Factors Of Mexican American Politics In South Texas

Submitted By julyjmlopez
Words: 849
Pages: 4

1) A medical doctor in the fifty eighty largest city in the United states corpus Christi, Dr. Garcia, or Dr. Hector as many affectionately called him, would become a political force as a result of his involvement in the Longoria controversy and through his later organization of the “VIVA KENNEDY” campaign a movement he would extend to presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson. Garcia would become an ambassador to the United Nations.
2) Gendered politics in South Texas represented a second factor inhibiting Beatrice involvement in civil rights protest over her husband’s wake. His region was not a place where Mexican American women commonly exercised a public voice in 1949, nor for that matter, anywhere else in the border Hispanic border zone on both sides of the Rio Grande.
3) The study defines the zone as stretching from Del Rio to Brownsville in the south and from Del Rio through San Antonio, Seguin and Victoria to Lavaca Bay in the north. Historically this area called Nueces strip, was the disputed land that precipitated the Mexican American War 1846.
4) Persons of Mexican origin were most concentrated in the southern reaches of the Nueces Strip. Anglos and especially Midwest Anglo transplants were most common along the greater Nueces River basin. Mexican Americans and newly arriving Mexican nationals sought employment opportunity and ethnic community in the lower two third of south Texas.
5) Anglos in the Longoria portion of the Nueces River basin, in towns like Corpus Christi and the Three Rivers sought inexpensive agriculture land, but also access to cheap and malleable “Mexican” labor for the expanding agro-economy and the emerging petrochemical industry.
6) South Texas became even more complex as locate after locale redefined itself on the basis of ever changing mixes of old Hispanics and new Hispanics arrivals , old Texans and new Anglos arrivals.
7) In history of conflict between Tejanos and Anglos dating all the way back to at least 1836, when the Texas broke away from the Mexican Republic. A combination of continuity and change led to increasingly conflictive and less integrative south Texas environment from about the turn of the twentieth century onward as communities through the zone modified their respective economic, social, and political orders in response to the evolving human and structural conditions within the region.
8) Broad general trends did emerge between about 1900 and 1949 across South Texas. Anglos became owners and administrators of the area’s economic units, Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals became workers on these production sites.
9) Anglos eventually distinguish themselves as whites, as Texans, as Americans. They came to see Mexican American and Mexican nationals as one and the same: “Mexicans,” brown alien, and economically, socially, and politically retrogressive, to be segregated from “Americans,” because they were UN –American and unit to become American.
10) In the twentieth- century middle class Americans leaders became preoccupied with their racial identity. They came to see themselves and other Mexican Americans as progressive “whites” of dual ethnic heritage, as Mexican American- Mexican national community seemed to think of themselves less in racial terms and more in terms of their ethnicity, their Mexicanidad.
11) South Texas bossism, or patron politics, wherein local Anglo political bosses accommodated Hispanic client-dependents with patronage in return for political support.
12) Anglos sat at the top and Mexican Americans sat largely at the bottom or stood outside of local South Texas