Mexican Americans In The 1960s Research Paper

“The origins of Mexicans in the Making of America begin with ‘first contact’ between Anglos and Mexican citizens in Texas in the 1820s and the annexation of the northern half of Mexico in 1848” (Foley, 16), leading to blatant racism, oppression, and stereotyping against Mexicans for decades to come. Furthermore, the mistreatment and disrespect towards Latino Americans of Mexican descent set the ball rolling for the first generation’s assimilationist politics of the 1940s-1950s followed by the second generation’s more fundamental politics of the 1960s and 1970s—two very distinct historical eras where different generations of Mexican Americans politically organized to protect themselves against deliberate forms discrimination. Legal cases/events,
political organizations, and key activists during these two periods explicitly challenged various forms of Mexican segregation and discrimination in the United States, especially in Texas.
In 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt composed the Good Neighbor Policy during World War II, forcing the United States government to take an active interest in the “forgotten people” of the Southwest as an instrument of foreign policy. Manuel Avila Camacho, the Mexican president at the time, and Ezequiel Padilla, his foreign minister, pressured the United States to end discrimination against Mexicans in the American Southwest while encouraging Mexican resident nationals in the United States to join the U.S. Army.