IMMIGRATION: A clash of cultures

Remembrances of U.S. history are often cast in the lore of the Great Melting Pot, the nostalgic notion that Americans not only tolerated differences, they embraced them.

But immigration has from the start created flash points over whether newcomers were becoming American enough, fast enough. Beginning with Germans in the 17th century and continuing through the Irish, Italians, Chinese and others in the 19th century, successive waves of immigrants arrived to a welcome of resentment and fear.

More than 12,00 Latino citizens and illegal immigrants marched together in Austin and rallied at the Capitol last year to press for new laws allowing the immigrants to become U.S. citizens.

Tensions & Alliances: People of Mexican heritage divided To Tejanos, music is sound of heritage Immigrants, citizens marched in unprecedented numbers in 2006 A fight for respect from people seemingly like their own A Chicana questions: Is dwelling on Mexican-heritage tensions fair? East Austin church strives to include immigrants A stranger in a strange land, learning to adapt People of Mexican heritage distinguished by wide diversity History, experience deeply intertwined

Now, a microcosm of the perennial backlash is playing out in Austin between some Mexican Americans and first-generation Mexican immigrants who are in the country illegally. The friction, largely nonconfrontational, is tied to the explosive growth of both populations and to the national debate over illegal immigration.

Tensions are spilling over in the workplace, churches, schools, neighborhoods, cyberspace and letters to the editor. They are even a factor — unintentionally, supporters say — in a long-running campaign to get Tejano music back on local radio.

"It's a culture clash," said Leonard Davila, 59, a self-described Chicano — an American of Mexican descent — and a leader in the radio campaign, whose supporters say they feel snubbed by corporations that they say chase immigrant dollars while abandoning Mexican American consumers.

The rancor of the immigration debate subjects many Mexican Americans to hostility from some non-Hispanics who equate being Hispanic with being illegal, a presumption that ignores their centuries-old presence here and implies a connection with Mexico that no longer exists. That hostility breeds Mexican American resentment of the undocumented and reawakens painful memories of the Mexican American struggle to be counted as equals in U.S. society.

"The white guy says, 'Those Mexicans,' but the Mexican says, 'We're not Mexicans,' " Davila said.

That uneasy feeling of standing outside both societies is reflected in a phrase uttered by generations of Mexican Americans: "Ni soy de aquí, ni soy de allá." (I'm neither from here nor from there.)

Ironically, grievances about cultural differences often mirror the rhetoric of the immigration debate.

Though a wide body of research indicates that Mexican and Spanish-speaking immigrants are "becoming American" in time, some Mexican Americans with long-established roots in Austin assert that many of the newcomers are not fitting in: They're not learning English, not assimilating, and they don't care to. The natives rail about immigrants who don't appreciate Mexican American culture and upset venerable neighborhoods, packing rental houses in large numbers, turning front yards into parking lots and drinking outdoors long after bedtime.

Another common complaint: that the newcomers are too demanding, expecting special treatment from social service agencies or local businesses or even churches.

"They want us to adapt to their ways," Davila said, recounting a story told to him about immigrants who groused about the Tex-Mex fare at a popular East Seventh Street restaurant because it wasn't real Mexican food.

"Mexicans put us down," said Leon Ramirez, a 62-year-old manager at another Tex-Mex restaurant in Austin, where he estimates that 90 percent of the kitchen and wait staff is from Mexico. "They say, 'You're pocho.' " Pocho is a slur Mexicans use to describe Mexican Americans who "act American" or forgot their heritage.

Ramirez says his co-workers, some of whom he said he suspects are here illegally, routinely deride Mexican American customers behind their back with put-downs about their dress, mannerisms and culture.

But some Mexican immigrants say it's the other way around: that it is Mexican Americans who discriminate against people of their own heritage, treating them disrespectfully and without compassion, giving them poorer service than others.

"Not only have I witnessed these things, I've lived them," said Juan Manuel, a painter from Veracruz, who asked that his surname not be used because he is living in the United States illegally.

