 |
 |
 |
 |
LA FRONTERA AND ITS PEOPLE: By Barbara A. Driscoll Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Working Paper No. 17 December 1993
Interviews with Dr. Charles Loomis,
Table of Contents
Consciously or not, those of us involved in Border Studies operate within a generally agreed parameter about what constitutes the U.S.-Mexico Border and its study. Today, representatives of various disciplines, as well as proponents of different perspectives and individuals in both countries, increasingly refer to a basic group of assumptions when discussing the region. Although much disagreement surrounds Border studies, some of it heated, research mostly departs from the same nucleus of premises. We mostly agree, for instance, that the Border that joins Mexico and the United States comprises far more than the strip of land contiguous to the international boundary. Most concur that it is a region whose identity, economic activities, cultural life, etc., supersedes its binational nature to be integrated in many respects. Although it appears to be a straightforward and self-evident concept from our vantage point, many years of convoluted research trails through parched deserts were necessary to reach that point. Crucial to the development of this intellectual infrastructure of Border Studies was the work in the 1950s by a mulitidisciplinary group of researchers organized by Dr. Charles Loomis from his position as the chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department of Michigan State University. Loomis, as the following pages testify, used his personal and professional background to plan and implement a long-term research program on the Border. The network of academicians throughout the Southwest and Midwest initiated research and developed a line of inquiry that would be an extraordinary step in the intellectual development of Border Studies, and one that is not only fascinating and important but also relatively unknown. This group of researchers produced some of the literature that we now consider classics in the genre of Border Studies. Dr. Loomis, along with Dr. Julian Samora, an early and important collaborator in Border Studies and a pioneer in Mexican American Studies, graciously agreed to share their recollections and perspectives about the 1950s and 1960s. The participation of Dr. Gilbert Cardenas, presently director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas, balanced their points of view with his experiences of the last fifteen years. These discussions were held at CEFNOMEX in Tijuana and proved to be even richer and more stimulating that had been expected. In fact, ironically, the original idea for the project was suggested by Dr. Jorge Bustamente, President of that institution. Dr. Loomis and Dr. Samora brought to light data about people, places and research during the early years of Border Studies as we know it, that is simply not available through normal documentary procedures. This monograph contains edited excerpts from these conversations. We have also decided to include an introduction to place the participants' accomplishments into proper historical perspective and a selective annotated bibliography reflecting various phases of Border literature. I. Preface | II. Introduction | III. La Frontera and Its People: The Early Development of Broder and Mexican Amercian Studies | IV. Selective Annotated Bibliography | V. Participants | VI. Acknowledgements | Endnotes United States-Mexican Border Studies, as it is generally understood, is a relatively young discipline of about thirty-five years. This is not to say that there was no literature or research about the Border Region before 1950. On the contrary, with little effort, even the most casual reader finds an abundance of written material, encompassing all sorts of information from specialized, technical reports to highly emotional and personal narratives. However, during the 1950s the academic community of the United States witnessed some decidedly remarkable strides in conceptualizing and studying the United States-Mexican Border Region, such that they would help to reorder the understanding of the area and influence much subsequent research. That is, it was this generation of researchers in the United States that made conceptual breakthroughs and substantial intellectual advances leading to some of the tools of analysis taken for granted today, and considered most befitting to an understanding of the Border Region. This cadre of researchers and academicians pioneering Border Studies in the 1950s was organized and sponsored by Dr. Charles Loomis, who at the time was head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Michigan State University. Professional background and training in various areas, as well as personal life experiences at Las Cruces, New Mexico facilitated in Dr. Loomis a firm and rational understanding of Border dynamics. Moreover, foresight and opportunity enabled Dr. Loomis to spearhead a planned and organized effort aimed at a systematic, professional examination of selected Border issues. From his base at Michigan State, Dr. Loomis invited collaboration from academics all over the American Southwest, as well as parts of the Midwest. All in all, this network produced much incisive academic work on the Border Region, opening new fields of inquiry and utilizing then innovative methodologies. However, many of the personal and intellectual achievements of this generation remain unrecognized for their contribution to Border Studies. This intellectual generation merits discussion, if not for the sake of the breadth of their accomplishments, at the very least for their contribution to Border Studies. Dr. Loomis' recollections augment our knowledge of the Border and Border Studies. Among the academicians Dr. Loomis attracted to his Border Studies projects was Dr. Julian Samora, the first Mexican American to earn a Ph.D. in sociology, and a trailblazer in studying Mexican Americans. Dr. Samora collaborated with many phases of Dr. Loomis's Border Studies projects, spent some time at Michigan State, and until recently was one of the few Mexican American professional scholars to pursue research within the ranks of Border Studies. Dr. Samora's experience and perspective regarding the Border is particularly perceptive in many respects; therefore, it was deemed crucial that Dr. Samora be invited to interact with Dr. Loomis in the proposed oral histories. Dr. Samora's professional commitment has remained that of exploring and promoting the study of the Mexican American people. In fact, his priority to understand the Border Region's most prominent ethnic group, Mexican Americans, has led him to make valuable contributions to the discipline of Border Studies. In turn, Dr. Samora himself has formed an entire generation of professional scholars in Mexican American Studies. Therefore, Dr. Gilbert Cardenas, a graduate of Dr. Samora's Mexican American Graduate Studies Program, represents one branch of the third generation of Border Studies in the United States.
The "Spanish" Borderlands. However, before embarking upon a discussion of the role of this group in the evolution of Border Studies, it would be both apropós and informative to consider briefly the notion of Border Studies prior to 1950. Such a review is enlightening in view of the subsequent development of Border Studies. It highlights many still-useful pre-1950 publications and emphasizes the significance of the work of Loomis and his colleagues. The historian Herbert Bolton was the individual who in the early 1920's coined the term "Spanish Borderlands" to refer to that area of the continental United States that had been part of the once expansive Spanish Empire in the New World. In his seminal work The Spanish Borderlands, Bolton opined after much research that having been a part of the Spanish colonial empire had left an imprint on that region of the United States; hence, the term. If one does not find obvious cohesion in the area, at least this shared legacy distinguishes the region from those others strictly under French or English colonial influence. Manifestations and intensity of Spanish colonial policy and culture certainly vary widely within the region for many reasons, but a commonalty remains. Within the definition of "Spanish Borderlands," Bolton included all of the United States contiguous with the Mexican border, that is, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas, plus Louisiana, Florida and Georgia. Although today we mostly equate Spanish Borderlands with the Southwest, it is true that Spanish explorations also extended into the Midwest. Indeed, the first permanent settlement in the United States was established by the Spanish at St. Augustine, Florida in the sixteenth century, thus predating the English foray in Massachusetts and Virginia by some years. Although the Spanish legacy of Louisiana and Georgia is not really our concern here, and does not touch on U.S. Mexican Border Studies, it does bear mention. The thrust of Bolton's historical treatment of the Border Region centers around the Spanish colonial era--its explorations, missions, presidios and settlements. This then meant that he neither discussed the effect of Mexican nationhood on the Borderlands, nor the consequences of its annexation from the United States. But most importantly for our discussion, Bolton did recognize that the relationship between Spanish colonial policy and the American Southwest was deep enough to help shape a region and culture within the United States, a region whose distinctiveness has survived and maintained its own identity. In the preface to The Spanish Borderlands, Bolton alludes to particular facets of life in the Southwest clearly attributable to the influences of Spanish civilization. Architectural designs and building uses, as well as missions, ranchos, and place name all serve for Bolton as tangible evidence of this. Also cowboy culture, land titles and surveys, legal precedents for water and mineral rights, as well as anachronistic property rights for women--still common at the time Bolton was writing--all bespoke of a Spanish legacy. To repeat, Bolton acknowledged the influence of Spanish colonial policy and endeavors upon the Southwest he observed, but apparently assumed it was static. He made no references to either Mexican national policy or the establishment of the international boundary in relation to the Border Region. Although Bolton was the first to refer to the American Southwest as part of the "Spanish Borderlands", he was far from the first writer to attempt to interpret the Southwest for American consumption. Indeed, in Bolton's words: "Not least has been the Hispanic appeal to the imagination. The Spanish occupation has stamped the literature of the borderlands and furnished theme and color for a myriad of writers, great and small." The body of literature that was