Historical “incorporation by conquest” and continued racism are why some of the oldest Mexican American communities in the United States fail to prosper in comparison with other ethnic populations, according to Richard Shingles, Virginia Tech political scientist.
Using data from a variety of sources, Shingles has conducted research on the “persistent relative deprivation of the Mexican-American community in the Southwest and the various explanations that have been given for it.” He is writing a book called Aztlán Lost: the legacy of conquest and race for Mexican Americans, which addresses several issues, including the consequences of nation building by conquest, the significance of whether immigration is voluntary or involuntary, and the difference in the treatment of Mexican Americans who are white and those who are of color. The latter are mestizos, or persons of mixed Indian and Spanish ancestry. While other Hispanic-American communities exist in the United States, such as the Cuban settlements in Florida and the Puerto Rican groups in New York, Shingles focuses on Mexican Americans in Texas and California along the Mexican-American border.
“The Mexican American presence is most prominent in that part of the United States that was formerly Mexico, particularly in the original Mexican settlement areas in Southern California and Texas that survived the conquest and annexation of half of the Republic of Mexico during 1836 to 1850,” Shingles says. “The largest of these communities are located in and around Los Angeles in Southern California, El Paso in far West Texas, and the metropolitan areas of South Texas, the oldest and largest being San Antonio.”
He looks at the scope and variety of impediments that have been placed in the path of these Mexican-American communities since conquest and “the steps taken by the dominant Anglo population to ensure that Mexican Americans would not present an economic or political threat to their conquerors and their (conquerors’) progeny.” The first part of the book is historical; the last half uses quantitative indicators to assess the current status of Mexican Americans in these communities.
Shingles’s book is in response to the growing concern over immigration of Latinos to America. The 2000 census showed that Hispanics are now the nation’s largest minority, having surpassed African Americans. Time magazine dedicated a special issue June 11, 2001, to the Mexican-American border, showing that 58 percent of the new largest Latino minority in the United States is of Mexican origin and declaring that “the border is vanishing before our eyes, creating a new world for all of us.”
In Texas and California, Shingles says, Mexican Americans are the largest minority and are projected to become a numerical majority in the early 21st century. Unlike other minority groups, such as Asian Indians, Japanese, Chinese, and Cubans, who are voluntary immigrants, Mexicans have not fared well in the United States, especially in those original Mexican communities.
Shingles points out that other scholars who have studied why some ethnic groups fare better than others to determine what lessons might be learned for less successful groups, have focused mainly on the history of the most successful “model minorities.” “A complete model can be constructed only by comparing the histories of both types of groups,” Shingles says. “America’s native minorities that were incorporated by force for the sole purpose of their exploitation — African, Mexican, and Indian Americans — are by far the least economically successful. Every generation of immigrants to arrive in the United States has surpassed these permanent minorities.
“The principal obstacle to economic mobility of America’s permanent minorities,” says Shingles, “is community-based resource deficiencies stemming from a history of racism and exploitation that are the inevitable result of incorporation by conquest. These groups have been permanently handicapped by their original status, by a history of subordination, exploitation, exclusion, and neglect, often rationalized by racist ideology, which has left them with fewer resources to compete with more recent groups.” Most Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants “reside in non-economically viable ethnic enclaves: isolated, resource-deprived barrios maintained in significant part by residential segregation and other forms of racial and ethnic discrimination,” he says.
“Long-term isolation of racial minorities in resource-deprived ghettos and barrios creates numerous structural impediments to individual and collective mobility: concentrated poverty, separate and inferior educational facilities, low-income, dead-end jobs, a dearth of entrepreneurial opportunities, a culture of segregation, and political isolation that discourages coalition politics with other ethnic and racial groups,” Shingles says.
His research is unique because, in studying the fates of Mexican Americans, he distinguished between them on the basis of race and not just ethnicity (nation of origin). “Mexicans are a mixed-race people,” he says. “Most are ‘white,’ largely of Spanish ancestry. However, as many as half, depending on location, are not white. They are mestizo. My own research shows that among Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, mestizos fare worse in the United States; they are more likely to be victims of housing segregation and more poorly represented by elected and appointed government officials.”
Shingles had to create a method to distinguish between mestizos and white Mexican Americans. He formed a “typological variable” from the census questions related to race and Hispanic origin. The first is “Are you Hispanic?” The people in California and Texas who say they are Hispanic are 99 percent Mexican American. The second census question asked the respondents to indicate their race, with the choices being White, Black, American Indian, Asian, and Other. Shingles interprets Hispanics in Texas and California who indicate they are “other race” to be mestizo.
He took several steps to validate this inference, steps common to any scientific study.
The first, face validity, means that, just as we take people at their word when they say they are white or black or Asian, the “other” race response should be taken at face value, too. He interprets the rejection of the “standard” racial categories and the use of “other race” instead to mean the respondent identifies as “mixed” race and, Shingles says, “a large portion of the Mexican people are mixed race.” One half (51 percent) of the Hispanic-origin population of California and 41 percent in Texas identified themselves as “other race.” Over 95 percent of Texans and Californians who chose “other” indicated they were of Mexican origin. “Mexico is officially a mestizo nation,” says Shingles.