It is one of many paradoxes infusing a complex phenomenon that defies stereotypes and challenges expectations.

"It's kind of surprising how poorly some Mexican Americans can treat Mexican immigrants, given that they have so much in common," said the Rev. John Korcsmar, pastor of Dolores Catholic Church in East Austin, which like many Central Texas congregations has seen an influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants.

Korcsmar and other Catholic leaders say that in their parishes, it is often Mexican Americans who treat undocumented immigrants the worst.

"You would think that they would say, 'Gee, somehow we're related' or 'We're both Mexicans,' but it can be very bad," Korcsmar said.

"They're not us," said Danny Camacho, 61, an amateur historian who chronicles Austin's Mexican American history and who can trace his own family's roots in Austin to the 1870s.

"It might be cold-hearted, but we don't" share a sense of identity, Camacho said. "If anything, we Mexican Americans who have been here for a time see (undocumented Mexican immigrants) in some aspects as a nuisance."

Feeding that annoyance, Camacho said, are complaints that immigrants are changing the fabric of neighborhoods with their living arrangements and late-night lifestyles.

A volunteer at Metz Elementary near his East Austin home, he and others say they see growing friction in the schools between U.S. Hispanic children and Spanish-speaking immigrants. At Metz, he says, kids ridicule the newcomers' culture and their inability to speak English.

"What the native population is responding to is not what those immigrants are going to look like 20 years from now. They're dealing with what's immediate," said Roberto Suro, who until recently headed the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington-based research organization. "It's very hard to say under any circumstance that, 'Look, everything is going to be all right in 20 years.' "

The conflicts are remarkable on several fronts. Tensions over illegal Latino immigration have famously erupted in the U.S. before, but usually between majority white populations and immigrants in communities that had never had significant Latino populations.

In Texas, however, the Mexican American presence is as old as the state itself, and Texas and Mexican histories are inextricably intertwined.

Noteworthy, too, is that the rancor is occurring in Austin, which cultivates an image of tolerance and where last year, Latino citizens and illegal immigrants first marched together — more than 12,000 strong — to press for new laws allowing the immigrants to become U.S. citizens.

Such ironies complicate discussion of issues already fraught with conflicted feelings and cultural sensitivity land mines. "Brown vs. brown" clashes trouble people of Mexican heritage in both groups.

Analysts point out that America's earliest immigrants — Irish, Italians and other Europeans — suffered some of the most hateful rhetoric from U.S. citizens of their own heritage who settled here during earlier immigration waves.

"They would say 'They're ignorant; they're backwards; they eat stinky foods.' There was this fear they would ruin the country," said Luis Plascencia, an assistant professor of anthropology at Arizona State University.

Clashes are also common in areas where immigrant populations soar. The Austin metro area's foreign-born population (legal and illegal) exploded nearly 2,500 percent, from about 6,000 in 1970 to 153,000 in 2000, according to a 2004 Brookings Institution report, which named Austin an emerging destination for immigrants. Fifty-five percent of new immigrants were from Mexico.

"Before, we didn't have as many illegals," Ramirez said. "Growing up (in Manchaca), I didn't see any."

Today, neighborhoods in large pockets of the city bear witness to a booming immigrant population. Restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, beauty salons and other businesses that cater to Spanish-speaking clienteles dot the landscape.

Though much research indicates that first-generation Spanish-speaking immigrants are indeed assimilating, learning English and becoming citizens if legally able, the process takes a generation or two. The inability of many Mexican Americans to speak Spanish today is perhaps the most prominent evidence that it occurs.

Yet Mexicans often take offense when Chicanos don't converse with them in Spanish, unaware that they may not understand the language or aren't fluent enough.

"Some of us believe that Chicanos think they are too good for us" to speak Spanish, Juan Manuel said.

The language issue, another irony in a state where older generations of Mexican Americans were punished for speaking Spanish in school, highlights the false expectations that strain relations between locals and newcomers.

