After this post, I'll get to the Chinese, another 19th century migration which brown supremacists like to trot out to "prove" 21st century white racism towards themselves.
This post concerns a "back in the day" conversation I had with another whose childhood was prior to the Civil Rights act and started out with a question inspired from a previous post here comparing the differences between northern and southern Italians and likewise Mexicans:
Quote:
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This reminds me of a difference between northern and southern Mexicans, that northern Mexicans tend to look down on southern Mexicans as bumpkins and southern Mexicans tend not to trust northern Mexicans. One person who grew up in the culture (one parent was northern Mexican, the other southern) and had employed Mexicans over the years informed me some years ago that northerners were more "crafty" or "calculating", the general preference of that person was to hire southern Mexicans.
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I wish I had more of an ability to relate this conversation, I feel quite inadequate to relate the full depth and meaning of it. Here is a very brief synopsis.
The woman, herself a child of Mexicans (who were born in Mexico), said that she doesn't know or care in the slightest what Mexican nationals think now (essentially, screw them), this was a while ago - the late 1950's.
In her time Northern Mexicans hopped back and forth across the border, might work a couple weeks here or a month there before going back. They were all "rah rah rah Mexico", were more about having a party than working. My perception is that she considered Northern Mexicans to be "border trash".
Southern Mexicans came to stay. They took a job and stayed with it, were much more reliable than northern Mexicans. Their children learned English in school when there was no such thing as bilingual programs or curriculum which peddled the notion that they needed to "keep their heritage".
There were correspondence courses for the adults to learn English, which they enrolled in - as a teenager she had helped a number of them to learn English in that manner.
The conversation rolled into the descendants of Mexicans, that the third and fourth generations just go to hell, many discovered welfare, food stamps and Medi-Cal. (This corresponds with a study I saw that shows that the first American generation generally does better economically than the Mexican immigrant generation, but the second American generation economically regresses below the first, there were no reasons in the study stated as to why)
There was more concerning reasons of why this may be so, but her reasoning boiled down to (my interpretation of her words fully follows) that many of the grand kids became spoiled with a sense of entitlement and took the easy way out. I know this woman grew up dirt poor, and there was no such thing as welfare for "Mexicans" (and not many others, if at all) in her day - you worked and scrounged and made do with what you had or you went hungry and ragged. Maybe I'm off the mark, but I believe that too much today poverty is defined by a lack of a certain amount of possessions rather than degree of destitution.
I do not have the long term experience one way or another, but I was told once upon a time that if someone gets used to living on unemployment or disability, they will never want to go back. What amazes me are the amount of people (I've personally met) who have Medi-Cal but can afford to drink in bars and smell like weed.