besides, a job in a fastfood restaurant doesn’t pay enough to cover the rent and utilities, let alone pay for childcare. I tried to get support from my family, but they don’t have any extra. The kids get a little Social Security, but it isn’t enough to survive on. I fi nally had to apply for welfare, at least for as long as it will take for me to learn some kind of trade. My family got so mad they disowned me. They think it’s embarrassing for me to take handouts.

When Goldie’s interviewer asked her about the overall attitude toward Anglos living in poverty in the Rio Grande Valley, she got very still for a moment, sighed, and then said, “We are ghosts.” Lone Anglo Students Amber Wharton first came to the Valley in 1975 when her father, who was a Texas game warden, was transferred to Mercedes. She said, Since we lived out in the country, we had to ride the bus to school every morning. I remember the bus being full of Mexican Americans. My brother and I were the only white kids. When we looked for a place to sit down, each person extended their leg to cover the seat so we could not sit down. Many called us names, “bolillos,” “pinche gringos,” and “white trash,” as we stood in the middle aisle of the bus. When I complained to the driver, he told me, “You Anglos are always complaining about something. If you want to get to school, you’ll stand.” I was only twelve years old, so I figured I was doing something wrong. For years, I was often ashamed of being white. Today, many of my best friends are Mexican and Mexican American, but it took a long time for me to get over how I was treated.

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It seems that Amber came to the Valley at an unfortunate time and to a school district where anti-Anglo feelings were running quite high. In the 1970s, the Valley was just emerging from an extended period of segregation, and the Chicano movement was stoking some hostile feelings against Anglos. Many Hispanics had received worse treatment in preceding generations. The Anglo children who suffered were generally not the children of the perpetrators of such treatment but rather lowincome Anglos whose financial status landed them in predominantly poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic school districts. The resulting antagonism is reflected in an interview with a Hispanic woman who was about the same age as Amber. Her interviewer asked her what her relationship with Anglos was like when she was in school. She said, When I was younger, it was expected that we Mexican Americans take care of our own and be on guard against the Anglos. I remember a white girl who wore some fancy tennis shoes to gym class one day. I liked them, and I knew my parents could never afford to buy me that brand of shoes. I told the girl to give me her shoes or I would beat her up after school. She gave me the shoes and never went back to gym class. I feel bad now for how mean I was. She did not deserve it, but I had a reputation to protect.

The majority of Anglo students do not come from low-income families. Their experience in South Texas tends to be very different from that of low-income students. Crissy, an Anglo college student, transferred to the Valley as a seventh grader. She related, I had every material item known to man. I was spoiled. Though many of my classmates were middle-class, many were not, and I often felt bad that I came from a family with money, like when I was selected to be a cheerleader in junior high. We had our first meeting, and I was so excited because we got to order our cheerleading uniforms. My dad gave me a signed blank check to give to the coach for the cost of my shoes and uniforms. Little did I know that was not how things were done. When we were choosing our uniforms, some of the girls were talking about selecting cheaper ones so we wouldn’t have to raise a lot of money. I didn’t get it—raise money? When I asked why, the coach said that not everyone can afford a couple hundred dollars for uniforms. So, as a squad, we would have fund-raisers to pay for our uniforms. No one

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could just buy theirs because it might embarrass those who didn’t have enough money. I was the one embarrassed. I didn’t want my new friends to turn against me because I was different from them. I really did not want to be seen as a spoiled brat.

Other patterns emerge for Anglo students in schools where they are the only Anglo students. First, being a lone Anglo student generally results from being of lower socioeconomic status and having to attend schools with extremely few Anglo students. Just as happens elsewhere in the nation, school districts and individual schools follow neighborhood lines, with middle- and higher-income students concentrated in some schools, while the poor are concentrated in their own areas. Sometimes, the poor treatment experienced by low-income Anglo students comes from higher-income Mexican students. Esther, a twentyyear-old UTPA student from Houston, said, I come from a low-income household. If it was not for this scholarship, I probably would not be in this university right now. I have been treated rather well here. I have many friends, and I’m beginning to like it here. The only time I can recall being treated badly was when I first got here. My first dorm roommate was from Monterrey, Mexico. She was very wealthy and so were her friends. We would talk every now and then, but we never talked enough to be friends. One day I had just taken a shower when she and her Mexican friend came in from shopping. Her friend asked her where I was and she said I was taking a shower. Her friend said, “She never leaves this room, poor naca. She probably doesn’t have any money or friends.” I walked into the room and said, “I may be poor, but I was taught good manners.” The next semester I got another roommate. I am not ashamed of being white or poor because I know that when I graduate I will not have a problem with money.

Today, the main form of discrimination lone Anglo students receive is name-calling. In many cases, it is somewhat friendly kidding, while in others, especially when done by strangers, it is meant to belittle. Karen remembered walking down the hallway at school and hearing mean comments. She said, Sometimes they wouldn’t even bother to say it in Spanish. Even if they did, I had lived in the Valley long enough to pick up basics of the Spanish language. I was always in trouble because I never put up with much

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from rude or mean people. I’m not fat, but I am heavy-boned, and I can handle myself. One day when I was a sophomore, we were all sitting down in the gym since we couldn’t go outside because it had rained the day before. Well, this guy started saying things like I was “easy white trash” and “a blonde airhead.” Needless to say, I got up and started beating up on him. I really did a work on his face. After a few minutes the coaches fi nally separated us. We were suspended for a week, but it was worth it since he’s never dared to speak to me again.

Another Anglo student, Keith, found a different way of handling the name calling. He said, I was the only Anglo on my high school basketball team. They’d call me “Cornflake” or “Wonder Bread.” One night when we came out for a big game, a bunch of the students had a big banner that said “Cornflake.” They had a few other banners for some of the other guys. Actually, I think the kidding showed they liked you. When they’d start kidding and using nicknames, I’d always joke back and laugh so they’d know I wasn’t offended.

Another important pattern that emerged from the in-depth interviews is that Anglo students reported experiencing the worst difficulties in their junior high years. A student interviewer reported that five of her seven respondents said the most prevalent acts against them were around their junior high or early high school years. One of them was Felix, a high school student who had lived in the Valley all his life. He said, I have always fit in with everybody. I hang out with the guys on my team and some other friends I’ve had since kindergarten. I have always been treated fairly well. The only time I can recall being treated badly was in junior high. I was the only white boy on the soccer team. The guys would talk in Spanish, but it really didn’t bother me because I had learned enough to know basically what they were saying. One day I heard one of them say, “Don’t pass the ball to the pinche gringo.” That sucked because I had played with this guy for two years.

As such stories illustrate, those Anglo students who learned to fit in the best appear to have made two important adjustments. First, they learned some Spanish. Anita, another Anglo student reported, “I recall being in seventh grade and walking down the halls of the school and

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hearing some girls making fun of me in Spanish. I turned around and informed them, in Spanish, that I knew what they were saying and that I would appreciate it if they would stop talking about me. They were shocked that a bolilla could speak Spanish. It never happened again.” The second helpful adjustment is learning to use humor to one’s advantage, especially learning to take kidding without getting offended. Andy learned to put up with, if not enjoy, the ethnic kidding. “There weren’t many Anglos at Weslaco High,” he said, “and I was often called names like ‘Hick,’ or ‘Farmer Boy.’ As the years went on, I noticed that the name calling was gentler and the grudges disappeared. Although the Anglo population didn’t grow any larger, we had somehow managed to end up good friends. Everything turned out okay.” While the preceding accounts give some anecdotal evidence of discrimination against Anglo students, especially those of low socioeconomic status, they fail to indicate how widespread such discrimination might be. Though survey research data could help answer this question, we did not conduct a separate survey of Anglo students. Nevertheless, we did include questions about the treatment of their children in the Survey of Anglo Newcomers. When we asked how common it was for non-Hispanic children to get into fights because of their ethnic status, 75 percent of respondents said it rarely occurred, 20 percent said it happened occasionally, and only 5 percent said it happened frequently. Some Anglo students, especially those of higher socioeconomic status, reported being accorded preferential treatment. Eric, age twentyfive, taught computer technology in the public schools. He was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, but moved to the Valley as a young child. He reported feeling “stressed out” because the teachers all thought he must be especially intelligent. He said, Around testing time, the school was in need of high scores so they could look good on the standardized tests. I always seemed to get special attention. They expected me to just naturally get high scores. The pressure was intense. The other Anglos experienced the same high expectations. It’s funny, but our performance did improve. I remember being called “whitey” and “white boy.” They also called me names in Spanish, but I couldn’t say anything back because if I would have dared call them a Hispanic slang term, I would have gotten beat up. Generally, though, it was friendly kidding. Still, I experienced clear benefits of being an Anglo. The teachers were more trusting because I was white. They would let me into the teacher’s lounge to use the vending machines and

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always sent me on special errands to the front office. I even had my own special hall pass that allowed me to go anywhere I wanted at any time. There were defi nitely struggles, but it wasn’t all bad.

Anglo Natives Glen grew up in Pharr, Texas, during the 1950s but seemed oblivious to the inequality that existed at the time. “My family was just as poor as those on the north side of the tracks,” he said. “My mother, a bookkeeper, made only $105 a month, and my father was a plumber.” His interviewer pointed out that the principal for the Mexican American grade school earned only $132 a month back then and that whenever money was spent to pave streets or beautify the city, it was almost always spent on the Anglo side of the tracks. Glen responded, “Hell, there was no problem back then. They kept on their side of the tracks and we stayed on ours. The siren used to go off at exactly 8 p.m. This was a sign for all the Mexican Americans to go back to their side of the tracks. God help them if they were caught on the wrong side.” His interviewer continued, “I saw a man very angry at the present situation. He claimed, ‘Mexican Americans discriminate ten times more than Anglos did back then. Take the city of Pharr. They don’t have one damned gringo working there, much less on the city commission. The Mexican people are clannish. If a candidate is one of them, then they’ll vote for him.’ When I asked him, ‘Where are all the gringos in Pharr?’ he responded, ‘Well yeah, that is part of the problem. Shit! They are all gone!’” Anglo Valley natives, especially those from the same period as Glen, often see themselves as victims of discrimination. We sought to determine how Anglos who were born in South Texas were treated compared to Anglo newcomers. We compared responses of Anglos in the Survey of Anglo Newcomers with responses to the same questions from seventyseven Anglo natives in the Cultural Practices Survey. Both surveys included the following questions: “How common is it for Anglos and others who do not speak Spanish to not get hired because they are not bilingual?”; “How common is it for Anglos to be excluded from organizations because they are Anglo?”; “How common is it for local people to start talking in Spanish and for you not to understand?”; and “How often do Hispanics here make offensive remarks about your race?” The percentages of each group, Anglo newcomers and Anglos raised in the Valley, who answered “frequently” are shown in chart 7.5.

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Chart 7.5. Perceived frequency of Hispanic discrimination reported by Anglo natives and newcomers in South Texas Source: Survey of Anglo Newcomers, 1996, and Cultural Practices Survey, 2001–2002.

These data show a rather pronounced difference between Anglos raised in the Valley and those who moved there later in life. On all four measures of discrimination, native residents were approximately twice as likely to answer “frequently” than Anglo newcomers. The greatest difference can be seen in the third item, with 34 percent of Anglo natives saying that Hispanics frequently excluded them by switching to Spanish, while only 11 percent of Anglo newcomers chose this response. A similar though not so extreme difference can be found on the item asking how often Anglos can’t get jobs because they are not bilingual; 29 percent of Anglo natives reported this happening frequently compared to 15 percent of Anglo newcomers. Two factors may be responsible for these results. On the one hand, Anglos who moved to the Valley are frequently recruited to come due to a scarcity of local people with the education and experience to fill managerial and technical positions. These newcomers face much less competition for their jobs from local Hispanics. Once here, many of them associate with highly educated people who speak more English than Spanish. As a result, the language factor would not be as important to them as it would to those who have to compete for lower-level positions with bilingual Hispanics. Anglos who grew up in the Valley, especially those who never learned Spanish, may have grown up around the prejudice against Hispanics more common in Valley schools several decades ago. As a result, many still feel highly insulted that they can’t get a job because they are not bilingual. Tracy, twenty years old, lived in Weslaco and was born in the

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Valley. She recalled once when she went to apply at a telephone call center in McAllen. She said, I heard that this call center was hiring, and since I had two years of call center experience, I went to apply because the pay was higher. I asked for an application, and the guy at the front desk asked me if I spoke Spanish. I told him I didn’t, and he said he couldn’t give me an application, that they were only hiring bilingual customer service representatives.

Maquiladora Managers and Their Families One group with a significant percentage of Anglos is that of the managers and their families who come to the Valley at the behest of their respective corporations to manage maquiladora assembly plants just across the river in Mexico. A review of a 2006 listing of maquiladora managers by surname in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas indicates that 34.2 percent of plant managers were not of Hispanic origin, and a majority of the non-Hispanic managers had Anglo surnames.12 These Anglo managers not only have to get used to living in Valley communities but must also adapt to working in Mexico and commuting daily across the international border. A male maquila manager said, You have to come with the right attitude, or it will be very difficult to adjust. Some people are forced to come. I wasn’t. I chose to come. If a manager comes with his wife and she doesn’t have a job, she stays home, feels lonely, gets depressed, and has no friends or relatives nearby. There just aren’t many Joneses or Smiths around here, and the biggest city, San Antonio, is three and three-fourths hours away. So many of them end up going back because learning a different culture and not knowing Spanish is more than they can take. If they don’t learn the culture, they will be miserable and have a negative attitude. When someone gets assigned to this area, the stereotypes and prejudices they carry must be put aside. Many don’t even try. And if the wife does not support her husband, they just give up and go back.

Stephanie, a maquila manager originally from Pennsylvania, found her greatest adjustment was in relating to the Mexican workers. She said, “It took some adjustment to take the time every morning as I arrived to work to do the formalities they have here, such as shaking hands, saying

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good morning, and even asking about one’s family. Back home we just got to business as soon as we arrived at our workplace. So here I had to learn to take a bit more time each morning to do that.” Winter Texans If Anglo maquiladora managers are immersed on a daily basis in Mexican culture, Anglo retirees who migrate annually to South Texas are essentially isolated from it. Every year, approximately a hundred thousand of them migrate to the Valley to escape cold winters up north.13 Approximately 85 percent of these winter Texans congregate in recreational vehicle (RV) parks where daily life revolves around activities exclusively for park residents. According to our 1995 Winter Texans Survey, 40  percent of the 326 respondents said they frequently went to Mexico to shop or visit, and 49 percent said they occasionally did so. But such contacts are generally quite superficial and seldom offer opportunities to get to know Mexicans as individuals. Very often, excursions outside the parks to shop or dine are conducted in groups. As a result, winter Texan retirees seldom interact with local Hispanics as neighbors, friends, or coworkers. Nevertheless, winter Texans are often fully aware of their contributions to the local economy. According to local chambers of commerce, these seasonal residents pay out more than $800 million a year for local goods and services in South Texas. Winter Texan spending in Mexican border towns was estimated in the winter of 2013–2014 to be as high as $40 million.14 As a result, some feel entitled to extra benefits. Seventy-three percent of winter Texans we surveyed agreed that people in the Valley should be grateful to winter Texans for their contributions to the local economy. Twenty-four percent of them said local businesses should give them some form of preferential treatment. Similarly, Valley residents generally have only superficial impressions of winter Texans. Mostly, this is due to the very limited contact between the two groups. The RV parks are generally closed to outsiders, so winter Texans and Valley residents seldom interact, except on local roads and in restaurants, stores, shops, and health care facilities. One of our interviewers wrote, One person I asked about feelings toward these annual visitors was my husband. He is the tire and battery center area manager at a large auto center in McAllen. “Out of every ten [winter Texans] that I help,” he

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said, “only three or four of them are genuinely nice and understanding.” I had to disagree with him because my experience with winter Texans was not quite that bad. A few years ago, I worked at Wal-Mart. I would much rather work with winter Texans [as customers] than with rich Mexican nationals.

When Valley residents do get to know winter Texans on a personal basis, friendships can develop. Such friendships, however, are not all that common, not because of bad feelings but because there are few opportunities to interact as friends and neighbors. When winter Texans become friendly with local residents, the connection is almost always limited to the customer-clerk relationship. And when closer relationships do occur, they are often not long-lasting. A Hispanic resident reported, My family has a mobile trailer that we park at Isla Blanca Park at South Padre Island. Last summer, we were out having dinner at Dirty Al’s, a local hotspot. While we were there, we met a winter Texan couple from Missouri. Throughout the evening, we kept talking to them across tables until my parents invited them to sit with us. After about an hour of karaoke and drinks, the couple invited us to their trailer for the rest of the night for a six pack. The evening was great. My parents, my husband, and I spent most of the time at the beach the next day and then decided to head on out to the same restaurant that night. Sure enough, the same couple from the previous night came in with two other Anglo couples. They walked right past our table. When my dad called out to the man and his wife, they just looked over at us, smiled, and kept on walking by. I can’t explain what I felt that night, but it wasn’t a good feeling.

At times, efforts to be friendly with local Hispanics may not be accepted as such. A young Hispanic woman reported, While stretching after a two-mile run at Santa Anna Wildlife Refuge one day, a winter Texan jokingly told me to watch out for the Border Patrol. I know he was just joking, but I found his comment to be completely racist and not funny at all. On the other hand, I know there are nicer ones out there because when I got a flat tire once, a winter Texan stopped to help me fi x it.

Like other Anglo residents, one complaint of winter Texans who do try to participate in local events is feeling excluded when Spanish is spoken either to them or around them. A winter Texan woman said,

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Something upset me terribly the other day. I was invited to a local high school graduation. They did the “Star-Spangled Banner,” presented colors, and then the valedictorian gave his speech—in Spanish! I sat there for about four minutes and was so disgusted that I decided to leave. It is a disgrace to graduate from a US high school and give a speech in Spanish. When I was halfway to my car, he started speaking in English, but the whole thing upset me terribly. We are an English-speaking country. I am not a racist, but I don’t like Mexicans coming over and trying to impose their culture on America. Some of the locals are good, the ones truly trying to be American and speak English. They need to assimilate into the American culture.

If this woman had asked anyone near where she was sitting, she might have learned that such speakers customarily start out in Spanish, thanking parents and grandparents—many of whom are first-generation Mexican immigrants who speak little English—for having encouraged the graduating seniors. Her comment does illustrate a widespread dominant cultural frame among many Anglos that tends to denigrate the use of Spanish (and equating speaking English with patriotism, especially for older Anglos such as winter Texans) in public settings. A winter Texan couple, the Gunns, also commented on the heavy use of Spanish. Ms. Gunn said, “It doesn’t bother me much, and I have learned to pick up a few words here and there. Still, there are times when I think they are talking about or poking fun at us.” In our survey of winter Texans, 19 percent complained that Hispanics who could speak English well would “begin speaking Spanish around us, knowing that we won’t understand.” Another 33 percent said this happened occasionally. In spite of unfavorable perceptions like these, most winter Texans and Valley residents we interviewed generally had favorable impressions of one another. Many winter Texans commented on how polite local young people were. Richard Anderson, from Minnesota, said, “I had fi nished eating at a local fast-food place when I reached out for my cane. It had rolled out of reach. Immediately, a young Hispanic boy got the cane and handed it to me. My friends and I always comment on how much we appreciate the way local kids show respect for age.” Occasionally winter Texans do decide to mix with local Hispanics. José and Rosa lived in a mobile home park that in the winter months added winter Texans. “We got acquainted with one couple,” Rosa said, “and we became close friends. They would frequently babysit for our smallest child, and we would take care of things around their house.

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When our oldest son married last summer, they made a special trip to be at the wedding. The following summer, we made a trip to see them in Minnesota.” In some cases, winter Texans enjoy the Valley to the point that they choose to become year-round residents. The Morgans decided to buy a home in the Valley rather than staying a few months in a trailer park. The husband, Henry, said, The change was drastic but pleasant. I discovered just how friendly people are. One day, for instance, I was cutting my lawn when a neighbor from two houses down offered to help. I was amazed at his eagerness to help, and we soon became close friends. We’ve learned to overlook our differences in culture and have become like one big family.

Volunteer work is another factor that increasingly brings winter Texans and local Hispanics together as equals. Twenty-eight percent of the winter Texans we surveyed said they did some volunteer work on at least half of the days they were in the Valley. Florence Jensen, from Iowa, volunteered at Rio Grande Regional Hospital. She said, “The people here seem to put family before any hardship they may encounter. It gets overwhelming when I see the lobby swamped with family coming to visit just one patient. In my hometown, we’re lucky if out-of-state relatives ever come and visit.”

(Mis)perceptions of Discrimination Despite their low and decreasing numbers, most Anglos in South Texas cannot realistically be considered a minority group. Though they make up only about 7 percent of the population, they have higher average incomes and a much smaller percentage living below the poverty line. Though they occasionally experience treatment that some consider discriminatory, the harm they experience is usually not intended, frequent, or very serious. Nevertheless, around 10 to 15 percent of Anglos in South Texas do experience significant discrimination. These are low-income Anglos, lone Anglos in Valley schools and especially in junior high and public schools, and Anglos born and reared in the Valley. All three of these groups tend to have somewhat lower incomes than Anglos who experience little discrimination and often preferential treatment. We account

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for this observation by showing that they not only have less economic power and prestige than well-to-do Anglos, but they must compete for lower-skill jobs with Hispanics who most often possess bilingual skills needed in the local economy. The stereotype that Anglos are smart and rich, which generally works to the advantage of high-income Anglos, works against those with lower incomes because some Hispanics who have internalized the dominant class frame tend to assume that if Anglos are poor, it is because they are failures, not very bright, or “white trash.” We suspect that the amount of discrimination against Anglos in South Texas is not much different from that reported by whites at the national level. In a 2002 nationwide survey, 13 percent of whites responded affirmatively to the question of whether in the previous five years they, family members, or close friends had experienced discrimination because of their racial or ethnic background. By comparison, 31 percent of Latinos and 46 percent of blacks responded affirmatively to the same question.15 At the national level, however, something else is going on—the belief among whites that anti-white bias is now greater than anti-black bias.16 In a 2011 study utilizing a nationwide sample that asked respondents to recall perceptions of racial bias in ten-year blocks from 1950 to 2010, white respondents overall rated anti-white bias as more serious than anti-black bias for the first time in 2000 and beyond.17 This tendency to over-emphasize anti-white bias, while minimizing or denying antiblack bias as a significant problem, however, is not new. In 1962, amid great racial protest against anti-black discrimination, nearly 90 percent of whites said black children were treated no worse than white children in relation to educational opportunity. The following year, nearly two-thirds of whites responded to a Gallup poll saying that blacks were treated no worse than whites in their own communities.18 But when people change their social situations, they may also change their misconceptions. Rosa Bork, a winter Texan, discovered this after she volunteered to help at a junior high school in Mission. “When I returned to the Valley this year,” she says, “I was very uneasy about whether the children would remember me or want me back. As soon as I got there, though, two boys from last year ran up and gave me big hugs and enormous smiles. I felt really appreciated. Now, every time someone here says, ‘Welcome home,’ I feel like I really have come home.”

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CHAPTER 8

Race and Ethnicity in South Texas

I went to school in Mission back in the 1940s. Relations between Anglos and Mexicans were very one-sided. Whenever fights would occur, the Mexican kids would always get licks, and they’d just tell the Anglos to go back to their side of the school grounds. Once, I got in a fight with the only black kid in our school. The principal called us in and swatted me several times. When he finished with me, the black kid said, “I hope you’re not going to give me licks, Sir. Us Anglos gotta stick together.” The principal laughed and only gave him one lick. Om a r Iz agu ir r e, 1994

Though quick thinking saved this African American from a few extra swats, he still had a greater problem of knowing who he was and where he fit in. Many blacks who come to the Rio Grande Valley are used to a world of blacks and whites. Where do blacks fit in when Hispanics are the majority of the population and whites are called not “whites” but “Anglos”? Where do they fit when they are not quite 1 percent of the local population? When many Mexican Americans and Anglos in this border region have had little experience with blacks, they often rely on stereotypes. As a result, some confusion about where blacks fit in the racial and ethnic makeup of the Valley is understandable. Anthony Morris became acutely aware of being a rarity when he came to UTPA from Dallas as an athlete. He said, When I first got here everything was cool. I liked the weather, the palm trees, and my classmates. But I wasn’t used to all the stares that I got. I went to the mall for the first time, and it was like everybody was staring at me, I mean everybody! At first I kind of liked it because I felt like I was the center of attention and everything. But then it got uncomfort-

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able and I wished that everybody would just stop ’cause I am not a freak show. It got to the point where I would just start staring back and giving mean looks to whoever was staring at me—even to little kids. I’m not a mean person, but sometimes you just can’t take it anymore.

Asian immigrants and their descendants, whose population representation in the Valley is close to that of blacks, often experience a similar adjustment upon arrival in South Texas. Marilu was just thirteen years old when she was uprooted from her childhood town in the Philippines and her native language of Tagalog. She said, I didn’t care that I was leaving everything that I had ever known my whole life. All I cared about was that I was going to America, the land of white people, blond hair, and all those things I saw on TV and movies. Boy, was I in for a shock. It’s been almost fourteen years since that day, and I still sometimes fi nd myself stepping back and realizing that I’m speaking English, eating my burgers and pizzas without using the knife and fork, and enjoying authentic Mexican tacos. I’ve grown to like rap, jazz, country, classical, and R&B music, though I have never gotten used to the mariachis and Tejano music. I still use po and opo to show respect to elders, but I am fast becoming Americanized, though I guess I’m also halfway to being Mexicanized.

Chart 8.1 shows how the representation of blacks and Asian Americans across five South Texas counties (Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, Webb, and Willacy) changed over eighty-four years, 1930–2014, revealing that neither group during this period has quite reached 1 percent of the population of the area. As chart 8.1 shows, the population share of blacks in South Texas declined considerably from the 1930s but began a steady climb after 1990. During this same period, the population share of Asian descent went from essentially 0 percent to nearly 1 percent and has slightly passed and outpaced the black population. The category “Asian Americans,” however, encompasses origins in many nationalities—India, China, Japan, and almost fifty other countries. Among these ethnic and nationalorigin groups, Filipinos predominate in South Texas, making up 43 percent of the entire Asian American population there; South Asians (of Indian descent) contribute 21 percent, and Chinese Americans add only 4 percent. If African Americans and Asian Americans each make up somewhat

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Chart 8.1. Black and Asian American shares of South Texas population, 1930–2014 Source: Authors’ calculations of US Census American Community Survey and other census data.

less than 1 percent of the population, why include them in this volume? We do so in part because blacks were the largest nonwhite racial or ethnic group in the United States until 2003, when they were replaced in that category by Hispanics/Latinos.1 Asian Americans are projected to become the largest immigrant group in the United States, surpassing Hispanics, around 2050.2 Researchers sometimes analyze unusual cases of a phenomenon of interest or cases that are considered outliers in order to develop richer, deeper understanding of the overall phenomenon; this is the case in our study of race and ethnicity in South Texas. More important, we can learn much about the larger Hispanic population by observing its interactions with smaller population groups, especially when these smaller groups differ racially or ethnically and in terms of their relative power. Much as we did in our analysis of Anglos, we can ask whether these two racial/ethnic categories are really minority groups. As we have explained, a minority group is defined not so much by its size as by its power and wealth relative to its population size and the amount of significant discrimination it encounters. Let us first examine the recent median household income of each group (chart 8.2). As shown in chart 8.2, Asian Americans in three South Texas counties not only surpassed Hispanics in median income in 2014 by easily more than double but also significantly surpassed Anglos and blacks. Perhaps equally surprising to some is that blacks in South Texas earn

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almost the same median income as Anglos—and earn, on average, considerably more than Hispanics. Not so surprising is that black newcomers tend to bring professional skills in short supply in South Texas, thus increasing their earnings. But how do things compare for individuals in those categories who are at the bottom of the income scale, those below the poverty line? Chart 8.3 presents this comparison. Here the differences become even starker. Black poverty in 2014 in the same three counties almost doubled Anglo poverty but was roughly two thirds the poverty of Hispanics. And the Hispanic poverty rate was five times higher than that of Asian Americans. These data present a very convincing case that Asian Americans are not a minority group in South Texas, though African Americans might be, in relation to Anglos and Asian Americans but not to Hispanics. So explaining these results should illuminate much about race, ethnicity, and inequality in South Texas. We will present a short analysis of Asian Americans, and particularly those of Filipino descent, before a more in-depth analysis of African Americans.

