The choice to move to another country doesn't mean that bonds of friendship and family are cut. Many immigrants regularly travel back to their hometown for vacations, special occasions, and to make sure that their children understand their cultural roots.

Immigrant communities often organize along linguistic, religious, and especially regional lines.

The unraveling of the Porfirian regime after 1910 coincided with a heightened demand for Mexican workers elsewhere in the United States, and as Mexican immigration surged, destinations shifted, with California and, to a lesser extent, Chicago, emerging as alternative poles of attraction. This epoch came to an abrupt end in 1929 with the onset of the Great Depression.

Flores' book is a timely contribution to Chicanx history in that it rejects the idea that the middle class is always a community of sell-outs or worse and also problematizes the issue of race.

So, rather than embracing "whiteness," as many scholars, mainly from outside Chicanx studies, have tried to argue about Mexican elites and middle class members, [End Page 300] Flores shows how the evidence in Chicago and Los Angeles runs contrary to the idea that those who embraced U.S. citizenship and might have been considered middle-class necessarily embraced whiteness or were seen by Anglo government officials as white. He shows how rare such claims of whiteness were as Liberals and Traditionalists embraced complex notions of mestizo or Spanish Catholic ancestry, and as most were seen to be darkly complected people by government officials

In this way, they are like Polish and other European immigrants in Chicago who split along nationalist secularist, and Catholic or religious nationalism, as both groups maintained a commitment to their language and country in the first generation.

New Mexicans protected bilingualism to a much greater extent than did Californians.

The letters of the Vallejo family are used to show how subsequent generations of this storied California family quickly and increasingly gained fluency in English and lost Spanish fluency. The Vallejo children, apparently guided by their father, acculturated in a California that was now a U.S. state.

hey encouraged Mexicans to become U.S. citizens and fully assimilate since they could freely be Catholics without the restrictions experienced in Mexico. Unlike the liberals, who saw education as a way to instill Mexican identity and political values—and therefore social consciousness—the traditionalists treated education as a model for individual self-improvement, both spiritually through the church and materially through economic gain. This aligned them more closely with the Progressive goals of education as a means for immigrants to assimilate more seamlessly into an Anglocentric capitalist system

Liberal nationalists who arrived in Chicago during the revolutionary period rejected Anglo assimilation for Mexicans, which put them in direct conflict with the Anglo administrators of the settlement houses and the project of Americanization. They eventually pooled their resources to form their own patriotic societies to commemorate important Mexican holidays, launch community betterment projects, and build cultural schools for their children. To name one example, they started the Centro Mexicano, a type of cultural center that included a school for Mexican children to be instilled with cultural and national pride and learn English alongside Spanish. Three of these centers operated in the different Mexican barrios in the 1920s as an alternative to the settlement houses and the assimilationist curricula of public schools. Through these centers, the liberals espoused a mexicanidad that was secular, nationalist, and promoted a mestizo identity that accounted for indigenous ancestry and roots. Children were taught to embrace their mestizaje, retain their Spanish while learning English, and see themselves as mexicanos de afuera (Mexicans from abroad) instead of Americans. Furthermore, the liberals rejected the idea that Mexicans had to become U.S. citizens to attain equality, in fact they discouraged it.

they pushed for curricula that promoted Spanish historiography. This associated the whiteness of Spanish European heritage, the Catholic religion, and the continuity of Spanish colonial institutions and cultural practice as the saving graces of Mexican identity. This erased all elements of indigenous cultural and national heritage

McGarrity explained that right-wing extremists like the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh were charged with hate crimes instead of domestic terrorism simply because “there’s no domestic terrorism charge.”To be clear, there is a law that defines domestic terrorism but not one that charges people who commit acts of terrorism in America. People who conspire with international terrorists—even if they aren’t materially involved in an act of violence—are charged with “acts of terrorism transcending international boundaries.” But someone who sends pipe bombs to Democrats; plows through a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville, Va.; or shoots up a church in Charleston, S.C., will not face domestic terrorism charges.

Among those testifying before the subcommittee was Michael C. McGarrity, the director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division.

all the blue checkmark really does is say that the person is who they say they are

Flores does demonstrate that Mexicans lived among European immigrants and African Americans and socialized across racial lines (pp. 84–85). Despite this integration, African Americans and Mexicans seldom unified politically for a variety of reasons despite both groups experiencing racial discrimination. Flores explains that the main cause of this lack of unity was that employers often aggressively pitted them against each other. It should surprise no one that Mexican immigrants in the first generation, like those from other countries, sought to maintain ties to their language, country of origin, and a commitment to the faith of their homelands.

So, rather than embracing "whiteness," as many scholars, mainly from outside Chicanx studies, have tried to argue about Mexican elites and middle class members, [End Page 300] Flores shows how the evidence in Chicago and Los Angeles runs contrary to the idea that those who embraced U.S. citizenship and might have been considered middle-class necessarily embraced whiteness or were seen by Anglo government officials as white.

Flores' book is a timely contribution to Chicanx history in that it rejects the idea that the middle class is always a community of sell-outs or worse and also problematizes the issue of race.

Yet even as some suburbs became majority Mexican American enclaves, internal conflicts existed. Within this new Mexican American suburban milieu, tensions developed between the Mexican American middle class and the Mexican American working class.

the complicated nature of suburbanization for Mexican Americans without writing off middle class or middle class-aspirational Mexican Americans. Gonzalez shows how Mexican Americans struggled to establish themselves as homeowners before and after World War II: during a period of significant suburban growth in Greater Los Angeles, which developed as a horizontal city committed to automotive driven sprawl.

embrace of upward mobility among Mexican Americans to a commitment to civic engagement and civil rights rooted in their status as homeowners

To escape the violence of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), tens of thousands of Mexicans immigrated to the southwest United States, where U.S. corporate investment in agriculture created many new labor opportunities. Diverse and often contradictory stereotypes of Mexican immigrants reveal both the complexity and diversity of this period of immigration, as well as American over-simplification of it. Mexican immigrants advanced their station by participating, both independently and in collaboration with other marginalized workers, in strikes for higher wages and better working conditions.

The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) then increased the flow: war refugees and political exiles fled to the United States to escape the violence. Mexicans also left rural areas in search of stability and employment. As a result, Mexican migration to the United States rose sharply. The number of legal migrants grew from around 20,000 migrants per year during the 1910s to about 50,000 – 100,000 migrants per year during the 1920s.

However, Mexicans were sometimes said to have certain positive qualities that made them “better” labor immigrants than the other groups. They were thought to be docile, taciturn, physically strong, and able to put up with unhealthy and demanding working conditions. Perhaps more importantly, they were perceived as temporary migrants, who were far more likely to return to Mexico than to settle permanently in the United States.

Cities like Los Angeles, San Antonio, Detroit, and Chicago soon had large and growing Mexican American communities. With this transition came new social tensions, as members of more established ethnic groups reacted to the arrival of Mexican Americans. Frank Tellez wearing hat and zoot suit. In Los Angeles in 1942, these tensions erupted in a week-long race riot--the Zoot Suit Riot. A zoot suit was a popular outfit with young African American and Mexican American men in the 1940s. Most zoot suits sported extra-wide shoulders, knee-length coats, and cuffed baggy pants, sometimes topped with a porkpie hat.