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Who Are the Mexican Americans?
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10265 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1993 |
2,140 Words |
| Author
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Daniel James
Daniel James has written extensively on Cuba. He is the author
of Cuba: First Soviet Satellite in the Americas and Che
Guevara: a Bibliography, and editor-translator of The Complete
Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara and Other Captured Documents. |
MEXICAN AMERICANS
The Ambivalent Minority
Peter Skerry
New York: The Free Press, 1993
463 pp., $27.95
Few writers have displayed the courage to treat as candidly as has Peter Skerry the very delicate and complicated subject of the Mexican-American population in relation to society and, in particular, to such putative rivals as African Americans. He has not pulled any punches in his criticism of Mexican-American leaders, who have hitherto enjoyed an immunity from rigorous examination rare in America's tumultuous politics.
Skerry's thesis is that "Mexican Americans are being seduced by the new American political system into adopting the not entirely appropriate, divisive, and counterproductive stance of a racial minority group." The fundamental decision to go "racial" was made not by the Mexican-American community Skerry emphasizes, but by a handful of self-appointed leaders who lack a grass-roots following. They did so because, emulating their black counterparts, they believed that that was the best way to take advantage of federal largesse offered through legislation such as the 1965 Voting Rights Act--the key to the power and influence they have since acquired.
The "strongest institutional expression of the racial minority view of Mexican Americans," the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), is, in fact, a replica of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund. MALDEF was not created by Mexican Americans and was not a response to their needs. It was established by that arch representative of WASPish noblesse oblige, the Ford Foundation, whose president, McGeorge Bundy, deliberately modeled it on the NAACP group in the belief that Mexican Americans were about in the same position as blacks a quarter-century earlier with respect to civil rights. Bundy's analogy seemed to imply that Mexican Americans were, like the blacks, an aggrieved racial minority thus (perhaps unwittingly) paving the way for MALDEF's future role in so defining Mexican Americans. The late President Kennedy's former national security adviser, Bundy dispatched MALDEF on its mission in 1968 with a $2.2 million grant.
The "striking difference" between the two organizations, however, is that MALDEF unlike its NAACP model, "has never been a membership organization [and] has no mass membership base among Mexican Americans." Furthermore, Skerry
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