published in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century about the Southwest is rich, diverse and informative, although sometimes naive and quite biased. Both fiction and non-fiction, with a few notable exceptions, were printed materials that were mostly distributed by eastern publishing houses to eastern urban markets. Although these books, pamphlets, etc., cannot be considered strictly Border Studies, their aggregate provided a certain ambiance and the informational bases from which Bolton's thesis could depart. A few brief allusions to different segments of this literature will illustrate its content and significance to the development of U.S. Border Studies. Much American fiction between 1870 and 1920 or so was inspired by many aspects of the Southwest: the harsh beauty of its rugged and unforgiving deserts; the alluring, exotic nature of Mexican culture; the undisciplined and uncivilized energy of cowboy life; and quite prominently, the tragic nobility of Native Americans and their severe deprivations. Cecil Robison in his analysis of the treatment of Mexico and the Hispanic Southwest in American literature theorizes that the American reading public found an emotional respite in this genre of fiction. The East and Midwest were rapidly and brutally industrializing, attracting immigrants from "undesirable" places (southern and eastern Europe) to support rapidly expanding economies, and in the process dramatically altering the fabric of "gentile society." Fashion and taste in the Gilded Age, moreover, were Victorian and often baroque. Reading about and vicariously experiencing the seemingly uncomplicated life of the bucolic Southwest, sometimes through the eyes of a Mexicano or Native American, inevitably created a new public perspective, albeit distorted, on the Border Region, and not a small amount of curiosity. In fact, many common notions about the West that later surfaced in cowboy movies and other forms of mass media date from this period. The piece d'resistance of this fiction is the famous novel Ramona, by Helen Fiske Hunt Jackson. Published originally in 1884, Ramona was so successful that by the 1930's it had been printed one hundred thirty-five times and had been interpreted cinemagraphically three times. A native of the eastern seaboard, Mrs. Jackson was a writer and journalist, and she earned a living from writing newspaper articles and selling short stories, inspired by her travels around the United States. In the mid-1870's, she married for the second time and made Colorado Springs her permanent base, and although she had already traveled around the Southwest, being situated in Colorado allowed for much more extensive travel in the region. Particularly through her travels and personal acquaintances in California, Mrs. Jackson found herself appalled by the dire circumstances imposed upon the native Mexican people and Native Americans. Most especially, Mrs. Jackson took the plight of Native Americans in southern California to heart, and on their behalf, she tried to lobby the federal government with her letters and testimonies before Congress and to reach the reading public with her writing, most prominently through the novel, Ramona. The book revolves around the deep and romantic relationship of Ramona, a young Native American girl, and her lover Alessandro, and is set in a fictional rancho in southern California. Although most experts feel that the locale is intended to be a ranch in the mountains in eastern San Diego County, Mrs. Jackson was deliberately vague, intending instead to provide a broad panorama of Native Americans in California. In fact, the book does provide rich and accurate details about life in late nineteenth century California, and in that regard, actively explores controversial themes surrounding her topic, and touches what we would consider part of Border Studies--land titles, cultural dislocation, etc. Nonetheless, readers responded to this novel as literature; its political impact was limited. Certainly, Ramona did not generate the political outrage that could lead to substantive improvement for Native Americans--to the disappointment of Jackson. Charles Lummis, a journalist, exemplifies another facet of this literature as dramatically as Helen Hunt Jackson. Arriving in the Southwest as representative for a New England newspaper, Lummis became enraptured by the region's peoples and lands. His romantic and somewhat stereotyped books, The Land of Poco Tiempo and Flores of Our Last Romance, were published by major eastern publishers for urban audiences and sold quite well. However, in the process of experiencing the Southwest, Lummis became an avid photographer and advocate for the area. He documented everything imaginable with photos and notes, which would become an extensive and famous collection of Native American artifacts. In fact, it is his personal library and collections that constitute the nucleus for the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles. It will serve our purpose here to include a magazine that Lummis developed and edited in Los Angeles entitled Land of Sunshine: Magazine of California and the Southwest. As a non-academic research journal, the magazine was inaugurated in the 1890's and included a multitude of Border-related topics from Coronado Island in San Diego County, to remnants of ranchos, to the last Native Americans to have lived within missions, to penitentes in New Mexico, to Chinese brides in California. Moreover, each issue had many fine documentary photos. But it is significant to note that the magazine was intended to support itself, as each issue was full of advertisements promoting household goods, tourism in California, and real estate development. Lummis even sold his own house through an advertisement in Land of Sunshine. And apparently the magazine was successful, because it survived for several years. Herbert Bolton's most immediate antecedent for his theory and academic research, however, was Hubert Bancroft, the semi-academic entrepreneur of history, based in San Francisco. Bancroft began his career in the East, writing and publishing semi-popular literature. After he accumulated some working capital and finished an ambitious ten-year project to purchase every book he could find anywhere on California and the American West (including in Europe), Bancroft gathered together a large group of compilers, note-takers and writers to write history. Bancroft, furthermore, had the foresight to conduct oral histories and take statements from persons still alive who knew something of what had taken place in the Border region during the previous fifty years or so, especially about the first few years after the Treaty of Guadeloupe, Hidalgo was signed, thereby generating a new source of primary historical data. Bancroft even interviewed Mexicans who had decided to stay in California after the Treaty of Guadeloupe, Hidalgo, the experiences of whom are essential to understanding the Border's historical formation. The result of this project was his famous thirty-nine volume set of histories, known as The Works of Hubert Bancroft, and its span is enormous. The volumes discuss a wide variety of topics touching Mexico, much of the American Southwest and even part of Canada, from colonial and ancient times to contemporary times, that is, to Bancroft's era, or the 1880's, or so. What is significant about The Works, moreover, is that they were published by Bancroft's own company based in San Francisco, known as the History Company. Bancroft's enterprise later published other historical treatises and works, and although not instantly profitable, it survived. Like Lummis in Los Angeles, Border topics provided Bancroft with a living in the early years of the twentieth century; Bancroft was as much a businessman as he was a historian. For the most part, Bancroft's works are not analytical. The bulk of the tomes recount events and occurrences, with small biographies of participants, with varying degrees of bias, and with a few precious footnotes and references. But The Works do succeed in relating and recording much historical data. In many respects, The Works is in itself a primary historical source because its publication is so close in time to many of the events it describes, and clearly reveals many nineteenth century biases about Border related topics. But it was left to Herbert Bolton, a dedicated academician, to incorporate these disparate segments of Border literature into a broader understanding, and to conceptualize them. Incidentally, Bolton was one of Bancroft's successors in directing the Bancroft Library in Berkeley. In fact, Bolton cites the work of both Hubert Bancroft and Charles Lummis in the bibliography to his The Spanish Borderlands. Bolton drew from these lines of inquiry about the Southwest, as well as his own training in Latin American history, to sketch the intellectual parameters of the Spanish Borderlands in the colonial era, and to underscore the importance of its study for United States history. Similarly, Bolton's avowed assumption underlying all his research that one had to transcend national boundaries in order to understand the historical development of any single country led to his famous theory of Western Hemisphere history, and consequently his notions about the Spanish Borderlands. Because of space limitations imposed upon Bolton by the publisher of Spanish Borderlands, he was not able to fully explore the historical question he was posing. And in fact, Bolton states in the book's preface that he was required to eliminate much material. Circumstances, then, had forced Bolton to be much more superficial in his treatment of Border history than he had intended. Even so, his study of the historical bond between the American Southwest and Spanish colonialism is provocative and for its time exciting. Unfortunately, Bolton's notion of Border history was neither well accepted by his peers nor further developed. Like his more global hypotheses about the shared legacy of Western Hemisphere history, his ideas about Border history lay dormant. His colleagues in the historical profession in the United States criticized his work, and significantly continued to think of him as a Latin American historian, rather than one of the American Southwest. Perhaps the milieu of the United States was not propitious for Bolton's proposals. While Bolton was suggesting a historical relationship between the United States and Spain, and by implication Mexico, many other American political and cultural groups were demanding the forced Americanization of European and other immigrants living in the country, as well as other means of homogenizing and insulating American society. It hardly seems likely that the academic community in the United States at that time would embrace Bolton's suggestions and their implications. Further work on the thesis would have to await Charles Loomis.
