Discuss the history of Mexican Americans in the United States and the current racial criminal justice and political issues they face.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The history of Mexican Americans, the largest subgroup of Hispanics or Latinos/Latinas in the United States, has been one in which they and their land were forcibly made part of the American Southwest. As a result of the Mexican–American War, which lasted from 1846 to 1848, Mexico lost almost half of its land, the area that has become the American Southwest, from Texas to California and all of the states in between. However, there is evidence that at least some of the Mexicans in these territories were willing to become citizens of the United States. Today in border states, the number of Mexican Americans and Cuban Americans is so high, and their assimilation into the culture so thorough such as in New Mexico, Arizona, parts of Texas, California, and Florida, that the existence of a clear racial or ethnic majority group has disappeared or has become the Hispanic/Latino/Latina group itself. The increased numbers of Mexican Americans in these states and the immigrants crossing over the southern border into the United States have sparked the political debate over recent Mexican immigrants and whether or not they should be accorded citizenship rights. At the center of the debate is the passage by the State of Arizona of an immigration law that allows law enforcement there to demand papers from any person whom they suspect might be in the country illegally, without further cause. Civil libertarians and civil rights groups allege that this law has resulted in discrimination against Hispanics in Arizona and the potential to fill jails, if not prisons, in that state. Whether in Arizona or in other states, however, and as with American Indians and African Americans, the representation of Hispanics in American prisons and jails is already disproportionate to their representation in the general population.