Americans are reminded almost daily of
the Negro's checkered progress toward equality. Seldom, by contrast,
are they apprised of the social and economic lag that afflicts the
nation's second largest disadvantaged minority: the 4,677,000
Mexican-Americans of the U.S. Southwest—proud, poor and increasingly
protest-minded. From the Rio Grande to the Russian River, in the bleak
barrios of East Los Angeles and the tar-paper colonias of the San
Joaquin Valley, the Mexican minority is struggling to articulate its
anger. Vague and inchoate, it is directed toward at least three targets: the
“Anglo,” for his cavalier indifference to Latin contributions to
Southwest history and culture; the Negro, for having won aid and
attention by rioting in city slums while the Mexican-American kept his
cool in his own ghetto; and his own people, for their self-defeating
pride and insistence on remaining aliens in their ancestral homeland.
The Mexican-American, after all, is predated in the Southwest by only
the buffalo and the Plains Indian; he has never put his psychological
signature to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded the Southwest
to the U.S. after the Mexican War of 1846. Bottles & Ols. Throughout the Southwest's “serape belt,”
Mexican-Americans are feeling strapped. Federal poverty projects in the
Negro neighborhoods of Los Angeles outnumber by 3 to 1 those for
Mexican-Americans. From 1950 to 1960, the Mexican-American high school
dropout rate held steady at 75%, while the Negro was making significant
strides forward in education.
More than a third of the nation's Mexican-American families live below the poverty line of $3,000 a year, while
their birth rate, sustained by Catholic-inspired resistance to
contraception, is soaring far higher than that of any other group.
Though 85% of all Mexican-Americans are pochos—native-born citizens of
the U.S. —many speak only Spanish or just enough English to deal with
cops and employers. Nowhere is the pocho's plight—or potential power—more evident than in
the monotonous, sun-scabbed flatlands of Ea,st Los Angeles, where
600,000 Mexican-Americans live. At the confluence of the swooping
freeways, the L.A. barrio begins. In tawdry taco joints and rollicking
cantinas, the reek of cheap sweet wine competes with the fumes of
frying tortillas. The machine-gun patter of slang Spanish is
counterpointed by the bellow of lurid hot-rods driven by tattooed
pachucos. The occasional appearance of a neatly turned-out Agringado clashes incongruously
with the weathered-leather look of the cholo . To the barrio dwellers, the rest of the world
is Gringolandia. Few venture forth except to attend the fights at
Olympic Auditorium, where their ebullient ols and accurately hurled
wine bottles give much needed support to Mexican club fighters with
more guts than science.