Filipino and Other Asian Americans The results found for income levels of Filipinos in South Texas are similar to that of Filipino immigrants throughout the United Sates. In 2013, the median US income of households headed by Filipino Americans was $82,370; the figure was $48,100 for all immigrants and $53,000 for all US-born households. To a large extent, the education system of the Philippines explains this disparity, for it produces far more Englishspeaking college graduates trained in professional fields, such as nursing, than the Philippine economy can accommodate. This excess supply of college-trained Filipinos promotes immigration to the United States and other countries with labor shortages in these fields. In essence, this excess supply of highly skilled and educated Filipinos is exported to economies that demand their skills. Filipino immigrants in the United States ages twenty-five and older have much higher levels of education than individuals in either the native or total foreign-born population. In 2013, 48 percent of Filipino immigrants reported having achieved at least a bachelor’s degree; the comparable figures for native-born citizens and all immigrants were 28 and 30 percent, respectively. Further, Filipino immigrants were much more likely than those in other immigrant groups to have completed at least a

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Chart 8.2. South Texas median (weighted) household income, by ethnicity or race, 2014 Source: Authors’ calculations of US Census American Community Survey and other census data.

Chart 8.3. South Texans below the poverty line (weighted), by ethnicity or

race, 2014 Source: Authors’ calculations of US Census American Community Survey and other census data.

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high school education. Only 8 percent of Filipino immigrants reported having less than a high school diploma, whereas 30 percent among all foreign-born adults did.3 But behind the numbers are some very difficult journeys. Two nurses, Dolly and Ron, explained how they eventually achieved high-paying jobs in the United States. Ron immigrated to the United States through his mother’s petition, using the family reunification provision of US immigration law. Dolly, however, started the long process of acquiring a visa almost seven years before her interview. She said that although there is a demand in the United States for nurses, there is a backlog of visa applicants at the US embassy. “At one time,” she said, “I had already paid an agency almost $3,000 just to apply and get the paperwork ready. And I still didn’t have final approval to leave. When it finally came, I had spent over $5,000 for the papers, agency assistance, test fees, and trips to Manila. And that’s not including the one-way airfare tickets for me and my daughter.” Many Filipinos come to the Valley as nurses.4 A 2012 white paper, “Nursing Disparities on the US-Mexico Border,” indicates not only a shortage of nurses in the border region but also a gap in the nursing programs that could supply nurses to the border population. “But in the Philippines, everyone just seems to know how much money nurses make per hour in America, the sign-in bonus hospitals offer, and the very low salaries available in the Philippines,” said Mica, a Filipina who struggled mightily to immigrate. But Filipinos and other Asian immigrants are hired for many other high-demand jobs. In Laredo, the median household income for the five hundred or so Asian Americans living there was close to $90,000 in 2014. Clearly, there is a demand for high-skilled and professional workers on the South Texas border that is not being met by locally trained workers. What is life like for the five thousand–plus Asian Americans living in South Texas? Most of our Filipino respondents who had spent at least ten years in South Texas had come to appreciate and even enjoy local culture. Many had become bicultural. One of our student interviewers said, After fourteen years, I have blended in with the Valley culture. I identify with the Mexican culture when I’m at school, work, or in public. But at home, church, or Filipino parties, I easily identify with my Filipino culture. It sounds weird, but it seems so natural for me and other Filipinos I know. We still miss how life is in the Philippines—how slow

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and unhurried it is. I miss being able to walk to a neighbor’s house or a cousin’s house and ask, “What’s for snack?” But after doing my interviews and writing this paper, I realized that if my dad had told me that our move fourteen years ago would be good in the long run, I would be looking at him today telling him that he was right.

There are many cultural similarities between Filipinos and Hispanics, according to the sociologist Anthony Ocampo. He suggests that similarities derive from a shared Spanish colonial experience in the Philippines, Mexico, and the US Southwest along with a majority Catholic heritage and even foods, phrases, and surnames. Ocampo goes as far as using the phrase “Mexicans of Asia” to capture “the racial experiences of Filipinos in Los Angeles.”5 We found very little evidence of prejudice against most of our Asian American interviewees. We found one important exception among some of the second- or third-generation Asian Americans. Today, only a handful of the Japanese American farmers who came to the Valley in the 1940s are still alive. Many of those who remain have personal accounts of racism and forced relocation to internment camps.6 Ken Hiyashi moved to South Texas after his family was released from an internment camp in Utah. He remembered the hostility he received as a boy from white residents there. He found it difficult to understand because he and his family had always felt deep loyalty to the United States. Until his death in 2011, he still hid deep feelings of hurt and resentment toward the white population of the United States, feelings he expressed only on rare occasions. Another Japanese American, Donna resident Happy Kitayama, recalled walking into a mid-Valley barbershop to get his hair cut during World War II. Mr. Kitayama, who was then serving in the US Army, said he waited patiently only to have the barber tell him, “We don’t cut Japs’ hair here. Go over to the Mexican side of town.” That experience haunted him over the decades, especially because at the time he was wearing his US Army uniform. Years later the barber apologized, confessing that if he had cut his hair, he would have been fired. Mr. Kitayama recalled from his days as a teenager, “We couldn’t go to San Antonio or Mexico; we had to get a permit.” The family considered themselves lucky that they did not have to go to an internment camp, which many Japanese Americans called “American concentration camps.” They, like African Americans in South Texas, have largely gotten past the hurt but recognize the pain their ancestors endured.7

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African Americans in South Texas Harry, an African American in his sixties, was raised in the Valley. He said, I guess my family has been here for over thirty years. The Valley has been a good home. I’ve dealt with bigots here and there, but I’m not going to let some fool get the best of me. What y’all don’t get is that blacks are used to stupid folk. We’ve dealt with them all our life. My life has seen both good and bad times, but nothing can compare to what our ancestors went through. They lived through mayhem. So I thank the Lord for my life and just try to live a good and happy one. Things are changing, though. I’ve never seen a time when so many blacks are coming to the Valley. And many of them are quite different from us old-timers.

Though blacks have always been a minority in the Rio Grande Valley, they have a much longer history there than do Asian Americans.8 Within the whole period of Spanish colonial Texas that ended in 1821, slaves never numbered more than thirty-seven in South Texas, primarily because of the sparse colonial population and ranching economy.9 At Texas independence in 1836, there were 5,000 African-descent slaves in Texas, and in 1840 the Texas Republic gave “people of Black descent the dubious choice of remaining in Texas and becoming slaves or being deported to Mexico if they wished to remain free,” with special exceptions for wealthy freedmen of African descent.10 By 1860 this number had grown to just over 180,000 in the newly incorporated state of Texas.11 Prior to the Civil War, several African Americans and biracially mixed families settled in South Texas. In the early 1850s, John Webber, a white settler in Texas, married Silvia Hector, his former slave. They came to South Texas to escape the extreme prejudices of other Texas settlers. They founded El Rancho Viejo on the north side of the Rio Grande, near what is now the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge. Another racially mixed couple, a former slave and slave owner, joined them. In 1884, the two couples built the Jackson Ranch Church, most likely the oldest Protestant church in Hidalgo County.12 In 1836, hundreds of Texas slaves took advantage of Santa Anna’s capture of the Alamo to escape local farms and plantations; they either supported the Mexican army or, in far greater numbers, escaped to the south across the Rio Grande to freedom. In 1855, approximately

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4,000 escaped slaves lived in or near Matamoros, Mexico, just south of Brownsville, Texas.13 Juneteenth is a celebration of the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, when Texans learned that slavery had been abolished. There were few slaves in the Lower Rio Grande Valley at the time due to the proximity of the Mexican border, across which many had escaped. After the Civil War, the building of railroads in South Texas and the assignment of black troops to military bases along the border brought in increasing numbers of blacks there. By the 1950s, a significant community of blacks had developed in Edinburg. They had their own church, school, cafes, and taxi stand. In 1942, the first public black high school opened in Edinburg, the only one available to blacks in the Valley. With increasing immigration from Mexico, however, immigrants began competing for jobs traditionally held by blacks. As a result, many black families moved north to fi nd work. Only in recent years has another migration to South Texas developed, increasingly made up of college-educated African Americans. Rob Jackson, a lifelong resident of South Texas, described growing up there in the 1950s. He said, We used to have rock fights with [Anglo] neighbors. It was out of hate. One time, when I was eleven or twelve, we were in the house watching TV and some neighbor kids started throwing rocks at our house. We went out and started throwing rocks back at them. After the fight, my father spanked me, saying that if we had hurt one of them, we would have been in big trouble in the community. During high school, I remember one game we played against PSJA. When I tackled their quarterback, he got up and called me a “n——r.” I just walked away. When I was playing basketball, sometimes people in the audience would yell out “n——r.” After high school, I went to college and graduated as a teacher. When I looked for a job in the Valley, no one would tell me what kind of openings they had. So I never got hired until I fi nally got a job as a substitute teacher.

Harvey Grant also had lived in the Valley for many years. He said, I moved here to work for the railroad. I had people call me the same names that most black people were called back then. Even down here there was segregation. Blacks had their own bathrooms and whites had

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theirs. When I worked on the railroad, if we stopped to eat, most of us blacks would end up not eating because the restaurant that we stopped at did not serve colored people. We had to hustle to fi nd a grocery store or somewhere else that would serve blacks.

Though, as we have noted, the number of blacks moving to the Valley is increasing, many local Hispanic residents still find them a rarity. Jazmyne Walker, a black athlete recruited to the university, described her first incident. She said, One day, I was walking into Wal-Mart to buy some groceries and a group of people in front of me literally fell over each other to see what I was doing or how I was doing it. . . . It was kind of scary. Every aisle that I went through someone looked at me as if they were shocked. It seemed like they wanted to run but couldn’t keep their eyes off of me. It made me very upset.

Keisha, Jazmyne’s friend and a fellow athlete, came to the area two years before Jazmyne. She stated, I love living here in the Valley. It’s helped me make a lot of friends. I understand the people here more now that I’ve discovered we are much alike, with similar hopes and experiences. I came to realize that people stare at me not because they don’t like me but because I am unique to them. It makes me feel special. When I first came to UTPA as an athlete, I did not know anyone, so it looked like people here were being racist. After I adjusted and made friends, it was much easier to understand the people here.

Newcomers versus Old-Timers Old-timer Olivia Williams observed, African American communities in South Texas fifty years ago seemed to be tighter and the culture was stronger. Back then, it seems we all knew each other. Especially during segregation, the community was closer, and as desegregation came, more blacks began to marry and assimilate into the Hispanic culture. Back then, our black churches were all black. Over time, many of the black churches became more mixed, and we had to adjust to the church services being less spontaneous. We

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Figure 8.1. Juneteenth celebration in Edinburg, Texas. Photo by Richard Coronado; © R. Coronado, used by permission.

would all celebrate Juneteenth. Today, you see more Hispanics at the celebration than blacks.

Belle Taylor, a black newcomer to the Valley, reported her experience with black longtime residents. One experience that I’ll never forget was from the people from whom I’d least expected it—the black people in the church we attend. You have to understand that the way we worship back home is a big part of who I am; I was raised to be natural in my worship. If I wanted to dance during the songs, I’d dance. If I wanted to play my tambourine, I’d play it. If I wanted to shout “Amen” during the message, I’d do it without even a second thought. Down here, time after time, the elders of the church, Hispanic and black, would give me minisermons on how it distracts other members in the congregation. They even took my tambourine from me during worship and returned it at the end of the service.

One of the newly arrived black entrepreneurs, a podiatrist, told his interviewer, “The Valley is a great place to start a medical practice. There is not as much competition here as compared to other areas. So,

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more of us are moving to South Texas. But many of us have to focus so heavily on our professions that it is hard to stay in tune with the black community.” Often, these black newcomers fi nd themselves somewhat divided from blacks who are natives to the Valley. As the preceding accounts illustrate, some of the blacks from outside report that many blacks who are native to the Valley seem to have picked up some of the traditions of the Mexican American culture and have not maintained some aspects of African American culture. Mia Adams, a relatively recent arrival in the Valley, said, It seems that many long-term blacks here are bilingual. Some even speak English with a Mexican accent. They really love Mexican dishes, their jokes are different, and they don’t seem to like strong black music. The older ones—those seventy and older—choose a different kind of music and worship in church. They are very different compared to my mother and grandmother’s generation. I have noticed that some blacks who have been raised in the Valley are friendly, but others are very stand-offish.

This cultural tension between black newcomers and black old-timers may be in part due to the perceived loss of “blackness” of old-timers in the eyes of newcomers. Blacks who are native to the Valley also express reservations about interacting with black newcomers. Theresa was interviewed by a black university student who was also an athlete. Her interviewer reported, “She told me she had experienced several difficult experiences because of black newcomers.” Theresa related, Sometimes it’s hard for me to talk to black people that aren’t from the Valley. I don’t talk like they do. When I was a freshman in college, some black girls not from the Valley started making fun of me. They said that I was trying to be Hispanic instead of black. So I usually don’t talk to blacks who are new to the Valley. I don’t think I should have to justify my blackness to them.

Her interviewer, also of African ancestry, said, “This struck a chord in me because I have heard the same thing myself. I don’t speak with any black accent and I am half Native American. So in a lot of ways I could understand her discomfort around some blacks.” Others, like Sharon Johnson, don’t want to be just Americans. Sha-

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ron felt it was very important to maintain her identity as an African American. She said, It’s very hard to maintain your blackness when you’re surrounded by Mexican culture. If I didn’t keep on my kids to remember their roots, they’d soon be acting like little Mexicans. Don’t get me wrong, Mexicans have every right to be as proud of their heritage as we blacks have to be proud of ours. But black people have no business living their life like a Mexican. My boys were tempted many times to hang with those little gangster wannabees, but they’ve held strong. I’m really proud of them.

Sarah recalled her experiences of dating and marrying within and outside her African American background. When I was in high school there was no way I would date anyone of a different race. All it did was cause trouble. Other black girls would just talk badly about those who did, and I didn’t want to be one of the ones talked about. After my first marriage to a black man failed, I decided to date a Hispanic male and fell in love with him. I have never been happier. We get a lot of stares due to our [relationship] being interracial, but I fi nd that most are just out of curiosity. If we do get any of the vicious stares, it is generally from the white winter Texans who live here [seasonally] in the Valley. I know that they lived in a different generation and perhaps they can’t be blamed for what they believe. There are a lot of things that my husband and I have both learned from each other, though, and I can say that I respect the Hispanic culture a whole lot more than what I did when I was in high school.

Social Distance In the preceding accounts, we see great variations in social distance, or people’s willingness to participate or not with other racial and ethnic groups in forms of interaction that vary from very close and personal to very distant. This idea is illustrated by the experience of Graig Garnet, who came from Chicago to play basketball at University of Texas– Pan American. While there, he dated and married a Hispanic woman. He said, “It took her by surprise that her family had a big problem with her dating me, a black man. They told her, ‘In the Hispanic culture, it is okay to be friends with blacks, but don’t bring them into the family.’”

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Graig added, “It is a shock for people that have not seen us in a long time to find out that we are still married. You can see the surprise all over their faces.” It should be noted that over the years there has been a trend toward more acceptance of close interaction among all groups.14 Though having people of different racial or ethnic groups marry into their families is still resisted by many individuals, the resistance even to this very personal form of interaction seems to have diminished somewhat over the years. Fortunately, as difficult as it may be for some, most people can, with effort, overcome many of the harsh effects of racism. Elijah Whitmore, an African American engineer who moved from Illinois to the Valley, spoke of his own change of heart. It’s funny that we should speak about discrimination and prejudice. Just the other day I was reflecting on how much my attitudes have changed since the sixties. I am not proud of what I was back then. I was very much involved with the Black Panthers. My faith in God along with various other factors contributed to my very slow change. Back then, the mere mention of the “N” word would send me into violent fits of rage at whoever said it. I can still remember beating a young white boy senseless because he had called me that. But I knew that in order to make something of myself, I needed to work hard and get my education. No one, white or black, was going to prevent me from becoming an engineer. And no one did. My career has been more than I ever hoped for. When we moved here from Illinois, I knew my family would have their hard times, just as I did. But the longer we’ve been here, the more my children have matured—and the less prejudice they’ve had to deal with. At the beginning, I wanted to pack up and leave when my children would come home crying that the kids at school were teasing them and calling them names. My daughter especially went through some hard times in high school. But overall, we have adjusted well after ten years of living here. Learning Spanish was a must for me. And my employees really appreciate it.

One of our of African American interviewers reported that five out of seven African Americans he interviewed found themselves picking up many aspects of Hispanic culture, such as the food, the language, and several customs. An African American woman told him, “I have lived here in the Valley for four years, and I can speak Spanish fluently, accent and all. If you talk to me on the phone, you can’t tell that I’m black.

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Whenever I visit home, though, I’ll notice myself sounding more the way I used to without any accent, so I know it’s still inside of me.” Even though this young woman believes her black culture is still inside her, given time, it might be hard to hold onto it. Another woman, Chineka Martin, described consciously cultivating her sense of being African American. I had never been around many blacks until I went to college. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people of my own culture. It was an awkward experience. My black friends thought I talked white, acted white, and even danced white. Of course, I had been influenced by my friends in the Valley, which is why I seemed to do everything white. So I joined the African American Culture Committee for two years and served as accountant for one year. During this time I learned all about my culture and the black history that had been left out of my school books or that my teachers failed to mention to me. Learning about my culture, black history, and the contributions of African Americans to society made a lasting impression on me. This is why I am now so proud to be black. Now I feel totally comfortable with black people, Hispanics, and Anglos because of my experiences in the Valley and later in college.

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The Interaction of Race, Class, and Ethnicity

Marco Chapín, an undocumented immigrant, is originally from Guatemala. When his interviewer asked if he ever had felt racism, he told her, while laughing, Look at me, of course I have. I’m short and I look indigenous. But the worst treatment has been by our own Hispanic people here the Valley. I hate when the kids around the neighborhood pass by and scream all kinds of remarks at me. I have been called “mojado” and told to go back to Mexico. I just laugh because I am from Guatemala. Also, I can’t understand why Americans claim we are here to take away their jobs. Most of them would never do the work we do, like farm laborers, dish washers, processors in meat plants, maids, or custodians.

Marco also experienced exploitation. Though he had worked in many types of jobs, he was at the time selling tacos at a stand in a small community in the Valley. He said, It is the worst job I ever had. My [Hispanic] boss makes me work long hours and only pays me $20 a day, even though he makes more than $3,000 a month in profits. I decided to quit, but he accused me of stealing money from the cash machine and refused to pay me for that week. He told me I needed to pay him back what he said I had stolen. There is nothing I can do because I am afraid of being sent back to Guatemala.

Marco was fully aware that he had suffered bigotry and exploitation. On the surface, his native Guatemalan ancestry and dark skin tone led him to believe racism was to blame. While that conclusion seems pretty

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straightforward, one wonders if his weak social class position, in which we would include his undocumented status, was also to blame for the way his Hispanic boss exploited him. It is also possible that some of the hostility he experienced from local Hispanics, even among those with skin tones as dark as his own, was based on ethnocentrism, a form of bias against his linguistic and cultural background. Similar questions can be asked about white discrimination against people of color at the national level. We might explore whether discrimination against them is based on erroneous or exaggerated stereotypes about their cultures, results from perceived lower social class positions, or is a remnant of centuries-old racial framing that presupposes that all nonwhite people, to varying degrees, are inferior to whites.1

Prejudice and Discrimination Though racism may not be as prevalent today as in past centuries, it still can leave deep emotional scars on its victims that can last for years. Such was the experience of Tiana Carver, a black student at UTPA. She related, I never thought I would feel like this. I hate that I have become a person who people avoid because of the animosity I still feel from an incident that happened almost two years ago. I was taking a class here at Pan-Am, and I saw a white guy who I remembered from a nightclub the previous weekend. I thought he was attractive, so I struck up a conversation. As soon as I started talking, one of the guys he was with said, “Hey are you lost?” I said, “No,” and tried to continue the conversation. The same guy said, “You must be lost. I think the zoo is that way!” They all started laughing; I just stood there dumbfounded. What kind of people would say things like that? It was the worst experience I have ever had, and I can never forgive myself for not doing something about it. I just try to not deal with whites any more, especially in my classes. I’ve even found myself making stupid remarks about them to other people. I never thought that such a situation would affect my view on people for the rest of my life.

When bigots not only have stereotypes of a particular group but also combine them with strong feelings such as anger, hate, and revulsion, they resist information that might present a more favorable image of the hated group. George, a white sociology student who had attended a Cal-

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ifornia university, reported an incident that happened while he worked summers there to put himself through school. I got a job for a moving company and was assigned to work with an older driver who was prejudiced against racial and ethnic minorities. For some reason, he really seemed to have it in for Filipinos. I frequently heard him make harsh comments about them. One day the two of us were called on to move a Filipino family. On the way to their home, he told me, “These Filipinos are really dirty people. You watch. The roaches will probably carry the furniture out for us.” When we arrived at the home, I was pleased and amused to fi nd it immaculate—not a speck of dirt anywhere. My partner said nothing until we were in the truck driving away. Then he shook his head and told me, “Just like them damn Filipinos—they’re either one extreme or the other.”

Although it is obvious that the driver in this incident was prejudiced, we need to ask what most clearly marks his prejudice. First, he prejudged individuals he had never met, seeing them in terms of a preconceived stereotype. But when he met someone who didn’t fit the stereotype, the new, contradictory evidence was twisted to use against them. Bigots tend to refuse to reconsider their prejudgments when new evidence becomes available.2 Are the stereotypes about Latinos that mischaracterize them as illegals, criminals,3 welfare cheats,4 un-American, and so on simply the result of bad information, or do those who hold onto such stereotypes have deep-seated racist, ethnocentric, or classbased feelings about them? We have defined discrimination as harmful treatment of a category of people for biased, irrelevant, or arbitrary reasons. As we attempt to examine the anti-Latino vitriol such as that observed in the 2016 presidential election cycle, we ask whether the bias against Hispanics is due mainly to a racist bias against people with a darker skin tone, to their generally lower social class positions and the suspected undocumented status of many,5 or to biases against the culture that immigrants from Mexico and Latin America bring with them. We briefly examine the case for each argument. Racial Discrimination in South Texas As we have seen, violence dominated past periods of race and ethnic relations in South Texas. In the early 1900s, Texas Rangers in South Texas rounded up and often lynched many local Mexicans and Mexican

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Americans in their effort to tame the area. Governor James “Pa” Ferguson sanctioned a special company of Texas Rangers, many of them vigilantes who, over a five-year period, shot, hanged, or drove into Mexico thousands of Hispanic US citizens.6 When many people speak of racism, they are not inclined to include Hispanics among its victims, assuming, as does the US Census Bureau, that they are not a distinct racial group. Nevertheless, many Anglos/whites and two-thirds of Hispanic adults do see Latinos in racial rather than, or in addition to, ethnic terms. Hence, as reported in a 2015 Pew Research Center article, there are strong opinions and some disagreement within the Hispanic community as to whether they should be identified in racial as opposed to ethnic terms.7 Many Anglos/whites who harbor prejudice against Latinos, as revealed during the 2016 US presidential contest, which began in earnest the year before,8 tend to think of minorities in terms of a racial continuum that runs from whites to blacks, with Latinos somewhere between the two poles. Are Latinos also the victims of racism? One way to answer that is to determine whether those Latinos with darker skin tone actually experience more discrimination. One study that did so was reported in 2012 by Vilma Ortiz and Edward Telles. They found that darker Mexican Americans were much more likely to be perceived as Mexican and to experience more discrimination, even when controlling for other possible causes.9 This seems to be part of an even larger pattern. In Latin American countries with large populations of indigenous people, those with darker skin tone have significantly lower levels of education than their light-skinned compatriots. Light-skinned Mexicans, for example, have completed 9.6 years of education, compared to 8.0 years for those with darker skin tone. In Guatemala, with a large indigenous population, the difference is even greater. Light-skinned people there have completed 9.8 years, compared to 5.7 years for those of darker skin tone.10 Still, though Latinos in South Texas and across the United States experience discrimination today, it can hardly approximate the deadly racism and rampant exploitation of a century ago. A 2016 Pew Research Center report found that more than half (52 percent) of Hispanic respondents said “they have personally experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity” either regularly or occasionally.11 While more than half of Hispanic respondents in 2016 said they encountered some discrimination, when asked about specific forms of discrimination ten years earlier, only 6 percent of 8,634 respondents in

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the 2006 Latino National Survey reported ever being prevented from moving into a neighborhood because the owner or landlord refused to rent or sell to them. Of the Rio Grande Valley subsample of 175 persons, 2.6  percent answered “Yes” to that question. Nationally, 14 percent of respondents said they had been treated unfairly by police; the comparable figure for the Valley was 9.6 percent. A total of 16 percent responded that they had been unfairly fired or denied a job or a promotion; 11.9 percent did in the Rio Grande Valley. And 15 percent of respondents nationally said they had ever been treated unfairly or badly in a store or restaurant, with 11.9 percent among the Valley subsample responding this way. Though no discrimination should be tolerated, Latinos nationally perceived significantly less pervasive racism than they did prior to the 1960s. In the Rio Grande Valley, such discrimination appears to have declined even more. Nevertheless, in South Texas and throughout the United States, there are still troubling vestiges of both overt and more subtle racism in US culture, whether in the media, private joke telling, textbooks, or stereotypes in general. In our ethnographic interviews, we found numerous examples, including Mexican American children who called other Hispanic children with a darker skin tone “mojados” regardless of their legal status. The sociologists Joe Feagin and José Cobas propose that a great deal of white racist behavior, especially joke telling and labels that demean Latinos, occurs in what they call “the backstage setting,” where only whites are present.12 In a separate publication, Feagin describes a study of 626 college and university students across the country who kept track of race-related interactions in their daily lives. Feagin determined that joke telling and verbal race bashing based on racial stereotypes are very common in white-only settings (the backstage) and that whites who engage in such behavior are not usually deemed “racist” by other whites unless they conduct such behavior in a frontstage setting where blacks or other races are present.13 Discrimination Based on Class Position Throughout this volume and especially in the four chapters of part I, we present many cases of bigotry and bias based on a lower social class position. The stigma of inferiority that often attaches to migrant farmworkers and colonia residents appears to be related more to their poverty, immigration status, or occupation than to their race or culture. This is especially true of other Latinos of higher social status who call them

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“mojados” regardless of whether they are actually undocumented. We consider discriminatory and exploitative treatment of undocumented immigrants including maids and other workers as class-based discrimination. In addition, we found many wealthy Mexican nationals who tended to look down their noses at lower-class Mexicans, referring to them as “nacos” and treating them like servants. Even much of the discrimination that low-income Anglos in South Texas receive appears to be based more on their class positions than on their race or ethnicity, with the stereotype of “white trash” often applied to them. And individuals in South Texas who receive welfare, regardless of their race or ethnicity, often experience discrimination and stereotyping based on the assumption that their poverty is something they choose because they are lazy or trying to live off welfare. Ethnocentrism: A Cultural Basis of Discrimination Can cultural differences and biases against those differences explain discrimination? We have discussed strong biases against Latinos, especially Mexicans, that are based on the assumption that they bring an inferior culture to the United States. Often, however, these critics of Mexican or Mexican American culture greatly exaggerate or distort Mexican culture. Such distortions we include in what we label “cultural bigotry.” Examples of cultural bigotry are very common in right-wing, extremely conservative publications. We fully acknowledge that Mexicans and Mexican Americans may have rather pronounced cultural tendencies that distinguish them from other groups. But we strongly resist the assertion that Mexican culture keeps them in poverty. Some cultural tendencies that many believe perpetuate their poverty may actually help them get out of it. We can illustrate this in reference to another aspect of culture—family roles and responsibilities. One of our student interviewers from Mexico discovered how differently Anglos and Hispanics tend to regard caring for family members. He said, I was not planning to interview my [Anglo] psychology professor, but our conversation fit my research paper like a glove. I was explaining to him how I needed to work very hard at my profession and become successful because I knew I had to take care of my parents when they were older since they do not have a retirement plan. He said, “That is

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crazy. . . . I don’t understand how you Mexicans think like that. My parents don’t have a retirement plan either, but I’m not going to take care of them.” Then I told him how my parents had been extremely supportive and worked very hard so that my brother and I could have a good future. “But that’s their job,” he said. “Your Mexican culture, while seemingly harmonious, can bring about very negative results. I know many smart students who will not reach their potential because their family does not want them to leave South Texas to get a fi rst-rate education.” Finally, we had to agree to disagree. He was born in a northern state and I was born in Mexico. I was sad that I could not bring him to appreciate the beauty of our Mexican culture.

