And by the end of the Mexican-American War in 1849, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave all Mexicans living in these areas the option of becoming U.S. citizens or of relocating within the new Mexican borders. Although some Mexicans moved to Mexico, most remained in what became U.S. territory. In the years following the treaty, Mexicans and Americans paid little attention to the newly created international border. Miners, shepherds, and seasonal workers traveled in both directions to fill fluctuating labor demands in what was essentially one economic region.11
While many states engaged in active recruitment of Mexican immigrants through the late 1800s, nativist sentiment was also conspicuous. Mexican immigrants may have been welcomed as workers, but they occupied an inferior position in the social structure. Eventually old labor began to attack new labor for its reluctance to enter unions.12 This mixture of demand for cheap Mexican labor and resistance to massive Mexican migration has continued throughout much of the twentieth century leading to enigmatic combinations of guestworker/temporary worker programs (e.g., the Bracero Program), and massive raids and Proposition 187 movements.
While Mexicans were also subject to cultural, social, and racial complaints from the Anglo-oriented power structure, for some time in the early part of this century at least they were not regarded as unassimilable as had been the Chinese. But Mexicans definitely had to be assimilated. From 1915 to 1921, one government-sponsored Americanization program was aimed directly at Mexican immigrants. In 1900, about a hundred thousand persons of Mexican descent or birth resided in the United States. By 1930, the figure was 1.5 million. While restrictionists and employers who claimed a need for cheap labor battled over future Mexican immigration, a third group of “Americanists” sought to assimilate Mexican immigrants. By 1913, California Governor Hiram Johnson was able to establish a Commission on Immigration and Housing, which directed efforts to teach English to immigrants and involve them in Americanization programs. The Commission focused its attention on Mexican immigrant women, in the belief that they were primarily responsible for the transmission of values in the home. School districts employed special classes and “home teachers,” hoping that Mexican women would pass on their newfound values to children and their husbands.13
The Americanization program cast a broad net over many aspects of the immigrants’ lives, with much of the program based on insidious stereotypical beliefs about Mexicans. The Commission regarded developing English-speaking ability the fundamental goal, not simply for facilitating a common language, but because it would help imbue immigrants with the values of American society by helping them see “the relation between a unified working force, speaking a common language, and industrial prosperity.” Family planning was a key ingredient because progressives and nativists alike feared that uncontrolled Mexican immigrant population growth would contribute to Anglo “race suicide.” The development of a work ethic outside the home was considered important so that Mexican women could fill the labor need for domestic servants, seamstresses, laundresses, and service workers in the Southwest; it would also contribute to “‘curing’ the habits of the stereotypical ‘lazy Mexican.’ “14 Getting the Mexican woman out of the home was also considered necessary to alter her values because at home her intellectual ability would not be stimulated by her husband.
Americanization programs taught food and diet management because a healthy diet was viewed as fundamental to creating productive members of society. Mexicans were to give up their penchant for fried foods; tortillas would be replaced with bread, and lettuce served instead of beans. The typical noon lunch for the Mexican child, thought to consist of a folded tortilla with no filling, was supposedly the first step in a life of crime, since the child would be tempted to steal from the other children. Furthermore, health and cleanliness were emphasized since program directors felt that Mexicans could not easily learn sanitation and hygiene because they found it less strenuous “to remain dirty than to clean up.”15
In the end, the Americanization program aimed at Mexican women had little impact on cultural practices. Certainly, an increase in female employment in factories, laundries, hotels, and bakeries may have been facilitated by these efforts, but in the home, little cultural change among the Mexican population was evident. While the Mexican immigrants’ material possessions changed, their values, cultural practices, and loyalty to Mexico remained largely unaffected. By the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the Americanization program stopped, restrictionist sentiment carried the day, and about half a million Mexicans were coerced by U.S. officials to return to Mexico.16
Anglo-conformity assimilation programs were not limited to immigrants. From the 1870s to the 1930s, the Americanization movement implemented a complete assault on every facet of Native American life: language, appearance, religion, economic structure, political models, values, and philosophy. The removal of most of the eastern and southern Native American tribes to the trans-Mississippi region by the 1840s was designed not only to secure state jurisdiction over Native American lands, but also to inculcate the essentials of the white man’s civilization into the people. Reservations were designed not only to remove Native Americans from the path of advancing whites, but also as a tool of control.17 The purported purpose of assimilation was to encourage Native Americans to modify their traditional lifestyle by emulating superior white civilization and striving for agrarian self-sufficiency. But many of the methods used constituted more of “a systemic policy of cultural annihilation.”18
Assimilation sought to replace the central beliefs of a tribal society with Western European societal and religious values. The white reformers sought to instill the concept of “competitive individualism” in Native Americans, supplanting the more cooperative spirit of tribal life. The reformers stressed respect for private property, especially land. Merrill Gates, the leader of the reform group the Friends of Indians, said in 1896, “We have, to begin with, the absolute need of awakening in the savage Indian broader desires and ampler wants. To bring him out of savagery into citizenship we must make the Indian more intelligently selfish before we can make him unselfishly intelligent. We need to awaken in him wants.” The assimilationist movement, which was directed by Christian reformers, felt that tribal deities had to be replaced with the Christian God.19
Tribal culture was suppressed by direct regulation of certain aspects of Native American behavior. Reservation agents and Bureau of Indian Affairs administrators restricted hair length, limited funeral practices, meat slaughtering techniques, dancing, plural marriages, and religious observances.20 Like Americanization programs aimed at Mexican immigrants, Native American Americanization programs also targeted family values. While Mexican women were the focus, however, a different tactic was used with Native Americans. Federal authorities targeted young Native Americans for a thorough restructuring of their values in the hope that the inferior Native American cultures and heritage would be destroyed at their roots. By 1870, the federal government was funding off-reservation schools under the auspices of religious groups. Native American parents were pressured and coerced into sending their children away to these schools under threat of withholding food, clothing, or money. Reluctant children were hunted down and physically transported to schools against their will. Once there, they were isolated for up to eight years and not permitted to see their families. They could not wear native clothing, speak their own tongues, practice native customs, or retain their own names. The philosophy was, to quote Richard Pratt, the founder and head of the Carlisle School for Indians in Pennsylvania, to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”21
In the end, the isolation and transformation shattered Native American
