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This chapter describes in detail the three worlds, focusing on the factors—labor, race, and politics—that will best explain the differential incorporation of blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants into the American welfare state and the scope, form, and function of relief provision across regions. On the eve of the Great Depression, the vast majority of European immigrants lived in the Northeast and Midwest, Mexicans lived overwhelmingly in the Southwest, while most blacks still lived in the South. So different were their experiences with the racial, political, and labor market systems in these regions that these groups could be said to be living in separate worlds. Each of them suffered from significant discrimination at the hands of native-born whites in the early part of the twentieth century. European immigrants were largely included in the social welfare system, blacks were largely excluded, while Mexicans were often expelled from the nation simply for requesting assistance.

This chapter looks at the emergence of the perception of a “Mexican dependency problem,” which gained early traction in Los Angeles. Prior to the 1920s, social workers in the city were cautiously optimistic that Mexicans could be assimilated, and they saw relief as one step in that process. As Mexicans made greater use of relief, however, social workers' initial optimism waned. By the mid-1920s, they became convinced that Mexicans were a dependent and diseased population, lacking in thrift and ambition. They decided that their efforts at Americanizing this group had failed. Concerned that charity funds were essentially subsidizing the agricultural industry, they came to believe that Mexicans represented an illegitimate economic and social burden to “American taxpayers.” Mexicans, they concluded, were racially inassimilable after all.

This chapter traces the emergence of an immigration-control apparatus on the boundary line and how political and economic conditions influenced how and against whom the nation-states used it. As U.S. immigration laws increasingly defined Mexicans as outsiders who could not freely cross the boundary line, the divisive power of the border became more apparent. This sense of division between the United States and Mexico and the United States' ongoing attempts to assert its authority over when and how Mexican immigrants cross the border, which reached one peak in the deportations of the Great Depression, continue to define the border today.

This chapter details variation in relief officials' efforts to use their own funds to expel destitute individuals from the nation. Relief agencies across the country helped repatriate immigrants during the Great Depression. However, the scale, scope, and character of these efforts differed drastically depending on the target of repatriation. Relief officials both inside and outside the Southwest used their own funds to repatriate Mexicans who requested relief assistance. These officials conducted mass-removal programs, often using coercive practices, targeting Mexicans and Mexican Americans alike, and placing greater emphasis on the economic savings than on the effects on those repatriated. Where European immigrants were concerned, however, repatriation programs developed on a more limited “casework basis,” where the needs and wishes of the individual were paramount.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the three worlds of relief created by the intersection of labor, race, and politics in welfare state development. Blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants inhabited three separate worlds in the first third of the twentieth century, each characterized by its own system of race and labor market relations and its own distinct political system. From these worlds—and each group's place within them—three separate perspectives emerged about each group's propensity to become dependent on relief. The distinct political systems, race and labor market relations, and ideologies about each group's proclivity to use relief, in turn, influenced the scope, reach, and character of the relief systems that emerged across American communities.

This chapter examines variation in the extent to which relief officials cooperated with the Immigration Service to expel dependent aliens. Frustrated by the inability and sometimes unwillingness of immigration authorities to deport Mexicans en masse, relief and other public officials in Los Angeles took matters into their own hands. They asked the Immigration Service to conduct raids in their communities to round up deportable aliens, and they invited the Immigration Service to set up shop in their welfare bureaus to interrogate all aliens applying for relief. Aside from the protests of the Mexican community and some business leaders, there was little dissent to this course of action; elected officials approved of these measures, as did local private relief officials. However, the situation was very different in northeastern and midwestern cities. When federal immigration and a few elected officials tried to find ways to expel dependent aliens in Chicago, for example, public and private relief officials came to their defense.

