A history of the Chicano community cannot be complete without taking into account the United States' domination of the Mexican economy beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writes Gilbert G. Gonzalez. For that economic conquest inspired U.S. writers to create a "culture of empire" that legitimated American dominance by portraying Mexicans and Mexican immigrants as childlike "peons" in need of foreign tutelage, incapable of modernizing without Americanizing, that is, submitting to the control of U.S. capital. So powerful was and is the culture of empire that its...

Chicano history, from the early decades of the twentieth century up to the present, cannot be explained without reference to the determined interventions of the Mexican government, asserts Gilbert G. Gonzalez. In this pathfinding study, he offers convincing evidence that Mexico aimed at nothing less than developing a loyal and politically dependent emigrant community among Mexican Americans, which would serve and replicate Mexico's political and economic subordination to the United States.

Gonzalez centers his study around four major agricultural workers' strikes in Depression-era...

This study argues for a radically new interpretation of the origins and evolution of the ethnic Mexican community across the US. This book offers a definitive account of the interdependent histories of the US and Mexico as well as the making of the Chicano population in America. The authors link history to contemporary issues, emphasizing the overlooked significance of late 19th and 20th century US economic expansionism to Europe in the formation of the Mexican community.