Becoming Mexican American

“Taking an approach largely derived from Amilear Cabral and Antonio Gramsci, [historian Juan] Gómez-Quiñones focused his attention on cultural resistance as the ‘negation of assimilation’ against dominant and dominating values. For him, as for [Oscar] Handlin, there existed two cultural poles: ‘Mexicano’ (or Old World ethnic for Handlin) ‘versus Anglo United States.’ Chicanos stood as a subculture between these two poles where ‘culture and identity is a safe-house and thus provides strategic and tactical elasticity vis-a-vis the dominant society.’ In this admittedly polemical essay, Gómez-Quiñones laid the basis for others’ writing on Chicano culture when he argued that ‘to acculturate is not merely to exercise a cultural preference but to go to the other side.’” 

Within his introductory discussion of the evolution of Chicano cultural studies, Sánchez emphasizes the role of resistance in the formation of Chicano identity. The Mexican community of Los Angeles provided a haven for immigrants to preserve their cultural practices while refusing to conform to the city’s dominant Anglo American culture. For Gómez-Quiñones, as for many Mexican immigrants, acculturation represented a betrayal of one’s identity. A generation of Chicano scholars adhered to this idea of Mexican and American cultures being polar opposites, but Sánchez chooses to focus on the overlap in the space between the two.

“In the United States, new ‘traditions’ had to be invented and older customs discarded or radically transformed at the same time that Mexicans in Mexico were creating ‘traditions’ to cement national identity. The early twentieth century was certainly a period tailor-made for the invention of traditions on both sides of the border.” 

The early 20th century witnessed the rise of nationalism across the world, including in Mexico and the United States. Here, Sánchez observes that traditions are a human invention, dictated by the dominant cultural force in a social group. The traditions invented by the Mexican and US governments were developed to secure cultural hegemony for one group, while older customs were either discarded or transformed to erase or acculturate other cultural groups.

“These efforts reflect attempts by sovereign states to control the ethnic identity of a people in turbulent social and economic times in order to bring cohesion to their respective countries by implementing what one scholar has called the ‘fictive identity’ of the nation-state.” 

In addition to inventing traditions, national governments during the 20th century strove to create a shared national mythos and patriotic qualities that its citizens should embody. These components comprised the “fictive identity” of the nation-state—a