"The purpose of this study is to analyze health, social conditions and educational environment which affect the educational development of the Mexican children in the Sonora Independent School and plan a remedial program. The source of the data in this study was the survey made by Winters, and a survey of health, social and educational conditions of the Mexicans living in Sonora. The study was limited to the Mexican families and the Mexican children in the Sonora school district."--leaf 1.

Oral history’s purposes have metamorphosed from a record of lifeways and stories of the elite to a means of healing for minority communities oppressed by trauma. This dissertation focuses on the power of oral history to catalyze the restorative justice process of moral repair for victims—in this case the Mexican Americans of Texas—who were traumatized by the Jim Crow laws and practices prior to 1965. I researched the racial, socio-cultural history of Texas from its colonial days up to the Jim Crow historical era of 1876-1965 and utilized archival, legal, and historical sources for my study. Additionally, I explore theories and frameworks of trauma, structural violence, and restorative justice, and analyze twenty-eight oral histories from the Voces Oral History Collection (University of Texas, Austin). Lastly, I apply oral history methodology to collect seventeen oral histories for my own project, Project Aztlan. My findings reveal a community suffering from structural violence—a theory that argues unjust laws harm individuals as much as physical violence. The oral histories unearth several issues: first, both groups of narrators were victims of structural violence as a result of traumatic racism. I anticipated finding traumatic racism, but not on such a broad scale. The results reveal it occurred in all four corners of Texas. Second, these Jim Crow laws and practices targeted members individually and collectively through racially restrictive housing covenants, segregation of schools/public facilities, job discrimination, and disfranchisement or poll taxes. Thirdly, the oral histories demonstrate and legitimize the fact that the Mexican American community deserves atonement, apology and reparation from historically guilty institutions. The State of Texas battered them with mass lynchings, disfranchisement, racially restrictive housing covenants, school segregation, and discrimination, oppressing them for over 100 years. My dissertation concludes that the oral history process helps victims attain moral repair because, similar to moral repair, it also allows them the space to voice their stories of injustice. In turn, the oral historian validates their claims and reconciliation occurs when narrators received vindication through this reparatory process. This acknowledgment fuses broken moral bonds by equalizing members of society. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Despite being the largest migratory movement between two states in modern history, the origins and operation of Mexican migration to the United States has not been a major research topic. We lack a comprehensive view of Mexican migration as it was established in early twentieth century and reproduced throughout the century as a system that reached from Texas borderlands to California and to western agricultural regions and beyond to Midwestern farming and industrial areas, a system that continued to be circular in nature even as permanent settlement increased, and which was in constant interaction with families, villages, and towns throughout Mexico. This interdisciplinary, bilingual, and transnational project is one of the first histories of the creation of migrant networks narrated from multiple geographic and institutional sites, analyzing the relationship between state agents, civic organizations, and migrants on both sides of the border. My project utilizes a statistical analysis of migration trends combined with qualitative research in order to show how migration arose as a mass phenomenon in Mexico and extended into the United States. This dissertation argues that large scale Mexican migration was created and operated through an interconnected transnational migrant economy made up of self-reinforcing local economic logics, information diffusion, and locally based social networks. I demonstrate that town-based interpersonal networks formed the engine that propelled and sustained large scale migration. Migrants needed transportation, capital, and information to travel north. Town-based networks provided all of these things. I follow the spread of migrant routes, explaining the creation of Mexican communities in the US Showing why communities were located where they are and their links to the larger economy of migrant labor before turning to Mexico and showing the effects of migration on sending communities. Migration evolved from a wave of mainly men into a broad based phenomenon, drawing in families and communities through remittances. I argue this is because a set of self-reinforcing economic logics were being created on both sides of the border. These logics are separate, but linked to the economic conditions that framed migration- the pull of the industrialization of the American West and the Mexican north with its relatively high wages- and the push of the chaos and violence of the Mexican revolution and Cristero Wars. Likewise, these logics could not have occurred without the demographic pressures of population growth in central Mexico, and the economic transformations of the Porfiriato. As more and more people participated in migration, they sent back information and remittances, which in turn made it easier for others to follow their path. Circular migration reinforced this dynamic as migrants returned home on a large scale, bringing back knowledge and experience. Together, these practices constituted the migrant economy and made central and central-north Mexico the engine of migration in the twentieth century. This new economy made it easier to move, but also tied many families and towns into continuous migrations in order to achieve economic stability. Ultimately this project shows the creation of the political economy of migrant labor between Mexico and the United States.

