The Mexican Revolution and WWI spurred the first large wave of Mexican migration to the United States. As a result, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed the largest cohort of children of Mexican migrants of the twentieth century. A significant percentage of these children were U.S. citizens by birth and were also granted Mexican citizenship through their parents, who generally did not seek to become U.S. citizens through naturalization. Using archival collections in Mexico and the United States, this dissertation examines the formal practices and strategies that these migrant families used to engage both U.S. and Mexican citizenship and navigate their place in both nations. It shows that the practice of citizenship was a multi-sited and transnational historical process as evidenced by an examination of two key areas in which it occurred. First, this dissertation uses education to show that Mexican parents and youth practiced Mexican citizenship from the United States. From 1924 to 1939, migrant parents and organizations, Mexican consuls, and the Secretary of Public Education established schools for migrant children in the United States. In addition, Mexicans in the United States pushed the Mexican government to create scholarships for U.S.-born youth at two Mexican universities in 1939 and 1945. Second, this dissertation provides new interpretations of repatriation by focusing on the relationship between repatriates and Mexican state, the role of the family during the Great Depression, and efforts by U.S.-born youth to claim and benefit from their status as U.S. citizens. By following migrant families across the U.S.-Mexico border, this dissertation is able to compare the ways in which migrants and U.S.-born youth engaged both the U.S. and Mexican state. Indeed, they deployed a similar set of strategies and language. For example, in both Mexico and the United States, Mexicans visited the consuls. While the consuls did not always provide Mexicans with the resources they needed, they were often important intermediaries between migrants and the state and between migrants and family members in either Mexico and the United States. In addition to visiting consul, Mexicans wrote to government officials, especially the presidents of both the Mexican and U.S. nation. Their countless letters, I show, emphasized their citizenship status, their affinity to the nation, their “Americanness” or “Mexicanness,” and their commitment to contribute to the nation. Moreover, in their letters, Mexicans echoed the nation’s patriarchal values and metaphor of the family. In constructing a transnational history of citizenship, this dissertation bridges and contributes to Chicano/a historiography, scholarship on Mexican nation building, and works on Mexican repatriation during the Great Depression. By including migrant families into the process of Mexican nation-building after the Mexican Revolution, I integrate a set of historical actors that have generally been excluded from Mexican historiography. Placing migrants and migrant children within this context contributes to Chicano/a historiography by demonstrating not only that Mexican citizenship mattered for these families, but that it was a negotiated process that included migrants and the Mexican state.

Not available / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2009. / Thesis directed by Rory McVeigh and William Carbonaro for the Department of Sociology. "October 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 200-210).

Not available / text

This work is intended to provide a synthesis on the development of a political ethos among Mexican Americans during the decades of the 1960s to the 1970s. This political ethos was neither uniformed nor overwhelmingly acceptable, but it nonetheless formed the ideological nucleus of what came to be known as the Chicano Movement. And this author would contend that some of those ideological strains remain important today among Mexican American leaders. This ethos was undoubtedly nationalistic, but it also incorporated race and class as elements of the Mexican American experience. Chicanismo, as it came to be known, would be the unifying theme for diverse groups involved in a myriad of causes and activities. To understand the development of this ethos, it is necessary to understand the generations of Mexican Americans of the post-war years. Also important to understand are those events, organizations and particularly individuals who began to have an impact on the minds of many Mexican Americans who saw a need for change in the way they lived, thought, and in the way they participated in American society. There are at least four phases to the development of the Chicano philosophical strains that guided the movement. First, the Mexican American intellectuals, politicians, students, and others came to be believed that the liberal agenda which had been seen as the solver of the community's problems was simply morally corrupt. It was a failure. This rejection of the liberal agenda led to a searching for new solutions. These solutions would be oriented toward a philosophical separatism. Second, Mexican Americans saw a need to re-interpret the past as it related to their own history and that of the Anglos who lived nearby. New heroes arose, and the community discovered its legacy of struggle. Also, they discarded the stereotypes of the lazy, passive, feebleminded Mexican American. Third, Mexican American activists, intellectuals and artists affirmed a rediscovered pride in their ethnicity and class status. Many found similarities between themselves and African Americans in their struggle for equality; others saw the similarities with Third World liberation movements of peasants and oppressed workers; and others simply saw themselves continue the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Chicano uprisings of the early 20th century. Finally, this philosophy was perpetuated through the individual and collective struggles of the organizations that promoted it as they met resistance or faced external attacks.

