Letter to George Sánchez


Dear Mr. Sánchez,

I wanted to write and thank you for your scholarship in your book Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. There was one passage that particularly stood out to me about the experience of Chicano people in Los Angeles. You write,  

“They were now interlopers on familiar land, even as their labor became increasingly crucial to its economic development and they had begun to settle their families in the United States. Mexican immigrants learned to live with the contradiction, partly because they continued to feel wholly Mexican, but mostly because they could do little to change their lot.” (62)

I am interested in the idea of how and why Mexican immigrants learned to “live with the contradiction.” I appreciate how you told the story of the Chicano experience in one part, it seemed, to dispel the idealized Ellis Island immigration experience. Your book confounded the linear, teleological assumptions of both immigration history but also westward expansion – indeed, Chicano immigrants in the early twentieth century were on “familiar land.” I think I fixated on this idea of living in the contradiction because it illuminates how the U.S. is truly built on contradictions – from the Declaration of Independence to the idea of “borders” as an effective means of unifying a country at all.

This personal resonance will inform my future work. This summer, I will be conducting academic research for a French film company making a film about the American West in the 19th Century. The concept of the “West” can too often be circumspect. The ideals of Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” John Gast’s American Progress, and Ansel Adam’s venerated photos of Yosemite come to mind as enduring legacies of the West as something wild and rugged, but also inevitably American. Your book pushes me to think about how the West is also constantly informed by the legacies of Northern migration and the Chicano identity. Thank you for deepening and challenging my conceptions of whose hands made the West, who got a say in its formation, and all the contradictions that ensue. Although your book focuses on later periods than my research, I will use my place of privilege to ensure that this consciousness is brought into my work this summer.

Sincerely,
Callan Showers

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