The Border: A Reappraisal That Dr. Charles P. Loomis should be considered the founder of contemporary Border Studies comes as no surprise in light of his interests, accomplishments, and his personal and professional commitments. His persistence in pursuing knowledge about his fellow man and society at large, combined with personal experience living on the Border and various encounters with international work and life, equipped Dr. Loomis with the tools and frame of reference to approach significant academic study of the Border Region. Loomis developed his research skills early in his career with a nine year professional association with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). They employed Dr. Loomis as an agricultural economist and social scientist. He studied rural life and applied social programs within a rural context, and for the last year, conducted extension work and training in the Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations. Loomis studied issues such as the standard of living in rural South Dakota, and in the Appalachia Mountains, planned rural communities, a comparison of African American sharecroppers with wage laborers in the Arkansas River Valley, the role of government agencies in rural society, and the process of resettlement in a rural area. But as early as 1938, Dr. Loomis came to research and publish studies that could be considered precursors of his later conceptualization of Border Studies, with the publication of Standards of Living in an Indian-Mexican Village and on a Reclamation Project, a report issued by the USDA. By 1941-43, however, almost all of Loomis's professional publications dealt with issues related to the Border and/or Spanish speaking in the Southwest. He published a series of reports and articles during that time based upon extensive research and field work among the rural Spanish American population of New Mexico-including "Wartime Migration from Rural Spanish Speaking Villages of New Mexico", "Spanish Americans: The New Mexican Experiment in Village Rehabilitation," an article about interagency cooperation in Taos, New Mexico and, interestingly, an article about inter-ethnic relations in two southwestern high schools. Reflecting his transfer to the Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations toward the end of his stay at USDA, Loomis published a couple of articles on agricultural extension work in Latin America, and particularly in Peru. However, in 1944 Dr. Loomis resigned from the USDA to assume the chairmanship of the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Michigan State. Dr. Loomis remained there at Michigan State until 1971 and served as department head until 1957. During his tenure Dr. Loomis was also the Director of the Social Research Service (1946-57) and the Director of the University's Area Research Center (1947-1971). It was during his stay at Michigan State that Dr. Loomis promoted his concept of Border Studies and consolidated the network of scholars and researchers mentioned earlier. The MSU Department of Sociology provided an ideal combination of institutional support and academic infrastructure. The MSU Department of Sociology at that time annually received $30,000 in research money from the College of Agriculture, a substantial amount of money in the 1950's, to be employed as Loomis deemed appropriate, including as seed moneys. Moreover, while associated with the Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations, Dr. Loomis was appointed to the board of Directors of the Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Costa Rica, a research and teaching organization associated with the Organization of American States, whose foundation and development had been facilitated by some individuals in the USDA. This institutional connection expedited a large grant of $150,000 from the Carnegie Foundation to study small agricultural villages in Turrialba, Costa Rica. The funds from this project financed several graduate student theses, but also enabled him to take a sabbatical leave from Michigan State in order to do on-site research in Costa Rica for a year. He subsequently published several articles in academic journals about field work there. Among them are "Health Aspects of the Community Development Project: Rural Area, Turrialba, Costa Rica," in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (July, 1953), and "Class Status in Rural Costa Rica--A Peasant Community Compared With an Hacienda Community" in Sociometry in 1949. Implementation of the Costa Rica project was pivotal for the later Border Studies projects. From Dr. Loomis's own reminiscences we learn that although the environment in Costa Rica furnished much material for research and analysis, he recognized that they were operating in an insulated setting. Like local rural societies in most places, that of the area around Turrialba was relatively isolated and its way of life essentially the product of one cultural tradition. Of course, its study would produce important information and insight into a local Latin American agricultural economy, inter-personal relations in a rural setting, and many other issues. But such local rural areas, be they in Latin America or the United States, innately lack the potential for comparative research. The "cutting edge" is missing; that is, a researcher would have to use information from other data sets to develop most kinds of comparative analyses. It was at this point that Dr. Loomis began to conceive of the U.S.-Mexico Border Region as an arena for potentially promising and insightful research. The region's unique character and dynamics inherently provided raw material for research not available in most other settings. Loomis's own life experiences in the Border Region had taught him the distinctive qualities of the area. The resources which Loomis had developed through Michigan State set the stage for his Border Studies project. University and USDA administrative machinery supported large scale research projects. Moreover, Rural Sociology, an influential journal of rural studies located at Michigan State for some of Loomis's stay, served as a vehicle of dissemination; funds and resources from the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station and College of Agriculture at MSU, the United States Public Health Service, and the MSU Center for International Programs, as well as data gathered through the Carnegie Corporation grants enabled Dr. Loomis to establish his network of Border Studies. From Dr. Samora's observations about those early years, it appears that the Border Studies cohort was rather loosely organized and oriented toward the pertinent research interests of its participants. The collaborators, as well as Loomis himself, encouraged their graduate students to do their Master's and doctoral theses on Border related topics as a strategy to generate more data. A cursory review of some of the contributors and their research activities will illustrate the diversity and scope of their work. They all worked with Loomis, receiving either financial or professional support. Loomis sought to include a broad range of research about the Border Region. At the University of Texas, Roy Clifford and Arturo de Hoyos were examining the awkward dilemma provoked by the floodwaters of the Rio Grande. Bill D'Antonio and Bill Farm were studying the power structure and decision-making processes in the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez metropolitan area, resulting in the book, Influentials in two Border Cities. Sigurd Johanson at New Mexico State was doing a series of community studies along the Rio Grande. Calvin Redekop was concerning himself with the Mennonite communities in Canada and in Chihuahua. Lyle Saunders was collaborating through his position in the Medical School in Colorado, and by means of a grant he obtained from the Russell Sage Foundation to continue the innovative research he was doing in the new academic field of medical sociology. Julian Samora, whom we'll discuss later, also at the Medical School in Colorado for a time, was working with Saunders and other members of the group. Edward Spicer published History of the Indians of the U.S. in 1969, a general overview of the Native American experience from a sympathetic perspective, and significantly included an analysis of the Native American perspective of their own history. In 1980, Spicer published a study about Samora, The Yaquis: A Cultural History, a richly illustrated ethnohistorical examination of the Yaquis, partially based upon personal observation of their culture and way of life. Most telling for our discussion here, however, is a book of readings edited by Spicer who makes a direct reference in the preface to Loomis and his theory of systemic linkage, one which Loomis has used to explain some Border phenomenon. Perhaps the group's most far-reaching publication was the bibliography published in Rural Sociology in 1960, developed and written by historian Charles Cumberland, but conceived and subsidized by Charles Loomis. Loomis recalls that he soon realized that the discipline of Border Studies needed a comprehensive bibliography that would serve as a reference tool, summarize the existing literature and perhaps promote the discipline. It required time and planning, but eventually Dr. Loomis found enough funds to bring the Mexican historian Charles Cumberland to Michigan State for a year to develop this bibliography. Dr. Loomis then literally purchased a 1960 issue of Rural Sociology to publish and distribute the bibliography. Cumberland's bibliography is quite long, over 100 pages, and is divided topically, utilizing a wide variety of categories employed today in Border Studies. For example, as a Mexicanist, Cumberland