The second method is criterion validity, meaning his interpretation of the “other” race response as mestizo is supported by other findings, such as the fact that in San Antonio and Los Angeles, Hispanics who indicate they are “other” race reside in neighborhoods near other peoples of color, serving as a buffer between the non-Hispanic black population and white Hispanics.
The third validation is construct validity, meaning the “other race” response is positively correlated with other indicators of mestizos. These indicators are found in two national surveys of Mexican Americans. Interviewers ranked Mexican-American respondents on their skin color, from very light to very dark. They also ranked them on their physical appearance from very European looking to very Indian looking. Mexican Americans who said they were white were much more likely to be judged by the interviewer to be light and European looking, and those Mexican Americans who indicated “other” race were darker and more Indian looking, Shingles reports. He found a very high correlation between the ranking on skin color and physical appearance. These same national surveys found that the Mexican Americans with darker complexions and more Indian features have “significantly lower education and income,” Shingles says.
In 1979 and 1989, the Department of Housing and Urban Development sent auditors to determine if discrimination was going on. The audits showed that Mexican-American and African-American couples were much more likely than non-Hispanic white couples to experience discrimination in the housing market from realtors and lending institutions, Shingles reports. The auditors found that the unfavorable treatment of Mexican Americans was associated with their skin color, but not ethnicity as measured by “Mexican” accent. “The principal reason for the residential segregation is exclusion based on race, not ethnicity,” Shingles says.
He found that, paradoxically, “Mexican Americans are most desperate in the states where they have the oldest and largest communities, where one might expect them to have the greatest resources and political clout.” Shingles found that the long-term consequences of forced incorporation are most manifest in these original Mexican settlement areas. “Vanquished minorities encounter the most pervasive, perverse, and persistent impediments to successful incorporation,” he says.
Most Mexican Americans are the descendants of Mexicans who voluntarily immigrated to the United States in the 20th century, Shingles says. However, “the communities to which they immigrated and which have born the major responsibility for assisting them in adapting to American society were initially incorporated by war and colonization during the 19th century,” he says. “This history has had fundamental and deleterious consequences for the ability of these enclaves to provide resources to subsequent generations of Mexican immigrants.”
Like previous researchers, Shingles looks at the structural features of non-economically viable ethnic enclaves that work against individual spatial, economic, and social mobility. He also, however, looks at the role of institutions in the larger society that create and maintain the structures that inhibit the success of the communities. Shingles contends that “the long-term success of groups depends more on their political incorporation than on unregulated markets” and says that research shows that “historically, the exclusion of Mexican Americans from the political process is an essential factor in their difficulty in competing academically and economically with other national-origin groups.”
Shingles spent time in Texas in 2000 under a grant from Virginia Tech’s College of Arts and Sciences talking to scholars and community activists, studying the barrios first hand, and going to libraries. One scholar said he was leery of talking with Shingles because, the man said, previous Anglo social scientists had done them injustices. But he was willing to talk after seeing Shingles’s materials. Shingles spent the most time in San Antonio. It and Los Angeles are the cities with the two largest Mexican-American populations. He also spent time in El Paso and the “super” barrio in Los Angeles.
Shingles also had the help of the National Association of Elected Latino Officials in doing his research. The activist group sent him lists of all elected Mexican-American officials in Texas and California broken down by municipality or county and type of office. Shingles spent months contacting government agencies and offices, making lists of the public offices, what the office holders did, and who was in them, so he could calculate the percentages of elected officials who are non-Hispanic whites, blacks, and Asians, and Hispanic whites and mestizos.
He found that, in California and Texas, Mexican-Americans were least well represented in the most powerful offices in proportion with the number of Mexican Americans in the electorate. In studying 42 counties in Texas, he divided them into Anglo (majority white electorate) and Tejano (majority Mexican-American electorate) zones. “Most underrepresentation for Mexican Americans is going on in Anglo zones,” he says. “Mexican Americans in some places are almost totally excluded from office even when they are a significant part of the electorate. The underrepresentation was limited almost solely to mestizos, not Hispanic whites.” Texas has a long history of disenfranchising blacks and Mexican Americans through such tactics as gerrymandering. Shingles says that his research supports other recent studies indicating that these minorities still face handicaps in the electoral process.
“The Supreme Court has ruled that certain kinds of electoral rules are illegal because they dilute minority votes, making them count for less,” Shingles says. One of those techniques is at-large elections. “If you have a community segregated like Los Angeles or San Antonio, and European Americans predominate citywide, if all offices are at large, the majority population is likely to elect only fellow Anglo/Europeans. Almost half the city may be minorities, but the office holders are Anglo.”
Because at-large elections must be contested city by city, there have been many lawsuits, Shingles says. He found that in those Texas cities in which lawsuits had been successful, Mexican Americans had electoral parity. In other cities where there are still at-large elections, there was disparity.
Political reforms have contributed to the greater empowerment of America’s permanent minority communities, Shingles says, but “the generations of discrimination and resource deprivation in mestizo communities and the inability of political gains to significantly ameliorate residential segregation, concentrated poverty, and grossly inferior education” have limited the effects of the reforms.
While many people look at the increasing immigration of Mexicans into the United States as the “Mexican problem,” Shingles concludes it is an American problem brought on by the history of the nation’s oldest and largest Mexican American communities, a history that started with conquest and has excluded generations from the benefits of development. “Our past cannot be separated from our future.”
