Becoming Mexican American

Chapter 6 follows up on the themes in Part 1 regarding patterns of family migration and settlement in LA. Sánchez continues to push back against the notion that the “traditional” nature of the Mexican family structure limited the ability of its members to adapt to shifting social and economic conditions. He illustrates this point with the story of Guadalupe Salazar, a single mother who traveled from Chicago to LA with her child during the Great Depression to reunite with her estranged father. Despite her disappointing experience in Chicago, Guadalupe remarried in LA and established a stable working-class life that allowed her family to survive the Depression and thrive years later (130). While Sánchez acknowledges the importance of kinship networks in achieving individual successes like that of Guadalupe, he also argues that no two families’ experiences were the same and that understanding this diversity is crucial to examining the continuous evolution of the Mexican American identity in LA.

After revisiting the points made in Chapter 1 with respect to internal and circular migration patterns, Sánchez utilizes records from the Board of Special Inquiry of the Immigration Service to examine the complex process of moving an entire family across the border in stages.