Chart CII.1 shows how a national sample of whites, blacks, and Hispanics of varying levels of English ability responded to one aspect of family-related culture—whether children should remain in the home and under the care of their parents until they marry. Almost all Spanish-dominant Hispanics agreed with this item, while fewer than half of whites agreed and English-dominant Latinos responded quite similarly to whites. Javier, born and raised in Mexico, illustrated the view of many Mexican immigrants when he said, “My mother tells us, ‘I don’t want to live like the gringos. They kick their kids and elderly out of the home as soon as they can. That is not a family.’” Chart CII.1 suggests that Mexican culture tends to assign a greater responsibility for parents to guide or control their college-age children than does either Anglo or black culture. Nevertheless, it would be

Chart CII.1. Percentage of whites, blacks, and three categories of Hispanics who

agree that children should live with their parents until they are married, 2005 Source: Pew Hispanic Center, Hispanics: A People in Motion, 2005.

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Chart CII.2. Percentage of US general public and first- and second-generation

Asian Americans and Hispanics who agree that most people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard, 2013 Source: Pew Research Center, Second-Generation Americans, 85.

wrong to overgeneralize or stereotype Latinos as not allowing their unmarried adult children to live on their own. It is more accurate to see culture as a set of tendencies rather than traits. A related error is to see cultural differences as cultural deficits or elements that impede upward mobility. Conservative Anglos often criticize Latinos for refusing to drop Spanish, citing it as a form of disloyalty to the United States. Nevertheless, maintaining two languages can present a distinct economic advantage for Latinos, especially in the South Texas economy in which well-to-do Mexican nationals constitute 30 to 40 percent of the retail trade. Indeed, many aspects of the culture that immigrants bring from Mexico may facilitate their economic success in the United States. They, like many other groups, use family solidarity as a means of survival and upward mobility. Rakesh Kochar and D’Vera Cohn report in a 2011 Pew Research Center study, “Living in a multi-generational household appears to be a financial lifeline for many.  .  .  . Among the unemployed, the poverty rate in 2009 was 17.5 percent for those living in multi-generational households, compared with 30.3 percent for those living in other households.”14 We find, contrary to the cultural bigotry often displayed in ultraconservative publications, that the culture Mexican immigrants bring to the United States promotes a strong work ethic that serves them well in moving up in America. According to the 2011 National Survey of Latinos, 78 percent of first- and second-generation Hispanics agreed that “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to

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work hard.” Among the US general public, however, the rate of agreement was considerably lower, at 58 percent.15 As chart CII.2 shows, Hispanics had a stronger agreement on this item than the US general public and Asian Americans of corresponding generational status. One of the fundamental problems with most of the cultural bigotry we and other researchers have observed is that it tends to blame the victims of poverty for their deprivation.16 In this view, the solution for ending poverty among ethnic minorities is to get them to drop their culture rather than getting American society to change its structure of inequality. Perhaps an even greater problem is how the culture of dominant groups in American society contributes to inequality. The campaign for the 2016 presidential election revealed a very large proportion of the American electorate who harbor intense anti-immigrant sentiments directed primarily against Mexicans and Muslims. Calls for mass deportation mainly of Mexican immigrants and building more walls on the Mexican border were enthusiastically supported by large proportions in opinion polls. Even a cursory examination of the opinions of this population segment in polls reveals a harsh and distorted view of Mexican culture. Many expressed beliefs that Mexican immigrants and their families are ruining the American way of life with supposedly backward culture, high crime rates, and their purported purpose for coming to the United

Figure CII.1. Racism on display. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

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States—not to work but to become dependent on welfare. Such portrayals are not only uniformly biased but demonstrably inaccurate. So we are left to ask whether anti-Latino bias simply arises from bias against Latino culture or whether it serves as a cloak for anti-Latino racism. Ethnocentrism involves discrimination based on cultural differences. For us, it has two major forms: cultural bigotry and cultural bias. Cultural bigotry is one ethnic group’s harboring of harsh stereotypes about the culture of another and treatment of members of that group as inferiors based on those stereotypes. Cultural bias is the judgment of members of another cultural group in accordance with the cultural standards, frame, or conventions of one’s own group. As a result, those less familiar with the subtleties of the dominant culture are at a disadvantage, and their culture will generally be judged to be inferior. Cultural bigotry is the more direct and intentional form of discrimination, while cultural bias is generally much less so. We have previously presented several examples of cultural bias, such as a Mexican maid who looked down when addressing her employers. She believed she was showing respect, while they saw her as ashamed or overly shy. We also have discussed the role of language when TexMex may elicit sneers from upper-class Mexicans. We also found that the class-based stigma of inferiority that the dominant group often attaches to low-income groups can also be a form of cultural bias. The other form of ethnocentrism—cultural bigotry—can be illustrated by the case of Teresa Young, an Anglo manager. Her interviewer described her as a woman who is faced with culture shock and having a hard time coping with living in the Valley. Before coming to South Texas, she had lived her entire life in North Texas and the Midwest. She told her interviewer, I hate the Valley. In my opinion, the people here are much too lazy. Their go-with-the-flow way of life is just an excuse to not change with the times. Just look at their country. It’s falling apart. They never do what they say they are going to do. When a white American tells you that something will be done by three o’clock tomorrow, you can be sure that he will stay late if necessary to get it done. Down here, that is next to impossible. Maybe with more time, this place could grow on me. But that would take a very long time, and I don’t want to stick around to fi nd out.

In this account, Teresa Young characterized the Hispanic people of the Valley as “lazy” and possessing a “go-with-the-flow way of life.” If

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she had to work one day in the fields as a migrant worker or another labor-intensive outdoor occupation, she might be less inclined to make such statements. Interestingly, in our 1996 Multiethnic Culture Survey, we asked 164 Anglos, 83 Mexican immigrants, and 262 Mexican Americans if they agreed with the statement “In life, people have to learn to ‘go with the flow’ because what happens to us is often outside the control of the individual.” Though 43 percent of Mexican immigrants agreed, that result was not significantly different from the 42 percent of Mexican Americans and 38 percent of Anglos who also agreed. Teresa Young clearly had made up her mind to attribute a cultural characteristic to Mexican-origin people that our research simply does not support. Such stereotypes are common in the way Anglos often frame Hispanic or Mexican culture. They could be debunked if those who echo them would ask the following four questions about any specific element they see as part of Mexican culture: 1. Does research show that it is really part of Mexican or Hispanic culture, or is it just a stereotype? 2. If research confirms that it is more common among Mexican-origin people, is it a trait or just a tendency?17 3. If found to be a tendency, is it just a difference, or is it a deficit that holds them back? 4. If it can indeed be found to represent a deficit, is it part of the culture, or should it more appropriately be seen as the result of structural bias such as some migrant farmworkers needing government assistance part of the year because their work is not available year-round?

Is Teresa Young a racist or a cultural bigot? Fundamental to racism is the idea that individuals enjoy their rights and privileges based not on being human but on belonging to a particular genetically based group or societal niche. To many European and American elites of the nineteenth century, this mindset seemed justified as they considered their superior economic, military, and political position. Their power and accomplishments seemed proof that they were brighter, stronger, and destined to rule less powerful peoples. Their racial framing included stereotypes, race-based emotions, and strong inclinations to discriminate against other races. Conquered and dominated peoples were relegated to the lowest rungs of society and kept in their assigned place, to be exploited with little remorse of conscience. The exploitation of their resources and labor within the United States and elsewhere in the world

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Figure CII.2.

Oftentimes there is little appreciation for the hard work and contribution of Hispanics in the daily life of America. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

was used for the benefit of the white masters and often excused or legitimized as being for their own good or for the greater good of society. In recent decades, overt racism has become largely delegitimized. The supposed inferiority of American minorities that many whites see is now blamed not so much on genetic inheritance as on culture. Most bigots do not like to be called racists but feel they are on safer ground to claim a superiority of American culture. Today, Mexican culture is denigrated, distorted, exaggerated, and stereotyped. Those who seek to block its spread northward generally seek to do so not by overtly racist arguments but by claiming to want only to block damage to American culture by drastic immigration controls, restrictions on minority voting, and English-only legislation. Those with a pronounced white racial or cultural frame claim something like “I am not racist. I just don’t want them bringing their inferior culture into the United States.” And they evidently believe they are being patriotic when they promote efforts to eradicate these differences through forced assimilation and severe restrictions on immigration. We propose that cultural bigotry should be regarded as distinct from racism, though it can be just as offensive, erroneous, and harmful. Only then can it be met with similar efforts to delegitimize it and disallow its use as a cloak for bigotry.

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Understanding Discrimination as a Product of Structural Systems and Arrangements The deep emotional hurt that individuals like Tiana Carver experienced at UTPA is very hard to overcome. But bigotry—whether racism or cultural or class bigotry—also leaves deep scars in a society’s culture and institutions that are also disadvantageous to minorities. Though freeing slaves was a necessary step in establishing equality under the law, the Emancipation Proclamation did not in itself make blacks equal in wealth, education, or occupational status. Even if racism had ended overnight, they still would have faced huge disadvantages from all the deficits that slavery, segregation, and racism had imposed on them. Today, blacks and Hispanics must not only endure continuing remnants of racist behavior but also fight an opportunity structure that works against them and a stereotype-laden culture that rose out of racist thinking in previous decades. Joe Feagin proposes that the combined and lingering effects of racism constitute what he calls “systemic racism.”18 Systemic racism includes the remaining vestiges of the blatant racism that once dominated American society as well as the inequalities of the vicious circle and structural bias that remain in social institutions. Feagin illustrates this with many examples, notably his description of housing and landownership, a primary means by which Americans today build or hold wealth. White Americans have been the primary and in some cases only beneficiaries of government programs such as homesteading, land grants, and leases to transfer public lands to private use or ownership. Many federal programs took vast territory from Native Americans to give to white settlers.19 The programs were inaccessible to most Americans of color. A similar process happened in the American Southwest when immense swaths of formerly Mexican-owned land were passed by government action to Anglo settlers. As a result, whites had more land and housing wealth to pass on to their children and grandchildren. Even if those heirs did not themselves discriminate against blacks and Latinos, they definitely benefited from the equity their forebears got from the government. Even during the New Deal era, whites continued to be the primary or only beneficiaries of federal socioeconomic mobility programs. These included Federal Housing Administration loan insurance and veterans housing programs that enabled millions of whites to buy homes and build significant home equity that they could pass on to their children. Such equity was often used as collateral for loans that enabled them to

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start businesses and facilitate college degrees for their children. The sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro have found that America’s middle class accumulated two thirds of its wealth through homeownership that was facilitated more by federal programs than by private thrift, savings, or investments.20 They also show that, both by intent and by omission, those benefits seldom extended to low- and moderate-income white families—and even less to Hispanics and African Americans. Today, many whites complain bitterly when affirmative action programs grant a few meager benefits to minorities who must first qualify; in this they are ignoring the fact that for hundreds of years, “affi rmative action was white.”21 Even today, much government action to build individual and family wealth disproportionately benefits whites.22 Feagin’s use of the term “systemic racism” is similar to our use of the term “structural bias.” We believe, however, that structural bias includes the advantages accumulated through past racism as well as those that came through class and cultural bigotry. We concur with Feagin’s point that systemic racism exists alongside a denial of its existence. Whites/Anglos can enjoy the advantages that past race, class, and cultural bigotry have provided them while blaming blacks, Latinos, and other minorities for the structural inequities these minorities continue to experience. Latinos and blacks are not playing on a level playing field, though whites proceed as if they were. And laws, regulations, and policies get imposed through democratic action that may, intentionally or not, hurt minorities. But because of structural bias, many minority communities lack the power to block such rules or policies—or to foster policies more favorable to their own communities. An experience of one of the authors can illustrate this concept. I was asked to be a PTA president in the elementary school where two of my children were enrolled. Because of the moderately high economic status of our neighborhood, there were not as many minority children in our school as there were in other areas of the city. As we took office, the other PTA officers and I saw that our school was very overcrowded. We organized the parents for a mass meeting with the school board, at which we packed people in and even had them standing in the hallway. Then our vice president, an eloquent attorney, made an impressive presentation. After having told us earlier that there was nothing that could be done, the board approved the immediate construction of additional classrooms. We found out later that other schools in the district had worse problems, especially those in the lower income minority areas.

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We felt sorry for them, but we were not elected to represent them. We got the classrooms, and the minority schools had to wait—again.

In this example, middle-income parents were able to get a school board to allocate scarce resources for their school. Although the crowding was bad for everyone, they got results because they were able to exert pressure. Even if the parents from the lower-income schools had organized, their chances of success would not have been the same. How many eloquent attorneys could they muster? How many working-class parents would have been able to attend? How much attention would the school board have paid to a group known for low voter turnout? The poorer, predominantly minority schools suffered more—but not likely because of racism and not likely as the result of exploitation. The resulting discrimination appears to have been caused largely by inequality of power and structural arrangements giving higher-income groups greater influence on decision makers than lower-income ones. This example also illustrates that because of structural bias, democratic action often unintentionally produces undemocratic results. Though both cultural bias and structural bias, by our definition, may cause unintentional harm, the harm is also largely preventable. Americans with power are not blameless when they continue to gain advantages from the unequal power structure. Weaker groups often lack the ability to block policies that affect them more harshly, such as tax structures that favor the rich, lending institutions that exclude them from credit or charge them outrageous interest rates, and problems in school created by having to migrate. Though wealthy elites may feel sorry for them, they tend to assert that these policies were not deliberately intended to harm minorities, often adding something like, “We all have to sacrifice.” Seldom, however, are they the ones making any significant sacrifices. We support Feagin’s view that the white racial frame remains an important part of American culture and that systemic racism accounts for much of the inequality that minorities of color suffer in the United States today. But we believe that not all bigotry is race-based. Cultural and class bigotry continue to be important sources of inequality and discrimination. Most of the federal housing programs of the late twentieth century were intended for middle-class families; low-income families— white, Latino, and black—were ineligible. The same applies to federally insured loans to start businesses. Working-class and poor people are generally unable to qualify for such loans.

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Chart CII.3. Percentage of national sample and of RGV subsample of Hispanic responses to questions about how important four items are for Hispanics to be considered fully American, 2006 Source: Fraga et al., Latino National Survey (LNS), 2006.

Though it may be impossible to determine which of these factors, race, class, or culture, contributes the most to inequality for minorities today, we should ask how much overt racism minorities experience. One way to do so would be to ask Hispanics what they see as the major obstacles to full inclusion in American society. In the 2006 Latino National Survey, Hispanics were asked how important each of several factors was for Hispanics to be considered fully American.23 As shown in chart CII.3, at the national level and with a subsample from the Rio Grande Valley, speaking English well, a cultural factor, had the highest percentage of respondents who considered it very important, while being white, a racial factor, had the lowest percentage agreeing that was very important. What information like that presented in chart CII.3 fails to reveal is that racism against and exploitation of Mexican-origin people in the United States has been often disguised with stereotypes about Mexican culture. Today, the white racial frame in America operates along with similar dominant-class and Anglo-cultural frames. Among other as-

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pects, these three frames greatly exaggerate the extent of welfare fraud. They also stereotype those who receive it, including migrant farmworkers, as lazy. Similarly, the Anglo cultural frame portrays Mexican culture as one that favors criminality, laziness, and superstition. Racial and cultural bigots erroneously allege that Hispanics refuse to change any aspects of their culture through assimilation. Indeed, holding this generally erroneous belief allows them to justify their prejudices based on the assumption that Hispanics are unpatriotic to the United States and refuse to adopt the culture that in their view made America great. Regrettably, racism is still a part of the larger American culture, be it manifested frontstage in the view of all or backstage in less open settings. The white racial frame predisposes racially and culturally bigoted Anglos to see Mexican culture and darker-skinned Mexicans as inferior. The 2016 presidential candidacy of Donald Trump was a clear example of voters who applaud a willingness to be frontstage in bigotry about Mexican-origin people. Whites in general, Feagin suggests, believe that racism no longer exists except in the minds of a few sick people. Even worse, many whites believe that blacks and members of other minorities enjoy opportunities equal to or, with affirmative action, even greater than whites have. A national sample of 417 respondents conducted by researchers at Harvard and Tufts Universities in 2011 concludes that whites on average believed that they more than blacks were the primary victims of discrimination.24 The absurdity of such beliefs is demonstrated by census data from 2010 that show that the net worth of the average black household in the United States was $6,314, compared to an average of $110,500 for white households. In a 2014 New York Times editorial, Nicholas Kristof points out that the United States today has a greater wealth gap between whites and blacks than South Africa did during apartheid.25 The sociologists Damon Mayrl and Aliya Saperstein used data from a 2006 survey of American racial and religious diversity to determine which whites were most likely to believe themselves victimized by “reverse discrimination.” They found that the social networks in which people live and interact provide rather closed regional communities of support, such as the same media sources and interaction within their own circles that in turn limit their association with others of differing viewpoints. This closed loop can reinforce a sense of victimhood and particularly a concern with so-called reverse racism and a loss of the

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American way of life to “culturally inferior” immigrants illegally crossing the southern US border.26 All of this contributes to the racial, cultural, and class frames that have become a part of American culture. One idea that is blown out of proportion in the echo chambers of the extreme right is that blacks and Latinos can easily take jobs and university positions from whites through affirmative action. In truth, affirmative action, when applicable, pertains only to job-qualified applicants. In reality, the actual percentage of affected whites is quite small. The most common source of job loss for white workers is not affirmative action but factory relocations, computerization, automation, and corporate downsizing. Whites who experience job loss from these sources, however, are often led to believe that they are victims of reverse racism. Upwardly mobile minority individuals often confront the accusation from whites that they only got where they are through affirmative action. And those minorities still struggling and needful of governmental assistance are accused of being welfare cheats or affirmative action crybabies. It is hard to get ahead in such an environment. Those who oppose Hispanic immigration and Hispanic culture often present themselves as patriotic defenders of the American way of life. Their ethnocentrism—both cultural bias and cultural bigotry—leads them to support draconian anti-immigrant laws, to close the borders to refugees, and even to support proposals to change the US Constitution to deny citizenship to US-born children of undocumented parents. They may see themselves as patriotic for opposing a presumed takeover by an inferior culture. Furthermore, because they consider their opposition to be against an inferior culture and not an inferior race, they seem to believe they can reject being labeled as racists. In such cases, there is not a great deal of difference between blatant cultural bigotry and racism.27 Indeed, there is evidence that some of those who blame Hispanics for importing and maintaining an inferior culture use this claim to cloak actual racism. This was demonstrated in a 2014 national study by the political scientists Todd Hartman, Benjamin Newman, and Scott Bell, who found that some whites take significantly greater offense at someone’s being in the United States illegally or working under the table when told the perpetrator is Mexican than when told the offender is British or Canadian or when no nationality was specified. The study showed a greater willingness to support harsh policies such as deporting Mexican offenders and building more walls on the Mexican border than when the offenses were committed by people who are not His-

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panic. Even the belief that greater numbers of Hispanics commit such offenses did not explain the greater antipathy toward Hispanic misbehavior and the severity of penalties that respondents wanted to level against them. In sum, the study found that many whites viewed “transgressions such as remaining in the country without legal documentation, working without paying taxes, and failing to support traditional symbols of American culture and identity” as “more offensive if committed by Latino than non-Hispanic immigrants.”28 Our conceptualization of the various forms of discrimination experienced by Latinos, blacks, and other minorities in the United States was summarized in table 4.2. As that table illustrates, bigotry, including racism, and exploitation are direct and intentional forms of domination that grant the powerful the ability to take advantage of those with less power. Racism, class bigotry, and cultural bigotry from previous times set in place in US culture racial, class, and cultural frames of inferiority regarding minorities. These factors also contributed to cultural bias, disadvantages experienced by minorities because they have to adjust their cultures to that of the dominant culture. At the same time, the exploitation facilitated by racism and cultural bigotry helped set up systemic racism, the vicious circle of inequality and tendency to deny that minorities experience any more harm than whites. A common form of harm to Mexican-origin people is illustrated by the story of Octavio Guerra. In 1985, he crossed the Rio Grande without papers, seeking work to support his family. Though undocumented, he was able to find work as a migrant farmworker. In 1987, immigration reform legislation made it possible for Octavio to become a legal resident under its amnesty provisions. With his newly acquired legal status, he opened a tapicería (upholstery shop) and struggled to make a home for his wife and two children. One day, a customer told him he had a car in Reynosa that needed reupholstering and asked Octavio to go with him to drive it back to his shop. As Octavio drove back into the United States, he never dreamed of the problems that awaited him. The inspector at the bridge, seeing the rather beat-up vehicle, told him to take it to “secondary” for further inspection. An officer there brought a dog to inspect the vehicle, which alerted officers to ten pounds of marijuana hidden in a compartment. Despite his explanations of how he had been set up, they refused to believe him and threw him in the county jail. His court-appointed lawyer never came to see him until the day they went to court. Though the attorney got him ten years’ probation for pleading guilty to the drug

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charge, he was immediately turned over to the Border Patrol, which took away his residency card and deported him. Undaunted, he crossed again without inspection, using un pasaporte negro (an inner tube; literally, “a black passport”). He rejoined his family, purchased land in a colonia in the La Joya area, and started a business as a shade-tree auto mechanic and upholsterer. The colonia location allowed him not only to hide his illegal status but to operate an informal business that provided a modest income by repairing vehicles for his low-income neighbors. During the sixteen years he had lived there, he managed to avoid police or other government agents, largely because his colonia home was not obviously visible as a place of business. Octavio’s case illustrates many of the points we have sought to explain in this volume. As with many Hispanics, his resilience in the face of intense difficulties, his ability to leverage his relationships, his proximity to the border, and the strength of his community are truly remarkable. Likewise, the opposition he has faced arises primarily from structural inequities that leave him exposed to an unworkable immigration and legal system. Perhaps his case will also illustrate what C.  Wright Mills in 1959 called “the sociological imagination”29—the ability to see private troubles, like those of one Mexican immigrant, as a manifestation of major social issues that residents of the South Texas border face every day.

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EPILOGUE

The Strength and Resilience of People of the South Texas Border With John Sa rgen t

One of our interviewers who interviewed seven colonia residents asked each of them if they liked living in a colonia. Only one reported a desire to leave, saying she wanted more privacy after having grown up on a rural ranch in Mexico. The others all had positive feelings about their colonias. Francisco responded with his own question: “Who in your neighborhood would help you out if you got a fl at tire?” When his interviewer responded that some of her neighbors might help if she asked for it, he replied, “Ah! ¿Ves? [See?] You would have to ask. Here, if they see that you have a fl at tire, they come and tell you about it and then they help you fi x it without being asked.” This account reveals the social capital present in colonias and elsewhere in the region as well as resilience and community self-reliance. And despite the problems associated with low-income colonias that we have pointed out, Francisco and other low-income residents of South Texas find a great deal to like about the area. This conclusion was reinforced by the 2015 Gallup-Healthways Survey that ranked the McAllenEdinburg-Mission area in South Texas with the heaviest concentration of colonias as the 11th-best community out of 190 in the nation despite its having some of the worst fi nancial, food, and health insecurity in the United States. In the many and varied ways we have described, the people of South Texas manage to feel good about their lives and their communities despite the profound economic obstacles they face. We have sought to let the people of South Texas tell their stories within an interconnected framework that focuses on class, culture, and the borderlands environment. We believe it is appropriate to end this volume by emphasizing the immense strength and resilience of these unique people. They do not ask for pity or handouts. They are some

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of the hardest-working people in the nation despite receiving some of the lowest incomes. They struggle mightily so that their children will have the advantages of education that most of them could never access in their own lives. They look for ways to earn additional income and to stretch what little they have by using the informal and crossborder economy to build homes, earn income, purchase goods, and keep down medical expenses by crossing to Mexico for medical care. They have learned to leverage the border and their own communities to solve many problems that all too frequently have been put in place by policies made in Austin, Mexico City, or Washington, DC. One route many seek to move out of poverty is small-scale entrepreneurship. In the larger American society, entrepreneurship is often heralded as a path toward economic development. Yet for many South Texans who are tasked with survival because of a lack of work authorization, poor employment opportunities, or underdeveloped skills, entrepreneurship may provide a chance to meet their basic needs. We have described this elsewhere for the region as “necessity entrepreneurship,”1 where small own-account enterprises (those with no paid employees) comprise nearly 90 percent of the Latino business ecosystem. For a few, however, entrepreneurship allows them to break the cycle of poverty and improve their socioeconomic standing in an environment of bigotry and racism, cultural bias and ethnocentrism, exploitation, and structural bias. We present three such real-life examples from South Texas and the border.2 The first case, of Delia Lubin, illustrates entrepreneurial ingenuity born of economic necessity in the Rio Grande Valley. The second case, of Blanca Cantú, showcases the integrated borderlands environment that both challenges residents and provides opportunities for residents on either side of the border. The third case, of Alberto Kreimerman, illustrates the welcoming nature of the region to outsiders who come to work with the local population, as well as South Texas as a conduit connected to the global economy.

Success from the Ranks of Poverty: Delia’s Tamales. Struggling to make ends meet, Delia Lubin decided to try to bring in extra money for her family. Delia and her sister scraped together ten dollars each for making masa and tamales, a cooking skill for which Delia was celebrated within her family.3 On that fateful day in 1985, Delia

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and her sister sold their first batch of tamales by informally going door to door; they netted a 50 percent return on their twenty-dollar investment. Plowing their earnings back into new supplies, they were able to make more tamales each day and sell them door to door. Tamales, a traditional holiday and special occasion plate, are popular in South Texas, Mexico, and Central America. Making tamales by hand is hard work. When Delia’s sister opted out of the new venture, Delia persevered. She expanded little by little, from her home kitchen in government housing to a home of her own, which she acquired in good measure from her growing tamale business. By 1989, Delia’s home-based business became too large for one person, so she encouraged her three daughters to help. They all sold door to door. During the holidays, the home was filled with bags of tamales to be sold. Business was growing and sales were becoming year-round. Slowly, Delia transformed her garage into a kitchen, adding a stove, oven, and freezer. In 1998, her home-based business moved to a commercial location in McAllen. The transition from home to formal retail outlet was successful, and the family business continued to grow, fueled by Delia’s reputation for quality tamales, value pricing, and exceptional customer service. In subsequent years, new stores and restaurants and a production center were opened in the region, in Pharr (2003), Edinburg (2006), Mission (2008), and San Juan (2008). Delia’s story of selling tamales began with a desire to improve her family’s bleak financial situation. She began as an informal tamale maker and seller and transformed her family business venture into a multi-unit restaurant chain popular in South Texas.

A Cross-Border Business: Florería Cantú and Cantú’s Special Events Blanca Cantú was born in Reynosa, Mexico. Her family came from humble origins, and all nine children needed to work to help make ends meet.4 Blanca balanced work and school while earning the highest marks in her class. During high school, Blanca worked at a branch bank close to her home in Reynosa. After graduation, Blanca decided to make the bank her full-time vocation in order to better support her family. She quickly moved up within the bank branch, acquiring new financial and managerial skills across different job categories. As Blanca reached the highest rung at the bank branch, she thought, “Do I really want to continue working at the bank, or can I create something for myself?” Three

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decades earlier, she had developed a business idea for a flower shop in Reynosa, and so she plowed all her savings and a 50 percent share from her mother into the project so as to venture out on her own. The flower shop, Florería Cantú, slowly gained popularity by offering more than just flowers. Blanca offered to entirely set up, decorate, and remove everything needed for traditional events and family celebrations. Quality and reliable service became trademarks for her business. Within a few years, clients hoping to carry on these traditional Mexican cultural events in Texas began seeking her services in South Texas. So Blanca served both sides of the border from her Reynosa storefront for ten years. When the demand required so much hassle and time to cross the border, Blanca decided to open a store, Cantú’s Special Events, in McAllen in 2007. Each operation came to employ eight to ten fulltime employees as well as part-time employees added during the busiest times. As she concentrated more and more attention on her McAllen store, her mom became the primary caretaker of Florería Cantú. As drug violence has escalated south of the border, more Mexican businesses like Cantú’s Special Events have set up complementary enterprises on the US side of the border. This allows them to take advantage of a culturally similar and expanding market in a safer and more stable and predictable business and economic environment.

