To Be An American. Bill Ong Hing
aspects of the immigrants’ lives, with much of the program based on insidious stereotypical beliefs about Mexicans. The Commission regarded developing English-speaking ability the fundamental goal, not simply for facilitating a common language, but because it would help imbue immigrants with the values of American society by helping them see “the relation between a unified working force, speaking a common language, and industrial prosperity.” Family planning was a key ingredient because progressives and nativists alike feared that uncontrolled Mexican immigrant population growth would contribute to Anglo “race suicide.” The development of a work ethic outside the home was considered important so that Mexican women could fill the labor need for domestic servants, seamstresses, laundresses, and service workers in the Southwest; it would also contribute to “‘curing’ the habits of the stereotypical ‘lazy Mexican.’ “14 Getting the Mexican woman out of the home was also considered necessary to alter her values because at home her intellectual ability would not be stimulated by her husband.
Americanization programs taught food and diet management because a healthy diet was viewed as fundamental to creating productive members of society. Mexicans were to give up their penchant for fried foods; tortillas would be replaced with bread, and lettuce served instead of beans. The typical noon lunch for the Mexican child, thought to consist of a folded tortilla with no filling, was supposedly the first step in a life of crime, since the child would be tempted to steal from the other children. Furthermore, health and cleanliness were emphasized since program directors felt that Mexicans could not easily learn sanitation and hygiene because they found it less strenuous “to remain dirty than to clean up.”15
In the end, the Americanization program aimed at Mexican women had little impact on cultural practices. Certainly, an increase in female employment in factories, laundries, hotels, and bakeries may have been facilitated by these efforts, but in the home, little cultural change among the Mexican population was evident. While the Mexican immigrants’ material possessions changed, their values, cultural practices, and loyalty to Mexico remained largely unaffected. By the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the Americanization program stopped, restrictionist sentiment carried the day, and about half a million Mexicans were coerced by U.S. officials to return to Mexico.16
Anglo-conformity assimilation programs were not limited to immigrants. From the 1870s to the 1930s, the Americanization movement implemented a complete assault on every facet of Native American life: language, appearance, religion, economic structure, political models, values, and philosophy. The removal of most of the eastern and southern Native American tribes to the trans-Mississippi region by the 1840s was designed not only to secure state jurisdiction over Native American lands, but also to inculcate the essentials of the white man’s civilization into the people. Reservations were designed not only to remove Native Americans from the path of advancing whites, but also as a tool of control.17 The purported purpose of assimilation was to encourage Native Americans to modify their traditional lifestyle by emulating superior white civilization and striving for agrarian self-sufficiency. But many of the methods used constituted more of “a systemic policy of cultural annihilation.”18
Assimilation sought to replace the central beliefs of a tribal society with Western European societal and religious values. The white reformers sought to instill the concept of “competitive individualism” in Native Americans, supplanting the more cooperative spirit of tribal life. The reformers stressed respect for private property, especially land. Merrill Gates, the leader of the reform group the Friends of Indians, said in 1896, “We have, to begin with, the absolute need of awakening in the savage Indian broader desires and ampler wants. To bring him out of savagery into citizenship we must make the Indian more intelligently selfish before we can make him unselfishly intelligent. We need to awaken in him wants.” The assimilationist movement, which was directed by Christian reformers, felt that tribal deities had to be replaced with the Christian God.19
Tribal culture was suppressed by direct regulation of certain aspects of Native American behavior. Reservation agents and Bureau of Indian Affairs administrators restricted hair length, limited funeral practices, meat slaughtering techniques, dancing, plural marriages, and religious observances.20 Like Americanization programs aimed at Mexican immigrants, Native American Americanization programs also targeted family values. While Mexican women were the focus, however, a different tactic was used with Native Americans. Federal authorities targeted young Native Americans for a thorough restructuring of their values in the hope that the inferior Native American cultures and heritage would be destroyed at their roots. By 1870, the federal government was funding off-reservation schools under the auspices of religious groups. Native American parents were pressured and coerced into sending their children away to these schools under threat of withholding food, clothing, or money. Reluctant children were hunted down and physically transported to schools against their will. Once there, they were isolated for up to eight years and not permitted to see their families. They could not wear native clothing, speak their own tongues, practice native customs, or retain their own names. The philosophy was, to quote Richard Pratt, the founder and head of the Carlisle School for Indians in Pennsylvania, to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”21
In the end, the isolation and transformation shattered Native American cultural values and left the young Native Americans disoriented and ostracized. Sent out into the white world, they were spurned because of their facial features and class status, notwithstanding their “Americanization.” Those who returned to the reservation found themselves in a foreign and unfamiliar cultural landscape.22
Eventually, private access to Native American lands declined and the impetus for assimilation correspondingly diminished. The movement also faltered in part because of the emergence of a racist perspective that Native Americans could not attain the level of accomplishment of the white race. Other factors which led to the termination of the assimilation programs included the fading of religious and scientific transcendent ethics, the increasing secularization of society, and studies by anthropologists and ethnologists which contributed to the public’s awareness of the depth, complexity, and uniqueness of the Native American cultures. In the 1920s, white artists and intellectuals from Taos and Santa Fe rallied behind the Pueblo tribes to oppose legislation that would have aided white squatters in their land claims against the Pueblos; their success awakened much of the country to the values of Native American culture and to the threat posed by the ongoing policies of assimilation.23
Nativist sentiment eventually caught up with Mexicans by the time of the Great Depression. Not surprisingly, the popular criticism of Mexican nationals was economic in tone—their high-paying jobs would be freed up for native workers if they were removed. Thousands of Mexicans were deported and thousands more were pressured to leave. Between 1930 and 1940, the Mexican-born population in the United States declined from 639,000 to 377,000. The protection-of-the-labor-market reasoning was used against Mexicans again in 1954, when “Operation Wetback” was implemented by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the midst of the post-Korean War recession and over a million undocumented Mexicans were deported.24
SPURNING CATHOLICS AND OTHER SOUTHERN AND EASTERN EUROPEANS
As economic conditions in western Europe improved in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigration from Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ireland declined. But at the same time, immigration from southern and eastern Europe rapidly increased. During the first decade of the twentieth century, which remains the decade that witnessed the greatest immigration to the United States, 1.5 million immigrants entered from Russia and another 2 million from Italy and Austria-Hungary. The constant flow