This chapter focuses on the first New Deal and access to Federal Emergency Relief, as well as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and the Civil Works Administration. Despite the New Deal's nationalizing reforms, intended largely to standardize relief policies across the country, local political economies and racial regimes continued to influence the administration of relief. Like blacks, Mexicans gained significantly greater access to relief during the New Deal, although they continued to face racial discrimination at the local level. Citizenship barriers were also typically strongest for local public work programs out West, and Mexican Americans were sometimes wrongly denied work relief on the assumption that they were non-citizens. The largest relief program during the first New Deal was the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), which brought blacks and Mexicans unprecedented access to relief.

This chapter focuses on the Social Security Act and the disparate treatment of blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants in the administration of Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Aid to Dependent Children, and Old Age Assistance. Though framed as legislation that would help the “average citizen,” scholars have shown that the Social Security Act in fact excluded the vast majority of blacks from the most generous social insurance programs, relegating them to meager, decentralized, and demeaning means-tested programs. European immigrants, by contrast, benefited from many of the provisions of the Social Security Act, and in at least some respects, they benefited more than even native-born whites. The net result of these policies was that blacks were disproportionately shunted into categorical assistance programs with low benefit levels, European immigrants were disproportionately covered under social insurance regardless of citizenship, and Mexicans were often shut out altogether.

This concluding chapter summarizes the principal findings and offers some reflections on the boundaries of social citizenship and the role of race and immigration in American social welfare provision. Taken together, the treatment of blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants provides a nuanced picture of how race, citizenship, and nativity served as dividing lines between those who were judged worthy of assistance and those who were not. Despite persistent and widespread nativism, European immigrants were included within the boundaries of social citizenship while Mexicans were left on the periphery, granted limited inclusion at times, completely excluded at other times, and in some instances expelled from the nation entirely. Ultimately, the different treatment of blacks, European immigrants and Mexicans reflected the worlds each group inhabited—worlds bound by both regional political economies and each group's social position.

This chapter uses the available microdata from the U.S. decennial Census to provide a sweeping account of the evolution of the Mexican-born workforce in the United States throughout the entire twentieth century. In particular, it describes the evolution of the relative skills and economic performance of Mexican immigrants and contrasts this evolution to that experienced by other immigrant groups arriving in the United States during the period. It also examines the costs and benefits of this influx. Specifically, it shows how the Mexican influx has altered economic opportunities in the most affected labor markets and discusses how the relative prices of goods and services produced by Mexican immigrants may have changed over time.

This chapter examines the assimilation of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. labor market. It studies the relation between gender and assimilation in labor supply and wages, both within and across generations. It shows that there is a much more traditional gender division of labor in the family in Mexico than among Mexican immigrants in the United States, with women in Mexico having considerably lower labor force participation and higher fertility than their ethnic counterparts in the United States. It documents a dramatic rate of assimilation in the labor supply of Mexican immigrant women. After twenty years in the United States, the very large initial differences in female labor supply between Mexican women and other women have been virtually eliminated. Further, the labor supply gap remains small in the second and third generations.

This chapter discusses why the American public has a significantly more negative opinion of Mexican immigrants than Asian immigrants. Anti-immigrant sentiment is directed almost exclusively at Mexicans, and Asian immigrants are rarely the target of any public hostility. Mexican immigrants are seen as more disruptive because of their perceived size, their status as predominantly illegal and unskilled immigrant workers, and their apparent unwillingness to assimilate culturally. In contrast, Asians are viewed as a smaller immigrant group that is legal, highly skilled, and better-integrated in American society because of socioeconomic mobility and cultural assimilation. However, the public perception of the disruptive impact of Mexican immigration seems to be exaggerated and Asian immigrants may be more socially and economically disruptive than commonly assumed.

During the 1990s the number of Mexican immigrants living in the United States rose by nearly five million people. In previous decades, nearly 80 percent of Mexican immigrants settled in either California or Texas. Over the 1990s, however, this fraction fell rapidly. Less than one-half of the most recent Mexican immigrants were living in California or Texas in 2000. Many cities that had very few Mexican immigrants in 1990—including Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham, Portland, and Seattle—gained significant Mexican populations. The inflow of Mexican immigrants to Southeastern cities is particularly significant because of the potential impact on the labor market prospects of less-skilled African Americans. This chapter explores potential explanations for the widening geographic distribution of Mexican immigrants and examines the effects of Mexican immigration on local labor markets across the country.

