Mexican American

German, Scandinavian, and Irish domestic workers were concentrated in the Eastern and Midwestern cities. Irish female immigrants, in particular, were almost exclusively domestics. Diner (1983) posits that in New York virtually every Irish girl during their adolescence spent several years as live-in domestics. In the Southwest, Mexican- American women filled the ranks of domestic service, while in the post-civil war

This research explored eldercare among Mexican American primary family caregivers from Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. Although these caregivers expressed feelings of burden, their ethnocultural values of familism placed burden in a broader cultural context in which caregiving was also viewed as an affirmation and fulfillment of core Mexican American cultural values. Mexican American familism includes expressions of family solidarity, ethnocultural determinants of informal caregiving, distrust of culturally alien institutions (particularly nursing homes), and a desire to care for the elderly within the family context regardless of the personal cost or consequences. In contrast to recent research, these findings suggest that it is premature to dismiss familism as a continuing and central influence in the lives of Mexican American family caregivers.

This longitudinal study examined Latino adolescents’ feelings of loneliness and the repercussions of loneliness for later educational success. Participants were 640 Latino students (56% girls, 62% Mexican/Mexican–American) who reported on loneliness across the first 2 years of high school. Growth mixture modeling identified three distinct loneliness trajectory classes for the Latino adolescents—consistently low, chronically high, and low but increasing. Language brokering, language use, and school mobility emerged as predictors of class membership. Increasingly and chronically lonely youth experienced academic difficulty, both in terms of academic progress and exit exam success, but support from friends served as a buffer of the negative relationship between loneliness and academic success. This study highlights the pernicious effects of loneliness and suggests promoting prosocial friendship support as a means of facilitating more positive academic outcomes for Latino youth.

This study examines the beliefs of college Chicanas regarding ethnic iden-tification, preferred endogamy, and male perceptions of their achievements. The central research question of this cross-sectional and exploratory study is to determine if ethnically identified Chicanas who ...

LA PATRIA PERDIDA O IMAGINADA: TRANSLATING TEODORO TORRES IN “EL MEXICO DE AFUERA” by ETHRIAM CASH BRAMMER December 2011 Advisor: Dr. Renata Wasserman Major: English Degree: Doctor of Philosophy One resent result of the Recovery of the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project has been the “rediscovery” of the novel La patria perdida (1935), written by acclaimed Mexican journalist Teodoro Torres while in exile in the United States. This novel is a kind of Mexican-American Horacio Algiers tale, detailing the success story of Luis Alfaro, who is eventually able to create a utopian Mexican-American hacienda, called Buenavista, outside of Kansas City, Missouri. Due to a number of important thematic inversions, La patria perdida stands in stark contrast to other early works of Mexican-American immigrant fiction, including novels like Daniel Venegas’s The Adventures of Don Chipote: Or, When Parrots Breast-Feed (1928) and Conrado Espinoza’s Under the Texas Sun (1926), which likewise document...

In a brief fashion, this paper covers the history of the Chicano Art movement from its origins in the 1960s up to some of its more recent expressions. The essay also includes a succinct history of the Chicano socio-political movement, since the author maintains that the Chicano art is interrelated and interdependent to it. On the artistic movement’s history, it is noted the significant influence of the Mexican Muralist Movement and other Mexican artists, like Frida Kahlo. It is also remarked the fundamental importance of the indigenous Mexican Pre-Columbian art forms and myths. On the description of the movement, the paper states that the essence of the Chicano Art movement is to provide an artistic outlet to the Chicanos social demands, helping the Mexican-American community to find and define its own identity as an American ethnic group, with the purpose of empowering it. As the American society becomes more diverse, the Chicano art movement moves forward, progressively assimilating to the American cultural mainstream.

Utilizing the concept of race-based traumatic stress, this study tested whether posttraumatic stress symptoms explain the process by which perceived discrimination is related to health risk behaviors among Mexican American adolescents. One hundred ten participants were recruited from a large health maintenance organization in Northern California. Mediational analyses indicated that adolescents who perceived more discrimination reported worse posttraumatic stress symptoms, controlling for covariates. In turn, adolescents who experienced heightened posttraumatic stress symptoms reported more alcohol use, more other drug use, involvement in more fights, and more sexual partners. Perceived discrimination was also directly related to involvement in more fights. Results provide support for the notion of race-based traumatic stress, specifically, that perceived discrimination may be traumatizing for Mexican American adolescents. Counseling psychologists and counselors in schools and community settings should assess Mexican American adolescents for the effects of discrimination and provide appropriate interventions to reduce its negative emotional impact.