An International Music Entrepreneur: Alberto Kreimerman The Rio Grande Valley is a hospitable environment for non-Mexican Spanish-speaking immigrants to establish business ventures. Because of language and culture similarities on both sides of the border, opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship may find fertile fields in which to grow. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the late 1940s, Alberto Kreimerman took to a guitar at age six and by age twelve was an accomplished guitarist.5 As a teenager in Argentina, Alberto began a life of music entertainment playing in the band Jackie y los Ciclones and later leading the band Beto y los Huracanes, both with a national reputation. Later, Alberto Kreimerman moved to Mexico as a solo artist (performing under the name “Bingo Reyna”) furthering his national reputation. He fell in love and married Carmen, a Mexican woman from Tampico. In the early 1980s, Alberto upgraded his music equipment on a cross-

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border shopping trip to McAllen. Soon afterward, the amplifiers failed while he was playing on the road in southern Mexico. To get the manufacturer to honor the warranty, Alberto was required to return to McAllen to turn in the equipment and wait for it to be repaired. Soon thereafter, following a concert, an individual who wanted to buy his guitar and amplifier approached him, and Alberto sold his guitar and amplifier for a hefty profit. This caused him to think of all the musicians in Mexico who had similar problems acquiring and repairing musical equipment. So he decided to open a music store in McAllen in 1982 that served musicians with the care he, as a musician, would like to be served. He named his store Hermes Music and began his business in the same location and with the same phone number as the recently closeddown Omega Music store. He piggybacked on that store’s music clientele and was fortunate that clients familiar with the location dropped by. In 1988 he expanded his reach in the Mexican market by opening an outlet office in Mexico City. He told a reporter for a 2014 story in Texas Border Business, “If a customer bought instruments from me in the United States and then had a problem with the equipment, I could honor the warranties and service needed in Mexico. This greatly increased the success of the business.”6 He priced his goods and services competitively, which gave him lower product margins but led to much higher sales. As the business grew, so did the number of stores and international reach. Hermes Music became the largest wholesaler of musical instruments in Mexico and the Latin American sales representative for major music brands. Alberto put his talent as an entertainer to work and eventually starred in his own television show, Porque amamos la música (Because we love music); the popular show aired on Televisa in Mexico, Telemundo in the United States, and Claro TV in other countries of Latin America. This allowed him to market himself, his store, and his charitable causes. In 2006, Mr. Kreimerman sold the retail portion of Hermes Music, allowing him to focus his attention on his Hermes Music Foundation, television show, and Latin American operations. His foundation, which focused on children and young adults, began in 1989. Among its many activities, the foundation provides toys for underprivileged kids in Reynosa and music opportunities in the cross-border region. Mr. Kreimerman attributes his success in large part to his ability to reach Mexico and the rest of Latin America as well as the Rio Grande Valley through music, entrepreneurship, and philanthropy.

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The examples of Delia Lubin, Blanca Cantú, and Alberto Kreimerman help us illustrate several themes discussed throughout this book: resilience, (im)migration, cross-border linkages, humble beginnings, innovation, and perseverance in the face of cultural, economic, political, and social hardships. Their spirit and the unwavering resilience of other South Texas residents will preserve the legendary contributions of South Texas to the US-Mexico border region, to Texas, and to the United States.

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APPENDIX A

Borderlife Survey Research Projects Utilized in This Volume

The Borderlife Project forms the backbone of this volume. From 1982 to 2010, more than ten thousand in-depth interviews and six thousand survey responses have been collected as part of the Borderlife Project. While this revised edition of the book has focused on the years since 1999, we utilized the entire range of primary resources available in the Borderlife Project, now archived at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Library. Additionally, we report in the following table the primary project areas, with sample sizes, in which we used the resources of the Borderlife Project; these encompass thirteen survey projects and seven areas of in-depth interviews. We also include a survey of maids and employers from Laredo that was not originally part of the Borderlife Project and various high school yearbooks from Valley schools, as shown in the table. Important sources of secondary research include the US Department of Labor’s annual National Agricultural Workers Survey (1989-2012), the 2006 Latino National Survey conducted by Fraga et al., and the Cross-Border Utilization of Health Care Survey. All these sources are discussed in the text when first introduced.

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Appendix A

Research projects utilized in this volume

Project title

Year(s) conducted

Sample

Size (N)

Borderlife survey research projects Migrant Farmworker Survey

1993

RGV migrant farmworkers

260

Undocumented Maid Survey

1993

RGV undocumented maids

162

Employers of Undocumented Maids Survey

1993

RGV employers of undocumented maids

136

Former Student Survey

1994

Past students from RGV schools

243

Undocumented Workers Survey

1994

Undocumented workers in RGV

150

Multiethnic Culture Survey

1996

RGV residents

509

Survey of Anglo Newcomers

1996

Recent Anglo RGV residents

224

Winter Texans Survey

1995

Winter Texans

326

Cultural Practices Survey

2001–2002

Mexican-origin residents

433

Perceptions of Deviance Survey

2002–2003

All RGV ethnic groups

424

Informal and Underground Survey

2006–2009

Informal/underground participants

526

Consumer Informality Survey

2010

RGV consumers

357

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335

Borderlife in-depth (ethnographic) interviews Former Students Exploratory Interviews

1982–2010

Past students from RGV schools

190

Colonia Life

1982–2010

Colonia residents

620

Maids

1982–2010

Maids

317

Employers of Maids

1982–2010

Maid employers

Migrant Farmworkers

1982–1993

Migrant farmworkers

400+

Migrant Education

1982–2010

Migrant students and parents, and teachers connected to migrants

320

Cultural Practices

1982–2001

RGV residents

250

28

Other primary data research projects Laredo Maids Survey

2000

Maids and employers

391

High School Yearbook Study

1995 and 2015

Ten RGV high schools

70

Secondary data research projects US Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey

1989–2012

National random samples of agricultural workers (yearly)

56,976

Fraga et al., Latino National Survey

2006

National random sample of Hispanics

8,634

Su et al., Cross-Border Utilization of Health Care Survey

2008

RGV residents in Texas border counties

1,605

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APPENDIX B

Students Who Contributed Ethnographic Accounts

Each of the following student researchers from the University of Texas–Pan American authorized and contributed to the anecdotal accounts cited in this volume. If a student contributed more than one account, a number in parentheses follows his or her name and indicates how many anecdotal accounts the student contributed. We do not cite students’ names alongside their respective anecdotal accounts in order to preserve the anonymity of the individuals they interviewed. Student names from the fi rst edition of Batos are also included, partly because we carried over some of the accounts from that edition and also because we wished to preserve and acknowledge student participation in successful publication with the Borderlife Project. A name set in boldface type denotes a contribution to a new anecdotal or ethnographic account in this revised edition. Adame, Beth Marie Adams, Kylie Adams, Norma Aguilar, Laura Aguilar, Mirna (2) Alaffa, Esmeralda Alanis, Beatriz Alaniz, Selina Alcantar, Martha Aleman, Arlene A. Alfaro, Alma (3) Alfaro, Norma Almaguer, Ignacio Almaguer, Julian Alonzo, Susanna (2) Alvarado, Cristal L. (2) Alvarez, Lázaro Jr. (2) Alvarez, Marco (2) Alvarez, Vicente (2)

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Anderson, Michelle Andrade, Arlene Anta, Marta (4) Aquino, Christian A. Arrévalo, José Arroyo, Malorie (5) Arteaga, Bernice Barker, Nora A. (6) Barrera, Delia Isabel Barrera, Verónica Bay, Shardae Bell, Beth Kohert Belshie, Harvie Berumen, Sylvia Birkenmeyer, Karen (3) Bishop, Jennifer (3) Blanco, Cesar (2) Bocanegra, Heather Bonilla, Astrid H.

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338

Appendix B

Brooks, Beth (5) Brooks, Margaret E. Brown, Milly Cadañas, Alejandro Cano, Martha J. (2) Cano, Rolando Cantu, Adriana (4) Cantú, Francisco (2) Cantu, Freddy Cantú, Glenda L. Cantú, Myrna G. (4) Cantú, Raúl Cárdenas, Paulina Carrasco, Marisa Briana Casanova, Esmeralda (3) Castañeda, Ricardo Castillo, David (4) Catterton, Linda (2) Cavazos, Ana Lisa (2) Cavazos, David Joe Cavazos, Ida Cavazos, José Cavazos, Melissa (4) Cavazos, Roxanne (3) Cepetillo, Roxanne Cervantez, Angie (5) Chapa, Janie Chapa, María Alicia Chavez, Mike (2) Chavez, Sandra (2) Chavez, Suzette D. (6) Cisneros, Pedro Jr. Clark, Danielle Clements, Tracy Closner, James Compean, Sonya Contreras, Maria Corker, Emily Coronado, Cynthia Lee (2) Cortez, Fermin Cortez, Delfi no Manuel Jr. Cortez, Linda Elizabeth Cortez, Valerie (2) Cox, Juanita V. Cruz, Brenda Cruz, Eric M. (3) Cruz, Francisco

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Curiel, Juan de la Cruz, Lorena (2) De La Garza, Cynthia de Leon, Arturo de Leon, Laila de los Santos, Lisa Degollado, Beatriz del Torro, Rosalinda Delgado, Anabel Diaz, Yerania (3) Dominguez, Maryly Dominguez, Patricia Duque, Dalia (2) Eilts, Peggy Ellis, Jacquelyn (2) Enriquez, Raquel Enriquez, Sandra Escamilla, Maritza Escobar, Aimee (3) Escobedo, Erasmo (2) Espinoza, Edgar (3) Espinoza, Lucas (2) Fernandez, Jessica (3) Flores, Diana (2) Flores, Gina (5) Flores, Janie Flores, Johanna Flores, Melisa Flores, Mercy (3) Flores, Monique Flores, Priscilla Flores, Ronald Flores, Ruben (2) Fonseca, Judy (3) Fonseca, San Juanita Gallegos, Eunice S. (6) Galligan, Keith Garcia, Alex (3) García, Arculando García, Belinda Garcia, Donna Garcia, Erika K. García, Fred (2) Garcia, Gabriela García, Hillary García, Jesús (3) García, Martha A.

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Appendix B

García, Michael D. García, Patricia García, Yolanda Garza, Adriana Garza, Aisa (2) Garza, Carlos Garza, Diana Y. (2) Garza, Román Jr. (2) Garza, Judy Garza, Lilia (3) Garza, Maribel Garza, Marisa Garza, Nelda Garza, Perfecto Garza, Raychel Garza, Sara Alicia Garza, Sylvia (4) Garza, Yolanda Gillis, Loy Gómez, Jimmy Gomez, Ruben Gonzalez, Amy Marie Gonzalez, Armando O. Gonzalez, Beatriz Gonzalez, Cynthia Ann (2) González, Daniela Gonzalez, Jorge Gonzalez, Josefi na A. Gonzalez, Juana M. Gonzalez, Leslie (3) Gonzalez, Maria Imelda Gonzalez, Melissa Gonzalez, Raúl Gonzalez, Sandra M. Gonzalez, Yvette (2) Guajardo, Becky Guajardo, Derley Guajardo, Gus Guajardo, Mariana (4) Guerra, Carolina Guerra, Jaime Guerra, Kasandra Guerrero, Emmy Guerrero, Margarita (2) Guerrero, Teresa (3) Guerrero, Velma Gutierrez, Blanca (2)

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339

Gutierrez, Luciano Gutierrez, Maribel (2) Gutierrez, Martha (3) Guzman, Eduardo (2) Hamer, Sheryl Harrison, Rebekah (3) Hayden, Maria Isabel (2) Hernandez, Aracelia Hernandez, Gina Hernandez, Isabel (2) Hernandez, Laura Marie Hernandez, Melissa O. Hernandez, Patsy Hernandez, Victor (2) Hernandez, Yadhira Y. Hill, Terrell Hinojosa, Iliana (2) Hinojosa, Mariano Hinojosa, Marissa Nelly Hinojosa, Mayra (4) Hinojosa, Nayeli (2) Honn, Jennifer L. Huerta, Cynthia Hussfield, Dolly Ibarra, Ana Ibarra, Claudia E. (2) James, R. Jimenez, Carol (3) Jimenez, Jessica A. Johnson, Jennifer Jorgensen, Taylor Kreimerman, Luis Larios, Carlos (4) Larsen, Dianira (3) Layton, James Manuel Leal, Christi (4) Leal, Cynthia Ledezma, Samuel Lerma, Orlando Leuders, Lois Leuders, Lois (2) Leyva, Jorge Gil (2) Leyva, Nancy (3) Lloyd, Anita Loera, Luis (2) Longoria, Nancy Longoria, Priscilla

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340 Appendix B

Longoria, Rackel Lopez, José Lopez, Lillian (2) Lopez, Maria Lopez, Martina Lopez, Nadine (2) Lopez, Norma (2) Lopez, Oneida Lopez, Ricardo Lopez, Sonya Lopez, Verónica Loya, Laura Lozano, Christine (2) Lozano, Floriza Luévano, Marta Luévano, Yolanda Lumbreras, Yolanda (2) Luna, Allysa (2) Madrigal, Eliga Magallan, Ruben (2) Maldonado, Nereyda (2) Maldonado, Nora Maldonado, Norma Maldonado, San Juanita Maldonado, Yuvia (2) Mares, Aleida (2) Marino, Michelle L. Marquez, Agustin Martinez, Alex (2) Martinez, Audry Martinez, Carmen Martinez, David A. (3) Martinez, Elva E. Martinez, Flor Martinez, Lorena Martinez, Melissa Martinez, Victoria L. Medellin, Laura Medina, Kelly (2) Medina, Marina Medrano, Olga Mejorado, Severa D. (2) Mendoza, Iris Mendoza, José L. (2) Mendoza, Yeannette Myrea Mercado, Nancy Lee (5) Mercado, Nelda Y. (7)

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Meyer, Ryan Michel, Kelly (3) Milian, Daniel Mills, Rita L. Molina, Katia Montes, Velma Morán, Diana Morelius, Michael V. Moreno, Thanya Moreno, Vianey M. (2) Muñoz, Julia Muriel, Paulina Narvaez, Yolanda Negrete, Nadia Nuñez, Orlando Ochoa, Constantina Ochoa, Gloria Olague, Diego Ornelas, Marisol Ownsby, Craig Palacios, Guadalupe Jr. Palomo, Stormy Pantoja, Jesse Pardo, María L. (2) Peña, Maria L. Peña, Maria I. Peña, Priscilla Perez, Ana Catalina (2) Perez, Christopher Perez, Fernando Perez, Gerrie Perez, Irene (2) Perez, Soila G. (2) Perez, Tony (2) Perez, Vilda Pierce, Tynesha Porras, Ivan Powell, Barbara L. (3) Quiroz, Crissy (2) Rader, Anne M. Ramirez, Cleo Ramirez, Dalinda I. Ramirez, Deanna (3) Ramirez, Janie C. Ramirez, Jessie (3) Ramirez, Melissa A. Ramirez, Teresa

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Appendix B

Ramos, Ana L. Ramos, Jaime Ramos, Jesús (2) Ramos, Nancy G. (2) Ramos, Priscilla Rangel, Evangelina C. Rawlings, Esmeralda Raya, Rebeca (3) Red, Efrelle Myke C. (4) Rendon, Laura Rendon, Melissa Reyes, Esmeralda Reyes, José Reyna, Michelle M. Reynolds, Chis’mere J. (6) Rios, David Ríos, III, Victor Rivas, M. (2) Rivas, Debra Robbins, Jason (2) Robinson, Rogena Robledo, Celeste (3) Robledo, Jenny (2) Robles, Patricia (2) Rocha, Sandra Rodriguez, Monica (2) Rodriguez, Rosalinda (4) Rodriquez Salinas, Ruby Rodriquez, Diana Linda (2) Rodriquez, José A. (5) Rodriquez, Maribel Rodriquez, Omar I. Rodriquez, Sandra (4) Rojas, Ena Noemi Rojas, Julissa Romero, Taryna Rosales, Elizabeth Rosas, Rosalinda Rubio, Ascensión (7) Ruiz, Estevan (3) Ruiz, Norina Saenz, Carla (2) Saenz, Hilda M. Saenz, Rosie (2) Salazar, Belinda Salazar, Joey (4) Salazar, Maribel

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341

Salazar, Marina Saldivar, Dolly (2) Salinas, Cindi Z. (2) Salinas, Elizabeth (2) Salinas, Grace (4) Salinas, Jorge L. Salinas, Lorena Salinas, Lucia Y. (2) Salinas, Pauline Salinas, Ruby R. Salinas, Teresa (2) Sanchez, Ana M. Sánchez, Beatrice Sanchez, Crecencio Jr. Sanders, Derek (2) Sandoval, María Santoy, Marisa T. Sauceda, Gerry (4) Scherrey, Michelle (3) Schwartz, Nathan (2) Serna, Dorothy D. Sherill, Daniel Silva, Arlene G. Solis, Elizabeth F. Solis, Rosa (2) Solis, Thelma Soria, Pedro Soto, Eberto Soto, Ester Spoon, Russel Stapleton, Donna Sustaita, Nimsi (2) Tafolla, Imelda Tamez, Laura Tanksley, Cari (2) Taylor, Cynthia Ann (2) Telles, Noellia Thrash, Brent Torres, Eugenio Torres, Ricardo (4) Torres, Socorro Torres, Viana Eliza (2) Trad, Lisette (2) Trejo, Aimee Trejo, Gabriela Treviño, Belinda (4) Treviño, Eliza (2)

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Appendix B

Treviño, Erica (2) Treviño, Guadalupe Treviño, Nancy (2) Trussel, Kevin (5) Vair, Theresa (3) Valadez, Danielle Valdez, Fernando Valdivia, Sandra (2) Varela, Lilia Vargas, Corina D. (3) Vargas, Janie Vasquez de Garcia, Amelia (3) Vasquez, Enedelia Vela, Catherine (2) Vela, Cristobal A. Vela, Dora Vela, Ruth Ann Venicia, Deborah C. (3) Vidal, Silvia Karina

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Villarreal, Erica Villarreal, Hector Villarreal, Linda M. Villarreal, Magda Villarreal, Marianilla Villarreal, Mónica Villarreal, Tony Villegas, Rosario (3) Villegas, Rosie Viranda, Sarah West, Stephen D. (3) Wirsche, Norma J. (2) Wisdom, Meme (3) Wright, Amy (2) Yanez Elpidio Jr. (2) York, Loren B. Ysasi, Noel (2) Zamora, Robert (4) Zepeda, Precious (2)

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Notes

Preface 1. Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 60–61. 2. John P. Hawkins, “The Undergraduate Ethnographic Field School as a Research Method,” Current Anthropology 55, no. 5 (October 2014): 566.

Introduction 1. Alasdair Baverstock, “Revealed, America’s Most Fearful City Where Texans Live Next to a ‘War Zone,’” Daily Mail (London), October 8, 2015, http:// www.dailymail.co.uk/. 2. “The Politics of the Border Crisis,” The Economist, July 19, 2014, http:// www.economist.com/. 3. In a 2009 article in The Nation, Gabriel Arana documents how public officials and the media created the myth of border violence, starting with reporting what could happen if Mexican cartels crossed the border, then coining the term “spillover violence,” and ultimately portraying it as an established fact—all despite contrary evidence that shows border cities as safer than most US nonborder cities; Arana, “The Border Violence Myth,” May 27, 2009, The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/article/border-violence-myth/. 4. These data were calculated from various tables in US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 2014 Crime in the United States (Washington, DC: FBI, 2014), https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime -in-the-u.s.-2014. 5. Sadly, Texas, which had the nation’s highest proportion of uninsured population prior to the Affordable Care Act, at the time of this writing refused as a state to participate, thus leaving large numbers of Texas residents, especially those on the border, without health insurance. 6. Matt Levin, “Survey: The 30 Happiest Cities in the U.S.,” Houston Chronicle, March 10, 2016, http://m.chron.com/; Health eVillages and Gallup-

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Healthways, State of American Well-Being: 2015 Community Well-Being Rankings and Access to Care (Washington, DC: Healthways, 2015), http://info.healthways .com/hubfs/Well-Being_Index/Gallup-Healthways_State_of_American_Well -Being_2015_Community_Rankings_vFINAL.pdf?t=1457449899148. 7. In at least one way, living in a low-income neighborhood may be an advantage. In a 2011 news release from the Association for Psychological Science, a researcher says the poor “give more and help more. If someone’s in need, they’ll respond. What I think is really interesting about that is, it kind of shows there’s all this strength to the lower-class identity: greater empathy, more altruism, and fi ner attunement to other people”; in “Social Class as Culture,” Association for Psychological Science, news release, August 8, 2011, http:// www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/social-class-as-culture .html. 8. Often, such medications were purchased in Mexico where most nonpsychotropic medications can be purchased without prescriptions. When purchased in small amounts, they can be declared, if the buyer is asked, as personal purchases and then resold informally at local flea markets. 9. Dejun Su et al., “Cross-Border Utilization of Health Care: Evidence from a Population-Based Study in South Texas,” Health Services Research Journal 46, no. 3 (2011): 859–876. Based on the telephone directories of the thirtytwo border counties, 1,605 respondents ages eighteen or older at the time of the survey in 2008 were randomly selected and subsequently interviewed. A range of questions was asked regarding sociodemographic background, acculturation, and health care utilization patterns in Mexico and the United States. Except for household income, few missing values were reported. The research was supported in part by the US Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (grant no. R24HS017003) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (grant no. 1H75DP001812-01). 10. See Chad Richardson and Michael J. Pisani, The Informal and Underground Economy of the South Texas Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), especially chapter 7. 11. According to Harold U. Faulkner, Lincoln believed the war was unnecessary and unconstitutional; American Political and Social History (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948), 325. 12. For a good description of this and other episodes associated with Cortina, see Jerry Thompson, Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007). 13. Apparently, Lee threatened to invade Mexico unless Cortina’s hostilities ceased; Sharyn Kane and Richard Keeton, Fort Brown: A New Frontier (Tallahassee, FL: National Park Service, 2001). 14. The Second Cavalry, with its Texas frontier experience, supplied four of the eight full generals of the Confederate Army: Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, Edmund Kirby Smith, and John Bell Hood; Carl Coke Rister, “Lee, Robert Edward,” Handbook of Texas Online, Austin: Texas State Historical Association, February 2011, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fle18. 15. Though both sides knew of Lee’s surrender, they had not yet received orders to surrender. In the Battle of Palmito Hill, the Confederate troops van-

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quished the forces of the Union army but soon surrendered when the governor of Texas ordered Colonel Rip Ford to disband his troops; Jeffrey William Hunt, “Palmito Ranch, Battle of,” Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2016), https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles /qfp01. 16. After Texans elected James “Pa” Ferguson, arguably the most corrupt governor in Texas history, he appointed Henry Ransom, who had shot an attorney in cold blood, as captain of a special company of Texas Rangers, many of them vigilantes. This drove out many Rangers who had the respect of South Texas Hispanics. Ferguson ordered Ransom to “go down there [the Valley] and clean it up if you have to kill every damned man connected with it”; Charles H. Harris and Louis R. Sadler, The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade 1910 to 1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004). The Harris and Sadler volume is an excellent history of the era. 17. For a good description of confl ict and accommodation in South Texas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987). On race relations before 1900, see also Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 18. Unless otherwise noted, the names of interviewers and individuals who were interviewed have been changed to protect their anonymity, especially in light of the sensitive nature of many of the interview topics. 19. The information for this paragraph is based on Arnoldo De León, “Mexican Americans,” Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2016), https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/pqmue. 20. Mario T. García uses the term “Post Chicano Generation” to describe the 1980s to the present; García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 21. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 262. 22. Montejano writes, “Cultural nationalism, an attractive philosophy during the mobilization against the Anglos, provided no strategy or instructions once ‘los they’ had been overcome”; Anglos and Mexicans, 290. 23. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 246. 24. In the Cultural Practices Survey fewer than 3 percent of Mexican-origin respondents in South Texas preferred the term “Chicano” to identify their ethnic identity. The term “Hispanic” was most commonly chosen (38 percent), followed by “Mexican American” (34 percent), “Mexican” (18 percent), “American” (6 percent), and “Latino” (2 percent). This fi nding is consistent with other survey research we have undertaken. 25. Daniel D. Arreola, Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 31. 26. We refer to the Rio Grande Valley, Lower Rio Grande Valley, and Valley interchangeably to describe the area of South Texas that constitutes the primary region of our study. This includes the four southernmost counties of Texas—Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy (and, for some, Webb County,

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Notes to Pages 19–25

where Laredo is located). Where it is informative, we also discuss other border and southern Texas counties, such as Maverick and El Paso Counties. 27. “American Community Survey 2011–2013,” US Census Bureau, various tables, http://www.census.gov/acs/www/. 28. These figures are derived from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), Texas: MSAs, Nonfarm Employment, 2000–2015, https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/categories/30907. 29. US Census Bureau, American FactFinder, various data queries, http:// factfi nder.census.gov. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. These figures are derived from FRED, Texas: MSAs, Nonfarm Employment; and US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), “Table  B-3. Average Hourly and Weekly Earnings of All Employees on Private Nonfarm Payrolls by Industry Sector, Seasonally Adjusted,” modified July 8, 2016, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t19.htm. 33. Student research generally took place as a class assignment. Students were given training in conducting interviews, particularly in guaranteeing the anonymity of their subjects. Most students in upper-division classes were assigned to identify and interview seven individuals who could best describe what life conditions were like for them and others in their situations. Then the students wrote up their work, including anecdotal accounts and patterns they had observed, in term papers. When they submitted their work, they were given grades, and only then were they invited to authorize all or portions of their work for possible publication. They were clearly informed that a decision to do so or not would not change the grades they had just received. Generally, about 92 percent of students chose to authorize their work for possible publication. Because of the sensitivity of many of the topics and commitments they might have made to their subjects, no pressure was exerted on the students to authorize their work for publication. 34. Su et al., “Cross-Border Utilization of Health Care Survey”; Luis R. Fraga et al., Latino National Survey (LNS), 2006 (Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR, June 2013), http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR20862.v6; US Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), Public Access Data: Fiscal Years 1989–2012 (Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, updated December 11, 2015), https://www.doleta.gov/agworker/naws.cfm. Fraga and colleagues surveyed 8,634 respondents in 2005–2006. NAWS for 1989–2012 was conducted by the Department of Labor for the Department of Agriculture with 56,976 respondents. 35. Stanley Milgram later replicated the study in an unregistered, backstreet office in a bustling city as opposed to the Yale campus. Though the level of obedience was slightly reduced, the percentage “going all the way” was not significantly lower; Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). 36. Because of the extreme emotional stress and infl icted insight suffered by the Milgram shock experiment participants, such experiments today would not be allowed at universities by human-subject review boards.

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37. BBC Two, “How Violent Are You?,” Horizon, episode 17, May 12, 2009, video, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kk4bz.

Chapter 1: Migrant Farmworkers 1. We will use “Batos” throughout the volume to refer to the first edition of Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), by Chad Richardson. 2. US Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Agricultural Statistics Service, Farm Labor Survey (Washington, DC: USDA, various years). http:// www.nass.usda.gov/index.php. 3. “Farm Labor: Background,” USDA Economic Research Service, http:// www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/background.aspx, accessed January 15, 2015. 4. William Kandel, A Profile of Hired Farmworkers, a 2008 Update, Economic Research Report no. 60 (Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, July 2008): i, http://permanent.access.gpo.gov/lps97534/err60_1_.pdf. 5. Ibid., 19–21. 6. Bowen National Research, Texas Rural Farmworker Housing Analysis (Austin: Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, September 2012), http://www.tdhca.state.tx.us/housing-center/docs/12-Rural-Farm-Analysis -Farmworker.pdf. 7. Melissa Clements et al., Texas Migrant Education Program Evaluation, Final Report (Austin: MGT of America, for Texas Education Agency, May 2011), xiii, http://tea.texas.gov/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=2147501048. 8. Ibid. 9. In fall 2015, the University of Texas–Pan American (UTPA) was merged with UT Brownsville and a new medical school to become the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). Throughout the book, we will use the UTPA designation for the period prior to this change. 10. Housing Assistance Council (HAC), Housing Conditions for Farmworkers, Rural Research Report (Washington, DC: HAC, September 2013), http:// www.ruralhome.org/storage/documents/rpts_pubs/ts10-farmworkers.pdf. 11. “Facts About Farmworkers,” 2012, National Center for Farmworker Health (NCFH), http://www.ncfh.org/uploads/3/8/6/8/38685499/fs-facts _about_farmworkers.pdf. 12. The study makes several recommendations to spur and streamline farmworker housing development, including clarifying farmworker housing-facility requirements, raising development requirements so that farmworker housing projects can be eligible for low-income housing tax credits, establishing a predevelopment loan program, and establishing a rental operating subsidy program that can reduce the risks associated with uncertain occupancies; Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, “Surveying the Landscape: The Challenge of Affordable Housing in Texas,” Banking and Community Perspectives, no. 3 (2012): 13, https://www.dallasfed.org/assets/documents/cd/bcp/2012/bcp1203.pdf. 13. For more on this issue, see Lauren Mills, “Poor Housing, Wage Cheats

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Still Plague Midwest Migrant Farm Workers,” IowaWatch.org, December  30, 2013, http://iowawatch.org/2013/12/30/poor-housing-wage-hassles-still-plague -midwest-migrant-farm-workers/. 14. Whitney Eulich, “For Migrants, a Push for Cross-Border Justice,” Christian Science Monitor, December 14, 2015, http://humantrafficking .csmonitor.com/for-mexicos-migrants-push-for-cross-border-justice. 15. “Facts about Farmworkers,” 2012, NCFH. 16. R.  C. Luginbuhl et al., “Heat-Related Deaths among Crop Workers—United States, 1992–2006,” (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 57, no. 24 (2008): 649–653, http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml /mm5724a1.htm. 17. Maria C. Mirabelli et al., “Symptoms of Heat Illness among Latino Farm Workers in North Carolina,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 39, no. 5 (2010): 468–471. 18. “Employer-Reported Workplace Injuries and Illness—2011,” US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), news release, October 25, 2012, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/osh.pdf. 19. “Farmworker Occupational Health and Safety,” National Center for Farmworker Health, 2013, 1, http://www.ncfh.org/uploads/3/8/6/8/38685499 /fs-occ_health.pdf. 20. Ibid. 21. “Agricultural Safety: 2009 Injuries to Youth on Farms,” US Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, April 5, 2012, 1, https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/injr0412.pdf. 22. Erin Robinson et al., “Wage, Wage Violations, and Pesticide Safety Experienced by Migrant Farmworkers in North Carolina,” New Solutions 21, no. 2 (2011): 251–268. 23. According to a 2012 Pew Research Center survey, 41 percent of whites— and 57 percent of Republicans—believed that poverty was most often due to a lack of effort; Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush-Obama Years: Trends in American Values, 1987–2012 (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, June 4, 2012), 42, http://www.people-press.org/2012/06/04/partisan-polarization-surges-in -bush-obama-years/. 24. Pew Research Center, The Politics of Financial Insecurity: A Democratic Tilt, Undercut by Low Participation (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, January 8, 2015), 8, http://www.people-press.org/2015/01/08/the-politics-of -fi nancial-insecurity-a-democratic-tilt-undercut-by-low-participation/. 25. The defi nition of the situation is a foundational concept of symbolic interactionism, a branch of sociology. It was first advanced by the American sociologist W. I. Thomas. See William I. Thomas, The Unadjusted Girl: With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923).

