Chapter 1
Myth, History, and Theory
The explanation for changes in family structure must await the fuller comprehension of family history. One must know what it is that is changing before one explains the change.
–Mark Poster, A Critical Theory of the Family, p. 164.
MYTHS HAVE AN IMPORTANT relationship to our understanding of everyday reality. Widely shared myths such as those of Santa Claus, George Washington and the cherry tree, and the free-market economy serve to promote hope, exemplary behavior, and social unity. Many historical myths exist to promote patriotism. Thus American history is a required subject in the schools, and not too surprisingly the schoolbook version of the American past is saturated with nationalistic mythology. By the time they graduate from high school young Americans learn that the Puritans were harsh and repressive individuals, that the American Revolution was fought to gain freedom from Britain, that Lincoln freed the slaves, that the stockmarket crash of 1929 caused the Great Depression, and that the New Deal ended this disaster. All of these “truths,” however, turn out to be false myths, distortions of the actual events or gross oversimplifications of the historical record.1
Having their origin in the distant past and passed on in the popular culture, myths may or may not be true. It is somewhat easier to check the myths that deal with events of the recent American past than to verify those that have their origin in prehistoric periods. False historical beliefs in American history that deal with relatively recent events have often been molded by the political and cultural milieu of the age in which they arose. For example, in the 1860s and 70s the reformers who fought to control runaway monopolies developed a mythology about the Robber Barons. Supposedly, as a group, American business leaders were corrupt, greedy, scheming individuals who robbed working-class poor as the feudal lords had exploited the peasants during the Middle Ages. The future historical study of nineteenth-century businessmen and corporate practices has been influenced by this myth of the Robber Barons.2 Other historical myths have influenced international relations and national policy. The still controversial myth of a monolithic Communist conspiracy to take over the world was born in the Cold War years immediately after World War II when Marshall Stalin faced President Truman over the explosive issues of Poland and the atomic bomb. To this day our nation’s debate over foreign policy has been framed in terms of a mythic conception of the Soviet Union’s intentions.
It is said that myths endure because they express essential truths. In the case of American history, however, it may well be that myths condition how we perceive the world and as a result how we interpret “truth” itself. One of the more useful purposes to which a historian can devote his or her energies is the correction of false historical beliefs and the elimination of simplified stereotypes. This book has as its object both these purposes in regard to its subject: an analysis of the historical experience of Mexican American families in the American Southwest.
Mexicans in the United States have labored under a number of stereotypes and prejudices. Recently Chicano historians have researched and written histories to challenge some of these misconceptions. In the area of the family life of Mexican Americans there are still a number of popular myths that need to be examined historically, and there are those doing sociological research who are trying to correct these distortions and stereotypes. A later chapter discusses in some detail this recent research literature as well as the misunderstandings of Mexican American family life that continue to plague even academic studies. I am concerned here with a popular, not an academic, mythology, one that is shared by a large number of people, including many Mexican Americans themselves.
In the popular imagination Mexican Americans, including the most recent immigrants from Mexico, are assumed to be and always to have been family oriented. Mexicans are seen as being emotionally bound to a large extended family and as having lots of children. Within the family Mexican Americans are supposed to be unusually warm, caring, and protective. Another belief is that Mexican Americans have a great respect for the elder family members and a great respect for parental discipline and familial authority. At the same time these positive stereotypes are often also interpreted by some as being detrimental to the economic achievement of Mexican Americans. The tightly knit family is frequently blamed for the lack of educational and occupational advancement of Mexican Americans. The protective and nurturing family is also sometimes blamed for promoting a low degree of assimilation into American society. The respect for male authority in the home is sometimes viewed as evidence of machismo, almost always interpreted as a selfish male subordination of women and a sexual irresponsibility. Mexican-American women are seen as virtual slaves of the family, lacking the will or initiative to stand up for their rights. Mexican-American women are supposed to be quiet homebodies, self-sacrificing, and virtuous. In the popular mind the Mexican family in the United States is a constellation of paradoxes: it is warm, supportive, and well-ordered while also being authoritarian, dysfunctional, and essentially un-American.
THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF THE MEXICAN-AMERICAN FAMILY
The popular mythology surrounding the Mexican-American family conditions how the administrators and policy makers in A+merican society perceive the social life and condition of those of Mexican heritage in the United States. Although social scientists have produced scores of monographs and essays on the contemporary Mexican-American family, there has been very little research on its historical antecedents.
Perhaps the only work thus far that treats the historical dimensions of Mexican-American family life is Alfredo Mirandé and Evangelina Enríquez, La Chicana: The Mexican American Woman.3 They argue that the contemporary Chicano family has been heavily influenced by pre-Columbian, non-Western traditions. In their view Chicano families have played a historic role in resisting assimilation and oppression. Present-day Chicano families, while having a wide diversity of values and characteristics, share certain common ideals which derive from their heritage. Mirandé and Enríquez believe that these ideals have remained relatively unchanged over time, even given the dramatic transformations that have occurred in the social and economic environment. The most prominent features of this system of ideals are the belief that there should be a strict separation of male and female roles, a respect for elders, a positive value given to male superiority (machismo), a priority on maternal devotion to the home and children, and the importance of the family as an emotional and physical support system.
To what degree have these ideals been held by Mexican Americans through history? What has been the relation of these beliefs to everyday reality? What has been the role of culture and the economy in creating diversity in family life? Does history offer any clues as to the origin of values and beliefs and the ways in which they were realized within the family? These are questions that can be debated but not without empirical evidence concerning family life from the past. Contemporary sociological studies seem to point to the fact that the Chicano family has undergone a good deal of change in recent decades. Diversity and not uniformity of practices and values seems to be the most salient characteristic mentioned in the contemporary literature. For the social historian the question becomes how has the Chicano family changed, in what directions, and for what reasons?
This book is an introduction to these complex questions. The approach I have taken is to examine the families of Mexican heritage beginning in the nineteenth century and specifically those living in four towns: Los Angeles, Tucson, Santa Fe, and San Antonio. Currently more than 90 percent of all Spanish speaking of Mexican descent live in urban areas. By studying the urban history of nineteenth-century families we can begin to trace patterns of continuity and give a historical dimension to debates over the dynamics of Mexican-American family life.
The late nineteenth century was a period of rapid industrial change, and for this reason the study of this period is important for our understanding of modern social processes. It was in the period 1848–1910 that Mexican Americans first felt the effects of industrialization and urbanization. In that era they also had to begin to deal with problems associated with being an ethnic group. Issues of immigration, assimilation, and identity first surfaced in these decades.
Noticeably absent from all the published American family histories is a comparative study of Hispanics. Most histories of the American family stop short of the Mississippi River and assume that samples of family life drawn from colonial New England, metropolitan regions of the Midwest and the Northeast, and the rural South are representative of patterns in America as a whole. While there have been numerous historical studies of black families, there have been only a few serious investigations of the history of Spanish-Mexican families in the American Southwest.4 This region, with the American West for that matter, is largely unexplored territory as far as historians of the family are concerned.
The Spanish-Mexican borderlands region and the American Southwest offer unique opportunities for us to test, in a comparative way, generalizations that have been arrived at through an analysis of non-Hispanic groups in American society. Since the nineteenth century this region has been a social laboratory which has brought together peoples of radically different cultures: the Mexican, the Anglo-American, a great variety of European and Asian immigrants, native Indians, and blacks. By the turn of the century the peoples of the Southwest were mostly living in villages, towns, and cities located near strategic water sources. The history of families in this region has especially been influenced by the economic growth of the twentieth century. Railroads and later superhighways linked its regional economy—mining, ranching, and agriculture—to a rapidly developing national financial and industrial system. In the process patterns of American economic development displaced or submerged native populations and constructed a sprawling economic network that depended on cheap European, Mexican, and Oriental labor for its prosperity.
THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO FAMILY HISTORY
The historical study of Mexican-heritage families in the Southwest is a new field that has yet to be defined with precision. As history is not an exact science, we should not expect that a theory of family history will be able to explain everything. Most often historical understanding is characterized by a humanistic perspective that is argued with logic and clarity. A theoretical approach to family history serves as a guide to give form and direction to our historical research. A satisfactory theory of family history should have several attributes. First, it should be general enough to enable us to organize a rich diversity of historical expression, ranging from census enumerations to poetry. Second, any theory of family history should be economical in its statement, being clear and concise, easily understandable by the layperson. Third, it should be capable of “explaining” the dynamic relationships among larger social, cultural, economic, and political forces. In this sense it should be provocative through leading toward critical thinking and toward further elaboration and research.
