Mexican-American Stereotypes

The animosity between Mexicans and Americans had an extensive history, based on various stereotypes and a lack of cultural understanding. Americans in the Southwest believed that Mexicans were, “lazy, shiftless, jealous, cowardly, bigoted, superstitious, backward, and immoral.” The Mexicans, however, thought Americans were “arrogant, overbearing, aggressive, conniving, rude, unreliable, and dishonest.” Tensions peaked during the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War, in which the United States rapidly and cruelly dispatched their Mexican foes, committing horrendous atrocities that General Winfield Scott claimed would “make Heaven weep and every American of Christian morals blush for his country.” To many Americans, the war affirmed their beliefs

that Mexicans were an inferior group of people. Thus, when the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ended the war and awarded the United States half of Mexico’s land, and, with it, 75,000-100,000 of its people, Americans quickly began to mistreat and take advantage of their new neighbors.
Mistreatment came in two forms—physical violence and structural political and economic abuse. Regarding physical violence, throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, news of the murder of Mexicans was increasingly common. In Corpus Christi, Texas, an 1886 New York Times article described how the town’s citizens raided the constable’s house (prison) in order to seize and execute two Mexican-Americans accused of stealing horses. In Santa Ana, California, a mob took an alleged Mexican-American murderer from his prison cell at one in the morning and lynched him from a telegraph pole. The article justified such treatment by claiming that, “while generally condemned, the lynching is the result of a belief that this Mexican’s friends intended to swear him free and that the court would be unable to punish him.” By differentiating this man’s lynching from what is “generally condemned,” the New York Times condones such mob justice and presents it as an acceptable method of enforcing the law, demonstrating how such discrimination and mistreatment of Mexican Americans was normalized in the United States. And those were only official accounts of the abuse, which the American public could justify because the Mexican-Americans they were killing were allegedly criminals. In William Carrigan and Clive Webb’s discussion of the lynching of Mexican-Americans, they describe other, unreported attacks, such as the 20-year-old Mexican laborer who was “bound to a mesquite tree, doused with kerosene and burned alive.” They also report that, while only 547 cases of lynching have been identified between 1848 and 1928, the real number of Mexican-Americans murdered is somewhere in the thousands. Violence against Mexican-Americans in the Southwest was so prevalent in part because it was almost officially sanctioned, particularly in Texas, where the infamous Texas Rangers embraced, and contributed to, the killing of Mexican-Americans. In fact, McWilliams described the Rangers as having, “degenerated into common-man killers” and claimed that, “There is no penalty for killing for no jury along the border would ever convict a white man for shooting a Mexican.” Thus, Mexican-Americans faced the threat of significant physical violence throughout their daily lives, with no relief in sight.
In addition to physical violence, Mexican-Americans encountered significant structural challenges to life in the United States.

As Mexican-Americans struggled to adjust to being governed by new laws and a new judicial system, Americans quickly took advantage of their ignorance. They stole Mexican cattle and sold the herds to American beef companies, and acquired “’large bodies of land that now have enormous value…sometimes legally and sometimes illegally, for almost nothing.” An example of Mexican-American struggles with corruption comes from Maria Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, an 1885 novel that told the story of a Mexican landowner in California, Don Mariano, and a newly wealthy American squatter, Clarence Darrell. In the chapter “The Don’s View of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” Don Mariano reflects upon how poorly the Treaty has been executed. Although the agreement supposedly protected the lands held by Mexicans (now Mexican-Americans), these landowners soon encountered issues with squatters stealing their land and killing their cattle. The Americans did not feel the Mexicans deserved so much land and made efforts to “take-back” what they thought was rightfully theirs. When asked if there are laws protecting property in California, Don Mariano responds, “‘yes, some sort of laws, which in my case seem more intended to help the law-breakers than to protect the law-abiding.’” Published only 39 years after the beginning of the Mexican-American War, the novel reflected many of the author’s personal experiences growing up and demonstrated a truth many Mexican-Americans came to know regarding officially sanctioned

injustice.
Rather than help, however, police would contribute to the crime by taking Mexican-American land and selling it under the guise that the former owners had failed to pay their “taxes.” If Mexican-Americans attempted to fight back in the court, they faced unfavorable juries, corrupt lawyers, and high legal fees. The loss of land, accompanied by an increasingly industrial economy, resulted in the loss of work for many Mexican-Americans. They were forced to enter the unskilled, unspecialized labor force, which paid poorly and contributed to a rapid deterioration of their economic status. The Mexican-Americans’ worsened economic status was accompanied by a lack of political representation, as policies of ethnic exclusion, such as “White Man’s Primaries,” where one had to pay a tax in order to vote, prevented Mexican-Americans from contributing at the polls. Thus, physical violence, and structural injustice pushed Mexican-Americans to the margins of the United States.