recognized the importance of understanding transboundary interaction for Border Studies, so he included many citations about and from the Mexican side of the Border Region. The bibliography also contains references to a myriad of literature about various aspects of the area's culture. In light of the nascent state of Border Studies, Cumberland's bibliography is a remarkable achievement and is still useful to the Border Studies student. Perhaps the inclusion of Julian Samora in Dr. Loomis's Border Studies projects demonstrates most clearly how perceptive his understanding of the Border Region was. According to Loomis, Samora's contribution to Border Studies was sought not only because he had multi-disciplinary training and experience but more importantly because he was Mexican American, and as such, brought a singular and essential point of view to academic study of the region. Researchers and writers previous to Loomis who studied Mexican Americans in the Southwest considered their subjects in a somewhat isolated fashion, that is alienated from the Border milieu of which they were a part, and detached from economic problems, land control questions, and agricultural developments. Dr. Loomis was the first to act upon the realization that understanding the Southwestern Mexican American community is fundamental to a solid grasp of Border reality. Dr. Samora's collaboration with Loomis's network is significant, along with his recollections about the development of Border Studies. A few words about Julian Samora are in order. A native of Pagosa Springs, Colorado, he is the first Mexican American to earn a Ph.D. in sociology. So large a part of his career Samora's dissertation studied the characteristics of bicultural Mexican American-Anglo leadership in a Colorado community, one of the first studies of its kind, and a forerunner of phenomenon later considered to be intrinsic to Border Studies. Samora also proposed early in his career several fields of inquiry within medical sociology as a point of departure for further academic investigation and as a vehicle to challenge his colleagues. They include investigating the implications of traditional folk medicine upon modern clinical medicine, and exploring the correlation between ethnicity and the delivery of health services. Moreover, the field of medical sociology permitted Dr. Samora to perform certain kinds of applied and evaluative research. So in 1955, Lyle Saunders and he published "A Medical Care Program in a Colorado Community", part of the book Health, Culture and Community, and falling well within the parameters of Border Studies. The study assessed problems and obstacles in establishing a cooperative health care program in 1946 in a Mexican American community in Colorado. In many ways, the discussion summarizes many issues germane to Border concerns--the unique position of Spanish speaking people, strained relations between Mexican Americans and Anglos, the dubious consequences of the introduction of Anglo medicine upon local folk healing practices, and the difficulties experienced by individuals from outside the cultural ambiance in establishing organizations. Dr. Loomis invited Samora to contribute to his Border Studies projects, and even brought him to Michigan State for two years as an Assistant Professor in his Sociology and Anthropology Department. As well as continuing his own research on Border related medical sociology, Samora also supervised graduate student theses (for example, that of Julius Riviera) and collaboration with other individuals, such as Lyle Saunders. While at Michigan State, Samora came into contact with Bill D'Antonio, another one of Loomis's Border Studies researchers, and a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Samora and D'Antonio began a collaboration that would affect the rest of Samora's career. Not only did they publish an article together in 1960, but Samora accepted a position in the Sociology Department at Notre Dame, where indeed he remained until his retirement in 1985. The article which he and D'Antonio co-wrote in 1962 is quite significant because it integrates several strains of Border related research, and its format shows Samora's subsequent professional direction. Entitled "Occupational Stratification in Four Southwestern Communities: A Study of Ethnic Differential Employment in Hospitals", and published in Social Forum in 1962, the data was drawn from Dr. Loomis's Anglo-Latino Relations in Hospitals and Communities Project at Michigan State. The study proposed to examine the degree and quality of the acculturation of an ethnic group through an analysis of employment patterns in hospital settings. The authors develop a comparative study of Mexican American employment in four Southwestern cities to contrast with Italian American employment on the east coast, utilizing professional, semiskilled and unskilled categories, as well as voluntary positions. They then proceed to describe the Mexican American community, in terms of recent changes and developments peculiar to the Border Region. Samora's professional interests and pursuits thereafter--after 1962 or so--became perceptibly more focused on efforts to educate the dominant Anglo society and make it aware of the national importance of Spanish speaking people. His work in Border Studies supplied an appropriate and effective foundation from which to launch his long-term project to promote Mexican American studies. In the early 1970's, Dr. Samora obtained a large grant from the Ford Foundation to develop a Mexican American Graduate Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame. Although he had already collaborated with students pursuing Mexican American Studies enrolled in the graduate program of the Sociology Department, the Ford money and the matching funds provided by Notre Dame enabled him to recruit students in other disciplines, including economics, political science and history. In 1978 and 1981, he received grants from the GPOP Program (Graduate Professional Opportunities Program) of the U.S. Office of Education for several continuing graduate fellowships with which he reinforced the program in economics and sociology, and expanded it to law and psychology. It remains one of the largest and most successful programs in Mexican American Studies, with almost fifty doctorates and/or Master's in sociology, history, economics, political science and psychology from Notre Dame, specializing in Mexican American Studies. The Mexican American Graduate Studies Program, moreover, has generated much research in many areas within Mexican American Studies, much of it related to Border Studies. We include here social linguistics, the Mexican American family, the history of mutual aid societies, the Mexican American experience in the Midwest, drug use among Mexican American youth and attitudes among Mexican American children. Striking, however, is the depth and diversity of data about Mexican immigration to and within the United States. One of Dr. Samora's most well-known and accomplished students is Dr. Gilberto Cardenas, now Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas in Austin, and presently Director of Mexican American Studies. Cardenas chose to pursue graduate study at Notre Dame in sociology because of Dr. Samora's presence and his dedication to the academic study of the Mexican American people. Jorge Bustamante and he collaborated with Dr. Samora in the award-winning book on undocumented Mexican migration to the United States, Los Mojados: The Wetback Story. Cardenas, moreover, was one of the first academics to study the Mexican American community of the Midwest. Dr. Cardenas was chosen to represent the third generation of Border Studies because he personifies a third successive academic coterie in Border Studies, and because he represents one especially important posture of studying the Border. Cardenas' perspective, in the discussions, moreover, differs from that of Dr. Loomis and Dr. Samora since he is at another point in his career. Whereas both Dr. Loomis and Dr. Samora have retired from their university teaching positions and are pursuing their research interests independently, Cardenas still has to balance his professional activities within a competitive university setting. Cardenas himself states in the course of the dialogue that his student-mentor relationship with Dr. Samora at Notre Dame was crucial to his intellectual growth, even if it was and is a challenging, and at times a demanding one. Moreover, we must recognize the fundamental role that scholars such as Dr. Cardenas, generally associated with Mexican American Studies, play within Border Studies. Although the two areas of study descend from related intellectual antecedents, Border Studies and Chicano Studies have developed independently of each other until very recently, with the notable exception of some work realized through Dr. Loomis's network, and they remain separate. But Mexican American Studies and Border Studies necessarily overlap in their discussions of many critical issues and concerns, such as legal and undocumented migration, land grants in the Southwest, and many more. Individuals like Jorge A. Bustamante of the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Oscar Martinez with the University of Texas at El Paso for a long time, and Dr. Cardenas all illustrate this phenomenon well. Indeed, it bears repeating that understanding the Mexican American people of the Southwest and their historical relationship to the establishment of the United States-Mexican Border is vital to the substance of Border Studies. As Dr. Cardenas indicates in the interviews, one of the felicitous results of the academic Chicano Movement has been the increased collaboration between Chicano and Border scholars.