This chapter addresses Mexican Americans’ attitudes about Mexican immigrants in the context of mass immigration. In addition to the boundary that exists between persons of Mexican heritage and non-Latinos, there is another important social boundary operating that highlights Mexican Americans’ understandings of their own ethnicity and American identity—the boundary between Mexican immigrants and themselves. Study respondents displayed a broad range of attitudes toward immigrants, illustrating the internal diversity of the Mexican American population, which runs contrary to their treatment in the media as a homogeneous ethnic group in terms of attitudes, politics, and voting. This chapter also demonstrates the underlying ideologies, philosophies, and rationales that respondents used to justify their immigration positions: whereas many framed their views based on American ideals, only a small minority framed them in terms of their ethnicity, basing their perceptions in an understanding of Mexican immigrants as co-ethnics.

This introduction explores the literature on Mexican immigrants and transnationalism; social movements; state-sponsored contract-labor programs; deportation; and naturalization, assimilation, and Americanization. It explains that a diverse body of Mexican immigrants settled in metropolitan Chicago in the wake of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. These Mexicans subscribed to distinct liberal, radical, and conservative (traditional) political beliefs and engaged in a wide-range of political projects. In the end, the traditionalists were the Mexican immigrants to become U.S. citizens in significant numbers, and they did so, in part, because of the anticlerical and radical legacy of the revolution, which alienated them from the postrevolutionary Mexican state and set them on course to create new lives for themselves in the United States.

This concluding chapter argues that the power imbalance between the United States and Mexico has been reflected in the politics of border control. Although U.S. and Mexican officials continued to negotiate bilateral border agreements and cooperative enforcement measures, the twentieth-century border was most influenced by the United States' political and economic agendas as well as the persistent challenges to those goals. From the 1930s through the end of the twentieth century, U.S. border policy primarily focused on encouraging the flow of transborder trade, while regulating the movement of Mexican immigrants and stemming the stream of illegal drugs across the boundary line.

This chapter examines the physical and geographical circumstances that provided Mexican immigrants of South Chicago with prospects that differed from those in rural communities in Mexico and the other Mexican enclaves of the Chicago area. In particular, it considers how living in a densely populated neighborhood with a large Mexican population allowed for community-building opportunities. It also explores the advantages of Mexicans over African Americans as far as working in steel mills was concerned, along with the role of South Chicago's steel-driven economy in defining how many Mexicans entered and left the community. Finally, it discusses the discrimination and mistreatment experienced by Mexicans in steel mills, the importance of the Spanish language in defining Mexican cultural and political identity, and how the English language helped Mexicans improve their employment prospects.

This chapter examines the various acts of negotiation and resistance in the everyday lives of Mexican immigrants in South Chicago and the surrounding Mexican communities. It explains how Mexicans in the Chicago area developed and used forms of resistance as they sought to improve their everyday life without compromising their sense of pride for Mexico or the facets of their Mexican cultural heritage. The Mexican community showed resistance by acting, reacting, and organizing against harassment, discrimination, and hardship in Chicago. Mexicans in and around South Chicago also formed mutual aid societies, pro-patria clubs, social clubs, and athletic teams in order to reinforce a sense of Mexican cultural solidarity, while simultaneously providing social and economic support for members of their community.

This chapter examines the experiences of Mexican immigrants in South Chicago during the Great Depression. Focusing on the case of Mercedes Rios, an aid worker and community leader, it considers events in the Mexican community of South Chicago during the period immediately leading up to and including the Great Depression. It explores how community functioned, how Mexicans were able survive in Chicago, and how they affected their environment in the Depression era. It also discusses the ways Mexicans in and around South Chicago continuously shaped their everyday lives to adapt to the evolving realities of economic crisis, by seeking either employment or relief. It argues that the events of the Great Depression, including unemployment and repatriation, helped strengthen the Mexican community in South Chicago.