Chapter 2: The Colonias of South Texas 1. From 2000 to 2013, the number of households in Texas receiving food stamps (SNAP) almost tripled; Tracy A. Loveless, “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Receipt for Households: 2000–2013,” Ameri-

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can Community Survey Briefs (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, March 2015), https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015 /acs/acsbr13-08.pdf. 2. Ariel Cisneros, “Texas Colonias: Housing and Infrastructure Issues,” in The Border Economy (Dallas: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 2001), 19. 3. “What Is a Colonia?,” Texas Secretary of State, 2015, http://www.sos .state.tx.us/border/colonias/what_colonia.shtml. 4. “Colonias Prevention,” Texas Attorney General, 2015, https://texasattor neygeneral.gov/cpd/colonias-prevention. 5. Peter Ward reports that 18.1 percent of the population in Willacy County resided in colonias in 1996, in line with other counties in South Texas; Colonias and Public Policy in Texas and Mexico: Urbanization by Stealth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). More recent colonia population data are unavailable for Willacy County. 6. The growth of colonias prior to 2000 and the virtual halt to their growth since then must be understood in terms of the population growth in these four counties (Willacy County is dropped due to a lack of comparable population data over time) that make up the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas over the same period. The combined population of these four Lower Rio Grande Valley counties was 320,484 in 1950 and remained relatively stable through the 1950s and 1960s. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed dramatic growth in the Valley as the population rose to 537,811 in 1980 and more than 700,000 in 1990. By 2000, it had reached 1.2 million. As of January 1, 2012, the US Census Bureau estimated the population of the Lower Rio Grande Valley at 1.3 million, nearly double its population in 1990; American Fact Finder, US Census Bureau, various years. 7. The colors represent the following levels of infrastructure (under)development: red, colonias lack access to potable water and adequate wastewater disposal or are unplatted; yellow, colonias have access to potable water via functional water wells or connections to public water systems, functional septic tanks, or connections to public wastewater collection systems but lack adequate road paving, drainage, or solid waste disposal; green, colonias have access to potable water, adequate wastewater disposal, adequate paved roads, drainage, and solid waste disposal; Texas Secretary of State, Colonia Initiatives Program, Tracking the Progress of State-Funded Projects That Benefit Colonias, prepared for the 84th Texas Legislature Regular Session (Austin: Texas Secretary of State, December 1, 2014), http://www.sos.state.tx.us/border/forms/2014-progress -legislative-report.pdf. 8. Per capita income in Starr County was nearly 20 percent less than per capita income in Hidalgo County for the period 2009–2013. The 2009–2013 estimates of per capita income for Texas counties included in this section are as follows: Cameron, $14,710; El Paso, $18,852; Hidalgo, $14,222; Maverick, $13,668; Starr, $11,584; Webb, $14,553. US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/. 9. Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, 2013 State of Texas Low Income Housing Plan and Annual Report (Austin: Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, 2013), 15, http://www.tdhca.state.tx.us /housing-center/docs/13-SLIHP.pdf. Contracts for deed have been replaced

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Notes to Pages 79–83

with warranty deeds; Noah J. Durst and Peter M. Ward, “Measuring Self-Help Home Improvements in Texas Colonias: A Ten Year ‘Snapshot’ Study,” Urban Studies 51, no. 2 (2014): 2143–2159. 10. Housing Assistance Council (HAC), Housing in the Border Colonias: Rural Assistance Report (Washington, DC: HAC, August 2013), 2, http://www .ruralhome.org/storage/documents/rpts_pubs/ts10_border_colonias.pdf. See also Texas A&M University, Real Estate Center, 2005 Updates: Rules Govern Contracts for Deeds, Publication 1754 (College Station: Texas A&M University, October 2005), https://assets.recenter.tamu.edu/documents/articles/1754 .pdf; “Highlights of Some Recent Texas Laws Related to Executory Contracts for Deeds,” Texas Attorney General, 2016, https://texasattorneygeneral.gov /cpd/highlights-of-some-recent-texas-laws-related-to-executory-contracts-for -dee. 11. Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, 2013 State of Texas Low Income Housing Plan and Annual Report, 15. 12. Ibid., 7–8. 13. “Colonias Prevention,” Texas Attorney General, n.p. As previously indicated, contract for deed became unlawful by 2001 for new lot sales. For compelling life stories and videos of life in South Texas colonias, see Texas Housers, a blog of the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service, at https://texas housers.net/. 14. Joseph R. Sharkey et al., “Association of Household and Community Characteristics with Adult and Child Food Insecurity among Mexican-Origin Households in Colonias along the Texas-Mexico Border,” International Journal for Equity in Health, 10, no. 19 (2011): 1–14. 15. See Kingsley E. Haynes, “Colonias in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas: A Summary Report,” Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, Policy Research Report, no. 18, Austin, TX, 1977, http://files.eric.ed.gov/full text/ED147055.pdf. 16. Durst and Ward, “Measuring Self-Help Home Improvements,” 2148. In a 2016 aerial study of Cameron County, Durst fi nds the average colonia lot value was $13,965, or $1.32 per square foot; Noah J. Durst, “The Nature and Extent of Self-Help Housing in Texas: From Colonias to Model Subdivisions,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 36, no. 2 (2016): 153. 17. Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, 2013 State of Texas Low Income Housing Plan and Annual Report, 14. 18. Jordana Barton and Elizabeth S. Blum, “Las Colonias: Life along the Texas-Mexico Border,” paper presented at Ten Gallon Economy: Sizing Up Texas’ Growth conference, November 7, 2014, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, http://www.dallasfed.org/assets/documents/research/events/2014/14tengallon _barton_blum.pdf. 19. Secondary immigration checkpoints, staffed by the US Border Patrol, are often harder to pass through than the actual border. More than a dozen permanent secondary stations, located roughly ten to forty miles from the border, are operated by the US Border Patrol in South Texas to check the citizenship status of motorists. The checkpoints are also used to interdict illicit drugs and other criminal activity.

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20. Since October 2008, the laser visa has doubled as a B-1 business visitor and a B-2 pleasure, tourism, or medical treatment visitor visa for many Mexican border-area residents. 21. Exiquio Salinas, The Colonias Factbook: A Survey of Living Conditions in Rural Areas of South Texas and West Texas Border Counties (Austin: Texas Department of Human Services, 1988), 2–5. 22. María E. Diaz reports the fi ndings of a qualitative language survey of seventeen participants from a colonia near Brownsville in Cameron County. Of the six participants ages thirty-one or more, Spanish was the dominant language, with little English-language ability. While the study is too small to provide any concrete evidence of language ability in colonias, it does lay a foundation for other researchers to investigate the phenomenon further; Díaz, “A Case Study of Spanish Language Use in a Texas Border Colonia,” EdD diss., University of Texas at Brownsville, 2011. 23. Texas Secretary of State, Colonia Initiatives Program, Tracking the Progress of State Funded Projects. 24. Ibid. 25. Wendy Jepsen, “Measuring ‘No-Win’ Waterscapes: Experience-Based Scales and Classification Approaches to Assess Household Water Security in Colonias on the US-Mexico Border,” Geoforum 51 (January 2014): 109. 26. Ibid. 27. Jordana Barton et al., Las Colonias in the 21st Century: Progress along the Texas-Mexico Border (Dallas: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, April 2015), https://www.dallasfed.org/assets/documents/cd/pubs/lascolonias.pdf. 28. Emily Ramshaw, “Improvement Comes Up Short in South Texas Colonias,” New York Times, July 7, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/. 29. Exiquio Salinas, Colonias Factbook. 30. Lydia Arizmendi, David Arizmendi, and Angela Donelson, “Colonia Housing and Community Development,” in The Colonias Reader: Economy, Housing, and Public Health in U.S.-Mexico Border Colonias, ed. Angela J. Donelson and Adrian X. Esparza (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), 95. 31. Danielle Z. Rivera, “The Forgotten Americans: A Visual Exploration of Lower Rio Grande Valley Colonias,” Michigan Journal of Sustainability 2 (Fall 2014): 119–130. 32. United States-Mexico Border Health Commission (BHC), Border Lives: Health Status in the United States-Mexico Border Region (El Paso, TX: BHC, April 2010), 161–162, http://www.borderhealth.org/files/res_2213.pdf. 33. Ibid., 176. 34. Ibid., 138. 35. For states, the federal government paid 100 percent of the expansion in 2014–2016 and is to pay 90 percent of the expansion after 2020; “A 50-State Look at Medicaid Expansion: 2016,” Families USA, updated March 2016, http://familiesusa.org/product/50-state-look-medicaid-expansion. 36. Texas Medical Association, The Uninsured in Texas (Austin: Texas Medical Association, 2014), https://www.texmed.org/uninsured_in_texas/, accessed March 25, 2015. 37. Barton et al., Las Colonias in the 21st Century, 23.

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38. Ibid., 2. 39. Richardson and Pisani, Informal and Underground Economy. 40. Ibid. 41. Cecilia Giusti, “Nuestra Casa (Our House): A New Model for Self-Help and Improvement along the Texas/Mexico Border,” Texas Business Review, August 2008. 42. Barton et al., Las Colonias in the 21st Century, 2. 43. As these questions were sensitive in nature, we employed a purposive sampling design to maximize respondent trust. Hence our results are more illustrative than defi nitive; Richardson and Pisani, Informal and Underground Economy of the South Texas Border. 44. The authors obtained the sheriff’s numbers by a public information request on April 2, 2015, from Blanca Sanchez, Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office. 45. The response of nearly 25 percent in upper-income neighborhoods might seem surprising until one considers that many of these households probably employ undocumented maids. 46. Emile Durkheim called the bond based on similarity of situation and occupation “mechanical solidarity”; see Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (New York: Free Press, 1997; originally published 1933). 47. Steve Taylor, “Colonia Residents Celebrate after Streets Get Repaired,” Rio Grande Guardian (McAllen, TX), March 29, 2015, http://riograndeguard ian.com/colonia-residents-celebrate-after-streets-get-repaired/. Successes like these strongly suggest that community organization can triumph in the face of many structural obstacles. For other examples, see Arizmendi, Arizmendi, and Donelson, “Colonia Housing and Community Development.” 48. Will Livesley-O’Neill, “Colonia Organizations Win Groundbreaking Street Lighting Victory in Hidalgo County,” Texas Housers (blog), November 18, 2015, https://texashousers.net/2015/11/18/colonia-organizations-win -groundbreaking-street-lighting-victory-in-hidalgo-county/. 49. Josué Ramírez, “Street Light Celebration Finally Begins as Colonia Residents Celebrate Victory,” Texas Housers (blog), January 19, 2016, https:// texashousers.net/2016/01/19/street-light-installation-fi nally-begins-as-colonia -residents-celebrate-victory/. 50. Proyecto Azteca relies on funding from Hidalgo County, the US Department of Agriculture, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation; Aaron Nelsen, “Low-income Families Slip through Cracks of Housing Rules,” Houston Chronicle, August 9, 2015, http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/; US Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Proyecto Azteca Helps Families Build Homes in the Colonias,” n.d., http://archives.huduser.gov/field works/0601/fworks1.html.

Chapter 3: “Only a Maid” 1. Maid or domestic work may also be referred to as sex-typed or gendered along the lines proposed by the psychologist Sandra Bem: “sex typing derives, in part, from gender-based schematic processing, from a generalized readiness

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to process information on the basis of sex-linked associations that constitute the gender schema”; Bem, “Gender Schema Theory: A Cognitive Account of Sex Typing,” Psychological Review 88, no. 4 (1981): 354. 2. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28. 3. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 99–100. 4. Ibid., 102–103. 5. As the surveys are now quite dated, we will use them sparingly—when no more recent survey research on these South Texas populations is available— and also to help us contrast the earlier period covered by the 1999 edition of Batos with their treatment during subsequent years. 6. The results of this study were published in Michael J. Pisani and David  W. Yoskowitz, “‘Por Necesidad’—Transnational Labor Movements, Informality, and Wage Determination: An Exploratory Study of Maids on the U.S. Mexican Border,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 16, no. 1 (2001): 67–82. 7. “Nannygate” scandals include that of Linda Chavez, who in 2001 had to withdraw her nomination as secretary of labor. In 2004, Bernard Kerik withdrew his nomination by President Bush as secretary of homeland security over allegations of illegally hiring an undocumented maid. In 2006, Jim Gibbons won his campaign for governor of Nevada despite revelations that ten years earlier he and his wife had employed an undocumented woman as a housekeeper and babysitter. At the beginning of the Obama administration, at least ten top-level cabinet or other federal appointees ran into trouble over failure to pay the “nanny tax.” In 2010, California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman lost, despite spending more than $140 million of her own money, after it was revealed that she had employed and allegedly had mistreated an undocumented immigrant as a nanny and housekeeper. And in 2014, the US Ambassador to India Nancy Powell resigned over the handling of an Indian junior diplomat’s arrest in New York precipitated by allegations of employing a nanny unlawfully. 8. See, for example, Christina Mendoza’s more recent qualitative study of forty maids in Laredo; “Crossing Borders: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work at the Texas-Mexico Divide,” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2009. 9. Secondary Border Patrol immigration checkpoints exist throughout the US-Mexico borderlands, typically forty to seventy-five miles inland from the border. In South Texas, all the major highway arteries have permanent secondary inspection stations; among them are the border checkpoints north of Laredo on Interstate 35, near Falfurias on US 281, near Sarita on US 77, and Hebronville on Highway 359. These official checkpoints create a second border-control inspection regime and are oftentimes harder to cross than the actual border. 10. Indeed, there is evidence that some US immigration officers in the Rio Grande Valley Sector look for quasi-legal ways to make the migration experience so discouraging that it will repel future migrations—not only of those ap-

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prehended, but of people who will hear their stories about how painful their experiences were; Guillermo Cantor, Hieleras (Iceboxes) in the Rio Grande Valley Sector, special report (Washington, DC: American Immigration Council, December 17, 2015), http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/special-reports/hieleras -iceboxes-rio-grande-valley-sector. 11. At the time of the 1993 survey, the United States used a border- crossing card known as a “mica” instead of the laser-visa in use today. We were unable to ascertain how many of those documents were legitimate and how many were fraudulent. 12. “Since 1980, the estimated unauthorized population in the United States has increased from about 2.5 million to about 11.7 million people. Between one-third and one-half of these aliens are believed to have entered lawfully through a POE (port of entry) and over-stayed their visas. An unknown proportion of illegal entrants also passed through POEs, either concealed in a vehicle or by using fraudulent documents”; Lisa Seghetti, Border Security: Immigration Inspections at Ports of Entry (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, January 26, 2015), posted by Federation of American Scientists at https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R43356.pdf. 13. Adam Isacson and Maureen Meyer, On the Front Lines: Border Security, Migration, and Humanitarian Concerns in South Texas (Washington, DC: Washington Office on Latin America, February 2015), http://www.wola.org/sites /default/files/ONTHEFRONTLINES.pdf. 14. Sarah Stillman, “Where Are the Children? For Extortionists, Undocumented Migrants Have Become Big Business,” New Yorker, April 27, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/where-are-the-children. 15. Isacson and Meyer, On the Front Lines. 16. For a more complete examination of social capital, see Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” in Power and Ideology in Education, ed. Jerome Karabel and A.  H. Halsey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 487–511; Chad Richardson and Michael J. Pisani, The Informal and Underground Economy of the South Texas Border (Austin: University of Texas Press), 2012, chapter 4. 17. For recent analyses of maids and the job search, see Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica; Mendoza, “Crossing Borders”; Michael J. Pisani, “Utilizing Informal Household-Work Substitutes along the US-Mexico Border: Evidence from South Texas,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 29, no. 3 (2014), 303–317; and Rogelio Sáenz and Karen Douglas, “The Economic Benefits of Domestica Employment: The Case of Mexicans in the United States,” Journal of LatinoLatin American Studies 3, no. 4 (2009): 98–114. For earlier studies, see Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A. (New York: Routledge, 1992), and Glenn, Issei, War Bride. 18. Pisani and Yoskowitz, “‘Por Necesidad.’” 19. Ibid. 20. Romero, Maid in the U.S.A., 43. 21. Ibid. See also Elizabeth Kuznesof, “A History of Domestic Service in Spanish America, 1492–1890,” in Muchachas No More: Household Workers in

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355

Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 17–36. 22. This, according to Shellie Cohen, is a common contradiction inherent in the employer-employee relationship. At issue is the lack of respect and trust afforded domestic workers; Cohen, “Just a Little Respect: West Indian Domestic Workers in New York City,” in Chaney and García Castro, Muchachas No More, 171–194. 23. Ibid. 24. Pisani and Yoskowitz, “‘Por Necesidad’”; Mónica Gogna, “Domestic Workers in Buenos Aires,” in Chaney and García Castro, Muchachas No More, 83–104. 25. Pisani and Yoskowitz, “‘Por Necesidad.’” Regarding duties frequently assigned to maids, see Glenn, Issei, War Bride. 26. Many maids must even indefi nitely suspend their roles as wives and mothers because those are inconvenient to their employers; Glenn, Issei, War Bride; Kuznesof, “History of Domestic Service in Spanish America.” 27. Glenn, Issei, War Bride; Romero, Maid in the U.S.A. 28. Pisani and Yoskowitz, “‘Por Necesidad.’” Concerning wages, see also Sherrie Kossoudji and Susan I. Ranney, “The Labor Market Experience of Female Migrants: The Case of Temporary Mexican Migration to the United States,” International Migration Review, 18 (1984): 1120–1143; HondagneuSotelo, Gendered Transitions. 29. Pisani, “Utilizing Informal Household-Work Substitutes.” 30. Mary Goldsmith, “Politics and Progress of Domestic Workers’ Organizations in Mexico,” in Chaney and García Castro, Muchachas No More, 221–243; Glenn, Issei, War Bride. 31. Terri L. Messman-Moore and Patricia J. Long, “The Role of Childhood Sexual Abuse Sequelae in the Sexual Revictimization of Women: An Empirical Review and Theoretical Reformulation,” Clinical Psychology Review 23, no. 4 (2003): 537–571. 32. See, for example, David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 33. Mendoza, “Crossing Borders.” 34. Floyd Merrel, The Mexicans: A Sense of Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003); Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (New York: Vintage Books, 1984); Eva Kras, Management in Two Cultures: Bridging the Gap between U.S. and Mexican Managers, rev. ed. (Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural, 1995); Ned Crouch, Mexicans and Americans: Cracking the Cultural Code (Yarmouth, UK: Nicholas Brealey, 2004). 35. Samuel Stouffer et al., The American Soldier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949). 36. Robin M. Williams Jr., Reduction of Intergroup Tensions: A Survey of Research on Problems of Ethnic, Racial, and Religious Groups Relations (New York: Social Research Council, 1947); Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, 25thanniversary ed. (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1979). 37. Marilynn B. Brewer and Norman Miller, “Beyond the Contact Hypoth-

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Notes to Pages 129–137

esis: Theoretical Perspectives on Desegregation,” in Groups in Contact: The Psychology of Desegregation, ed. Norman Miller and Marilynn B. Brewer, 281–302 (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984). 38. Donald Chu and David Griffey, “The Contact Theory of Racial Integration: The Case of Sport,” Sociology of Sport Journal 2, no. 4 (1985): 323–333. 39. Boaz Yakin, director, Remember the Titans, Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 2000. 40. For good discussions of the contact hypothesis and research related to it, see Thomas F. Pettigrew and Linda R. Tropp, When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact (New York: Psychology Press, 2011); Von Bakanic, Prejudice: Attitudes about Race, Class, and Gender (New York: Pearson, 2008). 41. Pisani and Yoskowitz, “‘Por Necesidad’”; Romero, Maid in the U.S.A. 42. Cohen discusses some of these inherent contradictions in the role of domestic servants living in the employer’s home; “Just a Little Respect.” 43. In the Laredo survey, 71.8 percent of live-in maids were single; Pisani and Yoskowitz, “‘Por Necesidad,’” 74. 44. Judith Rollins sees immigrant women as particularly vulnerable to such exploitation, which she calls “occupational ghettoization”; Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985). 45. This term was employed by Robert W. Fuller, Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society, 2003); he uses it to include racism, while we apply it only to bigotry and bias related to social class. 46. “From 2010 to 2014, the number of employers charged with worksite immigration violations hovered near 200 per year. In 2015, ICE was on track to charge fewer than 70 employers. The amount of fi nes collected from offending employers also has dropped sharply. In each year from 2011 to 2014, ICE collected more than $8 million in fi nes from offending employers. In 2015, ICE was on track to collect less than $5 million in fi nes”: Jessica Vaughan, ICE Records Reveal Steep Drop in Worksite Enforcement since 2013 (Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies, June 2015), http://cis.org/ICE-Records -Reveal-Steep-Drop-Worksite-Enforcement-Since-13. 47. Mariano Castillo, “Texas Immigration Bill Has a Big Exception,” CNN .com, March 2, 2011, http://www.cnn.com/. 48. The Domestic Workers Convention of 2011 of the International Labor Organization (ILO) outlines the basic rights of domestic workers; ILO, “C189—Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189),” Labour Standards (Geneva: ILO, 2011), http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEX PUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C189. Many of the domestic worker laws passed in US state legislatures under the framework of a domestic worker bill of rights mirrored one another and the ILO Domestic Workers Convention. In essence, these bills of rights for domestic workers sought to guarantee basic rights and protections including minimum wages and overtime pay, work hours, work breaks and time off, food and lodging allowances, privacy, job evaluation, and termination notice. A major advocate in the United States for domestic workers’ rights is the National Domestic Workers Alliance. See the

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2014 “Act Establishing the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights” from Massachusetts for one example of enacted legislation, at https://malegislature.gov/Laws /SessionLaws/Acts/2014/Chapter148. While adding a domestic workers bill of rights similar to the ILO’s Domestic Workers Convention to protect maids is unlikely in Texas, comprehensive immigration reform would reduce much of their vulnerability. 49. See Mendoza, “Crossing Borders.”

Chapter 4: Social Inequality on the Mexican Side of the Border 1. No data are available for the same year for both countries; income inequality data come from the World Bank Gini index, http://data.worldbank .org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI, accessed February 12, 2016. 2. Pew Research Center, The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground: No Longer the Majority and Falling Behind Financially (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, December 2015), http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2015/12/2015 -12-09_middle-class_FINAL-report.pdf. 3. Gerardo Esquivel Hernandez, “Extreme Inequality in Mexico: Concentration of Economic and Political Power,” working paper, Even It Up/Oxfam México, Mexico City, 2015, 7, http://cambialasreglas.org/images/inequality.pdf. The Mexican data cited in this paragraph come from this source. 4. By comparison, the top 1 percent of the United States in 2013 controlled 36.7 percent of the total wealth; Drew DeSilver, “The Many Ways to Measure Economic Inequality,” Fact Tank: News in the Numbers, September 22, 2015, Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/09/22 /the-many-ways-to-measure-economic-inequality/. 5. Christopher Woody, “One Jarring Stat Reveals Just How Vast Mexico’s Wealth Gap Has Become,” Business Insider, August 7, 2015, http://www.business insider.com/carlos-slim-and-mexicos-wealth-gap-2015-8. 6. Patrick Oster, The Mexicans: A Personal Portrait of a People (New York: William Morrow, 1989); see in particular chapter 2, “The Junior,” about often snobbish wealthy Mexican kids. 7. Will Grant, “Restaurant Tantrum Exposes Mexican Class Divide,” BBC News Magazine, May 6, 2013, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22354245. 8. Tim Johnson, “In Mexico, ‘Juniors’ and ‘Ladies’ Find Scorn in Social Networks,” McClatchyDC, May 10, 2013, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news /nation-world/world/article24749053.html. 9. Alfredo Corchado, “The Fresa Effect: Why Some of Mexico’s Elite are Starting Over in Dallas,” FD, July 27, 2014, http://fdmag.com/2014/07/fresa -effect.html/. 10. See Van V. Miller, ed., NAFTA and the Maquiladora Program: Rules, Routines, and Institutional Legitimacy (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2007). Other countries also participate in the maquiladora and export manufacturing sector; most prominent are companies from Japan, Germany, Canada, South Korea, France, and the Netherlands. 11. Because of NAFTA and Mexico’s full integration into the global econ-

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omy, the Mexican business cycle is now synchronized with the US economy; Pablo Mejía-Reyes and Jeanett Campos-Chávez, “Are the Mexican States and the United States Business Cycles Synchronized? Evidence from the Manufacturing Production,” Economía Mexicana 10, no. 1 (2011): 79–112. 12. John Sargent and Linda Matthews, “What Happens when Relative Costs Increase in Export Processing Zones? Technology, Regional Production Networks, and Mexico’s Maquiladoras,” World Development 32, no. 12 (2004): 2015–2030; John Sargent and Linda Matthews, “China versus Mexico in the Global EPZ Industry: Maquiladoras, FDI Quality, and Plant Mortality,” World Development 37, no. 6 (2009): 1069–1082. 13. On workers queuing for maquila jobs, see Rafael Otero and José A. Pagán, “Unions and Job Queuing in Mexico’s Maquiladoras,” Eastern Economic Journal 28, no. 3 (2002): 393–407. See also Alana Semuels, “Upheaval in the Factories of Juarez,” The Atlantic, January 21, 2006, http://www.theatlantic.com/. 14. Mexico, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI), Estadística integral del programa de la Industria Manufacturera, Maquiladora y de Servicios de Exportación (IMMEX) (Aguascalientes, Mexico: INEGI, May 2015), http://www3.inegi.org.mx/rnm/index.php/catalog/154. 15. See Alisa Priddle and Brent Snavely, “Why Mexico is Winning the Auto Jobs War,” Detroit Free Press, June 14, 2015. 16. Sargent and Matthews, “China versus Mexico in the Global EPZ Industry”; Jim Gerber and Jorge Carillo, “The Future of the Maquiladora: Between Industrial Upgrading and Competitive Decline,” in NAFTA and the Maquiladora Program: Rules, Routines, and Institutional Legitimacy, ed. Van V. Miller, 43– 60 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2007). 17. Christina Rogers, “Ford to More than Double Mexico Production Capacity in 2018,” Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2016. 18. At this time in Mexico’s economic development, nonmaquiladora foreign investment was restricted along the coast and along the border to no more than 49 percent. For an exploration of Mexico’s economic history, see Oscar J. Martínez, Mexico’s Uneven Development: The Geographical and Historical Context of Inequality (New York: Routledge, 2016). 19. Cynthia J. Brown and Wendy V. Cunningham, “Gender in Mexico’s Maquiladora Industry,” Working Paper no. 2002-8, Center for Border Economic Studies, University of Texas–Pan American, Edinburg, 2002, https:// portal.utpa.edu/portal/page/portal/utpa_main/daa_home/ogs_home/arc _home/cbest_home/imagesfiles/Gender%20in%20Mexico%92s.pdf. 20. Janice S. Miller, Peter W. Hom, and Luis R. Gomez-Mejia, “The High Cost of Low Wages: Does Maquiladora Compensation Reduce Turnover?,” Journal of International Business Studies 32 (September 2001): 585–595; Kurt Loess, Van V. Miller, and David Yoskowitz, “Offshore Employment Practices: An Empirical Analysis of Routines, Wages, and Labour Turnover,” International Labour Review 147, nos. 2–3 (2008): 249–273; Vic Kolenc, “Juarez Factories Face Worker Shortage,” El Paso Times, October 9, 2015, http://www.elpaso times.com/. 21. Eric J. Romero and Kevin W. Cruthirds, “Understanding Employee Turnover Patterns in Mexican Maquiladoras,” Journal of Centrum Cathedra 2,

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no. 1 (2009): 63–72, http://centrum.pucp.edu.pe/adjunto/upload/publicacion /archivo/understandingemployeeturnoverpatterns.pdf. 22. Edward J. Williams and John T. Passé-Smith, The Unionization of the Maquiladora Industry: The Tamaulipan Case in National Context (San Diego, CA: Institute for Regional Studies at San Diego State University, 1992). Semuels reports on the difficult process of creating an independent union in Mexican maquilas in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; “Upheaval in the Factories of Juarez.” 23. Cirila Quintero Ramirez, “Fighting for Independent Unions in the Maquilas,” NACLA: Report on the Americas 47, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 60–63, https:// nacla.org/news/2014/4/24/fighting-independent-unions-maquilas. 24. Agapito González Cavazos was the longtime union boss in Matamoros who served the labor cause for nearly seventy years until his death in 2001. 25. John Sargent and Linda Matthews, “Exploitation or Choice? Exploring the Relative Attractiveness of Employment in the Maquiladoras,” Journal of Business Ethics 18, no. 2 (1999): 213–227. 26. Many American companies voluntarily maintain worker safety protections similar to those in their US plants, though they tend to pay low wages along with maquilas from other nations. 27. Melissa del Bosque, “‘We are Disposable,’” Texas Observer, December 5, 2013, http://www.texasobserver.org/disposable/. 28. These experiences are not uncommon for Asian-origin firms; Thomas P. Rohlen, “‘Spiritual Education’ in a Japanese Bank,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973): 1542–1562. 29. See Eline Gordts, “11 Numbers to Help You Understand the Violence Rocking Mexico,” Huffington Post, October 31, 2014, http://www.huffi ngton post.com/; Kimberly Heinle, Cory Molzahn, and David A. Stink, Drug Violence in Mexico: Data and Analysis through 2014, special report (San Diego: Project Justice, University of San Diego, April 2015), https://justiceinmexico.org/wp -content/uploads/2015/04/2015-Drug-Violence-in-Mexico-Report.pdf. 30. Edward Fox, “Why Children Are Low-Risk Labor for Latin America’s Drug Gangs,” InSightCrime, May 15, 2012, http://www.insightcrime .org/news-analysis/why-children-are-low-risk-labor-for-latin-americas-drug -gangs; Robert Beckhusen, “How Mexico’s Drug Cartels Recruit Child Soldiers as Young as 11,” Wired, March 28, 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/03 /mexico-child-soldiers/. 31. In fiscal year 2013–2014, the US Border Patrol apprehended 68,541 children without parents. Nearly all of the children were from Central America, and 73 percent of them were apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley; Isacson and Meyer, On the Front Lines; Daniel González and Bob Ortega, “Surge Continues but Not as Many Central America Migrants Reaching the U.S.,” Arizona Republic, April 22, 2015, http://www.azcentral.com/; Ian Gordon, “70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year: What Will Happen to Them?” Mother Jones, July–August 2014, http://www.motherjones.com/. 32. Nathaniel P. Flannery, “As Mexico Tightens Its Southern Border, Central American Migrants Find New Routes North,” Fusion, April 23, 2015, http://fusion.net/story/124671/as-mexico-tightens-its-southern-border-central -american-migrants-fi nd-new-routes-north/.

