Poster in a window that says "We Serve Whites Only, No Spanish or Mexicans"

Throughout the southwest, signs such as this were common. Much like Jim Crow in the South, the southwest used segregation and entrenched racist policies to keep Mexican and Mexican-American people at the fringe of society.

Before World War 1, immigration along the southern border was relatively free. Farmers welcomed the ready supply of cheap, migrant labor. During World War 1, the United States actively recruited Mexican labor into our country to help with increased food production because of the war effort. If you will remember from the Fresh Air interview we listened to, South America was specifically exempt from the Immigration Act of 1924 specifically to provide the temporary labor farmers wanted. The bracero program of the 1940s brought even more immigrants into our nation from Mexico.

Unlike other immigrant patterns, Mexican immigrants tended to come to the U.S. as a family unit (except during the bracero program). This means that entire families, including children, often worked in the fields for American farmers and would follow the crops up and down California and the southwest. This leads to a low level of educational achievement for Mexican and Mexican-American children because of their transient lifestyle (that plus English-only policies that were put into place beginning in the 1920s). Mexican-American girls had on average even lower levels of educational achievement than boys. This began to change, however, with the Chicano/a rights movement of the 1960s. We will read more about this movement next week.

The following article is a bit long but discusses four different Mexican-Amerian women as they work to gain an education, specifically higher education. This article is great because it is a case study of four different topics giving us an in-depth micro-history on a wider topic that was unfolding throughout the southwest at the time.

While Mexican-American and black women worked to pursue higher education, white women had already started entering college in mass by the 1950s. However, white women often went to college specifically to pursue their "Mrs." degree in which they would find a husband and drop out. Black women and Mexican-American women that did go to college were much more likely to finish their program and apply that knowledge to a career.

Before Chicana Civil Rights: Three Generations of Mexican American Women in Higher Education in the Southwest, 1920–1965