History of Mexican Americans

History Of Mexican Americans

Mexican-Americans were once concentrated in the states that formerly belonged to Mexico, including California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas; they began creating communities in Southern California (Los Angeles, California, Long Beach, California, Santa Ana, California, San Bernardino, California and San Diego, California); San Francisco, California; Denver, Colorado; Dallas, Texas; Houston, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona and other industrial cities and steel producing regions when they obtained employment there during World War I. More recently, Mexican immigrants have increasingly become a large part of the workforce in industries such as meat packing throughout the Midwest, in agriculture in the southeastern United States, and in the construction, landscaping, restaurant, hotel and other service industries throughout the country.Mexican-American identity has also changed markedly throughout these years. In the past hundred years Mexican-Americans have campaigned for voting rights, stood against educational, employment, and ethnic discrimination and stood for economic and social advancement. At the same time many Mexican-Americans have struggled with defining and maintaining their community's identity. In the 1960s and 1970s, some Hispanic student groups flirted with nationalism and differences over the proper name for members of the community of Chicano/Chicana, Latino/Latina, Mexican-Americans, Hispanics or simply La Raza became tied up with deeper disagreements over whether to integrate into or remain separate from Anglo society, as well as divisions between those Mexican-Americans whose families had lived in the United States for two or more generations and more recent immigrants.

Before the founding of the United States Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, California, Colorado, and Wyoming were part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain and later formed part of the newly independent Mexican Republic. The Spaniards first entered the region in the late 16th century, starting small settlements in what is now New Mexico.

In California, Spanish Franciscan friars formed a string of missions designed to convert the Indians to Christianity. Along with the system of forts and land grants to favored associates of the king, the missions enabled small-scale Spanish settlement of the coastal California by a few hundred Spanish immigrants. Very small Spanish-speaking settlements were established near missions & forts in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas by the mid 18th century.