Americans are reminded almost daily of the Negro's checkered progress toward equality. Seldom, by contrast, are they apprised of the social and economic lag that afflicts the nation's second largest disadvantaged minority: the 4,677,000 Mexican-Americans of the U.S. Southwest—proud, poor and increasingly protest-minded. From the Rio Grande to the Russian River, in the bleak barrios of East Los Angeles and the tar-paper colonias of the San Joaquin Valley, the Mexican minority is struggling to articulate its anger.
Vague and inchoate, it is directed toward at least three targets: the "Anglo," for his cavalier indifference to Latin contributions to Southwest history and culture; the Negro, for having won aid and attention by rioting in city slums while the Mexican-American kept his cool in his own ghetto; and his own people, for their self-defeating pride and insistence on remaining aliens in their ancestral homeland. The Mexican-American, after all, is predated in the Southwest by only the buffalo and the Plains Indian; he has never put his psychological signature to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded the Southwest to the U.S. after the Mexican War of 1846.
Bottles & Olés. Throughout the Southwest's "serape belt," Mexican-Americans are feeling strapped. Federal poverty projects in the Negro neighborhoods of Los Angeles outnumber by 3 to 1 those for Mexican-Americans. From 1950 to 1960, the Mexican-American high school dropout rate held steady at 75%, while the Negro was making significant strides forward in education. More than a third of the nation's Mexican-American families (most of them in Texas) live below the poverty line of $3,000 a year, while their birth rate, sustained by Catholic-inspired resistance to contraception, is soaring far higher than that of any other group. Though 85% of all Mexican-Americans are pochos—native-born citizens of the U.S. —many speak only Spanish or just enough English to deal with cops and employers.
Nowhere is the pocho's plight—or potential power—more evident than in the monotonous, sun-scabbed flatlands of Ea,st Los Angeles, where 600,000 Mexican-Americans live. At the confluence of the swooping freeways, the L.A. barrio begins. In tawdry taco joints and rollicking cantinas, the reek of cheap sweet wine competes with the fumes of frying tortillas. The machine-gun patter of slang Spanish is counterpointed by the bellow of lurid hot-rods driven by tattooed pachucos. The occasional appearance of a neatly turned-out Agringado (a Mexican-American who has adapted to Anglo styles) clashes incongruously with the weathered-leather look of the cholo (newly arrived, often wetback Mexican laborer). To the barrio dwellers, the rest of the world is Gringolandia. Few venture forth except to attend the fights at Olympic Auditorium, where their ebullient olés and accurately hurled wine bottles give much needed support to Mexican club fighters with more guts than science.