... E-mail: lisa.edwards@marquette.edu ... of acculturation have allowed for orthogonal, bidimensional measurements, such that accultura-tion to both Mexican and European American culture can be assessed independently along two axes (eg, Cuellar, Arnold, & Maldonado, 1995 ...

Drawing on a critical race theory framework, this article weaves together sociology, education, history, and performance studies to challenge deficit interpretations of Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory and to analyze Culture Clash’s play Chavez Ravine. The play recounts a decade of Los Angeles history through the perspectives of displaced Mexican American families from three former neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine. Culture Clash’s performance recovers and personifies the community cultural wealth cultivated by these families. This multifaceted portfolio of cultural assets and resources includes aspirational, linguistic, social, navigational, familial, and resistant capital. Chavez Ravine affirms the continuity of Chicana/o communities, utilizing culture as a source of strength that facilitates survival and nurtures resistance. Manazar: I want to talk about this photograph right here. (Manazar points to the photo hovering above him.) I see uncles, primas, I see my sister, mira...

The early twentieth century brought transformative Mexican migrations to places from Texas to Alaska, Michigan to California, and the South was no exception. Examining the case of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the South from 1908 to 1939, this essay shows how international migration, in this case between the United States and Mexico, has shaped the racial ideologies of nations and societies at both ends of migration streams. It traces the arrival of Mexican immigrants to two Southern locations, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta, and discusses their initial experiences of race and class there. It then focuses on the middle- and upper-class community surrounding Mexico’s New Orleans consulate, as well as the self-appointed leadership among poor Mexican sharecroppers in Gunnison, Mississippi, to illuminate the distinctly Mexican strategies which Mexicans of all social classes pursued in their quest to attain and retain white status in the U.S. South. In the early twentieth century U.S. South, there were no Mexican Americans who could call upon U.S. citizenship or claims to be “Caucasian” under the law, nor organizers drawing Mexicans into class-based politics. There, Mexicans’ sole cultural and political claims took the form of Mexico-directed activism, through which the racial ideologies of both immigrants and Mexican government bureaucrats had a discernible impact upon the color line’s shape and foundations. Conversely, it was in the South that Mexican government representatives most directly confronted the black-white eugenic binary of U.S. white supremacy, and did so without the support of U.S.-based institutions or groups. This article argues that during the decade following the Mexican revolution, Mexican immigrants and bureaucrats in the South emphasized Mexico’s pre-revolutionary tradition of cultural whitening, avoiding the official post-revolutionary celebration of race-mixing, or mestizaje. In so doing, they successfully elided questions of eugenic race in their negotiation of the color line. They eventually secured Mexicans’ acceptance as white, a trajectory more closely mirroring national trends for European, rather than Mexican immigrants in the same period.

Abstract:Depressive disorders are present in a high percentage of Mexican American adolescents. Among the US Mexican American population, suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among 10- to 19-year-olds. Little research, however, has focused on Mexican American adolescents’ knowledge and views about depression and seeking help for depression. Results from a qualitative study on Mexican American adolescents’ attitudes about depression are investigated in this paper. Sixty-five high school and middle school students in a largely Mexican American, urban school district in San Antonio, Tex, participated in 9 semistructured, focus group interviews where participants were asked questions to elicit their understanding of depression, treatment for depression, and words used to describe it. Coding of salient words and themes from transcribed interviews were entered into Atlas.ti for qualitative analysis. Three themes emerged: (1) adolescents’ definitions of depression, (2) beliefs about adolescent depression, and (3) treatment for adolescent depression. While depressive symptoms among Mexican American adolescents are common and recognized, resource and treatment knowledge is scarce. An understanding of the beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge of these adolescents can provide crucial information about the content and structure of a universal, school-based, peer-facilitated depression awareness program. (J Sch Health. 2005;75(5):162-170)

The reliability and validity of Hoffman and Kloska’s (1995) Gender-based Attitudes toward Marital Roles (GATMR) and Gender-based Attitudes toward Child Rearing (GATCR) were assessed for a sample of Mexican American mothers and fathers (n = 167) of fifth-grade children in a large metropolitan area in the southwestern United States. Factor analysis was conducted, and the results suggest that the 6-item GATMR is

Newsletter theme: Politics and Comunidad. The Xicana/o Graduate Council is a group of Xicana/o or Latina/o identified graduate students at San José State University on the frontlines of education reform, and they are dedicated to building educational pipelines for all Xicana/o and/or Latina/o students. This newsletter points to the position each of us holds as people of color in both academia and our low-income and underserved communities.