Spaniards were the first Europeans to explore the Pacific Northwest coastline, but the only evidence of these early visits is a sprinkling of Spanish place names commemorating the intrepid voyagers. The more than four centuries of recorded history since that time are nearly devoid, of references to Spanish-speaking people, especially Mexicans and Americans of Mexican descent (Chicanos). Even the heavy influx of Chicano migrant farm workers in the 1950’s and 1960's failed to attract the attention of historians or social science researchers. By 1970, the Spanish-language population had become Oregon's largest ethnic minority and was exerting influence in most areas of state life. This study documents the depth and diversity of Oregon’s Chicano community and provides an historical context for the movement of Spanish-speaking people into the state. Even in the strongly Anglo-American milieu of the Northwest, Chicanos have retained their unique blend of Mexican and American cultural and linguistic characteristics. Through social clubs, cultural centers, economic and political organizations and an independent college, Chicanos in Oregon are preserving and proclaiming their heritage. Hopefully, this study will aid Anglo Americans in understanding and accepting cultural differences without prejudice or animosity, and help Chicanos to better appreciate their position in the state. The dominantly oral tradition of the Chicano coupled with the dearth of standard documentation, primary and secondary, required reliance upon interviews and conversations and generalization upon limited data. Research revealed that the migrant farm worker image of the Chicano has become obsolete as the Oregon population has become settled and primarily urban. If this study provides a frame of reference for and generates interest in further investigation of the migration of Chicanos into Oregon, it will have served its purpose.

During first year field placement, we worked with a number of rural families, most of them Mexican-American. It seemed to us that rural families in general and Mexican-Americans in particular were not being very well served by social service agencies. We questioned whether this might be due to a lack of Mexican-American perspective in traditional services or perhaps a lack of Mexican-American manpower or at least Spanish-speaking manpower. This study, then, developed out of a general area of interest that can be stated as three questions: (1) Do rural people (especially Mexican-Americans) feel there is a need for various social services and what do they identify as needs? (2) Do they know about social service agencies that exist and what their services are? (3) How available are those services? i.e., an existing agency may be "unavailable" because people don't know about it, because of lack of transportation, because of language/cultural barriers, because of an inappropriateness of services offered, etc.

The musical production of Los Tigres del Norte and El Vez illustrates Mexican and Chicano/a traditions of using popular music as an alternative way of narrating Mexican immigrant, Chicano/a and Mexican American community life in the U.S.A. These musicians grapple with the ways in which a dominant U.S. national discourse has historically subordinated Mexican immigrant and Chicano/a communities. Through their lyrics these musicians propose—albeit in different ways—a progressive cultural politics that underscores the importance of equality and anti-discrimination based on ethnic, cultural, gender and class positions. This thesis compares the work of Los Tigres and El Vez and argues that, beyond the merely documenting and providing a narrative representation of Mexican immigrant and Chicano/a experiences in the U.S.A., these musicians must also be regarded as political activists, using their lyrics and musical profile to articulate and present alternative politics on behalf of Mexican immigrants and Chicano/as in the U.S., and in ways that work with the legacies of the Chicano Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. In this thesis I attend to the differences between El Vez and Los Tigres del Norte. The musicians come from distinct musical and performance backgrounds, and work with distinct generic musical praxes. While recognizing those differences, I nonetheless identify five comparable axes of progressive politics in their work. First, they counter the notion that Mexican immigrant, Chicano/a and Mexican American communities in the U.S.A. form one homogenized group. Second, they emphasize community building as a form of empowerment for immigrant groups and ethnic minorities. Third, they continue the Chicano Movement fight for human rights and equality; but rather than calling for a separate nation of Aztlán, Los Tigres del Norte and El Vez claim a place for Mexican immigrants and Chicano/as as viable and productive constituencies in the U.S.A. Four, though these artists are male performers, they also deal with gendere issues and female characters and thus do not uphold the subordinate role of women in Mexican immigrant and Chicano/a patriarchal societies. And five, Los Tigres del Norte and El Vez engage with notions of an “America” whose pan-ethnic and trans-national qualities reflect the musicians’ advocacy of alliances between diverse subordinate groups. Such engagements demonstrate that Los Tigres del Norte and El Vez operate as political activists whose lyrics and musical profile confirm the lasting impact of Chicano Movement activist aspirations, while also reworking those aspirations in line with changing sociopolitical conditions.

