Word: mexicanization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...traditional picture of immigration is of men coming first and eventually sending for their families. But today experts estimate that more than half of the U.S.'s legal, and nearly half of the illegal, immigrants are women. Even undocumented Mexican immigrants, historically mostly male, are increasingly female. Many immigrant women are rural and have left their husbands and family behind...
...Taiwan, they learn to put together computer chips, sew flannel pajamas and cover baseballs. Moved irretrievably beyond the old ways by their experience, they tend to migrate to the same kind of factories or to other jobs in the U.S. In a way, assembly plants just south of the Mexican border are staging areas for women's immigration...
Immigrants' children are sometimes agonizingly aware of the traits that mark them as foreign. Among these: their names. Jorge Orellana, 8, the son of immigrants from El Salvador, says classmates in a Chicago school taunted him with the words "Mexican kid." He now introduces himself as George. Son Nguyen's 16-year-old brother asks new acquaintances whether they want "my American or Vietnamese name." He is Tien to his family, Tim to others...
Many state and local agencies take a similar approach. Both Valenzuela and his wife Elvira, 38, secured California drivers' licenses by showing their Mexican birth certificates and by passing a driving test and a written examination in Spanish. When the Valenzuelas registered their cars they needed no immigration documents. The same was true when they borrowed money from a major California bank, first to buy a car and later to nurture their business. "Anybody asks, I just say 'American citizen,' and I show them my driver's license and Social Security card," Valenzuela says...
...couple have three Mexican-born children and one, Enriqueta, who gained her coveted American citizenship the most direct way: born in the U.S.A. After her birth in 1977, Valenzuela filed a residency application, which is still pending. Such long waits are common. The Valenzuela children were enrolled in the Los Angeles public schools without any inquiry into their immigration status. After school, the boys, Ricardo, 16, and Jorge, 15, work in the family business, changing and repairing tires, while Leticia, 14, helps keep the books. The girls also do many of the household chores, because their mother badly twisted...