Abstract
“Failure to Provide” was the category that social workers of the California Immigration and Housing Commission (CIHC) used for many Mexican immigrant families that came to their agency to seek financial assistance during the interwar period.1 It referred to family fathers who failed to earn enough money to pay the rent, grocery bills, and other necessities. Whether this financial difficulty was due to the absence of a male breadwinner, unemployment, illness, or low wages was irrelevant to the caseworkers because they assumed that it was the father’s duty to provide for their families. In this categorization, which was based on ideals of masculine duties, social workers linked their understanding of the role of the male breadwinner to their perception of who was to be part of the American nation. “Failure to provide” charges had serious consequences for Mexican fathers: if the family became a public charge, it was denied naturalization and thus membership in the nation. In the wake of the Great Depression, this could result in deportation of the whole family, including US-born children.
This chapter is the result of research that I conducted for my PhD project Macho Men and Modern Women: Mexican Immigration, Social Experts and Changing Family Values in the 20th Century United States (Munich: de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), which is part of the University of Münster’s Research Group “Family Values and Social Change: The American Family in the Twentieth Century.” This research group is funded by the German Research Foundation.
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Notes
R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 80–81.
R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 184.
For efforts to theorize the four interrelated elements of applying gender theory to historical analysis, see Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1067–1068.
See also Kathleen Canning, “The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History,” Gender &; History 11, no. 3 (1999): 504.
See Connell, Gender and Power, 183–188; Raewyn Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (December 2005): 829–859.
The term “Anglo American” denotes native-born, English-speaking Americans of European descent. For the use of the term “Anglo” in the context of Mexican immigration to the Southwest, see Richard A. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class: San Antonio, 1929–1941 (College Station: Texas A&;M University Press, 1991), 18.
Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press 2006), 13.
Américo Paredes, “The United States, Mexico and Machismo” (1967), manuscript, Américo Paredes Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, General Libraries, University of Texas at Austin, Texas. A Spanish version of this article was first published in 1967, the English translation in 1971. See Américo Paredes, “The United States, Mexico, and Machismo,” in Volklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border, ed. Américo Paredes (Austin, TX: CMAS Books, 1993), 215–234.
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 6–7
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Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 8.
Yuko Matsumoto, “Gender and American Citizenship: The Construction of ‘Our nation’ in the Early Twentieth Century,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 17, no. 2 (September 2006): 159;
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Richard Griswold de Castillo, La Familia: Chicano Families in the Urban Southwest, 1848 to the Present (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 132;
William Madsen, Society and Health in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961), 10–11;
John F. McClymer, War and Welfare: Social Engineering in America, 1890–1925 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1980), 78;
Mario T. Garcia, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology &; Identity, 1930–1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 25;
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Matsumoto, “Gender and American Citizenship,” 159; Rima D. Apple, Perfect Motherhood, Science and Childrearing in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 66.
For a discussion of positive and negative aspects of machismo, see Alfredo Mirandé, “Macho: Contemporary Conceptions,” in Men’s Lives, ed. Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A. Messner (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2004), 30.
See Matthew C. Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 260; Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 835.
According to de la Mora, Francisco “Pancho” Villa himself had camera teams follow him on the revolutionary battlefields. Sergio de la Mora, Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 8.
Ernesto Chávez, “‘Birth of a New Symbol’: The Brown Berets’ Gendered Chicano National Imaginary,” in Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in the Twentieth Century America, ed. Joe Austin and Michael N. Willard (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 217; Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 834.
See Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 38.
See Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford, “Introduction: Eugenics and the Modern World,” The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5.
School segregation was scientifically justified by lower scoring of Mexican American children in intelligence tests, but already in the 1930s, educational researchers T. Manuel and George I. Sánchez pointed out the biases of those tests when giving instructions in English to Spanish-speaking children. See Herschel T. Manuel, “The Educational Problem Presented by the Spanish-Speaking Child of the Southwest,” School and Society 40 (November 1934): 7;
George I. Sánchez, Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1940), 32; Garcia, Mexican Americans, 253.
Emily K. Abel, “From Exclusion to Expulsion: Mexicans and Tuberculosis Control in Los Angeles, 1914–1940,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 831.
See Emory S. Bogardus, The Mexican in the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1970), 12.
Charles M. Goethe, “Other Aspects of the Problem,” Current History 28, no. 5 (1928): 767.
On these developments, see Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Mexican American Labor, 1790–1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994).
Adele S. Calhoun, “Marital and Domestic Trouble,” Complaint file of Jose L. vs. Guadalupe S. (Los Angeles, February 13, 1931), California Dept. of Industrial Relations, Division of Immigration and Housing Records, BANC MSS C-A 194.
Adele S. Calhoun, “Marital and Domestic Trouble—Common Law Wife,” Complaint File of Dominga A. vs. Porfirio G. (Los Angeles, September 22, 1924), California Dept. of Industrial Relations, Division of Immigration and Housing Records, BANC MSS C-A 194.
Emory S. Bogardus, “Attitudes and the Mexican Immigrant,” in Social Attitudes, ed. Kimball Young (New York: Henry Holt, 1931), 308.
See Cynthia Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 208.
See Guadalupe SanMiguel, “Let all of them take heed”: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910–1981 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 76.
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© 2015 Pablo Dominguez Andersen and Simon Wendt
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Roesch, C. (2015). “Failure to Provide”: Mexican Immigration, Americanization, and Marginalized Masculinities in the Interwar United States. In: Andersen, P.D., Wendt, S. (eds) Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137536105_9
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