S. democracy. In 1998, the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA convened several middle-aged Latinos to discuss the Latino society in California while they were growing up. Born in the 1940s and 1950s, they remembered a much more segregated and exclusionary society than the one today, and the hurt remains: They described growing up in a situation in which being Latino was simply not validated. "Back then [1950s]... who cares? You're just a Mexican, you're a 'beaner,' you know, you're a 'greaser'" (Hayes-Bautista, 2004, p. 14). The Mexicans born after the war had a very different experience than their parents and grandparents. The children of the postwar era were mostly children of U.S.-born Mexicans and grew up in barrios populated almost completely by the U.S.-born residents (Hayes-Bautista, 2004, p. 19)

Much did not change for the Mexicans from the 1940s to 1960s, with discrimination and segregation continuing to be the norm. Many school districts continued to send children to Mexican schools, based on the theory that the students were such slow learners they would hold back white student levels. In 1944, the parents of nine-year-old Sylvia Mendez' moved to the largely non-Hispanic white community of Westminster in Orange County and tried unsuccessfully to enroll her in the neighborhood school. This school was a source of community pride and the ramshackle Mexican school was located adjacent to a dairy farm (Hayes-Bautista, 2004, p. 24). Her father...

It stipulated in Los Angeles, for example, that "No portion of the herein described property shall ever be sold, conveyed, leased, occupied by, or rented to any person of an Asiatic or African race... Nor to any person of the Mexican race" (ibid).
The 1960s saw the beginning of a major change in civil rights across the entire United States for Mexican-Americans as well as blacks and other minorities. At this time, the Chicano movement was established and grew strong, with a strong emphasis on politics and law through such groups as the United Farm Workers. This heralded in a new, but still very difficult time for Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants that continues today.

References sited

Hayes-Bautista, David E. Latinos in the Golden State. Berkley: University of California Press, 2004.

Kowalski, Kathiann. Life in the Barrio. Cobblestone (2004) 25.5.

Menchaca, Martha. Mexican Outsiders. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.

Moore, Shirley Ann Wilson. We feel the want of protection: The politics of law and race in California, 1848-1878. California History (2003) 81:3-4, 96(31).

Urban History Review Becoming Mexican-American: ethnicity, culture and identity in Chicano Los Angeles,…