There are, of course, many possibilities for articulating a theoretical approach to family history and Chicano family history in particular. The 1970s witnessed a rapid growth in sociological theory dealing with the family, and there are increasing efforts to incorporate this body of material into historical analysis.5 At least three sociological-based theories may be relevant for a beginning conceptualization of the field: modernization theory, Barbara Laslett’s reproduction and production paradigm, and Mark Poster’s critical theory of the family.
Modernization theories have been developed by social scientists to explain social and economic changes in large geopolitical areas. Generally they hypothesize two historical eras: (1) a traditional or premodern stage, which is characterized by a subsistence rural economy, the lack of developed economic infrastructures, widespread poverty, and nondemocratic forms of government; and (2) a modern stage, characterized by a developing urban industrial base, the emergence of a sizable middle class, generally a higher standard of living, and increased egalitarianism at all levels of society. Modernization theorists attempt to analyze the social, political, and economic dynamics involved in the transition between these stages.6
Many criticisms have been leveled at the proponents of modernization. Some scholars believe that the modernization approach is yet another attempt by Western and American imperialists to justify the hegemony of the capitalist economic and social system. Modernizationists, they charge, overgeneralize and stereotype “traditional” nonindustrial societies, tending to discount the value of the latter. Modernization theory lacks precision, especially when dealing with societies at the micro level. Modernization concepts fail to explain satisfactorily why fundamental changes have taken place, often relying more on descriptive statements of low explanatory value. The social historian Tamara Hareven has charged that modernization approaches advance overly simplistic views of the complex processes involved in social and economic change. The theorists, she notes, often do not distinguish between men’s and women’s roles during the process of modernization. Nor do they recognize that so-called traditional patterns often coexist alongside modern ones.7
Maxine Baca Zinn has pointed out that for Mexican-American families modernization does not result in “a simple substitution of modern patterns for traditional ones.”8 She found that while employed wives in Chicano families demonstrated more egalitarian behavior in conjugal decision-making, they still retained many family values labeled as “traditional.” Zinn argues that more research must be done on the variation of Chicano family life and that historians as well as sociologists should abandon the simplistic modern-traditional dichotomy.
A critical view of the ethnocentric stereotypes often found in the modernization approach is necessary if we are to use it to explain change in the Chicano family. Modern forms of family life are not inherently better than traditional ones, as is usually implied by proponents of modernization. Changes associated with industrialization and urbanization have not always been uniformly progressive or positive vis-à-vis the family. The complexity and variability of the “traditional” rural Mexican and Chicano family should be recognized. So-called “static” rural societies are always the result of a dynamic and long-term historical process. Enough criticism of the social science stereotypes of the “changeless” traditional Mexican family has been leveled to make us suspect idealized and overly romantic notions of family life prior to the American conquest.9
For all its limitations, modernization may still prove to be useful for the study of the Mexican-American family. Few would deny that industrialization and urbanization have had an impact on the structure, function, and composition of the Chicano family. A systematic study of the modernization pressures experienced by the Mexican rural and urban family during the nineteenth century could reveal patterns and processes clarifying later changes undergone by Mexican-immigrant families in the twentieth century.10 The problems of assimilation and acculturation, both culturally and economically, may most usefully be studied in light of the modernization approach. Further research on the impact of industrial Western societies on non-Western rural peoples may, in the future, produce more sophisticated concepts and theories which will have a greater explanatory value for our understanding of Mexican-American family history.
A central issue Chicano historians must confront is the relation of economic development to family change. Modernization theory for reasons already mentioned is not easily adapted to a study of the social history of the family. Most recently Barbara Laslett has proposed a theory of family history in relation to the economy, which may prove to be useful to social historians.11
Basically Laslett’s approach is to analyze how the historical needs of the capitalist economic system have been in conflict with the needs of families. Since reproduction and production are vital for the continuation of society, a dialectical conflict often exist...