Crowding Out Latinos

Notes

Noles Chapter 1 1. Although I use the tenns Mexican Americans and Chicanos interchangeably throughout this study, the ways in which different Spanish-speaking Americans identify themselves can be the source of considerable disagreement. In California, where the largest number of Hispanics in the United States live, Latinos is the most comprehensive tenn used for all Spanish-speaking people. The tenn Chicano is preferred there, whereas Tejanos, or the great majority of Spanish-speaking people in Texas, feel more comfortable with being called Mexican Americans than Chicanos, since the latter tenn suggests a political activism that in the sixties and seventies was connected with a smaller number ofMexican Americans who actively sought social change. The tenn Spanish American is used more in New Mexico, whereas Chicano appears more common in Arizona. The tenn Latino, which also encompasses Chicanos or Mexican Americans, is used more specifically to refer to Spanish-speaking descendants ofpeople not only from Mexico but from other countries where Spanish is the common language. People from Spain were mainly, though not exclusively, a mixture of Christians, Jews, and Moslems. The mestizos or Spanish-speaking Chicanos and Latinos-the subjects of this study-emerged when the Spaniards came to the New World and mixed with the indigenous people of the Americas. 2. A few Latino communities in the United States have successfully developed areas that are increasingly attracting tourists and visitors from the rest of the United States and abroad. San Antonio, Texas, and Miami, Florida, are the two best known examples, though other metropolitan centers with vision appear to be emulating that success. Dallas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Albuquerque, Denver, San Francisco, Tucson, Phoenix, and other cities, mostly in the newly emerging sunbelt Southwest, are seeing considerable benefits in advertising and featuring the Latino sections of their cities. Otherwise, Hispanic areas are likely to remain downplayed, bypassed, and economically blighted areas instead of revenueproducing cultural centers. 3. The literature about seeking success in America is extensive, varied, and consists ofmany novels, histories, poems, and other narratives. Here I particularly have in mind Jewish stories of success and failure, such as Michael Gold's Jews Without Money (1930) and Abraham Cahan's The Rise ofDavid Levinsky (1917), along with Copyrighted Material 166 Notes to Chapter 1 167 Anglo-American autobiographies such as The Education ofHenry Adams (1907) and Willie Morris's North toward Home (1967). Since Chicano literature is a product of writers and ofa people who struggle in many different ways to achieve success, our writings are also part of this established literary tradition. 4. I have always believed that relationships between the young and the old can either help a society or not, as I sought to show in Youth andAge in American Literature : The Rhetoric ofOld Men (New York: Peter Lang, 1989). 5. The book that I particularly have in mind is Carey McWilliams's 1948 classic , North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People ofthe United States, which is still being mined for general information by many scholars. North from Mexico was reissued in 1968 with a new introduction by McWilliams, and updated as a new edition in 1990 by Matt S. Meier. McWilliams's book owed much to Paul S. Taylor's monographs on Mexican labor in the United States, includingAnAmerican-Mexican Frontier (1934), which McWilliams called "the finest single volume on AngloHispano relations in print today." Constructive discourses between Latinos and African, Native, and Asian Americans would also create a less insular and healthier pluralistic American society. 6. The difference between accommodation and assimilation is that the former requires the help and support ofmainstream Americans, while the latter simply requires ethnic Americans to leave their cultures and mores and to conform to the ways of the established majority population. 7. I am currentlyworking on a manuscript entitled Repairing Educational Systems, which discusses how the K-12 grades can better prepare Hispanic and nonHispanic students to be academically more competitive for higher education. 8. Leading Chicano critics Juan Bruce-Novoa and Ramon Saldivar, in particular , have invited such a dialogue with the rest of America. See Juan Bruce-Novoa, Retrospace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature, Theory and History (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990); and Ramon Saldivar, Chicano Na1Tative: The Dialectics ofDifference (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1990). In Retrospace, Bruce-Novoa wrote: "An early reading of Mircea Eliade was a revelation: the history of peoples could be seen as the repeated attempt to create a livable order in the midst of imminent chaos, to instill values...