Indigenous Mexican Immigrants in US Open Up About Racism, Gender, and Identity Eduardo Stanley - VOXXI
go to original August 16, 2013

In 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?”

Read the rest at VOXXI

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