more than two hundred businesses.34 By 1948, some workers in California were earning $2.83 a day picking beans, others $5.50 a day in the steel industry in Chicago, still others, from $8 to $14 a day as bricklayers in Texas.35
Despite hardships and prejudice, possibilities for entrepreneurial activity existed for Mexicans who became settlers. It was difficult to break sojourner habits, but many of them did, and as with the Chinese and Japanese, there are countless stories of Mexican immigrants, illegal and legal, who succeeded against the odds.
One young man who crossed the Rio Grande at the age of fourteen was apprehended by la migra (the Immigration Border Patrol) and was deported. But he soon crossed the river again, and this time eluded capture, teaching himself English at night while washing dishes, picking cotton, and cleaning floors during the day. By the time the law caught up with him ten years later, he had an American wife, a home, and a good job. Given sixty days to get his Mexican papers in order, he reentered the U.S. legally, eventually became a citizen, and sent all of his five children to college.36
There was even the possibility of breaking out of the system of sojourner pluralism in south Texas, where it was enforced more rigorously than anywhere else. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, migrant families followed the cotton harvest from the Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, Texas, up the road to Robstown to El Campo, Hillsboro, or perhaps Waxahachie in west Texas and then to the final destination in Petersburg or Lubbock. The work was grueling, from sunup to sundown, especially in Hillsboro. The mosquitoes were fierce in El Campo, the water extremely salty in Robstown, and babies there became ill. The firetrap shacks in which most migrants lived were infested by ants, yellow jackets, cockroaches, and rats. Yet, some of the migrant workers called the road from Edinburg to Lubbock “the road of hope,” and it was in such a migrant family that Jesus Luna grew up, going to school only sporadically because the family moved with the harvests and the authorities were lax in enforcing the school attendance laws. Young Jesus told his parents that if they left to travel the road of hope once more he would remain in Edinburg with one of his aunts and attend school there. His mother and father decided to stay. Because mother and father and all four children had worked at picking cotton over the years, Jesus’s father was able to stay put in Edinburg and purchase two lots and a truck. Jesus became an excellent student, and later, to the pride of his parents, attended college and graduate school. The Luna family were no longer sojourners, and in 1973 Jesus reported, “Dad and Mom now take an interest in how the children are doing in school and who is running in local politics.”37
The Lunas and other Mexican settlers saved and invested for the sake of the children, building communities of Mexican-Americans and Mexicans called colonias, the largest of which was in Los Angeles, where more than 200,000 Mexicans had settled. Between 1900 and 1940, hardly a town of any size—Delano, Hanford, Brawley, Sacramento, San Diego, Fresno—failed to acquire its Mexican colonia on the weathered side of the railroad tracks.38 As more Mexican nationals became settlers, economic mobility increased for themselves and especially their children. By 1950, when two-thirds of the Mexican-origin population in the U.S. had been born there, the proportion of craftsmen had more than doubled over 1930, and the percentage of sales, clerical, and professional employees had almost doubled.39 By 1970, less than one-quarter of all Mexican-Americans were employed in relatively unskilled occupations, and almost as many were employed as craftspersons. Fewer than one percent were professional workers in 1930; one in twenty was a professional worker by 1970.40
Comparisons between Mexican-American men born in the U.S. and Mexican-born men showed that, despite the restrictions, many of the children of those who settled were able to go beyond them. More than 15 percent of the Mexican-born men were employed as farm laborers, less than 8 percent of the sons, and 3 percent of the grandchildren. The second generation of Mexican-Americans born in the U.S. had a median education of 11.1 years, two years more than for first-generation U.S.-born Mexican-Americans and almost double that of Mexican nationals in the U.S. (5.8 years).41
Thomas Sowell observed in 1981 that wherever there was a settled Mexican-American community, the income was much higher than in areas where there were a higher proportion of newcomers and transients. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in metropolitan Detroit, for example, earned more than double the income of Mexicans in the metropolitan area of Laredo or Brownsville, a substantial gap even when wage differentials between those cities were taken into account.42 Overall, family income for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans was much less than the national average in the post-Second World War years; but comparisons of aggregate statistics were misleading. Family income was down for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans for many reasons. Labor-force participation rates among Mexican-American females was much lower than for either black or white women, thereby reducing household income. The Mexican-American and Mexican populations together were much younger than the average in the U.S., also reducing reported household income.
Actually, the incomes of Mexican-Americans age twenty-five and up were very close to the incomes of other Americans at the same educational level. When the American children and grandchildren of Mexican immigrants went to school and learned English, they performed well and later showed the occupational mobility so often seen among the children of immigrants generally. Later, however, in the 1980s, some disquieting statistics emerged about increased segregation of Mexicans and other Hispanic-Americans in the U.S. public schools and about a growing dropout rate for children from Spanish-speaking homes. But the general conclusions on mobility for Mexican-Americans in the postwar era was unambiguous: legal aliens had more success than illegal aliens; settlers did better than sojourners; and the grandchildren and children of immigrants did better than their parents.
Opportunities for Blacks and Asians and Mexicans Compared
In explaining the relative success of immigrants compared to African-Americans, some scholars have stressed the internal resources of the immigrants themselves, particularly their cultural values.43 Others, such as Stanley Lieberson, have emphasized the vast difference between the opportunities presented to blacks and immigrants.44 An examination of the experiences of the sojourners from Mexico and Asia who became settlers in the U.S. makes it obvious that both factors were important.
The Chinese transplanted the huis from China to the U.S., where they often provided an excellent means of capital formation to encourage entrepreneurship. The Japanese had the tanomoshis, and dozens of Mexican-American mutualistas (mutual aid societies) were formed in the U.S. in the early 1900s to provide assistance to families in need, mediate disputes, and organize social activities, although, unlike the huis and tanomoshis, they were not used to provide capital to form new enterprises.45 The cultural emphasis by the Japanese and the Chinese on savings, frugality, and self-restraint undoubtedly preserved capital in a way that spurred economic mobility for the second and third generations. The pride of all three groups in their own versions of la raza—a strong sense of peoplehood based on a distinctive history and culture—undoubtedly encouraged self-confidence in facing prejudice and discrimination in the U.S. The fact that these immigrants had made the decision to emigrate and then the extremely important decision to stay and raise their children in a new country also reflected a sense of direction and control over their lives. Internal resources were important to the immigrants, but there also was a vast difference between the opportunities presented to them and those available to native-born American Indians and blacks. No matter how badly they were disparaged or how strong was the intention to confine them to servile jobs, there were large cracks in the system of sojourner pluralism that did not exist under the rules of caste. Segregation was imposed far more rigidly on blacks; the immigrants received help from foreign governments in dealing with the hostility of employers; many white teachers and social workers encouraged the children of immigrants. Immigrants’ belief that through their actions they could improve life chances for their children and their children’s children gave them a tremendous psychological advantage over African-Americans, who had inherited at least a half dozen generations of subjugation under caste and whose own actions for self-improvement were blocked at almost every turn.
By the early 1900s, when Jim Crow laws were being enforced vigorously against African-Americans in the South, attempts to segregate Mexicans and Asians in the West and