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33. For an excellent discussion of the rationale for the recent surge in child migration from Central America, see Elizabeth Kennedy, No Childhood Here: Why Central American Children Are Fleeing Their Homes (Washington, DC: American Immigration Council, 2014), http://www.immigrationpolicy.org /sites/default/fi les/docs/no_childhood_here_why_central_american_children _are_fleeing_their_homes_fi nal.pdf. 34. Caitlan Dickson, “How Mexico’s Cartels are Behind the Border Kids Crisis,” Daily Beast, July 9, 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/. 35. Catherine Panter-Brick, “Street Children, Human Rights, and Public Health: A Critique and Future Directions,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (October 2002): 148. 36. Norma E. Negrete Aguayo and Juan F. Viveros García, Informe de monitoreo de país sobre la explotación sexual comercial de niñas, niños y adolescentes: México (Coyoacán, Mexico: ECPAT México and ECPAT International, 2014, http:// ecpatmexico.org.mx/pdf/publicaciones-editoriales/INFORME%20DE%20 MONITOREO%20DE%20PAIS%20ESCNNA%20MEXICO.pdf. 37. See Humberto de la Garza Almazan, Alejandro Hernandez Ramos, and Miriam I. Bocanegra Garcia, Informe final del la evaluación de consistencia y resultados de los programas financiados con el Fondo de Aportaciones Múltiples (FAM Asistencia Social) (Ciudad Victoria, Mexico: DIF Tamaulipas, 2014), http://trans parencia.tamaulipas.gob.mx/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/DIF-INFORME -ANUAL-DE-EVALUACION.-RECURSO-FAM-2014.pdf. 38. Gerardo Albarrán de Alba reports that 62 percent of Mexico City street children claim to have been detained by police officials, with 35 percent of those reporting physical or verbal abuse at the hands of police; “En el Distrito Federal la infancia no es prioridad: Se multiplican la producción de niños que viven, crecen y mueren en las calles,” Proceso, June 17, 1996, 16–23. 39. Omar Millan, “Mexico Children Used as ‘Mules’ by Drug Gangs,” Huffington Post, March 14, 2012, http://www.huffi ngtonpost.com/. 40. We believe overwhelmed Mexican social service and charitable responses simply don’t do enough to help Mexican street children or address the underlying problems of poverty and the breakdown of some families. And some formal and informal institutions like the police and the drug cartels exacerbate the problems street children face. Unfortunately, we do not anticipate the problems faced by street children to be ameliorated any time soon.

Conclusion to Part I 1. Authors’ calculations, World Bank, “World Development Indicators,” data.worldbank.org, accessed February 28, 2016. 2. In 2015, ICE was on track to charge fewer than seventy employers for the year. In each year from 2011 to 2014, ICE collected no more than $8 million in fi nes from offending employers. In 2015, this declined to around only $5 million in fi nes; Vaughan, ICE Records Reveal Steep Drop in Worksite Enforcement. 3. Richardson and Pisani, Informal and Underground Economy. 4. John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1952).

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5. Richardson and Pisani, Informal and Underground Economy. 6. Joe R. Feagin, The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013). 7. Howard Newby, “In the Field: Reflections on the Study of Suffolk Farm Workers,” in Doing Sociological Research, ed. Colin Bell and Howard Newby (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977), 108–129. 8. Feagin, White Racial Frame. 9. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 10. Raúl Delgado Wise and James M. Cypher, “The Strategic Role of Mexican Labor under NAFTA: Critical Perspectives on Current Economic Integration,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610 (March 2007): 119–142. 11. There are many laws that prohibit discrimination. Noteworthy are the Second, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution; Fair Employment Act of 1941; Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1968, and 1991; Voting Rights Act of 1965; and Fair Pay Act of 2009. 12. Joe R. Feagin and Clairece Booher Feagin also present a typology of discrimination that distinguishes intentional from unintentional harm. Their four types are Type A, isolated discrimination; Type B, small-group discrimination; Type C, direct institutionalized discrimination; and Type D, indirect institutionalized discrimination; Racial and Ethnic Relations, 20–21. 13. Oscar Martínez describes a similar situation in other border cities, though he states that empirical evidence of pressure to enter such relationships is unavailable; Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 327.

Chapter 5: The Pain of Gain 1. Oscar J. Martínez, Troublesome Border, rev. ed. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); Jerry Thompson, Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007); Paul Ganster and David E. Lorey, The U.S.-Mexican Border Today: Conflict and Cooperation in Historical Perspective, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). 2. See also Guadalupe San Miguel Jr., “Let All of Them Take Heed”: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910–1981 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987). 3. Some of these in-depth interviews contained accounts related to both interethnic relations and dropping out of school. 4. Christla S. Brown, The Educational, Psychological, and Social Impact of Discrimination on the Immigrant Child (Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2015), http://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/educational-psychologi cal-and-social-impact-discrimination-immigrant-child. 5. Questions for the survey were developed from patterns identified in earlier Borderlife research. 6. According to Rodolfo Acuña, Anglos believed in the supremacy of the

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English language and culture. His basic argument is simple: Spanish-speaking people who lived in the United States had the burden of learning English, and teachers had no duty to learn Spanish; Occupied America (New York: HarperCollins, 1988). 7. See San Miguel, “Let All of Them Take Heed.” 8. Douglas E. Foley makes this the central theme of his ethnographic study of a small South Texas town, showing that the schools there perpetuated inequality by teaching “a materialistic culture that is intensely competitive, individualistic, and unegalitarian”; Learning Capitalist Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), xv. The social confl ict waged in the schools against Mexican Americans in the twentieth century is also the theme of Guadalupe San Miguel’s “Let Them All Take Heed.” 9. Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (Denton: University of North Texas, 2013), 23. 10. Jennifer Nájera in her 2015 study of farming community La Feria in South Texas argues that “the Mexican problem was that Anglo-run farms, which had quickly become the backbone of a new economy, were dependent upon Mexican labor to sustain them; however, Anglo settlers did not want Mexican people to have a social or cultural impact on their communities. In other words, Anglos needed Mexicans to be present for the labor that they could provide but did want their presence in society as a whole,” including the schools; The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 37. 11. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 230; San Miguel, “Let All of Them Take Heed.” 12. Edcouch and Elsa are neighboring small towns fifteen miles east of Edinburg, Texas. The 1968 student walkout is well documented in B. James Barrera, “The 1968 Edcouch-Elsa High School Walkout: Chicano Activism in a South Texas Community,” Aztlán 29, no. 2 (2004): 93–122; and Miguel A. Guajardo and Francisco J. Guajardo, “The Impact of Brown on the Brown of South Texas: A Micropolitical Perspective on the Education of Mexican Americans in a South Texas Community,” American Educational Research Journal 41, no. 3 (2004): 501–526. 13. An outgrowth of the Edcouch-Elsa High School walkout was the creation of the first Chicano university in the United States. Colegio Jacinto Treviño in Mercedes in 1970 was established to train Mexican-origin teachers to instruct in high-density Latino schools. Colegio Jacinto Treviño worked with Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, to deliver nontraditional studies in education and offered master of arts degrees in teaching and education and a bachelor of arts degree in interdisciplinary studies. From 1970 through 1976, the largest cohort was forty students, with a mission “to develop a Chicano with conscience and skills, [to give] the barrios a global view, [and] to provide positive answers to racism, exploitation, and oppression”; quoted in Aurelio M. Montemayor, “Colegio Jacinto Trevino,” Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, June 2010), https://tshaonline.org /handbook/online/articles/kbc51. The Texas Board of Higher Education denied certification in 1976, effectively closing Colegio Jacinto Treviño. Daniel

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García Ordaz reports on the school in “Once upon a Chicano College: Hispanics United to Create the First School of its Kind in the U.S.,” Valley Morning Star (Harlingen, TX), October 4, 2005. 14. Linda Chavez, Out of the Barrio (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 29. 15. For a more complete review of the distinct historical periods during this time span, we refer you to the 1999 edition of Richardson, Batos, 126–131. 16. Dianne C. Betts and Daniel J. Slottje, Crisis on the Rio Grande (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), table 1.1; US Census Bureau, decennial population data, 1950–2010. 17. The yearbooks were from McAllen, Mission, Pharr–San Juan–Alamo (PSJA), Edinburg, Donna, Weslaco, Harlingen, Lyford, Raymondville, and Port Isabel High Schools for the years 1950–1990. For various years since 1990, the high schools were Mission, PJSA, McAllen, Edinburg, Harlingen, McAllen Memorial, Weslaco, Edinburg North, and Mercedes. 18. Region 1 includes the four counties of the Valley plus Jim Hogg, Zapata, and Webb Counties. The student population has a higher Hispanic percentage than the overall Valley population because the higher birth rate among Hispanics yields more Hispanics in the school-age population. 19. Brown, Educational, Psychological, and Social Impact. 20. Ibid. Brown also reports on teacher-initiated discrimination. 21. See David Montejano’s work for an excellent and personal discussion of the Chicano movement, especially Sancho’s Journal: Exploring the Political Edge with the Brown Berets (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), and Quixote’s Soldiers: A History of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1981 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012). 22. Montejano, Quixote’s Soldiers. 23. The lack of encouragement for undocumented Latino students in the educational pipeline is described in Marisol Clark-Ibañez, Undocumented Latino Youth: Navigating Their Worlds (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2015). 24. Terris Ross et al., Higher Education: Gaps in Access and Persistence Study: A Statistical Report (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, August 2012), 50, 51, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012046.pdf. 25. Texas Education Agency (TEA), Region One Education ESC Demographic Profile, Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS) Fall Collection, 2014–2015 (Austin: TEA, April 2015), http://www.esc1.net/cms/. 26. Ibid. Recently, the designation “LEP” has been changed to “ELL” (English language learners). Either acronym refers to “students whose primary language is other than English and whose English language skills are such that the student has difficulty performing ordinary classwork in English”; “Frequently Asked Questions Regarding ELL Programs,” Texas English Language Learners Portal, TEA, 2012, http://www.elltx.org/docs/FAQs.pdf. 27. “Digest of Educational Statistics, 2014 Tables and Figures,” US Department of Education, March 2015, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14 /tables/dt14_204.20.asp. 28. Ibid. 29. Jie Zong and Jeanne Batalova fi nd that South Texas counties have very high levels of limited English-proficient residents; “The Limited English Pro-

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ficient Population in the United States,” Migration Information Source, July 8, 2015, n.p., Migration Policy Institute, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article /limited-english-proficient-population-united-states. 30. US Department of Justice (DoJ) and US Department of Education (ED), Ensuring English Learner Students Can Participate Meaningfully and Equally in Educational Programs (Washington, DC: ED, 2015), http://www2.ed.gov/about /offices/list/ocr/docs/dcl-factsheet-el-students-201501.pdf. 31. Shepherd, Linn, and Brown note that LEP (Limited English Proficiency) students have been traditionally overrepresented in special education programs in South Texas; Terry L. Shepherd, Diana Linn, and Randel D. Brown, “The Disproportionate Representation of English Language Learners for Special Education Services along the Border,” Journal of Social and Ecological Boundaries 1, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 104–116, http://www.tamiu.edu/coas /jseb/11files/ELL.pdf. 32. For a discussion of metrics other than standardized testing, see Brown, Educational, Psychological, and Social Impact. 33. Nate Blakeslee, “Crash Test,” Texas Monthly, May 2013, 9. 34. Ibid. 35. Walt Haney, “The Myth of the Texas Miracle in Education,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 8, no. 14 (2000): n.p., http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article /view/432/828. 36. In 2000, Texas began field testing the State Developed Alternate Assessment (SDAA) to assess the students, but it wasn’t until 2006 that the results of their scores were reported as part of the current school academic excellence indicator (AEI) reports; “Statewide Assessments,” Texas Project FIRST, n.d., http://www.texasprojectfirst.org/StatewideAssessments.html. 37. Stephanie A. Bohon, Monica Kilpatrick Johnson, and Bridget K. Gorman, “College Aspirations and Expectations among Latino Adolescents in the United States,” Social Problems 53, no. 2 (2006): 207–225. 38. Pew Hispanic Center and Kaiser Family Foundation, National Survey of Latinos: Education (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, January 2004), http://www.pewhispanic.org/files/reports/25.pdf. 39. Chad Richardson, Karen M. Watt, and Dejun Su, “Understanding the Perception of College Readiness in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas,” University of Texas–Pan American, Edinburg, 2010, in authors’ possession. 40. Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA), College Bound and Determined (San Antonio, TX: IDRA, 2014), http://www.idra.org/College _Bound_and_Determined/; Steve Taylor, “King Highlights PSJA’s Successes at Las Colonias Conference,” Rio Grande Guardian, August 4, 2015, http://riogrande guardian.com/king-highlights-psjas-successes-at-las-colonias-conference/. 41. For more information about the Llano Grande Center, see the center’s website, http://llanogrande.org. 42. Giselle Lundy-Ponce, “Migrant Students: What We Need to Know to Help Them Succeed,” Adolescent Literacy, 2010, http://www.adlit.org/article /36286/ 43. As mandated by the Texas legislature in 2005, Texas school districts used the National Center for Education Statistics defi nition of a dropout as “a

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student who is enrolled in public school in Grades 7–12, does not return to public school the following fall, is not expelled, and does not: graduate, receive a GED certificate, continue school outside the public school system, begin college, or die”; Texas Education Agency (TEA), Secondary School Completion and Dropouts in Texas Public Schools 2013–2014 (Austin: TEA, 2015), 18–19. Earlier dropout defi nitions were less restrictive. 44. Abelardo Villarreal and Anita Tijerina Revilla, “Creative Educational Opportunities for Migrant Students,” IDRA Newsletter, February 1998, 1, http://www.idra.org/IDRA_Newsletter/February_1998_Migrant_Education /Creative_Educational_Opportunities_for_Migrant_Students/. 45. In 2015, even with the Affordable Care Act, Texas was the only state where more than one in five adults lacked health insurance; David Lauter, “Two Years into Obamacare, Only One State Has More than 20% Uninsured,” Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/. 46. A recent study using thousands of observations found that school officials who evaluated teachers tended to give the best marks to teachers whose students already were performing well, while those teachers working with academically struggling students were penalized. Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, called the effect “a huge bias”; Stephen Sawchuck, “Research Detects Bias in Classroom Observations,” Education Week, May 21, 2014, http://www.edweek.org/.

Chapter 6: From Mexicanos to Mexican Americans to Americans? 1. This process of assimilation, or of transforming the identity of foreign immigrants to Americans, is often called the “three-generation process” in the popular press and scholarly discourse because it is thought to usually take that long to assimilate. Still, it has been observed that in many instances the third generation, the grandchildren of immigrants, recognize that they have lost something and begin to seek in some ways to reestablish elements of their ethnic identities; S. Dale McLemore, Racial and Ethnic Relations in America, 4th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1994), 5. 2. David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 3. Jingxue (Jessica) Yuan et al., “Mexican Cross-Border Shoppers’ Motivations to the USA,” International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research 7, no. 4 (2013): 394–410. 4. Steve Nivin, The Spending Patterns and Economic Impacts of Mexican Nationals in a Twenty-County Region of South and Central Texas (San Antonio, TX: SABÉR Research Institute and San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, St. Mary’s University, April 2013). 5. Ibid. Monterrey is second only to Mexico City for the largest number of “super-rich” individuals, those who possess elevated sums of wealth far beyond a million dollars. The millionaire-plus class in Mexico in 2012 controlled wealth of $730 billion, 43 percent of the individual wealth in Mexico. Indeed, while the

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worldwide number of wealthy individuals declined slightly, by 0.3 percent from 2007 to 2012, the number of Mexican millionaires increased by 31 percent over this period; New Mexico State University, “Mexico’s Rich Flourish,” Frontera NorteSur, June 30, 2013, http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/mexicos-rich-flourish/. 6. Robbie Whelan, “Affluent Mexicans Flee to Texas,” Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2012, http://www.wsj.com/. 7. Alejandra M. Leal Martínez, “For the Enjoyment of All: Cosmopolitan Aspirations, Urban Encounters and Class Boundaries in Mexico City” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011). 8. The nation of 119.5 million people in 2015 included 25.6 million who considered themselves indigenous and 1.4 million of African descent; INEGI, Encuesta intercensal: Panorama sociodemográfi co de México, 2015 (Aguascalientes: INEGI, 2015), http://internet.contenidos.inegi.org.mx/contenidos/productos //prod_serv/contenidos/espanol/bvinegi/productos/nueva_estruc/7028250780 65.pdf. According to a 2010 government survey on discrimination cited in a 2013 news article, only 13 percent of Mexicans considered themselves “lightskinned” or “blond,” while 64.6 percent said they were “dark.” The rest described themselves as anywhere from “cinnamon,” “swarthy,” “chocolate,” “brown,” “yellow,” and “a little tanned” to “black”; Tim Johnson, “For DarkSkinned Mexicans, Taint of Discrimination Lingers,” McClatchyDC, August 22, 2013, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24754798 .html#storylink=cpy. 9. “White People in Mexico,” Metapedia, http://en.metapedia.org/wiki /White_people_in_Mexico, last modified April 22, 2015. 10. Simon Schwartzman, “Étnia, condiciones de vida y discrminación,” Simon’s Site (blog), 2007, http://www.schwartzman.org.br/simon/coesion_etnia .pdf. Cohesión Social (ECosoiAL, Encuesta de Cohesión Social en América Latina) is a 2007 survey by Cieplan (Corporación de Estudios para Latinoamérica) in Santiago, Chile, and the Instituto Fernando Henrique Cardoso in São Paulo, Brazil. The survey formed the basis for the analysis by Schwartzman. A general overview of the survey is found in Eduardo Valenzuela, “Encuesta latinoamericana de Cohesión Social: Informe de principales resultados,” September 2007, https://ia800707.us.archive.org/5/items/EncuestaLatinoamericanaDe CohesionSocial/2007ecosocial_geral.pdf. 11. Mario Arriagada Cuadriello, “Quién no es quién,” Nexos, August 1, 2013, http://www.nexos.com.mx/?p=15432. 12. T. Johnson, “For Dark-Skinned Mexicans, Taint of Discrimination Lingers.” 13. The term “cultural capital” has come to have different meanings in sociology and economics. Sociologists often follow Pierre Bourdieu when he argues that parents from all social classes endow their children with somewhat unique cultural elements. He emphasizes that the elite make their culture into a form of capital, however, by controlling the defi nition of their culture as “superior” and then by restricting access to it (through elite schools, for example); Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction.” In economics, the term “cultural capital” refers to any culturally acquired competencies

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that can be leveraged to obtain economic benefits, no matter how these competencies are valued or restricted. 14. See Gilda L. Ochoa, Becoming Neighbors in a Mexican American Community: Power, Conflict, and Solidarity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). 15. For further discussion, see Chad Richardson and Rosalva Resendiz, On the Edge of the Law: Culture, Labor, and Deviance on the South Texas Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). 16. This group was found to consist of Mexican Americans who had assimilated or were trying to assimilate into Anglo society and of Anglos who didn’t want to be labeled as anything except “American.” Both groups were clearly very conservative in their opinions and rejected traditional Mexican culture. 17. Nevertheless, Mexicans and Mexican Americans who rated undocumented immigration in generally neutral terms did not let their tolerance carry over to other forms of cross-border deviance such as smuggling and drug use. 18. These results were later reported in Pew Hispanic Center, Hispanics: A People in Motion (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, January 2005). 19. See Tomás R. Jiménez and David Fitzgerald, “Mexican Assimilation: A Temporal and Spatial Orientation,” Du Bois Review 4, no. 2 (2007): 337–354; Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009). 20. Huntington, Who Are We?, 253. 21. Ibid.; Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations Revisited,” New Perspectives Quarterly 24, no. 1 (2007): 53–59. 22. Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster (New York: Random House, 1995). For an excellent critique, see Kevin R. Johnson, “Fear of an ‘Alien Nation’: Race, Immigration, and Immigrants,” Stanford Law and Policy Review 7, no. 2 (1996): 111–118. More on Brimelow’s background is available at “Peter Brimelow,” Extremist Files, Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi vidual/peter-brimelow. 23. Huntington, Who Are We?, 227. 24. Ibid., 253. 25. In a 2015 article on Mexican American assimilation, the sociologist Van C. Tran summarizes the reaction: “The conventional view, rooted in much careful research has been that Huntington got it wrong. Very wrong. In the aftermath of the book’s publication, Huntington’s argument came under serious attack by scholars of immigration, who noted that much of the empirical evidence pointed to clear intergenerational progress among Latinos, despite the many barriers that they face”; Tran, “Revisiting the American Dream,” Pathways: A Magazine on Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policy, Spring 2015, 19, http:// web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/pdf/pathways/spring_2015/Pathways _Spring_2015_Tran.pdf. Also see Frank D. Bean, Susan K. Brown, and James D. Bachmeier, Parents without Borders: The Progress and Pitfalls of Mexican American Integration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2015). 26. The sociologist Tomás R. Jiménez in Replenished Ethnicity (2010), his study of Garden City, Kansas, and Santa Maria, California, sought to uncover

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differential rates of Mexican assimilation in a long-term Mexican-origin community (Garden City) that received a wave of immigration vis-à-vis a Mexicanorigin community receiving constant immigrant newcomers (Santa Maria). Jiménez found Mexican-origin populations well integrated and assimilated into American society over time, though the assimilation process differed somewhat in the newcomer and replenishing communities. Jiménez also notes, “If the immigrant group occupies a low status in the host context—as is the case with the largely poor, laboring, and unauthorized Mexican-immigrant population— then those who are members of the ethnic groups being replenished may experience status degradation. If, on the other hand, the status of the immigrant population is high—as with some highly skilled Asian-origin groups—then the status of the previously arrived members of that ethnic group rises through their affiliation with the high-status immigrants” (22); Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 27. See, for example, Jim Gilchrist, “The Reconquista Movement: Mexico’s Plan for the American Southwest,” Human Events, July 27, 2006, http:// humanevents.com/2006/07/27/the-emreconquistaem-movement-mexicos -plan-for-the-american-southwest; William Sullivan, “Banning the American Flag and Reconquista,” American Thinker, March 1, 2014, http://www.american thinker.com/articles/2014/03/banning_the_american_flag_and_emreconquis taem.html. 28. The National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States, has been blamed for supporting this notion even though it has stated on its website that it “has never supported and does not endorse the notion of a Reconquista (the right of Mexico to reclaim land in the southwestern United States) or Aztlán”; “Myth vs. Reality,” NCLR, http://publications.nclr.org/bitstream /handle/123456789/565/NCLR_MythvReality.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y, accessed March 5, 2016. 29. See Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shyrock, eds., Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000); Rubén Rumbaut, Douglas S. Massey, and Frank D. Bean, “Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention in Southern California,” Population and Development Review 32, no. 3 (2006): 447–460; S. Dale McLemore and Harriet D. Romo, Racial and Ethnic Relations in America, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2004). 30. See John R. Logan and Hyoung-jin Shin, “Assimilation by the Third Generation? Marital Choices of White Ethnics at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century,” Social Science Research 41, no. 5 (2012): 1116–1125; Richard Alba et al., “Only English by the Third Generation? Loss and Preservation of the Mother Tongue among the Grandchildren of Contemporary Immigrants,” Demography 39, no. 3 (2002): 467–484. 31. Israel Cuéllar, for example, established Generation 1 as a person born in Mexico but living in the United States, Generation 2 as an individual born in the United States with at least one parent born in Mexico, Generation 3 as

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a respondent born in the United States with both parents born in the United States but all grandparents born in Mexico, Generation 4 as a respondent born in the United States with both parents and at least one grandparent born in the United States, and Generation 5 as respondent born in the United States with both parents and all grandparents also born in the United States; Cuéllar, “Acculturation as a Moderator of Personality and Psychological Assessment,” in Handbook of Cross-Cultural and Multicultural Personality Assessment, ed. Richard H. Dana (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000), 113–130. For varied views of generations, see also Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait, 4th ed., rev. and updated, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014; Bean, Brown, and Bachmeier, Parents without Borders. 32. Though we could add a half point for each great-grandparent born in the United States, few respondents were able to state the countries where their great-grandparents were born. 33. Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters, The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002). 34. Each student participating in our study was instructed to interview at least four respondents—a person born in Mexico who had lived at least five years in the United States, a Mexican American born and raised in South Texas but with at least one parent born and raised in Mexico, a Mexican American with US-born parents but at least one grandparent born and raised in Mexico, and a Mexican American whose parents and grandparents were all born in the United States. As previously indicated, this resulted in a total survey sample of 433 respondents. 35. Richard D. Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 36. Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America. 37. Douglas S. Massey, “The Real Hispanic Challenge,” Pathways: A Magazine on Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policy, Spring 2015, 4, https://web.stanford .edu/group/scspi/_media/pdf/pathways/spring_2015/Pathways_Spring_2015 .pdf. 38. Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 39. Ibid. Gordon contends that the different types of assimilation may occur simultaneously, though at different rates. Although he proposes that acculturation generally occurs most quickly, he contends that once structural assimilation takes place, then other types of assimilation will follow. Though both cultural and structural assimilation are important, the current literature focuses far more on the former than on the latter. Some scholars subscribe to the idea that cultural assimilation will lead to structural assimilation; see, for example, Chavez, Out of the Barrio; Lawrence E. Harrison, Who Prospers? How Cultural Values Shape Economic and Political Success (New York: Macmillan, 1992). 40. These relationships are all significant at the .01 level. 41. Telles and Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion. A more recent survey of gen-

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erational attainment by Frank Bean and associates shows the debilitating and long-term effects of the lack of legal status on education and income for Latinos in Los Angeles; Bean, Brown, and Bachmeier, Parents without Borders. 42. Our scale was derived from Cuéllar, “Acculturation as a Moderator of Personality and Psychological Assessment.” 43. S. Dale McLemore, Harriet D. Romo, and Susan Gonzalez Baker, Racial and Ethnic Relations in America (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001), 3–5. 44. Cuéllar, “Acculturation as a Moderator of Personality and Psychological Assessment.” 45. Even one of the most comprehensive measures of acculturation, by Susan Keefe and Amado Padilla, inquired about only a few cultural practices, and these were mostly related to food preparation; Keefe and Padilla, Chicano Ethnicity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987). 46. We have presented these full results in the conclusion to Richardson and Resendiz, On the Edge of the Law. 47. The significance level was at or below the .01 level for these thirty-three cultural practices and mean generation score. The ten items that were not statistically significant (and thus not likely to be lost in two or three generations) at this level were: (1) men greeting each other with an abrazo (hug); (2) women greeting each other with a kiss on the cheek; (3) getting together with relatives on Sundays; (4) men and women visiting separately at parties; (5) making and sharing tamales at Christmastime; (6) getting godparents for children being baptized; (7) not eating meat on Fridays; (8) touching children to avoid ojo; (9) using traditional herbal remedies from a hierbería; and (10) grandparents disciplining children even when the parents are present. 48. Irene F. Abril, “Mexican-American Folk Beliefs: How They Affect Health Care,” American Journal of Maternal Child Nursing 2, no. 3 (1977): 168–173. 49. For a more detailed discussion of which forms of music are retained and which are largely lost after the second or third generation, see Richardson and Resendiz, On the Edge of the Law, 273, 282–284. 50. Fraga et al., Latino National Survey. See also Pew Research Center, Second- Generation Americans: A Portrait of the Adult Children of Immigrants (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, February 7, 2013), http://www.pew socialtrends.org/fi les/2013/02/FINAL_immigrant_generations_report_2-7-13 .pdf. 51. Pew Research Center, Second-Generation Americans, 10. 52. Fraga et al., Latino National Survey. 53. Pew Research Center, Second-Generation Americans, 49. 54. Ibid., 18.

