Mexican American - Discrimination and Stereotypes

Discrimination and Stereotypes

Throughout U.S. history, Mexican Americans have and continue to endure various types of negative stereotypes which have long circulated in media and popular culture. Mexican Americans have also faced discrimination based on ethnicity, race, culture, poverty, and use of the Spanish language.

Since the majority of illegal immigrants in the U.S. have traditionally been from Latin America, the Mexican American community has been the subject of widespread immigration raids. During The Great Depression, the United States government sponsored a Mexican Repatriation program which was intended to encourage people to voluntarily move to Mexico, but thousands were deported against their will. More than 500,000 individuals were deported, approximately 60 percent of which were actually United States citizens. In the post-war McCarthy era, the Justice Department launched Operation Wetback.

During World War II, more than 300,000 Mexican Americans served in the US armed forces. Mexican Americans were generally integrated into regular military units, however, many Mexican American war veterans were discriminated against and even denied medical services by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs when they arrived home. In 1948, war veteran Dr Hector P. Garcia founded the American GI Forum to address the concerns of Mexican American veterans who were being discriminated against. The AGIF's first campaign was on the behalf of Felix Longoria, a Mexican American private who was killed in the Philippines while in the line of duty. Upon the return of his body to his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas, he was denied funeral services because of his race.

In the 1948 case of Perez v. Sharp, Andrea Perez—a Mexican-American woman listed as White—and Sylvester Davis—an African American man—the Supreme Court of California recognized that interracial bans on marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution.

In 2006, Time magazine reported that the number of hate groups in the United States increased by 33% since 2000, primarily due to anti-illegal immigrant and anti-Mexican sentiment. According to the annual Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Hate Crimes Statistics Report, in 2007, Hispanics comprised 61.7 percent of victims of crimes motivated by a bias toward the victims’ ethnicity or national origin. Since 2003 the number of both victims of anti-Hispanic crimes and incidents increased by nearly 40 percent. In 2004, the comparable figure was 51.5 percent. In California, the state with the largest Mexican American population, the number of hate crimes committed against Latinos has almost doubled.