History of a Barrio: East Los Angeles

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 segreg

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goating. When the economy in Los Angeles was booming, before the depression, the immigration authorities looked the other way with regard to illegals. The "nativist" point of view held that Mexicans were of inferior intelligence, prone to sloth, and concerned only with living for the moment. Even so, authorities saw them as essential to the transportation, ranching, farming, and construction industries. As Romo quotes one Imperial Valley developer as saying, "'I am a construction man, and if we have a job in the Imperial Valley, for instance, to construct water works in those hot regions, I am compelled to use Mexicans. We cannot get our own men to go there to perform that work'" (p. 114). This argument is, of course, the same argument that was used to assert that the Black man was genetically suited to slavery in the fields, because his dark skin was capable of absorbing the parching sun all day. The educational system in Los Angeles, the most progressive that John Dewey had to offer, did little for Mexicans. It attempted to teach them Anglo ways, to wean them away from sloth and filthiness, and to affix in them the values of wholesome Anglo-Saxon culture. At the same time, Mexicans were segregated into their own schools

Category: History - H