Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1990
Document Type
Article
Abstract
During the first three decades of the twentieth century, a variety of factors-overpopulation, endemic poverty, inflation, stagnant wages, peonage, and, especially, the Mexican Revolution of 191O-drove hundreds of thousands of Mexicans from their homeland and into the United States. Although most of these migrants settled in the contiguous southwestern American states, tens of thousands proceeded north into the Great Plains and the Midwest, establishing dozens of colonias (settlements) in railroad centers, mining camps, industrial districts, and agricultural encampments. From 1900 until the Great Depression, the creation of these cultural islands of Mexican immigrants in such places as Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Omaha, Chicago, Gary, and Lansing enriched the social fabric of those regions of the United States beyond the borderlands. Unlike their compatriots who settled in the Southwest, immigranrs in the Great Plains and Midwest found no receptive Mexican communities or barrios. More than a thousand miles from home and facing an alien, often hostile, environment, they encountered an unfamiliar language, cultural tradition, and legal system. To cushion the shock of migration and to help satisfy their fundamental need for community life, Mexicans created their own national institutions. One of the most significant products of ethnic institutional development was the immigrant press. Denied access to information in American newspapers by their inability to speak or read English, Mexicans depended upon their native tongue for news not only of this country and their adopted communities but also, and more important, of their homeland and their own people.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly [GPQ 10 (Spring 1990): 71-85].Copyright 1990 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska—Lincoln.