Mexican American Stereotypes

United We Stand Divided We Fall

America has always been a place where different groups of people often sought asylum because this country has been labeled “the land of the free”, so throughout American history people from all parts of the world decided to cut their losses and escape political corruption, religious persecution, and/or stagnate economies. Large groups of people took their families and decided to start anew in United States, but when they got here they were often met with hostility. Irish Americans flocked in huge numbers in the 19th century. They were discriminated against, and many Americans believed that the Irish were racially inferior and deserved second-hand citizenship, in fact. The Irish being of inferior intelligence

The media has played a huge role in portraying Mexicans in a negative manner. Popular media has contributed to the perceptions in which Tanya Golash-Boza noted in her article entitled “Dropping the Hyphen? Becoming Latino (A)-American Through Racialized Assimilation." In this article, Lichter and Amundson found that “compared to Anglos, television’s Hispanics were low in number, low in social status, and lowdown in personal character, frequently portraying violent criminals” (Golash-Boza). This shows that whites’ stereotypes of Hispanics are very similar to whites’ stereotypes of blacks. Hispanics are seen as less intelligent, more prone to be on welfare, and more likely to be involved in drugs or other criminal activity than whites. When the dominant class (whites) has racial stigmas against people from a different culture, they tend to live in areas with less diversity. This happened in great numbers throughout our U.S. history. When minorities dominate certain neighborhoods, the schools become segregated, which then creates disparities in test performance. This eventually leads to disparities in access to higher education, which creates labor market disparities, which in turn leads to high unemployment and crime. Post-colonialism inadvertently created this cycle. According to the article "Foreign Language Exposure, Cultural Threat, and Opposition to Immigration" written by Benjamin Newman et al, the authors argue that “language barriers pose a clash of cultures, as well as an often impenetrable so-called glass ceiling affecting economic status” (Newman). The media then played on the fears of white Americans. In the article by Regina Branton et al, "All Along the Watchtower: Acculturation Fear, Anti-Latino Affect, and Immigration," the political backlash against immigration for a time received considerable national