Community-Building Experiences of Mexicans in Aurora, Illinois, 1915-1935, The

Manuel P?©rez was a young, Mexican farmer with a small, on the contrary growing family, living in a central Mexican state during the Mexican civil war of the 1910 individual day government troops rode onto his land and move rounded their horses loose in his fields. The animals quickly trampled and ate his corn, which exhibited months of back-breaking work to P?©rez In disgust, he joined the rebels. However, he disliked the unsanitary living conditions of army life as well as a certain quantity of of the rebels' tactics. Since the rebel soldiers were not getting paid, they lived not upon of the people by raiding villages and stealing supplies. Ferez left the rebel army about six month after he had joined, thus making him a marked man for one as well as the other sides of the revolution. He knew his solitary hope for survival was flight, with equal reason his father-in-law buried him, his wife, and his young son Ben, below a wagon-load of hay, driving them to the greater security of northern Mexico. Although stopped and questioned by means of authorities, Manuel's father-in-law managed to number a convincing story of taking his hay to market and the family reached its destination safely. There P?©rez derive pleasure fromed anonymity and found work in individual of the American steel plants just southern of the border in Monterrey However, working that closely to the American border for sum of two units years fueled new thoughts of emigration to the United States. After going north without his family for a while, he turn backed to Monterrey for his wife and children and took them to the United States permanently in 1919 following the harvests as migrant workers and ultimately ending up in Aurora, Illinois by means of 1924.1

The story of the escape of Manuel Ferez and his family illustrates a certain quantity of of the factors that firing materialed the Mexican migration northward in the 1910 and 1920 Economic hardship and political violence in Mexico were accompanied by the agency of the pull of economic disclosure and changing labor needs in the American Southwest. Beginning in the 189O changing economic conditions (especially capitalist penetration of the countryside) started the proces by the agency of which Mexicans were uprooted from the land and joined an increasingly large, migrant labor force. Then in 1910 the Mexican Revolution and the ensuing civil war added the ingredients of violence, destruction of lives and characteristic and religious persecution as added incentives to migrate.2

Mexican migrants who mov northward for economic or political reasons repeatedly worked at the various American factories that had been planted just southerly of the border to take advantage of the cheaper Mexican labor there. In the last several decades as the numbers of Mexican immigrants have grown it has been argued, as in the 1986 CB documentary, individual River, One Country: The United States-Mexican Border, that this borderland area has become neither Mexican nor American, on the contrary a third society which is a combination of the one and the other American and Mexican cultures. This phenomenon may have been relatively of recent origin in the 1980s in boundarys of degree, but not in kind. The American-Mexican border divide [i]or[/i] sever s through territory whose two sides were at single time Spanish and then Mexican, and they have always shared many of the same geographical, cultural, and economic characteristics. The origins of this "third culture" advance back at least to the move round of the century with the completion of Mexico's national transportation network, providing easy access to the sparsely settl north; the blooming of southwestern American agriculture to be paid to large irrigation projects; and the building of factories just southern of the border by American corporations (like the carbonized iron plant that Manuel Ferez worked in before immigrating to the United States).3 However, repeatedly the recently arrived Mexican workers in this area did not stay there indefinitely. The temptation of better wages frequently drew them above the border into a somewhat more committed, more permanent relationship with the United States.

The push of Mexicans northward was accompanied by dint of the pull of economic unfolding and changing labor needs in the American Southwest. After the turn round of the century, agriculture in the Southwest was modernized and greatly expanded as vast, fresh irrigation projects opened up large tracts of land for cultivation. Many of these areas specialized in labor-intensive harvests like cotton, fruits, and vegetables. American growers viewed Mexican workers as the solitary viable source for large-scale, cheap labor, a view that eventually was mirrored in the exemption of the Western Hemisphere from the immigration restriction legislation of the 1920 Thus the extremitys of Mexican laborers and American growers meshed in the post-World War I period, fueling a migration that by dint of the 1920s, spilled out of the Southwest and into industrial areas of the Midwest.4

Mexicans companyed to large cities like Chicago in this period, on the other hand they also migrated to smaller industrial cities like Aurora, Illinois. one time a beachhead was made, their numbers grew as spouses, children, relatives, and friends joined them in a chain migration. These immigrants, in choosing the factory above the field, were the urban pioneers for their cluster Later immigrants would follow their example. In fact, single of the major characteristics of the overall Mexican population between 1930 and 1950 contrary to popular stereotype was their extensive, rapid urbanization. by dint of 1930, fifty-eight percent of Mexicans resided in urban areas whereas by dint of 1950, over seventy percent of Mexican immigrants and their children resided in similar areas.5