The musical production of Los Tigres del Norte and El Vez illustrates Mexican and Chicano/a traditions of using popular music as an alternative way of narrating Mexican immigrant, Chicano/a and Mexican American community life in the U.S.A. These musicians grapple with the ways in which a dominant U.S. national discourse has historically subordinated Mexican immigrant and Chicano/a communities. Through their lyrics these musicians propose—albeit in different ways—a progressive cultural politics that underscores the importance of equality and anti-discrimination based on ethnic, cultural, gender and class positions. This thesis compares the work of Los Tigres and El Vez and argues that, beyond the merely documenting and providing a narrative representation of Mexican immigrant and Chicano/a experiences in the U.S.A., these musicians must also be regarded as political activists, using their lyrics and musical profile to articulate and present alternative politics on behalf of Mexican immigrants and Chicano/as in the U.S., and in ways that work with the legacies of the Chicano Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. In this thesis I attend to the differences between El Vez and Los Tigres del Norte. The musicians come from distinct musical and performance backgrounds, and work with distinct generic musical praxes. While recognizing those differences, I nonetheless identify five comparable axes of progressive politics in their work. First, they counter the notion that Mexican immigrant, Chicano/a and Mexican American communities in the U.S.A. form one homogenized group. Second, they emphasize community building as a form of empowerment for immigrant groups and ethnic minorities. Third, they continue the Chicano Movement fight for human rights and equality; but rather than calling for a separate nation of Aztlán, Los Tigres del Norte and El Vez claim a place for Mexican immigrants and Chicano/as as viable and productive constituencies in the U.S.A. Four, though these artists are male performers, they also deal with gendere issues and female characters and thus do not uphold the subordinate role of women in Mexican immigrant and Chicano/a patriarchal societies. And five, Los Tigres del Norte and El Vez engage with notions of an “America” whose pan-ethnic and trans-national qualities reflect the musicians’ advocacy of alliances between diverse subordinate groups. Such engagements demonstrate that Los Tigres del Norte and El Vez operate as political activists whose lyrics and musical profile confirm the lasting impact of Chicano Movement activist aspirations, while also reworking those aspirations in line with changing sociopolitical conditions.

Not available

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-228).

The United States has seen tremendous growth since it has achieved a population of 300 million. Interestingly, events like this mask the heterogeneity of fertility behavior particularly along racial/ethnic lines. Unfortunately, despite the voluminous literature examining the dynamics and differentials of fertility, extant studies suffer from several limitations including the treatment of racial/ethnic groups as homogenous, the cross-sectionality of their analyses, or their focus on either current or cumulative fertility ultimately underplaying the complexity of fertility behavior. Therefore, this dissertation investigates the fertility behavior of Mexican American and white women paying particular attention to race/ethnicity and social mobility by conducting a quantitative analysis of current and cumulative fertility behavior of women at three different points in their life course. The findings demonstrate the significant effect that socioeconomic characteristics and race have on explaining the higher fertility of Mexican American women in the United States thus, encouraging the adoption of a racial/ethnic stratification framework in studies of fertility.