Chapter 7: “Ahí Viene el Bolillo!” 1. One of the adjustments many Anglos go through is to get used to being called an “Anglo,” which essentially means a non-Hispanic white person. In our survey of Anglo newcomers, the majority (61 percent) of those who had lived in

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South Texas for five years or less preferred the term “white” over “Anglo” for their ethnic group. The majority (60 percent) of those with six years or more preferred the term “Anglo.” This change in ethnic group classification preference was statistically significant (p = .003). 2. Other groups included Asian American and international faculty; “Faculty Information: TAC Section 51.9745,” Texas A&M International University (TAMIU), Laredo, February 2015, https://www.tamiu.edu/adminis/oire/docu ments/TAMIU_SEC519745.pdf. 3. Other groups included Asian American, African American, and international faculty; “Stats at a Glance: Fall 2013,” Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness, University of Texas–Pan American, Edinburg, 2013, https:// portal.utpa.edu/portal/page/portal/utpa_main/pres_home/oire_home/files _data_and_reports/minifactbook2013.pdf. 4. Gloria Sánchez et al., Theresa Nevarez, Werner Schink, and David E. Hays-Bautista, “Latino Physicians in the United States, 1980–2010: A ThirtyYear Overview from the Censuses,” Academic Medicine 90, no. 7 (2015): 906–912. 5. In 2014, SpaceX (owned by Elon Musk, the billionaire of PayPal and Tesla fame) broke ground for a rocket-launching facility at Boca Chica beach near Brownsville. This launch site was expected to bring in many highly trained outsiders with expertise in space exploration. As of September 2016, SpaceX construction at Boca Chica continues to move forward and was set to be completed by the end of 2017, with potential rocket launches in 2018; Juan D. De La Garza, “Work on SpaceX’s Boca Chica Launch Site Continues,” Spaceflight Insider, September 4, 2016, http://www.spacefl ightinsider.com/organizations/space -exploration-technologies/work-spacexs-boca-chica-launch-site-continues/. 6. Data culled from the 2013–14 Texas Academic Performance Report indicate these ethnic distributions for K–12 students and teachers for the following independent school districts in South Texas: Brownsville, 98.7 percent Hispanic student body, 11.1 percent Anglo teaching staff; Donna, 99.6 percent Hispanic student body, 5.7 percent Anglo teaching staff; Edinburg, 98.1  percent Hispanic student body, 6.9 percent Anglo teaching staff; Idea Public Schools (Hidalgo County), 95.0 percent Hispanic student body, 16.8 percent Anglo teaching staff; Los Fresnos (Cameron County), 96.3 percent Hispanic student body, 18.6 percent Anglo teaching staff; McAllen, 91.9 percent Hispanic student body, 18.7 percent Anglo teaching staff; Mercedes, 98.6 percent Hispanic student body, 6.0 percent Anglo teaching staff; Mission, 98.8 percent Hispanic student body, 9.5 percent Anglo teaching staff; Pharr-San Juan-Alamo, 98.9 percent Hispanic student body, 5.5 percent Anglo teaching staff; Raymondville, 98.2 percent Hispanic student body, 16.7 percent Anglo teaching staff; San Benito, 99.0 percent Hispanic student body, 11.1 percent Anglo teaching staff; and United (Laredo), 98.5 percent Hispanic student body, 3.9  percent Anglo teaching staff; Texas Education Agency (TEA), 2013–14 Texas Academic Performance Report (Austin: TEA, 2014), https://rptsvr1.tea.texas.gov/perfreport //tapr/2014/srch.html?srch=D. 7. We have been unable to fi nd any more recent studies related to discrimination against Anglos in South Texas.

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8. A few accounts from the fi rst edition of Batos are also included. 9. Arthur’s comment “I thought we were in the United States” illustrates his culturally biased frame. 10. Oftentimes, children in South Texas arrive at kindergarten and elementary school with limited English abilities. For many families, the transmittal of Spanish occurs at the family level and the acquisition of English occurs in the schools. In her quest to become a better teacher, Hudson learned Spanish to reduce the sink-or-swim atmosphere to one of mutual care and consideration. Mrs. Hudson’s initial perception of employability is related to cultural bias. 11. We do know from our yearbook study, however, that Anglos have long been overrepresented in many high school activities including cheerleading. 12. In Nuevo León, another Mexican state that borders South Texas, 19.6 percent of maquiladora managers in 2006 were not of Hispanic origin. The data for this analysis were purchased from Solunet Info-Mex, a subsidiary of the Canadian company Owen Media Partners (http://www.owen-media.com /solunet.html), which compiles an annual listing of all maquiladoras operating in Mexico. 13. The high-water mark for the number of winter Texans was the winter of 2009–2010, when 144,000 winter Texans made their winter homes spending more than $800 million in the local economies in South Texas; Steve Taylor, “Report: Big Drop in Number of Winter Texans Visiting Rio Grande Valley,” Rio Grande Guardian, August 1, 2014, https://riograndeguardian.com/report -big-drop-in-number-of-winter-texans-visiting-rio-grande-valley/. 14. Penny M. Simpson, “Winter Texan 2013–2014 Report” (Edinburg, TX: Business and Tourism Research Center, College of Business Administration, University of Texas–Pan American, July 2014), https://portal.utpa.edu /ut pa_ main /daa_ home/coba_ new_ home/coba_facult y/facult y_centers /tourism/viewer. 15. Pew Hispanic Center and Kaiser Family Foundation, 2002 National Survey of Latinos (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, December 2002), chart 25, p. 31, http://www.pewhispanic.org/files/reports/15.4.pdf. 16. Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 3 (2011): 215–218. 17. Ibid. Norton and Sommers did not use historical data in their study; rather, they asked people in 2011 to indicate to what extent blacks and whites were the targets of discrimination in each decade from the 1950s to the 2000s. 18. See Tim Wise, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2009).

Chapter 8: Race and Ethnicity in South Texas 1. Lynette Clemetson, “Hispanics Now Largest Minority, Census Shows,” New York Times, January 22, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/22/us /hispanics-now-largest-minority-census-shows.html (accessed April 19, 2016). 2. See Mark H. Lopez, Jeffrey Passel, and Molly Rohal, Modern Immigration

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Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change through 2065: Views of Immigration’s Impact on U.S. Society Mixed (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, September 28, 2015), 4, 9, http://www.pewhispanic.org /files/2015/09/2015-09-28_modern-immigration-wave_REPORT.pdf. 3. Keith McNamara and Jeanne Batalova, “Filipino Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Information Source, July 21, 2015, n.p., Migration Policy Institute, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/filipino-immigrants -united-states#Income%20and%20Poverty. 4. In Texas generally, there is a shortage of nurses. This shortage is even more acute along the Texas-Mexico border. Although there were more Hispanic/Latino registered nurses working in border counties (57.0 percent) in 2012 compared to nonborder counties (9.2 percent), the ethnic and racial distribution of nurses in border counties still did not match that of the general population. Hispanics/Latinos made up 88.3 percent of the Texas population in border counties, while only 57.0 percent of registered nurses on the border reported being Hispanic/Latino. This shortage in the border area is due to a lack of fi nancial support for nursing students and a lack of faculty to expand existing nursing programs; Allison Dubin et al., Nursing Workforce Disparities on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: Texas Center for Nursing Workforce Studies, Texas Department of State Health Services, 2012), http://www.dshs.texas.gov /chs/cnws/2012-Nursing-Workforce-Disparities-on-the-U-S—Mexico-Border .doc. 5. Anthony Ocampo, The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 11. 6. George Kitamura and Tonia Imai Kitamura, interview by Thomas Walls, May 14, 1979, San Benito, TX, Institute of Texan Cultures, Oral History Collection, University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Libraries, http://digital .utsa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15125coll4/id/650/rec/3. 7. Happy Kitayama and Kay Kitayama, interview by Thomas Walls, May 15, 1979, Donna, TX, Institute of Texan Cultures, Oral History Collection, UTSA Libraries, http://digital.utsa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection /p15125coll4/id/1046/rec/2. 8. Today Mexico, like the Valley, has a very small population of blacks. In 2015, the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI) began enumerating the black population in Mexico, recording 1.4 million people, 1.2  percent of Mexicans, as black; “Resultados defi nitivos de la Encuesta Intercensal 2015,” news release (Aguascalientes, Mexico: INEGI, December 8, 2015), http://www.inegi.org.mx/saladeprensa/boletines/2015/especiales/espe ciales2015_12_3.pdf. For more information about the underground railroad to Mexico, see Rosalie Schwartz, Across the Rio to Freedom: U.S. Negroes in Mexico, Southwestern Studies Monographs no. 44 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1975). 9. Menchaca, Recovering History, 112. 10. Ibid., 231. 11. Ibid. 12. “Jackson Ranch Church,” Local Collection Historical Events, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, UTRGV University Library, Edinburg, http://

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www.utrgv.edu/library/departments/special-collections/historical-events /index.htm, accessed February 5, 2016. 13. “African American History of the West Timeline,” BlackPast.org, http://www.Blackpast.org/timelines/african-american-history-american-west -timeline#sthash.SyvOz64Y.dpuf, accessed February 5, 2016. 14. See Emory S. Bogardus, “Social Distance and Its Origins,” Journal of Applied Sociology 9 (1925): 216–226; Vincent N. Parrillo and Christopher Donoghue, “Updating the Bogardus Social Distance Studies: A New National Survey,” Social Science Journal 42, no. 2 (2005): 257–271.

Conclusion to Part II 1. The term “framing” was promoted by Joe Feagin as a comprehensive theory of racial and ethnic oppression. It will form the basis of much of our discussion here; Feagin, Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 2006). 2. See Allport, Nature of Prejudice; Thomas F. Pettigrew et al., Dimensions of Ethnicity: Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1982). 3. According to the 2012 nationwide National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) and Latino Decisions study of stereotypes toward Latinos, 71 percent of respondents said they saw Latinos portrayed as criminals “very often” (36 percent) or “sometimes” (35 percent) in the media they watched; Matt A. Barreto, Sylvia Manzano, and Gary Segura, The Impact of Media Stereotypes on Opinions and Attitudes Towards Latinos (Pasadena, CA: NHMC, September 2012), http://www.nhmc.org/reports/impact-media-stereotypes-opinions -attitudes-towards-latinos/. 4. In the same survey, 51 percent of respondents said they agreed with this characterization. 5. The NHMC and Latino Decisions 2012 poll found that over 30 percent of non-Hispanics believed that more than half of Hispanics are undocumented. In reality, the estimate of undocumented Hispanics in the United States in 2012 was around 18 percent; Barreto, Manzano, and Segura, Impact of Media Stereotypes, 2. Indeed, only 37 percent of US Hispanics are immigrants (both documented and undocumented), according to the Pew Hispanic Center; Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “Overall Number of Unauthorized Immigrants Holds Steady since 2009,” Hispanic Trends, September 20, 2016, Pew Research Center, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2016/09/20 /overall-number-of-u-s-unauthorized-immigrants-holds-steady-since-2009/. 6. According to William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, between 1915 and 1918, vigilantes and law officers, including the Texas Rangers, executed without due process “unknown thousands of Mexicans for their alleged role in a plotted uprising known as the Plan de San Diego”; Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 252. Whites’ fears of Mexican revolutionary violence exploded in mob violence in July and August 1915. This violence was touched off after raiders from

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Mexico, in resistance to the dominance of Anglos in South Texas, committed a series of assaults on the economic infrastructure of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. For a recent summary see William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, “When Americans Lynched Mexicans,” opinion, New York Times, February 19, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/. 7. Ana Gonzalez Barrera and Mark H. Lopez, “Is Being Hispanic a Matter of Race, Ethnicity, or Both?” FactTank: News in the Numbers, June 15, 2105, Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/15/is-being -hispanic-a-matter-of-race-ethnicity-or-both/. 8. See, for example, Tina Vasquez, “I’ve Experienced a New Level of Racism since Donald Trump Went after Latinos,” The Guardian, September 9, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/. 9. Vilma Ortiz and Edward Telles, “Racial Identity and Racial Treatment of Mexican Americans,” Race and Social Problems 4, no. 1 (April 2012): 41–56, doi:10.1007/s12552-012-9064-8. 10. For a recent review, see Juan A. Paez, “Racial Discrimination in Latin America: The ‘Pigmentocracy’ Approach,” Dejusticia’s Global Rights Blog, December 9, 2014, https://dejusticiablog.com/2014/12/09/racial-discriminationin-latin-america-the-pigmentocracy-approach/. For a more historical study focused on race in Latin America, see Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964). 11. Pew Research Center, On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart, June 27, 2016, 59, Social and Demographic Trends, http:// www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/on-views-of-race-and-inequality-blacks -and-whites-are-worlds-apart/. Another 2016 Pew Research Center report has found that rates of discrimination among Hispanics increased for those between eighteen and twenty-nine years of age and for those born in the United States; Jens M. Krogstad and Gustavo López, “Roughly Half of Hispanics Have Experienced Discrimination,” Fact Tank: News in the Numbers, June 29, 2016, Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/29/roughly -half-of-hispanics-have-experienced-discrimination/. 12. Joe R. Feagin and José A. Cobas, Latinos Facing Racism: Discrimination, Resistance, and Endurance (New York: Routledge, 2014), 126. 13. Feagin, White Racial Frame. 14. Rakesh Kochar and D’Vera Cohn, Fighting Poverty in a Tough Economy, Americans Move in with Their Relatives (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, October 3, 2011), http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/10/03/fighting-pov erty-in-a-bad-economy-americans-move-in-with-relatives/. 15. Pew Research Center, Second-Generation Americans, 85. 16. An earlier researcher, Charles A. Valentine, noted victim-blaming tendencies in his Culture and Poverty: Critique and Counter-Proposals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 17. These traits or tendencies may also be seen in a positive manner, though probably not from the view of Teresa Young. 18. Feagin, Systemic Racism. 19. Feagin and Cobas, Latinos Facing Racism, 126.

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20. Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006). 21. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W.  W. Norton, 2005). 22. Feagin and Cobas, Latinos Facing Racism, 127. 23. Fraga et al., Latino National Survey. 24. Norton and Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game.” 25. “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” New York Times, August 30, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/. 26. Damon Mayrl and Aliya Saperstein, “When White People Report Racial Discrimination: The Role of Region, Religion, and Politics,” Social Science Research 42, no. 3 (2013): 742–754. 27. Portrayals of Mexican Americans as disloyal to the United States and unwilling to become Americans—and to even seek a “reconquest” of the American Southwest—have been fueled by scholars such as Samuel Huntington and Carl Horowitz; see Huntington’s Who Are We? and “Clash of Civilizations Revisited” and Horowitz’s “La Reconquista—Amnesty’s Elephant in the Living Room,” Social Contract 15, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 198–206. Similar sentiments, including Horowitz’s absurd assertion that Mexican Americans want to join with Mexicans in reconquering the Southwest, are expressed by scholars associated with the Heritage Foundation. 28. Todd K. Hartman, Benjamin J. Newman, and C. Scott Bell, “Decoding Prejudice toward Hispanics: Group Cues and Public Reactions to Threatening Immigrant Behavior,” Political Behavior 36, no. 1 (2014): 144. 29. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1959), 5, 7.

Epilogue 1. Richardson and Pisani, Informal and Underground Economy, especially chapter 3. 2. These three descriptions are based on real names and businesses, not pseudonyms. 3. Information for Delia’s Tamales is derived from a student-initiated case study presented to Professor John Sargent, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and from the Delia’s Tamales website, http://www.deliastamales.com. 4. Information for Blanca Cantú is derived from a student-initiated case study presented to Professor John Sargent, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and the following websites: Cantu’s Special Events, http://cantuspecial events.com, and Florería Cantú, http://www.floreriacantu.com/. 5. Information for Alberto Kreimerman is derived from a student-initiated case study presented to Professor John Sargent, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and the following websites: Hermes Music, http://www.hermes-music .com/en/index.php, and Fundación Hermes Music, http://www.fundacion

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hermesmusic.org/. Two news stories enhanced this story: James Osborne, “Musician Turned Businessman Sets Eyes on Charity Work,” The Monitor (McAllen, TX), May 23, 2008, http://www.themonitor.com/news/local/musician-turned -businessman-sets-eyes-on-charity-work/article_f b520847-0e83-53d0-ba79 -76d429b776d3.html; Roberto H. Gonzalez, “With Alberto, the Business of Music Has a Heart,” Texas Border Business, February 24, 2014, http://texas borderbusiness.com/alberto-business-music-heart/. 6. In R. Gonzalez, “With Alberto, the Business of Music Has a Heart.”

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures or tables. ACA (Affordable Care Act), 90, 343n5, 365n45 acculturation, x, 106, 244, 248– 258, 344n9, 368–369n31, 369n39, 370n45; cultural practices, as measure of, 22, 224, 239, 250–255, 335, 370n45, 370n47; defi ned, 244; measures of, 250–258; threegeneration process and, 223, 239 affirmative action, disproportionate benefits of, 320, 323, 324 African Americans (blacks), x; assimilation of Hispanic culture by, 300–305; and discrimination, 289, 298–300, 304; history of, in South Texas, 298–300; and Juneteenth, 299; minority status of, 293–294; population representation of, in South Texas, 19, 292–293, 295; relations of, with Hispanics, 42, 235, 236, 291, 292; as slaves escaping to Mexico, 298, 299; in South Texas, newcomers vs. old-timers, 300– 303. See also contact hypothesis agricultural work, dangers of, 54–56. See also migrant farmworkers Alinsky, Saul (Industrial Areas Foundation), 103 Anglo cultural frame, 260; nega-

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tive portrayal of Mexican culture within, 323 Anglos: befriending Hispanics, 58, 68, 195; bigotry among, 171, 194; defi ned, x, 370–371n1; differential treatment of rich and poor, 274– 282; discrimination by, 30, 45, 58, 95, 186, 194; discrimination of, 189–190, 267–274, 282–284; as employers, 123, 125–127, 131–133; as ethnic minority, x, 263–267, 288, 289; living in South Texas among, 259, 260; median household income of, in South Texas, 265; as newcomers, 260–263, 272, 273, 282–283, 283, 370–371n1; and perceived racial discrimination, 289; in poverty, 266; resentment of, among Mexicans, 6, 16, 362n10; settlement of, in South Texas, 6–12, 17; as South Texas natives, 282–284; in South Texas population, percentage of, xi, xiii, 19, 263, 264; as teachers in South Texas, percentage of, 371n6; stereotyping by Hispanics of, 273–277. See also Anglo students; winter Texans Anglo students: and discrimination avoidance, 280, 281; discrimina-

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400

Index

Anglo students (continued) tion against, due to low socioeconomic status, 278–281; lone, 277–282; and name calling, 190, 191, 279–281; preferential treatment of, based on socioeconomic status, 281, 282; treatment of, in junior high, 280; in South Texas, 185–187, 189–193, 197–199, 221, 222, 263, 270–274, 277–282 Arizmendi, David, xiv Arreola, Daniel D., 18 Asian Americans: assimilation of, 244, 246–247, 257, 258, 292, 314– 315, 367–368n26; discrimination against, 297; as faculty, 371n2, 371n3; population representation of, in South Texas, 19, 292–293; as possible minority group, 244, 293– 294; as students, 200. See also Filipino Americans; Japanese Americans in South Texas assimilation: discrimination as retarding factor in, 242, 243; factors affecting Hispanic assimilation, 223, 224, 256–258; Hispanic refusal of, claims of, 323; marital, 244; of Mexican-origin people in South Texas, 223–258; pace of, in South Texas, 238–258; push/pull plus hold/repel factors in, 240– 243; self-identification as American as factor in, 256–258; traditional health practices as measure of, 251–253; types of, 244, 369n39. See also acculturation; cultural assimilation; linguistic assimilation; structural assimilation Bain, Ken, xii–xiii bato, x Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados, 1999 edition: ix, x, xviii, 22, 29, 31, 75, 96, 105, 106, 156, 195, 208, 337– 342, 347n1, 353n5, 363n15, 372n8; title, x bigotry, 36, 60–64, 66, 98, 199, 201,

Richardson_6442-final.indb 400

204, 222, 307–308, 319, 323, 325, 356n45; class, 58, 63, 64, 100, 126, 311, 325; cultural, 312, 314–316, 318, 320–321, 324, 325; as discrimination type, 17, 324–326; emotional effects of, 228, 229; forms of, 17, 128, 130, 133, 171–175, 178; forms of, against Anglos in South Texas, 271, 272, 275–276; responses to, 328; results of, 194, 203; vs. structural bias, 175–180 bilingual education, 14, 188, 201, 203–206, 208, 217–218, 220–221. See also ESL (English as a second language) bilingualism, 16, 221, 236, 249, 255, 256, 258, 261, 262, 267–270, 273, 282–284, 289, 302; as structural bias, 179–180 bolillos, 259, 272, 277; defi ned, x border bandits, 9 border crossing, 111–116, 155, 354n11; illegal, 1, 324; for medical care, 4, 328; risk and dangers of, 32, 34, 111–112, 114; for shopping, 83; for work, 111–116 borderland(s), x, xv, xvi, 3, 18–19, 21, 23, 84, 149, 180, 224–225, 238, 255, 257, 327, 328, 353n9; spillover violence in, xi, 1, 343n3. See also border crossing; South Texas; Texas-Mexico border; US-Mexico borderlands Borderlife Archive, x–xii Borderlife Project, xi; accomplishments of, xii–xiv, xvii; and embedded student researchers, xvii, 94; impact on student interviewers/researchers of, xii, 166; purpose of, xv–xvi, 22; research methodology in, xii, 21, 361n5; research projects in, 22–23, 43, 74, 184, 224, 261, 333–335; and student interviewer experiences, ix, 4, 14–16, 32–33, 67, 107, 117, 138–139, 161, 202– 203, 296–297, 312–313; and students, xiv, xvii, 337–342

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Index 401

Border Patrol, US, 114, 116, 265, 286, 326; apprehension by, 113, 114, 359n31; and secondary checkpoints, 350n19, 353n9; threat of informants calling, 116, 118 boundaries, 124, 129, 130, 132–133, 134, 136, 138 Brewer, Jan (Arizona governor), 1 Brownsville, TX: Cortina in, 8; and Mexican-American War, 6; as part of LRGV, 18; population growth in, 147 Brownsville-Harlingen MSA, 2, 19, 21 Cantú, Blanca (Florería Cantú, Cantú’s Special Events), 328, 329– 330, 332, 376n4 Central America: migrant minors from, 114, 115, 157–158, 359n31, 360n33; undocumented immigration from, x, 18, 243; violence in, xi, 157–158 Chamberlain, Jenny, xiv Chicano (label), 345n25 Chicano era, 13–14, 187, 188, 192, 362–363n13 Chicano movement, 13–14, 196, 278, 363n21 Closner, John, 10 college preparation: importance to Hispanics of, 199, 209–211, 247; parental support for, 210 colonias: 73–104; advantages of, 74, 75, 79–84, 101–102; changes in, 76–78; and color coding scheme, 76–78, 349n7; community-based initiatives in, 103–104; and crime, 97–99; defi ned, xi, 3, 73–75; distortions created by, 74; drainage and wastewater disposal problems in, 74–76, 80, 85–88, 92, 99, 102– 104, 176; employment in, 79, 82, 83, 92–93, 94; enumeration difficulties for, 75–76; explanations for, 99–103; family and community stability in, 79, 81, 102; and flooding, 87–88, 176; growth of, xi, 75,

Richardson_6442-final.indb 401

76, 104, 349n6; health problems in, 82, 86, 87, 89–92, 95, 99, 104; history of, 78–79, 349n6; home ownership in, 73, 79, 82, 100, 102; homes in, informal construction process of, 22, 99; improved conditions in, 76–77, 80, 81, 103, 104; and informal consumption, 94– 95; informal economic activities as base for, 83, 92–93, 99, 100–101; life in, x; migrant farmworkers as base for, 73, 78, 79, 84, 92–93, 100, 102, 103; physical problems of, 84– 91, 99; policy recommendations for, 104; potable water problems in, 74–76, 79, 80, 85–87, 90, 99, 103, 104; poverty in, 80, 82, 85, 91, 94–95, 99, 104; and prevention/remediation by public officials, 80, 350n13; quality of life in, 76–78, 104; residents of, discrimination against, 95; residents of, immigration status, 83, 95, 99, 106; residents of, resourcefulness among, 93; residents of, solidarity among, 4, 83, 102, 327; as rural slums, 74, 82; as a South Texas border phenomenon, 74, 77, 82; trash collection and disposal problems in, 85– 87, 99, 104; uncertainty in, high degree of, 92; undocumented residents in, high rate of, 75, 83, 84, 95, 101; unemployment rates in, 83, 92, 95, 99; and unpaved roads, 59, 74–76, 79, 85, 87–89, 99, 103, 104 Consumer Informality Survey, 23, 74, 92, 137, 334 contact hypothesis: and treatment of maids, 128–130, 135, 137–138, 356n40; and treatment of winter Texans, 286–289 contract for deed, 78, 80, 100, 349, 350n9, 350n13 Corpus Christi, TX, 2 Cortina, Juan, 6–9, 17, 344n12, 344n13

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402 Index

countervailing power, 168–170; maquila industry as inapplicable to, 169, 170 coyotes (human smugglers), 35, 113– 114. See also smugglers, human; traffickers, human Cox, Juanita Valdez, xiv Cuéllar, Israel, 250, 368, 369n31, 370n42 cultural assimilation, 14, 183, 235, 236, 240, 242, 243, 248–258, 369n39; defi ned, 244 cultural bias, 3, 17, 58–64, 66–67, 126, 165, 169, 171–174, 177–179, 203, 235, 316, 321, 324, 325, 328, 372n10; Anglos’ experiences of, in South Texas, 269–273, 275; and class difference, 126, 174, 177; creation of, 173–174; defi ned, 59, 173– 174, 316; and ESL, 204; forms of, 171–175; learning of, 203; and migrant education, 212–220 cultural capital, 174, 178, 231, 366–367n13 cultural difference as deficit to mobility, 234, 235 Cultural Practices Survey, 14, 16, 23, 74, 224, 241–242, 244–245, 249– 252, 257, 282–283, 334, 345n24, 369n34 Cultural Values Survey, 247 culture as explanatory variable, 127–128 cumulative causation, 63–64 cycle of inequality, 63–66, 70, 99, 178, 180, 319, 325. See also stigma of inferiority deference to those of higher status, 146, 172–173, 186–187, 262 defi nition of the situation, 24, 25, 127, 262–263, 348n25; defi ned, 65; as self-fulfilling prophecy, 263; and variations in Anglos’ adjustment to South Texas, 261–263. See also power of the situation Delia’s Tamales, 328–329, 332, 376n3

