Mexicans in the 21st Century

With America’s 21st century fear of Muslim terrorism coming to attack America, came the prejudice against Mexican immigrants laying siege to America from the south. This stereotype is not something new to this century, but a stereotype that can be rooted back to the early 1800’s and America’s history with Mexico in the Mexican- American war. That said as stated in Mexican historians, Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz’s article, Racial Identity and Racial Treatment of Mexican Americans, “ Mexicans have been treated as second class citizens… attributed to the Bracero program, a program that was aimed to give Mexican migrant workers low paying labour jobs in american agriculture. Mexicans have been perceived as a dirty, disease ridden, uneducated, violent and an impoverished community”(Ortiz&Telles 2012). This stereotype has been the heart of anti-immigrant debate in the 21st century and fueled a xenophobia that can be most recently seen in 2017 president Donald Trump’s campaign. Trump’s notoriously popular slogan, “build a wall” fed on the prejudice’s of America’s conservatives and used this historical Mexican immigrant stereotype to benefit his campaign. This stereotype of the thievish dirty Mexican immigrant worker partnered with xenophobia finalized the results to one of the most unexpected presidential elections of the 21st century.

 

Ortiz, Vilma, and Edward Telles. "Racial Identity and Racial Treatment of Mexican Americans." Race and social problems. U.S. National Library of Medicine, 4 Apr. 2012. Web. 25 Mar. 2017.