Word: mexicans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...influence on metropolitan culture, at least superficially, has been great. There is an air, especially in East Los Angeles, of what Mexican Poet Octavio Paz says are his national essences: "delight in decoration, carelessness and pomp, negligence, passion and reserve." Shop signs, often pictorial, are painted directly and unprofessionally on stucco façades. The slow promenades of customized cars are nationally famous...
...Among Mexican Americans, however, there are class and other divisions that can be as important as the distinctions among Latin nationalities. "There is a huge difference between the kids born here and the kids born in Mexico," says Jesse Quintero, a teacher whose students are mostly illegals. "It's a different breed." And while the waves of illegal Mexican immigrants are exceptionally poor, the barrio's long-entrenched Mexican Americans inhabit a world more like William Bendix's TV L.A. in the 1950s show The Life of Riley: working-class comfortable. The middle class, perhaps 30% of L.A.'s latinos...
...plain. Diablo, 23, spends most of his free time hanging out with a few fellow members of the Lopez-Maravilla gang. They look tough. But at a meeting in a tool shed late last month, they were mostly concerned with planning an upcoming rummage sale. There are some 300 Mexican youth gangs in L.A., and many are violent drug users: police say 260 homicides last year were gang related...
...Raina, 24, is a University of Southern California graduate who dates Anglos (40% of Mexican Americans marry across ethnic lines) and spent her junior year studying in Madrid: Ernie had wanted her to perfect her Spanish...
Jesse Quintero, 28, and his wife Rosemary, 27, were born and raised in East L.A., but they met as students at U.S.C. They are teachers in the schools of heavily Mexican Bell Gardens. "I am a latino," Jesse declares. "I'll never feel Anglo." He glances at Rosemary, who is wearing her Camp Beverly Hills T shirt. "Sure," he says, "we listen to Anglo music, watch Anglo TV, go to Anglo movies. But we do it with other latinos...