No description available.

No description available.

The Latino community in the United States, currently estimated at over 23 million, is projected to become the largest minority group in America within the next fifteen years. However, insufficient national-level data on Latinos has resulted in relatively few studies being published on the voting behavior of this increasingly important group. Using data drawn from the first national probability sample of Latinos, the Latino National Political Survey, this paper addresses selected socio-demographic indices correlated with voter turnout. The logistic regression model empirically demonstrates the importance of distinguishing among subgroups and identifies the life-cycle effect as a principle determinant of voter turnout.

"The history of the Spanish-speaking population of Texas, as noted throughout this study, is synonymous with this group's struggle to overcome its social and economic subordination in a society where Anglo-American culture, language, and customes predominate. Mexican-American politics during this century have included several factors, namely abolishment of predjudices against Americans of Mexican ancestry, improvement of educational facilities and opportunities, eradication of this group's social apathy, and elimination of any other inequities which plagued this ethnic group. Progress in these fields was, Mexican-American leaders believed, precursory to direct governmental participation of Texans of Mexican descent - as voters and candidates - in local, state, and national elections."--leaf 90.

The increase in Italian American political power from the 1920s through the 1940s coincided with the rise of Fascism in Italy and Americanism in the United States—two opposing ideologies that greatly influenced how Italians practiced political citizenship. Benito Mussolini’s Fascist ideology demanded Italians’ permanent subservience to the Italian corporate state, even to the seventh generation abroad. At the same time, American xenophobes pushed an aggressive platform of Americanism; an anti-immigrant ideology that demanded foreigners’ total loyalty to America, its Constitution, and its Anglo-Saxon culture. Scholars have separately noted Italian Americans’ overwhelming support of Fascism and the dramatic rise in their electoral participation during the Great Depression, but few have investigated the overlap between those two developments. None have placed Italian Americans’ growing ethnic awareness within the context of Americanism. This dissertation uncovers the causal relationship between Italian Americans’ Fascism and their newfound political capital, and demonstrates how ethnic elites pushed politicians from adhering to strict Americanism to accepting ethnic political citizenship and transnational activism. Beginning in 1930, Italian American elites made shrewd choices about how Fascism would spread and function in the United States to avoid government investigations. Italian immigrants first organized pro-Fascist clubs to find a collective purpose as transnationalistic citizens. Hoping to prove their value to Italy, immigrant elites first used their clubs to mobilize their growing communities in support of favorable terms of repayment for Italy’s World War I debt to the United States. The war debt campaign taught the Italian government and pro-Fascist immigrants that Italian Americans had potential for great political power, but only if they naturalized. To pursue naturalization and ethnic politics simultaneously they first needed to overcome their ideological conflicts with the Americanist values of total assimilation. Italian American elites resolved the tensions of choosing between Americanism and Fascism by bringing their communities together around an ethno-cultural nationalism, called Italianità, that pursued the ascension of Italian Americans in the United States and the supremacy of Italy in Europe. Italianità allowed immigrants to exercise transnational citizenship by using culture as a screen for advancing their political causes, helping them avoid criticism. Seemingly apolitical events organized by Mussolini’s supporters, like Columbus Day rallies, brought Italian Americans masses to the attention of American politicians at a crucial moment in electoral campaigns. The more active Italian Americans became in support of themselves and their homeland, the more aggressively American politicians courted their votes. By 1941, Italians had far surpassed Germans and Japanese in continual demonstrations of pro-Fascist nationalism through Italianità. Because they also eclipsed their co-ethnics in American voting power, the government largely ignored Italians in its extensive investigations of un-American activities before and after Pearl Harbor. This dissertation is the first to recognize the political roots of the government’s investigations into Germans and Italians and the resulting arrests during the war. The strategies employed by immigrant elites in the 1920s and 1930s enabled Italian ethnics to escape the mass internment and arrests of the 1940s. Rather than shrink from their ethnic identity, Italian Americans employed the full weight of their political capital to serve their community through the end of World War II.