Ricardo Romo's History of a Barrio: East Los Angeles examines the wave of Mexican immigration into the U.S. during the early part of the twentieth century. He covers the various factors affecting the development of Mexican American communities; more specifically, he examines the resourcefulness of Mexican Americans who attempted to sustain a culture within a culture in the face of economic, social, and political discrimination.
Los Angeles has always depended on Mexican labor, as Romo frequently points out. The Mexican immigrants were good enough as cheap sources of labor, even if they were natively inferior to Anglos, as the commonly accepted sentiment in the early 1900s would have it. The economic interests of north-of-the-border industrialists and land barons were bolstered by inexpensive Chicano labor, and the presence of immigrants was tolerated to the extent that they fulfilled an economic role in the community. As will be shown later, during the depression, when jobs for everyone all but disappeared completely, Chicanos were scapegoated and sent packing when their economic usefulness was no longer.
Schools for Mexicans (most of the immigrants did not bother to become naturalized, accepting their "inferior" status as immutable in the eyes of the Anglo) were literally that--Mexican schools, since segregation was practiced. Even the progressive reformers of "modern" American public education did not see the apparent contradiction between progressiveness and segregation. Mexicans had "special needs" which could only be administered to in a separate setting. As Romo explains, from these unlevel beginnings did the inequalities between Chicanos and Anglos continue to grow, until even today, the East L.A. barrio is an unequal world within a world, or, as Romo puts it, a "metropolis within a megalopolis" (p. 171). It is, however, a metropolis (2 million and growing) of substandard housing, violent gang crime, and politic...