Here, in a land that was once Mexico, the Mexican American presence goes back a dozen generations or more, before Texas became a republic. Yet most Mexican American adults also have an immediate or inherited memory of a time when their people battled racial discrimination.

"There's a good deal of understandable pride among (them) about the struggle," Suro said.

But Mexican immigrants know nothing about that and shouldn't be expected to, he added: "They don't get discriminated against for being Mexican in Mexico."

Unburdened by such history, they see the United States simply as the land of opportunity, Suro said. Many quickly reap the gains of their labor, opening bank accounts, buying cars and homes — stoking resentment among native citizens.

"They look at us and say, 'How has he, who's been here just (a few months), afford to buy a nice truck or a house?' " said Jaime, a 27-year-old from the state of Mexico who works in the kitchen of an upscale Austin restaurant and is in the country illegally. "They resent that the immigrants are progressing."

Gonzalo Barrientos, a former state senator from Austin and a soldier in the Chicano civil rights struggle, said Mexican Americans he's spoken with don't begrudge anyone getting ahead; they simply have a problem with those who are in the country illegally taking jobs from citizens, and driving down wages and receiving social services.

"I've heard a story of someone having a baby and paying (the hospital) little or nothing and some Hispanics saying 'I paid $5,000 or $10,000, and I don't have anything,' " Barrientos said.

"I, along with thousands of other Chicanos, fought for equal rights, fairness and justice. But there are some of those people feeling now that Mexican immigrants are taking advantage of all that while they didn't drop an ounce of sweat to achieve it," he said.

Employers who take advantage of immigrants willing to accept cheap wages must bear some responsibility for the perception that illegal immigrants are taking jobs from Mexican Americans, said Rita Gonzales-Garza, a leader with the local League of United Latin American Citizens.

"I don't necessarily blame the immigrants for taking those jobs," Gonzales-Garza said.

Unschooled in the Chicano civil rights fight and surrounded by Mexican Americans in the workplace and in working-class barrios, the immigrants question why the Americans haven't achieved more considering their advantages of citizenship and language, said Plascencia, who conducted extensive interviews with Mexican immigrants in Austin from 2003 to 2005.

"From their perspective, these people were born here, and they've had all the opportunities that this great country offers, so why aren't they all middle class or wealthy?" Plascencia said.

"They don't know about 'Mexican swimming days' at public pools in Texas or that there were restaurants with signs, "No Mexicans or Dogs." They don't know the long history, everything from Jim Crow to employment discrimination to segregation."

In his interviews, Plascencia found that conflicts in the workplace usually involved issues that can flare between people of any race or ethnicity.

"Immigrants might say, 'The Chicano is always sticking it to us,' but really it's about the supervisor, that he's a slave driver or whatever," he said. "But because sometimes the middle men are Mexican Americans, it gets filtered through Mexican American vs. Mexican kind of lenses."

A 2002 Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that foreign-born Latinos are more likely than native-born Latinos to report that same-heritage discrimination is a problem.

False expectations, Suro said, are a contributing factor. He explains what can happen when immigrants encounter someone in a position of authority — it could be anyone from a police officer to a sales clerk — who looks like them: "If there's an expectation they're going to relate to them as paisanos rather than as someone in a position of authority, you're going to get friction."

Yet Suro and others point to clear signs of alliances, such as the April 2006 march in downtown Austin. Some recent immigrants report that they get along fine with Mexican Americans and are grateful for their help in finding jobs and navigating the English-speaking world.

Polling consistently shows that native-born Hispanics who have been in the United States for generations have more positive views toward recent immigrants than do non-Hispanics. Among Latinos, however, negative views of immigrants are highest in the native-born, middle-aged, middle class group.

"So there's some sympathy, but that doesn't mean that you eliminate all the friction," Suro said.

Language is the most important guidepost when measuring how well immigrants assimilate in a new country, analysts agree. And research indicates that English is the favored language for the children and grandchildren of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the U.S.

