Word: mexicanization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Jose Luis Villa, who slipped across the Mexican border last fall, has even worse prospects. He makes his home on a ragged mattress, one of about 30 lying in a row underneath the roaring traffic of Los Angeles' San Diego Freeway. Next to Villa's mattress stands a cardboard Perrier carton that contains most of his worldly possessions: a toothbrush, a tube of Colgate toothpaste, a cracked and yellowing bar of soap, a flashlight and a beginner's manual of English. Villa looks 13, but he claims to be 16. Every morning he hikes over to the "slave market...
Even with the best intentions on all sides, the question of how to fit all these varieties of strangers into a relatively coherent American society remains difficult. Linda Wong, a Chinese-American official of the Mexican- American Legal Defense and Education Fund, sees trouble in the racial differences. "There is concern among whites that the new immigrants may be unassimilable," says Wong. "Hispanics and Asians cannot melt in as easily, and the U.S. has always had an ambivalent attitude toward newcomers. Ambivalent at best, racist at worst...
...around them. "Many American values and customs which are very much part of the American way of life are seen (by Indians) as 'evil,' " writes Parmatma Saran, associate professor of sociology at Baruch College in Manhattan. "The American attitude toward sex . . . is viewed as immoral." Gaspar Ortega, a onetime Mexican prizefighter who is now a social worker in New Haven, Conn., is concerned about American treatment of the family. "I get disgusted when I see families separated. I blame the pressure of the dollar when both mother and father have to work and leave the kids in day care...
...months ago, a mere handful of people were showing up for Saturday- night home services conducted by Jorge Alvarado, a Mexican-American upholsterer and part-time evangelist in Houston. But soon so many people were coming that Alvarado had to move his congregation to a small commercial building, and then to a large house, where some 80 worshipers now regularly attend his meetings. These two-hour gatherings feature testimonies, rousing hymns accompanied by electric guitar, and high-energy sermons ("The Lord gives strength to the weak...
...result, U.S. Catholicism often seems unfriendly and unfamiliar to Hispanics. Says Xavier Murrieta, a Mexican immigrant in the Protestant Centro de Amor Cristiano in Phoenix: "In small Mexican villages the local priest is a family counselor, the doctor, the lawyer. That ingredient is missing here." Roberto Martinez, who owns a Chicago restaurant favored by Hispanics, believes that U.S. priests do not mingle enough. Says he: "I've never met a priest in my restaurant, but I've met a hundred reverends...