Conclusion Rare, indeed, is it that students of a discipline have the opportunity to have contact with the persons responsible for cultivating the intellectual base from which an area of study later departs. The set of assumptions, together with personal and professional experiences, that Dr. Loomis used to fashion a trailblazing generation of Border Studies created an innovative frame of reference with which to view the area. What Loomis provides us through the present format is objective and subjective information concerning how he went about doing it. Further, the groundwork that first generation of Border Studies laid partially opened the way for Dr. Samora to develop Mexican American Studies. From a purely historical perspective, we must consider ourselves fortunate to have access to this genre of information. The careers of all three participants command respect. Dr. Loomis and Dr. Samora were pioneers in their respective areas and had the stamina and foresight to persist in their endeavors. Their areas of study were not popular or mainstream topics when they began; belief in the merit of their work undoubtedly reinforced their commitments. All of them, Drs. Loomis, Samora and Cardenas alike, have been able to wisely use available resources to generate new sets and sources of information. All have realized the importance of training scholars and have promoted graduate studies programs. What do we know about the Border? The information contained herein should provoke intellectual self-evaluation within each individual studying or researching any aspect of the U.S.-Mexican Border Region. We should examine and reassess the assumptions and frameworks being utilized, the validity and suitability of data for probing the unique nature of Border questions, and the pertinence of various topics for understanding the Border. Perhaps, most importantly, we must reflect upon the process we used to acquire our research data and tools of analysis for Border Studies, and evaluate their efficacy. Finally, the research priorities and agendas of the first two generations of Border Studies portended many aspects of the subsequent spectacular growth of the entire Border Region. In retrospect, for example, the Rio Grande community studies done by Loomis and his students, the application of the concept of "systemic linkage" to the Border as well as some of Dr. Samora's early work, presaged increased Border urbanization and rural-urban migration and the importance of organizations within the Mexican American community. Review of the Border literature and research generated and produced by the Border Scholars of the 1950's and early 1960's provides us with a relatively untapped source of data, sometimes provocative, at times with unfamiliar slants upon widespread concerns. In fact, we stand to learn much from Dr. Loomis, Dr. Samora and Dr. Cardenas concerning Border Studies and its maturation, its increasing importance for both sides of the border and the present tenor of the discipline. Following are the edited discussions of these three scholars about the foundation of Border Studies in the United States. We have divided their comments into five general areas--Background, Consortium, Mexican American Studies, Definition of the United States-Mexican Border, and Methodology. Each section opens with an introductory comment. I. Preface | II. Introduction | III. La Frontera and Its People: The Early Development of Broder and Mexican Amercian Studies | IV. Selective Annotated Bibliography | V. Participants | VI. Acknowledgements | Endnotes III. La Frontera and Its People: The Early Development of Broder and Mexican Amercian Studies III.A. BACKGROUND [Drs. Loomis and Samora recollect about the factors that led to their respective interests in studying the Border. Loomis speaks of the Border region as a high problem density area for researchers and of the potential of applying research results to improve practices. Both Loomis and Samora address the obstacles they encountered in trying to collaborate with Mexican researchers.] SAMORA. It is always difficult to get at the beginning of anything. When I was a young man and an academic, I would read an article now and again by the late Dr. Sanchez, or by Lyle Saunders. But the first inkling that I had of Border Studies came from Dr. Loomis, and I am convinced that Dr. Loomis probably was the originator of the concept "Border Studies." My first introduction into Border Studies per se came in letter in 1955. When Dr. Loomis invited me to join the staff at Michigan State University, where he indicated that he had a Border Studies Project, for Border Studies and Latin America. I knew of Dr. Loomis through his involvement in studies related to the Spanish Speaking population. I believe his study in the 1940's of El Cerrito, New Mexico, may be one of the first rural community studies under the U.S. Department of Agriculture sponsorship. LOOMIS. Well I, indeed feel very honored to be in the position here of talking a little bit about the beginnings as you described them. I don't know that I merit the commendation that you've made, but I won't reject it. I wouldn't be a good administrator, inviting somebody unless he knew an awful lot about the border but I do think to explain, we need to go back to give you the underpinnings of, reasons for getting into the kind of adventure that you all have here. As an academic, one has several roles such as an administrator. But he also is a teacher and his number one objective has been to advance knowledge. Also, most of us start from a frame of reference with which we plan to advance knowledge. Most of these conceptions, schemes are more or less assumptions that are made; I have always assumed that a sociologist deals with human relations as does sociology generally. These human relations are structured into systems. If you're going to understand your own system of interaction as a scientist and team member, you have to ask yourself what are your objectives. I merely say that as these human relations are structured in both cultural and sociological contexts. You have the cognitive aspect, i.e., the belief aspect. You have a sentiment or feeling aspect. You have an evaluative or normative aspects, all cultural and sociological components: status role, power and authority elements and the rank or status elements. There are two very important processes involves in the way knowledge is advanced. One of them is boundary maintenance. You can't have a good organization (let's say a sociology department) unless people in that organization can say "I am a member of scientific organization and nobody can take that away from me." In other words, you have boundary maintenance; you have to have that to have a good organization. How do you build high morale so that everybody is proud to be a part of this organization? In addition, if you're going to advance knowledge you've got to really reach out beyond the system boundary. I like to call this a systemic linkage. Many anthropologists call it acculturation. Theses are two processes that were so important in our efforts to understand borders. SAMORA. Well, if you are seeking knowledge, which you have always been doing, what provoked you to start at the Border? What provoked you to come up with the notion of Border Studies? LOOMIS. Yes, that's a crucial question. The quest for knowledge led me to search for the best areas for this. This led to search for areas with what I like to call problem density. Cross cultural situations are such areas. Not only do borders supply arenas with high problem density useful to the social scientist, we know that some of the problems of the world, the independence of India, South Africa, Ireland, and all these places are extreme cases of border problems. The suffering resulting from many forces, including boundary maintenance are boundless. SAMORA. I have the feeling that you have always wanted to do sociology. That's number one. Number two, you have always wanted to establish cross culture relationships. Number three, you have always wanted to involve other professors and students in a consortium kind of way. And number four, you've wanted to change the situations. LOOMIS. It might not have been in that order, but my earliest efforts were to advance improved practices and increase the quality of life. This has always been my goal. Whenever you get into that, anytime you get in action programs, it's not just sociology, but also social psychology, cultural anthropology, economics as a minimum. Several disciplines become involved and they move you on out. SAMORA. Dr. Loomis was very flexible. He would say, "if you can use my conceptual scheme, please do, to add to the knowledge; if you've something better, use that. If you can work one the border, please do; if you need to work some place else, do that." Many times he would pick up travel expenses, sometimes he would pay the summer salary expenses. I remember while I was with the Colorado Medical School, I took a trip to Mexicali, Sonoyta, Yuma, San Luis, San Diego, Tijuana, at his expense. I was supervising Riviera, Frank Nall, who was doing his Ph.D. research in El Paso, Juarez. It was a wide open kind of cross cultural study to advance knowledge. That happened because of Dr. Loomis and his foresight. A major contribution was that most of the people who have done border studies since 1955 probably did so because of your influence. Could you perhaps talk a little about that? His training and interests were not just sociology or just anthropology. His cross-disciplinary training and interests led him to go take the broad view. LOOMIS. I tried to get people, if possible, that would have training in at least two disciplines. That was always good because I had an applied research approach. Most of our work has been applied. You can't do applied work with blinders on with only one discipline. You've got to be alert in more than one field. I changed the name of the Department when I came to Michigan State University. It was the Department of Sociology when I came. I changed that to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, but most of us also have a leg in psychology.
