Indigenous Mexican Immigrants In U.S. Open Up About Racism, Gender, And Identity

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The last two decades, the ethnicity of the immigrant population from Mexico changed as more indigenous people from states like Oaxaca, Guerrero and Puebla became part of the landscape in the fields of California and of other states.

During the harvest season where you used to hear Spanish, now farm workers speak Zapoteco, Mixteco, Triqui or any other indigenous language spoken in Southern Mexico.

“Until 1996, most immigrants from Mexico – including Oaxacans – used to go back and forth between California and their towns of origin,” explains Dr. Gaspar Rivera Salgado, Program Director of the Labor Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who was a mentor of the project. “But since then, crossing the border became a very dangerous and expensive experience.”

In 1996 started the construction of a wall between Mexico and the U.S., in California, pushing immigrants to cross the border in more isolated areas, like the Arizona desert. The number of dead undocumented immigrants raised dramatically in that area.

“So immigrants decided to stay here and bring in their families, and one of the results is the increase of the young population,” said Salgado Rivera. “So the question is, what is going to happen with this youth? What do they think? Are they going to keep their parents’ traditions and ideas?”

To answer these and other questions, an original project was created, El Equipo de Cronistas Oaxacacalifornianos (ECO), or Oaxacalifornian Reporting Team, sponsored by the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“We applied the methodology of participatory research, in which all participants are researchers and subjects of the study,” details Rivera Salgado. “The young participants organized several groups to take Pan Valley Institute of the American Friends Service Committee (PVI) of Fresno.

PVI developed a cultural festival, Tamejavi, in which culture is part of immigrants’ identity to be protected. Also, those involved in organizing cultural events could become active members of a community rather than passive ones.

“You feel bad when you can’t get a scholarship because you don’t have [legal] documents… So I started looking for allies, and I decided to get involved in a folkloric dance group,” said Juan Santiago, of Zapotec origen and a resident of Madera, Calif.. “We learned more than dancing; the whole group participated on the immigrants’ marches of 2006 in Los Angeles.”

This experience was a revealing one for Santiago. “Through culture you can send a message, learn to organize and to participate.” He later received a fellowship at PVI where he learned to analyze and conceptualize his experience.

After decades of coming to the US to work and send money to their hometowns and families, indigenous immigrants are now looking to their new society differently.

“Our parents sent money to help our towns — paving roads, building schools – but now they are thinking it is time to build something here,” said Antonio Cortez, an activist of Mixtec origin and resident of Madera, Calif..

“And this is happening when I noticed that the new generations, their children, are becoming conscious of what it is to be indigenous.”??

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