Becoming Mexican American

In Chapter 4, Sánchez analyzes the perceptions of Euro-American transplants in LA regarding Mexican migrants and their culture, primarily through the use of “Americanization” programs designed to implement consistent cultural practices. In addition to non-white immigrants, the population boom in LA from 1895 to 1930 was also spurred on by the movement of Anglo Americans from the East coast and Midwest region of the United States. Sánchez points out that LA culture would have been just as unfamiliar to Anglo Americans from elsewhere in the US as it would have been to newly arrived Mexicans. Anglo Americans, however, were compelled to redefine that culture to conform to their vision of the Protestant industrial order, and the programs they designed to integrate foreigners into that order revealed the kinds of assumptions they held regarding Mexicans and their cultural practices.

The LA Chamber of Commerce invested heavily in advertising campaigns to attract upper- and middle-class Anglo Americans to settle in the city, leading to the growth of a relatively homogenous population of white, elderly settlers who injected a “midwestern flavor” into Southern California. Sánchez notes that the middle-class Midwesterners who came to dominate city politics and shape public culture were steeped in the Protestant worldview, which manifested in nativist and anti-urban tendencies in favor of a pastoral suburbia governed by small-town values.