III.B BORDER STUDIES CONSORTIUM [We hear both Loomis and Samora here relate the scope of their Border Studies network, and how it operated. The researchers explored many questions from many perspectives while enjoying Loomis's intellectual and institutional support.] SAMORA. We started this discussion with 1955. I happened to go through a report which you sent me in 1956. And just to give you a notion of the extent of the participation, let me read a couple of names here, the report says that at the University of Texas Roy Clifford and Arturo de Hoyos were doing the Rio Grande flood study. In Juarez and El Paso, Bill Farm and Bill D'Antonio were doing the power structure, the influentials study. In Sonoyta, Mexico, Julius Riviera was doing something. Ivan Belnap at the University of Texas was doing problems of hospital functions in cross cultural settings, one community in New Mexico, two in Texas. I think it's probably safe to say here you had two large projects: one was the border project, the other was the Anglo-U.S., Anglo-Latino relations I think you called it, relating to health. So you had a health project and a border project, which you combined neatly into really border cross-cultural. Walter Firey was doing studies of the origin and development of conservation sentiments and value; Tyrus Vain in a study the spread of 1570 acala cotton in U.S. and Mexico. LOOMIS. Yes, this was a study community. You could get much more for your cotton if you had one variety of improved cotton so that at the cotton bin bales with a mixture were not sent to market, this was going on in both Mexico and the U.S. near Las Cruces.... Look at the differences of the problem you have when you try to organize a one variety cotton community in Mexico versus the U.S. I might mention that Calvin Redekop's Ph.D. thesis done at the University of Chicago. He was studying the Mennonites in Chihuahua and the Mennonites up in Canada with our Carnegie Corporation support. He and I did an article on status-roles in the systemic linkage process as Mennonites linked with Mennonites in Chihuahua... (Sigurd Johansen did) eight community studies along the Rio Grande, which was his Ph.D. dissertation. SAMORA. And at Texas A&M and the Agricultural College of Coahuila, you had a report on a Point Pour program where the Mexicans actually demonstrated and drove out the gringos. LOOMIS. One of our Ph.D.'s, Antonio Arce, a Costa Rican, went down and did a nice study. Coming in as a Costa Rican, the Mexicans accepted him and the Gringos accepted him, and he obtained unbelievably nice data. I myself tried to look at it by going to Mexico City and working through the U.S. Embassy there thought and told me it was a big Communist plot. Arce got a different and correct story. SAMORA. Which Olen Leonard was in on......Yeah, and Paul Walters a sociologist at New Mexico was collaborating? LOOMIS. His Ph.D. was based on two Hispanic villages near Albuquerque.... Ed Spicer and James Officer did the power structure of Tucson... relating the ethnic groups there. Officer's dissertation, done with our financing, turned out to be such a good job that the university president took it out of circulation. He did not dare to publish the study because it involved the president (of the university) in Tucson. It has never been published, but its author, James Officer, is a dean there at the university, I believe. SAMORA. Spicer, Olson and Olen Leonard at Tucson were doing diffusion of improved agricultural practice. At San Diego State College, you had Jack Delora, Orrin Klapp, L. Vincent Padgett and Aubrey Wendley. They were trying do a study of Tijuana and San Diego. In Colorado there was Saunders and myself at the Medical School. Involvement in these projects included primarily sociologists, but also psychologists, anthropologists and agricultural types, and other people who were interested in the border, but the border was never defined. If you say cross culture, that makes more sense. That was in 1956. BUSTAMANTE. But the point you are making is that is that Dr. Loomis was behind all of this. SAMORA. Always. For example, at the University of Colorado Medical School, Lyle Saunders had a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation. We were studying the delivery of health systems to minorities, Blacks, Whites and Mexican Americans. Julius Riviera and Bob Hanson worked with us, so they were collaborating with us. Loomis did not get that money. Saunders did, but it was related to Loomis's hospital studies, and Saunders always had an interest in borders. That's the way the relationship began. Then in 1956-57 you had an expansion into studies of community leaderships. I saw a report that suggested that the following cities were involved in studies of community leaderships: El Paso, Cd. Juarez, Denver, Las Cruces, Harlingen, McAllen, San Diego, Tijuana and Tucson. We were all participating, which suggested that there were many people involved working in these, graduate students. Could you say how many Ph.D. students did you support? LOOMIS. About 15 supported by project funds. SAMORA. Erickson, De Hoyos, Arce, Nall, Stabler, D'Antonio, Blair, Proctor, Alers, Montalvo, Powell, Norris, Stoddard, Officer and Riviera did Ph.D.'s. The unpublished report entitled "History and Results of the Michigan State University Carnegie Corporation Border Project" provides in its Appendix a listing of dissertations and later writings. You had this Anglo-Latino relations in community hospitals: Edward Spincer at Arizona, Lyle Saunders at Denver, Paul Walter at New Mexico, Sigurd Johanson at New Mexico State, and Friedson at North Texas State College. ...Dr. Loomis brought Bradford from Brigham Young University. Klapp from San Diego State, Spicer from Arizona, Johansen from New Mexico, Stabler from North Texas State College, Belkap from Texas, Walters from New Mexico, Saunders and me from Colorado. We met in Denver, Colorado. The idea was to establish a consortium of participating faculty and graduate students to do hospital studies, but actually to do cross culture research and Border studies. BUSTAMANTE. I was going to ask you, in regard to a comment in passing you both made this to bibliography on Border Studies by Cumberland. Whose idea was that? LOOMIS. Well, it was mine. I just knew then no great border study could get off the ground without a good bibliography. We needed to have a definitive bibliography done by somebody qualified and that means an historian who is a good bibliographer, so I found one who had done some definitive work in Mexico. He had one volume on Mexican history, and I knew that he would be able to do it, if I could get him. I finally got enough salary to bring him. SAMORA. But that isn't the end of the story, you also then subsidized the Rural Sociology journal, which was at Michigan State and said, here it is, somebody publish it. Who would publish a definitive bibliography on the border? Nobody. You had to come up with money. And so he bought an issue of the journal. LOOMIS. That's the way we did. Julian was an editor of that issue, which had the Cumberland bibliography as a supplementary issue. That issue carried some first rate articles on the Border and on Latin American generally. CARDENAS. What about the urban question in 1950? What role did they have for Border Studies? I wonder to what extent, Border Studies included analyses of urban life and lifestyles. LOOMIS. It is true that at Michigan State University we had available some money for research from the Agricultural Experiment Station and would publish materials in the form of an Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin. Thus, the Gallup organization did a modified probability study of all persons 21 years of age or over, rural and urban in the United States, an example of about 1500. It's true that we included rural Michigan in the study with something between 100 and 200 interviews..., but it came out an important study of attitudes of Mexicans, Americans and U.S. Hispanics or Mexican Americans. Comparable data from Mexico were paid for by the Carnagie Corporation. All this is available free because it was published in the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin, No. 14. entitled Linkage of Mexico and the United States (1966). We studied the nature of decision-making inequities on both sides of the border. Some eleven cities were studied with the main focus being Anglo-Latino differences and inter-relationships. Perhaps the D'Antonio and Forum study published in book form by the University of Notre Dame Press, 1965 about influentials of Juarez and El Paso, entitled Two Border Cities: A Study in Community Decision Making is the best know of these studies. A short over-all description of this and others is to be found in the American Sociological Review, June, 1961, by D'Antonio, et al., "Institutional and Occupational Representations in Eleven Community influence Systems." ...Julian had already completed important studies along the lines in which we were interested. Then, on trying to think back about my motivations, I came up with a thought which I hope will not offend Julian. I must say that for Border and Anglo-Latino Hospital studies, Julian's origin was of very great importance. Other members of our research team and I believe that we understand how non-Anglos in Border relations think, I often have my doubts. You can try to imagine yourself in the role of the others but there are shortcomings. Julian had not only the needed background, but also the excellent scientific training and experience. There is another thing that has been of concern to me. There's a great wastage. When they want to have somebody negotiate, let's say in Latin America, who's going down there? Do they speak Spanish? There are millions of people with this background that could be employed who are not a part of international negotiations. Should this not be considered in the total effort to link and to improve relationships between the two cultures? It seems to me that should be an objective of the border institutes. VALDEZ. I was very interested in your health project, and it seems to have opened so many avenues, even the consortium. DEL CASTILLO. Dr. Loomis, in your description of how you got into the business of Border Studies, you never mentioned the overall time taken for a U.S.