A 2004 analysis of census data by the State University of New York at Albany found that 72 percent of Hispanic children whose families have been here three generations or more spoke English exclusively. Researchers said the results closely mirror historical patterns set by the descendants of most Europeans immigrants in the late 19th century who became exclusively English-speakers within three generations. They found one notable exception: Larger percentages of Hispanics maintained bilingualism in the third generation than did their earlier European counterparts.

Another prime marker of acculturation: becoming a naturalized citizen. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of naturalized citizens from Mexico rose by 144 percent from 1995 to 2005, the most of any major sending country.

47 Percentage of Latinos who think Latinos discriminating against other Latinos is a major problem

57 Percentage of foreign-born Latinos who think immigrants have to speak English to say that they are part of American society

To me this is more of an issue that blood is thicker than water. From what I have observed over a number of years is that legal hispanics will always side with illegals.

Unfortunately generally true. Depends on the circumstances. Many Hispanic families are part legal and part illegal so they will enable illegals. Where Hispanics are concentrated into communities and barrios this is true. When they are spread out not so true. The university educated Hispanics will tend not to coddle illegals. Many times legal Hispanics are the employers of illegals and get rich off them

I know an 80yo hispanic who was born in this country. She has been saying for years that we need to take in the “Poor Mexican”. She has no qualms about the illegal alien. As a matter of fact she buys food stamps from them.

Don't doubt it

I also know that many of the government employees doling out food stamps and welfare in the Valley are legal hispanics. They have no problem accepting lies from illegals.

This is going on all over

Today's "legal hispanic immigrant" is very likely the beneficiary of one of the countless quazi-amnesty programs. Hurricane in Honduras? Quake in Nicaragua? War in El Salvador? Or just snuck in from Mexico 25 years ago.....

We have had programs for all of them, leading to citizenship for the parasites that just never go home.

Then these former-illegals-turned-legals naturally become the leading enablers and door openers for each following wave of illegals....soon to be made legal.

And the process goes on and on and on.

State by state, it’ll have a strong effect.

I’m hearing that I-10 out of OK into TX looks like the “Grapes of Wrath,” with illegals loading up and leaving. (Better to leave in your car for another state, than to be deported by ICE and lose the car.)

All it’ll take is one but I think that’s ultimately what they want to happen in Oklahoma anyway is for the illegals to go elsewhere. What we really need is for every state to pass the same kind of legislation, including about anchor babies.

Oklahoma is one of the most “Indian” states in the Union. With plenty or real Indians and real reservations. With lots of whites and blacks with Indian blood in them. Just look it as the the American Indians running the Mexican Indians out of town

The best plan is for the states with cojones and American pride to enact anti illegal alien legislation. Illegals keep trying to dodge this state by state, finally give up and go home to Mexico and the wonderful nations south of it

Be like Rawhide-
Get those doggies rollin, rollin , rollin, rollin
Head ‘em up
Move ‘em out!
Rawhide!

I agree with you regarding the amnesty programs for the different countries. We haven’t had a decent president regarding illegal immigration for 25 years and that is starting with Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush. Not a one of them controlled our borders.

Most politicians will sell us all , using our money, for a measley vote.

Many of the gangs we have today started from the citizens of the amnesty programs. The recipients of the amnesty didn’t appreciate anything. I think all of these programs were started because of some UN great American experiment. What a sell out.

However,I really like Oklahoma’s approach to the anchor baby. If something doesn’t happen soon, our children and grandchildren will not have a chance in the country that their ancestors fought and died for.

Worst things I ever heard said about Hispanics were said by Mexicans. Worst things I ever heard about Blacks were said by Hispanics.

None of this is simple or obvious.

The best plan is for the states with cojones and American pride to enact anti illegal alien legislation.>

Those would be the south and southwestern states, liberal legislators in the rustbelt would faint or have a heart attack at even the thought of doing such a thing.

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