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Hey y'all,
Forgive me if this question/poll isn't in the proper category but I don't believe I saw anywhere else to place this.I was talking to a friend from work who is of Mexican descent and we got to talking about Mexicans in the US and what people groups and cultures Mexicans feel "closest" to and what surprised me was he didn't name a another Latino group!It got me interested to ask Mexican-Americans on City data what their opinion was about this subject.
Hey y'all,
Forgive me if this question/poll isn't in the proper category but I don't believe I saw anywhere else to place this.I was talking to a friend from work who is of Mexican descent and we got to talking about Mexicans in the US and what people groups and cultures Mexicans feel "closest" to and what surprised me was he didn't name a another Latino group!It got me interested to ask Mexican-Americans on City data what their opinion was about this subject.
Your friend is correct. Certainly in the United States only Black Americans can relate to the struggles endured by Mexican-Americans (I.e., racism, discrimination, lynchings, etc.).
Culture-wise there are many countries that share the “family-centric” culture of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Indians come to mind as a prime example.
There is a generational divide (assimilation ruled for older immigrants) but also a geographic one (ethnic communities vary widely depending on where in the US you are). But language and the Church are arguably the main things that brought people together regardless of time or place.
There's both a pan-Hispanic identity and a nationalist identity.
Most Mexicans will identify with the pan-Hispanic identity while still harboring very nationalist (and often times belittling) ideas about other Hispanic nationalities.
I've met Salvadorans who hate Hondurans yet you couldn't pick them apart from a line up. So it really is a complex question.
Edit: And most Hispanics don't really identify with Black Americans due to some semblance of shared history. Outside of very progressive universities, most Hispanics don't relate to others based on "past oppression." You'd be shocked how few Hispanics have even heard of the Mexican Repatriation, and even those who have don't seem to dwell on it much. There's very much a "echa pa'lante" cultural strain in Latino history that prefers to focus on the future even when the past hasn't been so kind. This has its pros and cons, of course.
Last edited by manitopiaaa; 03-30-2024 at 02:42 PM..
There's both a pan-Hispanic identity and a nationalist identity.
Most Mexicans will identify with the pan-Hispanic identity while still harboring very nationalist (and often times belittling) ideas about other Hispanic nationalities.
I've met Salvadorans who hate Hondurans yet you couldn't pick them apart from a line up. So it really is a complex question.
Edit: And most Hispanics don't really identify with Black Americans due to some semblance of shared history. Outside of very progressive universities, most Hispanics don't relate to others based on "past oppression." You'd be shocked how few Hispanics have even heard of the Mexican Repatriation, and even those who have don't seem to dwell on it much. There's very much a "echa pa'lante" cultural strain in Latino history that prefers to focus on the future even when the past hasn't been so kind. This has its pros and cons, of course.
The question was specifically about Mexican-Americans not Hispanics as a whole.
There's both a pan-Hispanic identity and a nationalist identity.
Most Mexicans will identify with the pan-Hispanic identity while still harboring very nationalist (and often times belittling) ideas about other Hispanic nationalities.
I've met Salvadorans who hate Hondurans yet you couldn't pick them apart from a line up. So it really is a complex question.
Edit: And most Hispanics don't really identify with Black Americans due to some semblance of shared history. Outside of very progressive universities, most Hispanics don't relate to others based on "past oppression." You'd be shocked how few Hispanics have even heard of the Mexican Repatriation, and even those who have don't seem to dwell on it much. There's very much a "echa pa'lante" cultural strain in Latino history that prefers to focus on the future even when the past hasn't been so kind. This has its pros and cons, of course.
This is true. Hispanics identify closer to white people than blacks. In recent years there has even been quite a bit of open racism against blacks from the Mexican community.
The Mexican-Americans I knew from university and a sports center here in the San Francisco Bay Area tended to hang around with other brown-skinned Mexican-Americans like themselves (no accents, so either born here or brought here as children).
I'm white, and was invited to one of their family homes for a holiday dinner where I experienced my one and only bowl of menudo.
Some years later, during a vacation to Mexico City, my husband and I (we aren't Mexican) got to know a highly educated, tall, white Mexican man with Spanish roots and we learned that there is a large divide between Mexicans of Spanish roots and those that are Mestizo. The "White Mexicans" don't tend to emigrate to the U.S. as much, perhaps because they are already "top of the food chain" in Mexico.
got to know a highly educated, tall, white Mexican man with Spanish roots and we learned that there is a large divide between Mexicans of Spanish roots and those that are Mestizo. The "White Mexicans" don't tend to emigrate to the U.S. as much, perhaps because they are already "top of the food chain”.
This is very true, and very similar to wealthy Northern Italians vs. Southern Italians emigrated to the U.S. due to poverty and seeking for better opportunities.
The rich industrialist families (usually generational wealth and power.) in the Northern region of Italy were well established therefore no need to move. (For years I wondered about the drastic differences between Italians from Italy and Italian-Americans.)
The Mexican-Americans I knew from university and a sports center here in the San Francisco Bay Area tended to hang around with other brown-skinned Mexican-Americans like themselves (no accents, so either born here or brought here as children).
I'm white, and was invited to one of their family homes for a holiday dinner where I experienced my one and only bowl of menudo.
Some years later, during a vacation to Mexico City, my husband and I (we aren't Mexican) got to know a highly educated, tall, white Mexican man with Spanish roots and we learned that there is a large divide between Mexicans of Spanish roots and those that are Mestizo. The "White Mexicans" don't tend to emigrate to the U.S. as much, perhaps because they are already "top of the food chain" in Mexico.
Plenty of white looking Mexicans move to the USA.
Jalisco is one of the whitest states and there are tons of people from there all over the western USA. They prefer the western us over the east coast for some reason.
Jalisco is noticably whiter than Mexico city. Look into it.
White Mexicans with high status typically dont move. That's true, however.
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