-Mexican relations. I was wondering, if back in the fifties the context of U.S.-Mexican relations was important for Border Studies. LOOMIS. At first, I always said we're interested in finding the truth, and I might not have said that we know if that answers your question or not, but I've always been interested in improving relations. If a would-be scientist gets the reputation of being a "do-gooder" or if he is pushing some ideology, how good a scientist would he be? SALAS RODRIGUEZ. Yes, in relation with Dr. del Castillo's question I wonder in your experience in the middle fifties, while you were working with Border problems and cross cultural problems, did you ever try to get involved in Mexican academe. They had an interest in anthropological sociology, etc., kind of sociology in Mexico, psychological, but mainly cultural problems. LOOMIS. Our collaboration with Mexican social scientist was rather superficial. We had some relationships with the Interamerican Congress of Psychology. Many of their most important members are Mexicans. At one time, because of our work they wanted to meet at Michigan State. I knew that they had met previously in various Latin American cities including Havana. There such groups are entertained through wining and dining after a fashion that I could not get away with at Michigan State. I called a former college mate, Logan Wilson, then President of the University of Texas. From his vantage point he arranged a very nice meeting and some of us attended. Some relations did develop but as I say, they were superficial. Most of these Mexicans earned their bread and butter, not from research and teaching, but in other ways. They were scientists more or less as an avocation. In the years I have tried to promote Border Studies, I found that most of the foundations I approached wanted to get professional collaboration with Mexicans. We and others have tried, but we did not succeed very well. SAMORA. May I make the statement? It seems to me, if you're talking about the fifties' and the sixties' and you're looking for Mexican sociologist, for example, where would you go to? SALAS DE RODRIGUEZ. Well, I think there was an Institute of Social Research at the University. SAMORA. Oh, sure, there was Aguirre Beltran, for example, the U.S.-Mexico Border Public Health, etc. I worked in Mexico for the Ford Foundation about '68 and we were trying to get urban studies done. Luis Lenero seemed to be about the only sociologist who was interested in doing this kind of investigation. But this was '68. I think probably the important thing about what Loomis said is that professional, up until very recently, it has been difficult in many places in Latin America for an economist or sociologist to be a professional academic full-time. Usually he's had three jobs. What I'm trying to say is, the system is different. I'm not saying one is better than the other, the systems are different. Now when you tried to collaborate in those days with this kind of a system, it posed a number of problems. CHAVEZ. Yes, can I ask you to maybe step back for a second and discuss a little bit about the important evolution of problems, the ones you tackled in the beginning, back in the fifties, vs. the kind of problems that are on the forefront of border research today? CARDENAS. One outcome of the 1960's and 1970's social movements in the United States was the insertion of Chicano studies into Border Studies as an integral part, although it is still a study in its own right. If you study the Border, you have to take Chicano Studies into consideration. In that respect a new area that Chicano researchers and others are studying in Border Studies is the Chicano-Mexicano population of the United States. Further, the new Border Studies is focusing attention on Mexico as it relates not to just the United States, but to political realities between Mexico and the United States. Moreover, the new Border Studies is examining the relationship between Mexicanos and Chicanos, as another dimension of Border dynamics, to that extent there has been much new research in Border Studies. Also, it seems to me that there's a greater emphasis on issues in social stratification and class analysis. In this respect, Chicano academics have contributed to Border Studies, studying conflict, class relations on a macro level, such as farm workers, maquiladora workers on both sides of the Border.
III.C.MEXICAN AMERICAN STUDIES [Dr. Samora recollects his early experiences in the evolution of the Mexican American presence in the United States, not only in strictly academic matters, but also in political questions, such as the Southwest Council of La Raza and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.] CARDENAS. I was fascinated listening to Dr. Loomis talk about the linkage that were established; the research you were able to do, the contacts, the financial support. Julian Samora, who's my major professor, and dissertation director, and who also was successful in securing support for research at a later time. How easy were the entrances into Border Studies and Southwestern Studies? What was the climate, or the reaction of American foundations, the federal Government or state-supported institutions to funding research initiated by a Mexican American researcher, who might be approaching these studies, either the same way, or slightly different? SAMORA. It was particularly difficult to get research moneys. Let me tell you where I first got money. About 1961, I guess, I was approached by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to do, mind you, a national study of Hispanics. They had $12,000 and three month's time. So we did that study and they didn't like it particularly, because most of the people in the Civil Rights Commission were lawyers and their sense of data were court decisions; that is real data. I came up with statistics from the 1960 Census. There's discrimination, or there's lack of access to universities. They just didn't think this was data at all. Well, that was the first grant I've ever got, $12,000. Then two or three years later I was invited to be a visiting professor at U.C.L.A. In the meantime the Ford Foundation had decided that Mexican Americans were important. I don't know that you want this for the record because I can't document it. There was a fellow at the Ford Foundation who was chummy with the chancellor of U.C.L.A. He had about $400,000, and he said, we want to do this, can you find somebody who will do it. Now, part of the story sounds true, because they came with a fellow by the name of Grebler, unknown to most of us. Grebler was in environmental studies, real estate or something. Then they came up with Joan Moore, and this was the study team. Grebler, having read the Civil Rights Report, invited me to consult with him. I met him at Disneyland, I remember. He wanted to see the study, and I didn't want to show it to him, because of what I had heard; so he established a national advisory committee. And to tell you how ludicrous that was: Grebler and Moore announced that they were going to take a six months trip throughout the Southwest to get a "feel" for the Southwest. You can imagine, what that did to some of us who already had a "feel" for the Southwest. He was getting a lot of criticism from Dr. Manuel Guerra from Bert Corona. He put all these persons on a national advisory committee. When he called these community people they started speaking in Spanish, he didn't understand this. Then they started writing letters to the Ford Foundation, so things were going very badly. They needed a Mexican American. In the meantime, while doing the Civil Rights Study, I had run across Ralph Guzman, who was a Ph.D. student at U.C.L.A., so I suggested Guzman, who could finish his Ph.D. and lend legitimacy and credibility to the study. I'm sure other people would give you a different story. Out of that, we did get some money to do a study in East Chicago, Indiana, to get at Mexican Americans in the industrial Midwest which I did with Professor Richard LaManna. In the meantime, Herman Gallegos who has always been in and out of and very influential and important in Chicano Studies, Hispanic Affairs, was associated with the Rosenberg Foundation. So he talked, I'm sure it was he, talked with Ruth Chance, who was Executive Director of the Rosenberg Foundation to ask me to do a study of Mexican Americans. She asked me if would I do it in honor of a trustee who had died, and they would bear the cost. Out of that came La Raza, Forgotten Americans. Now we knew we wanted to get a lot of money for Chicanos to do Chicano things. So Herman and I figured, why don't we have an editorial conference of the people whom I had asked to write chapters for La Raza, and then we expanded it to get Galarza, Manuel Quevedo, who was a big politician in Los Angeles at that time, and people like that. Rosenberg bought it and we had a big meeting in San Francisco, and then we said, why don't we invite the Ford Foundation? So we invited Paul Ylvasker and Lyle Saunders. What we did was tell them how important we were and that we needed money. Out of that, Ylvasker was convinced that Galarza and Gallegos should be consultants to the Ford Foundation to help them figure out what to do for, with, and about Mexican Americans. In the meantime, I had joined the Ford Foundation in Mexico, but I was part of the consultant team and the foundation paid for a meeting of the three of us every month wherever we wanted, Mexico City, San Francisco, New York, wherever we happened to be. That went on for two years and we came out with a notion of the Southwest Council of La Raza which later became the National Council of La Raza. As a result of that, Dr. Miller, at the Ford Foundation, approved the first grant which I called U.S.