Richardson_6442-final.indb 402

discrimination, 95–96, 167, 175, 186, 199, 220, 223, 237, 266, 289, 304, 319–326, 361n11; class-based, 10, 171–175, 311, 312; defi ned, 267, 309; ethnicity-based, ix, 6, 10, 375n11; and ethnocentrism, 312– 318; as impediment to assimilation, 242, 243; intentional vs. unintentional, 17, 177–178, 325; of migrant farmworkers, 30, 45, 65; misperceptions of, 288–289; and prejudice, 308–309; race-based, 6, 10, 263, 267–273, 275, 279, 281– 283, 308, 309–311, 366n8, 371n7, 372n17; student-initiated, 185, 189–195; teacher-initiated, 195– 197; typology of, 17, 361n12. See also assimilation; bigotry; cultural bias; exploitation; structural bias division of labor, 106, 130, 135; as structural explanation, 130, 135– 136, 138 dominant-class frame, 172–174, 178, 289 dropout rate (students), 22; change over time of, 208–212; and college preparation, 209–211; and declining migrant population, 211, 220; defi nition of, for Texas, 364– 365n43; among Hispanic children, 220, 221, 245, 247. See also education; South Texas schools drug cartels, 112; dangers of, 1; death toll from, 157; effects on Mexican border street children of, 157, 164, 360n40; kidnapping, trafficking, and extortion rackets among, 113– 116, 158, 227; as threat to wealthy Mexicans, 146, 227; wars and, xi, 156–157 Edcouch-Elsa school walkout, 187– 188, 362n12, 362n13 education, 96, 183–222, 289, 313, 319, 328; adult, 175; assimilation and, 186, 188, 248, 258; attainment in, 20, 99, 233; bad, 64; good, 70, 174,

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Index 403

231, 262, 283; high-stakes testing and, 206–208; Hispanic, trends in, 183, 192, 210, 220, 222; and income, 21, 70, 245, 246, 294, 296; level of, xii, 33, 52, 67, 71, 72, 110, 158, 304; low, 65, 141, 310; in Mexico, 247; school district funding and, 177; special, 205, 206, 208, 364n31. See also assimilation; bilingual education; Chicano era; dropout rate (students); migrant students; post-Chicano era; post– World War II era; segregation era education levels, 245–247; South Texas vs. Texas vs. US, 20–21 ELL (English language learner). See ESL (English as a second language) El Paso, TX: colonia population in, 76; color coding scheme and, 77; contract for deed and, 78; crime rate in, 2; per capita income in, 349n8 embedded researchers, xi, xvii, 94, 185; purposes of, 21, 22 employer sanctions, 33, 168, 360n2 employers of undocumented maids, 105, 116, 119, 138, 356n46; class and ethnicity of, as affecting treatment, 125–127; cultural and structural effects on treatment of employees by, 125–127, 128; good treatment of employees by, 123– 125; interviews with, 106–107; and the law, 136–137; live-in maids and, 114, 117, 118; live-out/day maids and, 118; poor treatment of employees by, 118–119, 120–123; ranking and treatment of employees by, 133–135; search for maids by, 117, 118; social distance and treatment of employees by, 129– 132; surveys regarding, 106, 107; and undocumented men, comparative treatment of, 137–138. See also boundaries; contact hypothesis employing undocumented work-

Richardson_6442-final.indb 403

ers, 137; illegality of, 107, 353n7, 356n46 English-only rule, 201–203, 232, 318. See also No-Spanish rule ESL (English as a second language), 184, 200–206, 208, 217, 229–230 ethnocentrism, 134, 178, 308, 309, 324, 328; defi ned, 308; discrimination, as basis for, 312–318. See also discrimination ethnogenesis, 255; defi ned, 248; as acculturation, 248; Tejano music as a form of, 255; Tex-Mex as, 236, 255; Thanksgiving celebrations as, 255 ethnography accounts, x, xi, xii, xvi, 22–23, 185, 190, 267, 337–342 exploitation, ix, x, 3, 9, 11–12, 17, 53, 74, 85, 109, 120–123, 133–134, 137, 138, 169–172, 175–180, 307, 310, 317, 321–322, 325, 328, 356n44, 362n13; case of, 307–308; defi ned, 169. See also employers of undocumented maids; structural bias farmwork: dangers and hardships of, 37–42, 54–58; leaving, reasons for, 69–72; pesticide exposure and, 54–56 farmworkers, ix, x; categories of, 31– 34; children of, 32, 34, 36, 42, 44, 45, 49, 50, 55, 60, 61–63, 67, 69– 71; earnings of, 40–41, 52, 58, 72; ethnic status of, 37; follow(ing) the crop (FTC), 31–32, 41; foreignborn, 70, 71; hourly wage levels for, 40–41; seasonal, 30, 32, 33, 49, 50, 51; settled vs. migrant, 31– 33, 34; as shuttler migrants, 32, 35, 36, 41; toilets for, 39, 40; undocumented, 30, 32–37, 42–43, 53, 59, 60, 71. See also discrimination; migrant farmworkers Feagin, Joe R., 172, 177, 311, 319–321, 323, 361n12, 374n1 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 50, 73–74, 83 Ferguson, James “Pa,” 310, 345n16

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404

Index

Filipino Americans, 292, 294, 296– 297, 309; cultural similarities to Hispanics of, 296, 297; and educational attainment, 294, 296; and nursing in South Texas, 296, 373n4 Flota, Chrystell, xv, 236–237 food stamps, 42, 73, 276, 348–349n1 Former Students Survey, 185, 186, 191 193–196, 199, 335 frontera, 19

internalizing negative stigmas, 60– 65, 71, 142, 180, 186, 218, 289

Galbraith, John Kenneth, 168 Gallup-Healthways annual report, 2, 327 generation score: and assimilation pace, 239–242, 245–246, 249–254, 256–258, 370n47; calculation of, 240; and other generational measures, 368–369n31; Gordon, Milton, 244, 369n39 güeros/as, 272 Gutierrez, David, 225

labor contractors (crew leaders), 33– 36, 41, 243 Laredo, TX, 30, 203, 221, 264, 296, 345–346n26, 353n8, 371n6; crime rate in, 2; history and demographic background of, 6, 18; maids survey, 23, 106–107, 112, 114, 117, 135, 333, 335, 356n43; MSA, 2, 19, 21 laser visa, 83, 351n20; misuse, 110– 112; as mica replacement, 112, 354n11 Latino National Survey (2006), 23, 224, 256, 257, 311, 322, 333, 335 Lee, Robert E., 8, 344nn13–15 legitimacy, 176–178, 180 LEP (limited English proficient). See education; ESL (English as a second language) lice, 187 linguistic assimilation, 249, 250, 257, 258 Llano Grande Center, 210–211, 221, 364n41 Lone Star Card, 73, 348–349n1 Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV): defi ned, xi, 345–346n26; population of, 349n6. See also Rio Grande Valley; South Texas LUPE (La Unión del Pueble Entero), 103 lynching, 9, 309–310

Harlingen, 10, 69, 363n17. See also Brownsville-Harlingen MSA Hawkins, John P., xiii–xiv Hermes Music, 331, 376–377n5. See also Kreimerman, Alberto Hispanics: self-identification as Americans by, 223, 224, 243, 247, 256–258, 367n16 “Hispanic” vs. “Latino,” usage of, 18 home remedies, 90, 370n47 human traffickers. See smugglers, human; traffickers, human Huntington, Samuel P., 16, 237, 238, 243, 256, 367n25, 376n27; testable hypothesis provided by, 238. See also assimilation hypothesis testing, 238, 240 Informal Consumption Survey. See Consumer Informality Survey informal economy, 5, 69–70, 83, 92, 93, 95, 99–101, 107, 168, 326, 328, 329, 344n8

Richardson_6442-final.indb 404

Japanese Americans in South Texas, 297 Juárez, Benito (Mexican president), 8 Juneteenth, 299, 300–301 King, Daniel P., xiv, 364n40 Kreimerman, Alberto, 328, 330–332, 376–377n5

“mañanitas, Las,” 251, 253–255 manzanilla tea, 251, 252

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Index 405

maquiladora industry, 147–155; advantages to Mexican government of, 147–149; Anglo managers in, 155, 169, 174, 175, 176, 178– 179, 259, 261, 262, 283, 284–285, 372n12; Asian maquiladoras, 154, 169, 359n28; associations, 169, 179; benefits, 153–154; defi ned, 147, 149; employee turnover in, 150; exploitation of workers in, 155, 169–170, 176–179; history of, 149; hourly wages in, 148–149; housing problems of workers in, 152; low wages and, 148–151, 153, 169, 175, 176, 359n26; sexual harassment in, 150, 179; size of, 147, 148; as source of employment, 150– 152; transportation problems for workers in, 153; and unions, 150– 152, 168, 169, 176, 178, 359n22, 359n24; working conditions in, 152–155 Matamoros, 2, 18, 147, 299, 359n24 Maverick County, 76–78, 345– 346n26, 349n8 Maximilian I, Emperor, 8, 234 McAllen, TX, 1, 2, 10, 18, 66, 95, 96, 143, 146, 155, 188, 189, 193, 194, 221, 228, 261, 262, 269, 284, 285, 286, 329, 330, 331, 363n17, 371n6; sector, x–xiv McAllen-Edinburg-Mission MSA: community well-being in, 2–3, 327; hourly wage level in, 21; low crime rate in, 2; population growth in, 19 Mexican-American War, 6, 8, 18, 344n11, 344n14, 344–345n15 Mexican culture, 14, 102–103, 125, 126, 174–175, 238, 296, 367n16; distortions of, by general American public, 312, 315–318, 322–323; loss of, 226, 236, 250–255, 261, 285, 303; and parental responsibility for young single adults, 313– 314; poverty in, cause of, 312–312; retaining/maintaining, 240–242,

Richardson_6442-final.indb 405

244, 250–255; and work ethic, 314. See also ethnogenesis Mexicans, 154, 236–237: children of wealthy ( fresas, papis, or los junior), 145–146, 228–229, 357n6; as crossborder shoppers, 227, 314; as employers, class bigotry among, 125– 127, 132, 138; food favored by, ridiculed by Anglo students, 171, 172, 183–184, 190–191; and Mexican Americans, 224–236; pejorative names for wealthy, 228; in South Texas, 227, 228; stereotypes of, 143–145, 224; wealthy, 126, 127, 132, 136, 138, 141, 143–147, 177, 227–228, 230, 262, 312; wealthy, treatment of Hispanic clerks and wait staff by, 227–228 Mexicans vs. Mexican Americans, 223–226; class divide among, 226– 230, cultural differences, 224– 236; and lifestyle choices, 234– 235; “Mexican American” vs. “Mexican-origin,” 18; national loyalty and ignorance of Mexican history among, 232–234, 236–237, 257; undocumented immigration, shared acceptance of among both, 235, 236. See also assimilation; Mexicans: nationals; pocho(s) Mexico: beggars in, 143, 155–156, 165; blacks in, 366n8, 373n8; health care in, 4–6, 82, 94, 95, 344nn8– 9; immigration from, x, 13, 18, 36–37, 54, 115–116, 217–219, 235– 236, 247, 299; land prices in, 82; lifestyle of, 145, 234, 236, 240– 242, 260; lifestyle of, aversion to, by South-Texas Hispanics, 16, 257; number of wealthy in, 144, 365–366n5; perceptions of culture and lifestyle differences between United States and, 223, 224, 233–235; police protection in, 115–116, 157; population and size, 168; poverty in, 94, 105, 108, 109, 118, 142, 237; sex role differ-

4/18/17 10:35 AM

406

Index

Mexico (continued) ences in, 233; social class in, marks of, 126, 127, 132, 145, 173–174, 226–230, 232; social inequality in, 136, 138, 145; social mobility in, 106; and US Civil War, 8; whites in, 230–231. See also assimilation; Cortina, Juan; drug cartels; education; farmworkers; generation score; informal economy; maquiladora industry; Mexican-American War; Mexican culture; Mexicans: wealthy; Mexicans vs. Mexican Americans; migrant farmworkers; “mojados(as)”; Nueces Strip; reconquista; street children, Mexican; undocumented maids migrant farmworkers, xi, xii, xiii, 29– 72, 84, 167, 171, 176, 184, 211, 214– 215, 311, 317, 323, 335; breaking the cycle of, 69–72; exploitation of, 53, 68, 69; and farm owners, 52–54; housing improvement recommendations and, 347n12; housing types and conditions for, 34, 43, 44, 47–51, 52, 58, 63, 64, 65, 72, 171; national origins of, 71; population decline among, 32, 44; pesticide dangers and, 55–56; poverty cycle of, 44, 61, 66, 71; poverty rates among, 57–58; and townspeople, 58–59, 167; treatment of, 43–72; welfare abuse by, suspicions of, 56–58, 61; work-related problems of, 51–58; undocumented, 30–37. See also discrimination; migrant school programs migrant school programs, 212–217, 220. See also colonias; cultural bias; discrimination; dropout rate (students); farmworkers migrant students, 43–45, 211–220; cultural bias against, 218–220; structural bias against, 216–218; school efforts toward, 214–216 Milgram, Stanley, 24, 25, 346n35, 346n36

Richardson_6442-final.indb 406

minority group, 16–17, 59, 174, 244, 266, 288, 293, 294; defi nition, 264, 265 “mojados(as),” 59, 95, 185, 200–201, 221, 224, 229, 307, 311, 312 Montejano, David, 183, 345n22 Monterrey, Mexico, 223, 226, 227, 279, 365–366n5; wealthy shoppers from, 146, 165, 227 Multiethnic Culture Survey, 317, 334 “naco/a(s),” 141, 147, 172–173, 177, 179, 228, 232, 279, 312 NAFTA (North American Fair Trade Agreement), 79, 147, 149, 169–170, 357n10, 357–358n11 Nannygate scandals, 107, 353n7 National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), 23, 31, 34, 37, 39–40, 41, 48, 54, 57, 71, 333, 335, 346n34 No-Spanish rule, 13, 201–203, 221, 232. See also English-only rule Nueces Strip, xi, 2, 6; as historical and cultural region, 17–21; history of, 6–9; map of, 7. See also South Texas Nuevo Laredo (Mexico), 18 ojo, mal de (evil eye), 251–253, 370n47 Ortiz, Vilma, 247–248, 310 Palmenez, Noel, xv paternalism, 67, 131, 172, 178, 188 “pelados,” x Perceptions of Deviance Survey, 97, 224, 235, 334 Perry, Rick (Texas governor), 1 pocho(s), 16; defi ned, x, 125–126; Spanish, 146, 179, 231–233 police, 47, 49, 311; Mexican, 113–116, 157, 158, 161–165, 168, 360n38, 360n40; in South Texas, 1, 3, 92, 98, 128, 133, 177, 311, 326. See also Mexico: police protection in; sheriffs Polk, James (US president), 6 post-Chicano era, 12, 14, 345n20

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Index 407

post–World War II era, 12, 13 poverty, ix, 3, 20, 44, 61, 66, 71, 80, 82, 85, 91, 94–95, 99, 104, 110, 142, 143, 147, 167, 168, 176, 214, 228, 237, 275–277, 311, 312, 314, 315, 328, 348n23, 360n40; empathy of poor, 344n7; line, xiii, 57–58, 168, 171, 266, 275, 288, 294, 295 power of the situation, 24–26, 127, 129, 262 prejudice, 66, 95, 128, 129, 171, 176, 178, 234, 271, 283, 284, 297, 298, 304, 308–310, 323; defi ned, 308–310 prescription drugs, 4–5, 82, 344n8 Profeco incident, 146. See also Mexicans: wealthy Proyecto Azteca, 103–104, 352n50 PSJA (Pharr–San Juan–Alamo): high school, 192, 299, 363n17; school district, College3 program, 210, 221 purposive sampling, 107, 185, 352n43 push-pull vs. hold-repel model, 110– 111, 114, 240–242, 353 racial framing, 198, 308, 317, 318. See also white racial frame racism, 63, 134, 171, 176–177, 230–231, 238, 297, 304, 308, 315–318, 319– 328; backstage setting of, 173, 311, 323; vs. cultural bigotry, 319–326; delegitimization of, 176, 186, 318; frontstage setting for, 173, 311, 323; against Mexican-origin people, 3, 9, 11–12, 17, 45, 230–231, 307, 308; among Mexicans, 230–231, 366n8; in Mexico and Latin America, 230– 231, 310, 375n10; against South Texas Hispanics, 310, 311. See also bigotry; discrimination; exploitation; structural bias ranking, as structural explanation for racism, 130, 133–135 rankism, 134, 177–178, 356n45 reconquista, 16, 237, 238, 368n28, 376n27

Richardson_6442-final.indb 407

Region 1, Texas Education Agency, 203, 220–221, 363n18 reverse discrimination, 323–324 Reynosa (Mexico), 1, 18, 91, 93, 113, 114, 132, 135, 147, 148, 152–155, 161, 165, 241, 261, 325, 329–331 Richardson, Chad, xii–xiv, 4, 21, 22 Rio Grande Valley, xi, 16, 18, 19, 30, 32, 44, 76, 79, 86, 90, 97, 116, 256, 257, 260, 277, 291, 298, 311, 322, 328, 330, 331, 345–346n26, 353– 354n10, 359n31; schools, 189–199. See also Valley, the Sargent, John, xv, 376nn3–4, 376– 377n5 segregation era, 12, 45, 186–187, 190, 192, 221, 278, 299, 300, 319, 362n10 self-image (self-concept), 96, 141–142 sheriffs, 10, 98, 177, 352n44 smugglers, human, 36, 115; contrasted with human traffickers, 115–116 snowball sampling, 21, 107. See also purposive sample social capital, 4, 116, 117, 231, 327, 354n16 social class, x, xvi, 125–127, 132, 134, 142–143, 192, 225–226, 308, 309, 311–312, 356n45, 366–367n13; as fi xed, 142; between Mexicans and Mexican Americans, 226–237; in Mexico, 144–147, 167–180; on the South Texas border, 167–180. See also discrimination; employers of undocumented maids; Mexico social distance, 129–132, 226; among racial and ethnic categories, 303–305 social inequality, 16–17; in United States vs. Mexico, 141–166 social science, xii, xv, 23, 24 sociological imagination, 326 sociological perspective, 23-26, 124– 125, 214–137; and Anglo adaptations to South Texas, 262, 263

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408

Index

South Texas: assimilation in borderlands of, 242, 244, 250, 255, 257; borderlands, x, xi, xiii–xiv, xv, 3, 14–16, 18, 22, 25, 26, 118, 224, 238, 296, 326; demography of, 191–192, 237; demographic changes in, xi, 191–192, 199; foreign-born residents of, 20, 294, 296; entrepreneurship of residents, 327–332; Hispanics in, patriotism of, 16, 287; history of, 6–16, 180, 345n17; hourly wage levels in, 21; misrepresentations of borderlands of, 1, 2; population characteristics of borderlands of, 20–21; profile, 17–21; map of, 7; racial/ethnic confl ict in, history of, 6–16; resilience of residents of, ix, 6, 327– 332; twentieth-century period in, 363n15. See also South Texas schools South Texas College, xvii, 210, 221 South Texas schools: assimilation as preferred by Hispanic parents of students in, 188; discrimination by Hispanic teachers in, 195– 196; ethnic relations in, history of, 185–188; exclusion of Hispanics in student leadership in, 194–195; exclusion/integration of students in, 185–222; interethnic dating in, resistance to, 192–193; name-calling at, 191, 279–281; representation of Hispanic students in, 188, 189; segregation in, 186–187, 192–193; student-initiated discrimination in, 189–195. See also bilingual education; discrimination; dropout rate (students); education; ESL (English as a second language); migrant school programs; Region 1, Texas Education Agency; tracking students Starr County, TX, 20, 76–78, 81, 82, 87, 203, 275, 292; as part of South Texas, 345–346n26; poverty in, 349n8 stereotypes, 22, 141, 172–174, 180,

Richardson_6442-final.indb 408

265, 308–309, 311–312, 316–319, 374n3, 374n5; of Anglos, 273– 275, 289; of blacks in South Texas, 291; of colonia residents, 95, 97; fact checking and, 317; of Hispanics (based on survey results), 314, 375n17; of Latinos by Mexicans, 138; of maids, 136; of Mexicans, 141, 143, 224, 236, 284, 322–323; of Mexican street children, 165; of migrant farmworkers, 42, 49, 59, 61, 63, 67; of RGV residents, xiii. See also discrimination stigma of inferiority, 59–68, 177, 178, 180, 311–312, 316; and colonia residents, 95–97, 99; regarding Hispanics, 16, 194, 229, 232; regarding Latino students, 187, 191, 194, 202–204; regarding migrant workers, 60–68, 212, 218; regarding poor Anglos in South Texas, 277; regarding the poor in Mexico, 142, 143, 173, 229; realization of, 65– 66. See also bigotry; cultural bias; cycle of inequality street children, Mexican, 143, 155, 166, 167, 177, 360n40; and American tourists, 164–165; changes since 1999 among, 156–157; and domestic violence, 160–161; and drug and alcohol addiction, 166; and drug cartels, 156, 157, 164; home-based, 158–160; and Mexico’s DIF, 162, 360n37; and police, 162–164, 360n38; school difficulties among, 159, 160; street-based, 160–163; types of, 158–163; as victims of the sex trade, 161–162; and wealthy Mexicans, 165, 166 structural assimilation, 13, 14, 239, 244–248, 258, 369n39; by education and income level, 245–247; of Hispanics vs. Asian Americans, 245–247; in primary vs. secondary relationships, 244, 245 structural bias, 3, 16–17, 175–180, 328; in colonias, 90–91, 92, 94, 98, 100, 101; defi ned, 17, 175, 178;

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as harm to Mexican-origin students, 204–206, 213; inequality and, 320, 321; and maquila workers, 170, 176, 178, 179; and migrant farmworkers, 50–53, 63–64; and migrant students, 214, 216– 218, 220; need to migrate as, 108– 111; and powerlessness, 175–177, 180; and school funding, 177; slavery and ongoing effects of, 176, 319; vs. systemic racism, 319–321; and upper classes, 179–180. See also bigotry; cultural bias; exploitation; systemic racism structure as explanatory variable, 127–128 Su, Dejun, et al., 23, 335, 344n9 Survey of Anglo Newcomers, 260, 261, 266, 273, 281, 283, 334, 370–371n1 Survey of Migrant Farmworkers, 214–215, 334 systemic racism, 177, 178, 319–321, 325, 374n1; vs. structural bias, 320; and unequal housing opportunities, 319–321. See also Feagin, Joe R.; racism tamales, 45, 69, 83, 94, 101, 328–329, 376n3; as cultural practice, 251, 254, 255, 370n47 tandas, 101 Telles, Edward, 247–248, 310 testing, 281, 364n32, 364n36; failure of, 206–208; high-stakes, 206– 208; history of, in Texas, 206–207; impact of, on minority students in Texas, 208; iterations of, in Texas, 206–207. See also education Texas A&M University programs, 221 Texas-Mexico border, 19, 73–75, 82, 259, 373n4. See also borderland(s); South Texas Texas Rangers (law enforcement), 8, 9, 17, 309–310, 345n16, 374n6 Texas Water Development Board, 75 tracking students: by high school

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counselors, 198, 199; by highstakes testing, 206–208; and Hispanic students, 198–200. See also education; South Texas schools traffickers, human, 115–116, 158 transnationalism, 250, 255; cultural and structural, 241, 242; as deterrent to assimilation, 240–242. See also assimilation undocumented immigrants, 143, 168, 363n23, 367n17, 374n5; in colonias, 75, 83, 95, 101; dangers of, 36, 111–113, 122; denial of citizenship for children of, 324; discrimination against, 309–312; employer abuse of, 170, 176, 307–308; and employer risk, 168; as farmworkers, 33–37, 42–43, 53, 59–60, 71; and immigration reform, 72, 104, 243, 325, 356–357n48; as maids, 105–139, 141, 167, 352n45, 353n7; mixed-status families and, 84, 243; passing for documented, 83; population size of, 354n12; reason given for migrating, 108–111; South Texas as entry point for, 10–11, 18; unaccompanied children as, 10– 11; and US immigration system, 10–11, 171, 235–236; vulnerability of, 124; welfare-abuse accusations and, 42, 57, 61, 96, 309, 312, 316, 322–324; as workers, xi, 22, 83, 168, 170–171, 173, 224, 325. See also border crossing; farmworkers; informal economy; undocumented maids undocumented maids, 105–139; abuse and exploitation among, 120–123; crossing the border, 105–106, 111– 116; earnings of, 105, 121–122; family-like treatment of, 123–124, 127, 128, 131, 133, 135, 137; and fi nding employment, 116–119; informal work performed by, 83; interviews, 21, 106–107; law or authority as supporting, 136–137; legal rights of, 128, 356–357n48;

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undocumented maids (continued) live-in, 114, 117, 118; live-in, hours of, 121; live-out/day maids, 118; migration patterns of, 107–108; networks utilized by, 116–117; outsider treatment received by, 120– 123, 129, 132; and pressure to work, 118, 121; reasons given for migrating, 108–111; repatriation desired by, 114–115, 121, 138; sexual abuse of, 116, 122; structural position of, 125, 128–130, 136; surveys regarding, 23, 106; and suspected stealing, 118–120, 136; treatment of, 119–136; and undocumented men, comparative treatment of, 137–138. See also contact hypothesis; employers of undocumented maids; Undocumented Maids Survey Undocumented Maids Survey, 106, 108, 114, 124, 125, 334 Undocumented Workers Survey, 137– 138, 334 uninsured population, 90, 343n5 University of Texas–Pan American (UTPA), xiii, 21, 29, 36, 45, 58, 68–69, 74, 95, 144, 155, 229, 264, 271, 274, 279, 291, 300, 303, 319, 337–342, 347n9. See also UTRGV (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) uninsured rate in Texas, 90, 343n5, 365n45 US-Mexico borderlands, x, xv, 18–19, 23, 74–76, 79, 116, 255, 296, 332, 353n9; hardening of, 112–113. See also borderland(s); South Texas; Texas-Mexico border Utilization of Health Care Survey, 5–6, 23, 333, 335, 344n9 UTRGV (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), xii, 21, 221, 347n9; archive, library, xvii, 21 Valley, the, 10, 37, 59, 223, 248, 284, 307, 345n16; Anglo adjustment in, 259–263, 267–269, 271–272, 282–

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283, 316–317; Asian Americans in, 296–297; assimilation in, 252; bigotry in, 275–280; blacks in, 291– 292, 298–305, 373n8; changes in, 263–265; colonias in, 349n6; defi ned, xi, 18; immigration in, 18– 19; informality in, 79; migrants in, 93, 113; migrant students in, 216, 218–219; schools in, 66–67, 69, 188, 213, 274, 281, 363n17; tensions between Mexicans and Latinos in, 227, 238, 241; uniqueness of, 18– 19; winter Texans in, 285, 288. See also South Texas: borderlands Valley Interfaith, 103 victim blaming, 315, 375n16 violent crime, FBI rankings, 1–2, 343n4 white racial frame: defi ned, 186; and assertion of greater racism against whites, 323, 324; and dominantclass and Anglo-cultural frames, 322–323; promoted by Joe R. Feagin, 172; as minimizing harm from cultural and class bigotry, 321; in South Texas, 172, 178, 187, 194, 260, 263. See also Feagin, Joe R.; racial framing; systemic racism whites: blancos (whites) in Mexico, 230; cultural superiority of, claim to, 318, 323–234; perceived discrimination against, 289, 323, 372n17; and perception of illegal immigration, 235–236, 324– 325. See also Anglos; bigotry; discrimination; racism; reverse discrimination winter Texans (retirees), 285–289; contributions to borderlands economy by, 285, 372n13; and interactions with locals, 285–286; perceived discrimination from locals among, 286–287; survey of, 23, 261, 285, 334; year-round, 288 yearbook study, 185, 188–189, 194– 195, 333, 335, 363n17, 372n11

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