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Chapter 1 Introducing Becoming Neighbors One gets sad because one is humiliated here, and unfortunately one’s own race is doing the humiliating. I have been humiliated many times because I can’t speak English.  , Mexican immigrant Migrating from Cuernavaca, Mexico, to escape an abusive husband and with hopes of ‘‘earning enough money to eat,’’ thirty-six-year-old Sara Valdez arrived in  in La Puente, a city in Los Angeles County, California.1 After acquiring a job in a neighborhood restaurant, she encouraged other family members to join her. She now lives with her two teenage children and her cousin in a converted two-car garage. She works from  .. until midnight, more than forty hours a week, as a waitress. Sitting at her kitchen table, Sara speaks candidly about the difficulties she has encountered in the United States. As her voice cracks and tears well up in her eyes, she describes the humiliation she experiences because of her current economic situation and her limited English-speaking skills. Living and working in La Puente, a largely Mexican-origin community, Sara explains how it is ‘‘established’’ Mexican Americans who have humiliated her.2 Sorrowfully, she shares: One’s own people discriminate. It’s sad. These are people that clearly are established. They have businesses and their own homes. They look down on one because of one’s bad economic situation. The coraje (courage out of anger) that led Sara Valdez to travel thousands of miles to leave her abusive husband is what she is drawing on now to combat the ridicule she currently faces. After long nights at work, she studies English at a local school: It’s a little hard to go to school because I usually get home from work at midnight, but sometimes as late as  .. It’s hard to get up, but I am going to school because of coraje. I want to improve myself and have a better job for my children, so I tell myself, ‘‘What do you have to do to improve?’’ Because since I came here, I’ve been in the same little hole. 1 I’ve gotten angry because they humiliate us and I ask, ‘‘Why?’’ And then I push my tiredness, and I go on. Having lived in the United States ten years longer than Sara, María Ramos also migrated as a single woman, but she has a different story to tell. In  she left her home in Jalisco, Mexico, at the age of twenty-two. The second-oldest of ten children, she crossed the U.S.-Mexican border, ‘‘running like contraband,’’ to assist her parents economically. She met her husband , also a Mexican immigrant, in Los Angeles, and after living in East Los Angeles and various San Gabriel Valley cities, they purchased a home in La Puente in. Mexican Americans facilitated her family’s settlement in their new city. Gratefully, María retold how her Mexican American real estate agent was instrumental in placing her children into schools that were within walking distance. She also spoke fondly of a past Mexican American school board member who ensured that her oldest son was enrolled in a special program that provided assistance for his speech impediment. It was in that I met both Sara Valdez and María Ramos. I was interviewing Mexican immigrant women as part of a project I was completing on immigrant settlement and incorporation in the United States. Looking at these women’s experiences in a larger context, we see that they are a re- flection and a manifestation of some of the macro-level dynamics occurring in California around immigration, language, and race/ethnic relations.3 At the time that these two women shared their stories with me, California was in the midst of an economic recession, and anti-immigrant sentiment was on the rise. Mexican immigrants were the targets of such xenophobia and nativist sentiment. They were being accused of taking jobs away from U.S. citizens and of draining public services. Such anti-immigrant sentiment and the resulting legislation stemmed from societal concerns over the supposed detrimental impacts of immigrants on the U.S. economy, the dominant culture , and the national image. For many California voters, such misperceptions diverted attention away from the ongoing impacts of global economic transformations. Such transformations have included the shifting of manufacturing jobs and transnational corporations from the United States into countries throughout Latin America. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) implemented in  has hastened the...

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