History of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles

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Mexican Americans have lived in Los Angeles since the original Pobladores, the 44 original settlers and 4 soldiers who founded the city in 1781. People of Mexican descent make up 31.9% of Los Angeles residents, and 32% of Los Angeles County residents.

Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles Asistencia was founded in early 1784 within the burgeoning Pueblo de Los Ángeles as an asistencia (or "sub-mission") to the nearby Mission San Gabriel Arcángel.^[1]

The city's original barrios were located in the eastern half of the city and the unincorporated community of East Los Angeles. The trend of Hispanization began in 1970, then accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s with immigration from Mexico and Central America (especially El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala). These immigrants settled in the city's eastern and southern neighborhoods. By 2000, South Los Angeles was a majority Mexican area, displacing most previous African-American and Asian-American residents. The city is often said to have the largest Mexican population outside Mexico and has the largest Spanish-speaking population outside Latin America or Spain. As of 2007, estimates of the number of residents originally from the Mexican state of Oaxaca ranged from 50,000 to 250,000.^[2] Montebello was the first Spanish settlement in California in Los Angeles County.^[3]

Job contracts, sponsored by the US government in partnership with the Mexican government, initially motivated Mexican immigrants to migrate to Los Angeles.^[4]

Post-World War I fear of communism manifested itself in Los Angeles through an increased nationalistic, anti-immigrant sentiment. While prominent politicians such as former governor Hiram Johnson and activist Simon Lubin advocated for progressive policies, such as women's rights and labor rights, local politics of Los Angeles county and California at large leaned conservative, with governor Friend W. Richardson reallocating the Americanization programs to the California Department of Education in 1923. The goal of these Americanization programs was to assimilate immigrants into "the American way of life"^[5] and particularly targeted Mexican immigrants because of their perceived ethnic proximity to Europeans relative to other immigrant groups, such as the Chinese and Japanese; the main way this was achieved was through the instruction of the English language. At first, these programs prioritized Mexican men, registering them through their workplaces, but because of the seasonal nature of farm work, teaching English successfully was not possible.^[5]

Aligning with the American ideal of Republican motherhood, assimilation efforts were eventually redirected toward Mexican women, who were usually in charge of the home and more involved in community institutions like schools than Mexican men. The new goal of Americanization programs then became training Mexican women for domestic work, to help "alleviate the shortage of housemaids, seamstresses, laundresses, and service workers."^[5] By making Mexican women, the homemakers, more American, Americanists hoped that Mexican culture would slowly phase out of immigrants' lives; for example, replacing tortillas with bread during meals. These efforts to push Mexican women into newly-profitable, domestic work outside of the home was met with resistance, which Americanists attributed to machismo in Mexican culture. When naturalization rates of Mexican immigrants did not improve, Americanization programs shifted focus yet again to the implementation of Americanization curriculum in schools, in an effort to teach American values to American-born children of Mexican immigrants. Despite these programs promising full integration into American society, they only provided "idealized versions of American values"^[5] and second-class citizenship, as Mexican immigrants continued to face economic disenfranchisement and their children received an unequal education to their white counterparts.^[5]

Agricultural labor shortages associated with World War II brought on another wave of Mexican immigration to Los Angeles. The bracero program, or guest worker program, was a partnership between the US and Mexican governments, as well as American farms, to bring Mexican agricultural workers to the United States through labor contracts. With a demand for workers that exceeded the supply of labor contracts, the bracero program inadvertently became one of the origins of undocumented immigration from Mexico to the United States.^[6]

As of 2010, about 2.5 million residents of the Greater Los Angeles area are of Mexican American origin/heritage.^[7]

As of 1996 Mexican-Americans make up about 80% of the Latino population in the Los Angeles area.^[8] As of 1996 the Los Angeles region had around 3,736,000 people of Mexican origins.^[9]

There's a shift of second and third generation Mexican-Americans out of Los Angeles into nearby suburbs, such as Ventura County, Orange County, San Diego and the Inland Empire, California region. Mexican and other Latin American immigrants moved in East and South sections of L.A. and sometimes, Asian immigrants moved into historic barrios to become mostly Asian-American areas. Starting in the late 1980s, Downey has become a renowned Latino majority community in Southern California, and the majority of residents moved in were middle or upper-middle class, and second and third generation Mexican-Americans.^[10] The Mexican population is increasing in the Antelope Valley such as Palmdale.^[11]

Suburban cities in Los Angeles County like Azusa, Baldwin Park, City of Industry, Duarte, El Monte, Irwindale, La Puente, Montebello, Rosemead, San Gabriel, South Gate, South El Monte, West Covina, Whittier and especially Pomona have large a Mexican population.^[12][13]

Mexican Americans from Los Angeles have celebrated the Cinco de Mayo holiday since the 1860s. They, along with other Spanish-speaking peoples, celebrate the Day of the Three Wise Kings as a gift giving holiday.^[14]

Zoot suits were a staple of Mexican-American attire in the 1940s. The wearing of soot suits represented rebellion against the injustices of society.^[15]

In the 1990s the quebradita dancing style was popular among Mexican-Americans in Greater Los Angeles.^[16]

The El Centro Cultural de Mexico is located in Santa Ana.

Plaza Mexico is located in Lynwood.^[17]

Two films, Tortilla Soup and Real Women Have Curves, portray Mexican-American families in the Los Angeles area.

Another film that portrays the life of a Mexican-American in Los Angeles is Stand and Deliver, which demonstrates the life of Mexican-American high school students and how they get through their academic struggles, with the help of their teacher, Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos).

Notable Mexican Americans from Los Angeles

• Acuña, Rodolfo (1996). Anything But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles. Verso Books. ISBN 1859840310.
• Alarcon, Rafael; Escala, Luis; Odgers, Olga, eds. (2016). Making Los Angeles Home: The Integration of Mexican Immigrants in the United States. University of California Press. ethnographic and statistical perspectives in a study of Mexican immigrants' strategies for economic, political, social, and cultural integration
• Balderrama, Francisco E.; Santillan, Richard A., eds. (2011). Mexican American Baseball in Los Angeles. Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 9780738581804.
• Lewthwaite, Stephanie (2009). Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles: A Transnational Perspective, 1890-1940. University of Arizona Press. ISBN 9780816526338.
• Monroy, Douglas (1999). Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520920774.
• Lopez, Eduardo F. (2016). "Catholic Education for Mexican Americans in Los Angeles: A Brief Historical Overview" (PDF). Journal of Catholic Education. 19 (2). doi:10.15365/joce.1902082016.
• McConnell, Eileen Díaz (2015). "Hurdles or walls? Nativity, citizenship, legal status and Latino homeownership in Los Angeles". Social Science Research. 53: 19–33. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2015.04.009. PMID 26188435.
• McConnell, Eileen Díaz (2015). Restricted Movement: Nativity, Citizenship, Legal Status, and the Residential Crowding of Latinos in Los Angeles. Vol. 62. pp. 141–162.
• Melero Malpica, Daniel (2008). Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the City of Los Angeles: Social Networks and Social Capital Among Zapotec Workers (PhD). UCLA. ISBN 9780549484936.
• Rendón, Maria G. (2015). "The urban question and identity formation: The case of second-generation Mexican males in Los Angeles". Ethnicities. 15 (2): 165–189. doi:10.1177/1468796814557652. S2CID 147031256.

• "Los Angeles County Chicano Employees Association".
• "Chicano Studies Research Center". University of California Los Angeles.
• "Chicano Rock!". PBS.
• Wick, Julia (May 2, 2021). "L.A.'s history is often whitewashed, romanticized and censored. A new push to tell the truth". LA Times.