-Mexico Border Studies. You won't believe that, I'm sure; but it wasn't totally U.S.-Mexico Border Studies because I had promised Galarza, who had been pretty much done in by the McCarthy Committee, the Un-American Activities Committee, the DiGiorgio Corporation. He was a person non grata, he was allegedly our leading Communist, and nobody would hire him and Ernie was a great writer. He told me, "I've been trying to do some research but I can't get it published". And I told him "you will write three books for me," which he did. It took him a long time, but he did. And that was all that was out of the U.S.-Mexico Border Studies project. I got a hundred and some thousand from the Ford Foundation, and I think that was just about that was thrown to Mexicans, you know. And so when we put it together, I figured I ought to support graduate students, Mexicans and Mexican Americans. And I ought to do some Border research, and so I thought, there's something about the undocumented that has not been written. We decided that was maybe the first project. But we got a book, Los Mojados, which is criticized, well, anything you write is criticized; rightly a lot of times, wrongly sometimes, and we got Galarza's Barrio Boy, and we got his Spider in the House and Workers in the Fields. And many years later we got his Agribusiness and Unionism, but he had been working on that for twenty years, that I know of. I went to the University Press and asked if they wouldn't publish La Raza. They said no, of course, La Raza, who knows about La Raza? I then went to the Rosenberg Foundation, would they pay to get it published? They said yes, so I went back to the press, would you publish it? Yes, if it doesn't cost us anything. It doesn't make any difference, whether it's important or not. Out of that came a series on Mexican American Studies which has been rather important and influential.... That was published in 1966, and then went into paperback about two years later, and then was picked up by university courses. CARDENAS. It was also the first publication in terms of the new body of literature on Chicanos. SAMORA. Kind of that, by Chicanos. In other words, this was a beginning of Chicanos getting involved academically, in research, in writing, and that sort of thing. The upsurge of the importance of the Mexican American population, now the Hispanic population and the development of Chicano Studies programs, during that period, changed my emphasis from sheer Border research to the importance of the population in an attempt to make it known to the Eastern establishments, the foundations, the government. So I went off in a different direction, with a foot still on the Border. Before the publication of Los Mojados, there was very little material about the northern frontier, about emigration. There was stuff that was done in the 1930's by Manuel Gamio, Paul Taylor, but that was a long time ago. Mexico itself didn't have any particular interest. There was one book that was an important tome, but I am not aware of all the literature of course. It was Benitez Cabrera. La población de México 1960, 1940 to 1960?... It was demography, which was beginning to show the development of the northern border, but there was little interest in the Border on the part of Mexico. So that's the way we started. Well, actually, in my early life experiences probably there's no relationship between that and the Border. I got involved in doing things about Chicanos because of the discrimination that I suffered in going to school and in trying to get jobs and things like that. Very early I decided I'm just as important and just as good as the next Gringo and I'm going to speak English as well as they do. I did all these things and they still discriminated against me. You can't figure it out. That I think was a big motivation for all my life. I have been involved and trying to do something about, now I guess, Hispanics. Then in the sixties, Mexican Americans were unknown in the United States. If they did know about them, it was in the Southwest, immigration was little known or unimportant. I've always have wanted to bring to the fore the notion that Hispanics are important. I'm using a term that in the wisdom of the Census Bureau, we're all now Hispanics, so I'm using that term very loosely. I wanted to bring to the attention of foundations, government and several universities that Hispanics are an important segment of population. I think that's what motivated me to do what I've done, but I've wondered if it's been worth it. To get Reagan to do something about the border is not really what I had in mind. CARDENAS. It was a very uncommon thing though for a Mexican to have a Ph.D. in the United States. Were you not the first Chicano sociologist? To what extent was the work interdisciplinary, perhaps with George Sanchez, with Galarza and or Americo Paredes? SAMORA. Well, I didn't meet Galarza until 1964. I already knew Sanchez, I knew Saunders, and of course, had known Dr. Loomis. I didn't meet Parades until later but I knew of his work. There was so few of us who were Mexican, had Ph.D's, and were working in academe. When I took a Ph.D., I think there were five Chicanos with a Ph.D. I knew who they were: Galarza, Sanchez, Arturo Campa, etc.. And they were in different fields. So, you almost necessarily got into interdisciplinary work. But then some of my training has been interdisciplinary work. My Ph.D. from Washington University was in Sociology and Anthropology, or the European and American. But for the few Chicanos who had Ph.D's.. Sanchez was in education; Arturo Campa, Literature, at the University of New Mexico and later at the University of Denver. Parades was English, Anthropology, Folklore and so it went. In those days we would jump at the chance to read anything that was published about Mexican Americans. You go to the library to find Johanson, Johansen's dissertation, or Paul Walter's dissertation. These were done in the 30's, I guess, or the 40's. The first big important book that came out was Carey Mc Williams, North from Mexico about 1949. Gee, that was something. Sanchez has Forgotten People, that was in New Mexico on education. I went to the University of Wisconsin. and said I wanted to do a dissertation on Mexican Americans. Where are they? And you have to understand these things, I think. So I left the University of Wisconsin, not because I couldn't find a director but because I ran out of money. I found at a place where I was teaching in Colorado, that there was an anthropologist doing research in Del Norte, 30 miles away, on the Chicano community, that's how come I ended up going to Washington University. Undocumented? I don't mean to offend anyone. And... Jorge, I don't remember how you and I got involved, but it was clear that you were amazed that you were learning something about the northern Mexican border at Notre Dame. And I was very pleased, so I guess you and I put the total project together and figured out, I'm sure that it was your suggestion that you do the participant observation. I think that the grant was for a hundred and some thousand dollars. I already had Galarza in there for three books. I hired him as a research associate. He did his work in San Jose. Then I had just about enough money left for a couple of fellowships to do this research, but with no continuing university support. The U.S.-Mexican Border Studies Project ended with the termination of the grant, but we did get the interviewing done. Then it was in '70 I believe, then the Ford Foundation awarded us a half million dollar grant to set up the Mexican American Graduate Program, or may be '71. That helped continue the fellowships. The idea was to try to get some sort of descriptive account of the undocumented worker. The bias, that I operated under, went back to the earlier literature, Lyle Saunders and George Sanchez used to write little articles here and there about the exploitation of these workers. That was my bias, a real bias, I mean, you can see it throughout the book, well, we all have biases. I was really concerned that these workers were being exploited so much, that it ought to come out. It ought to be public knowledge which it is now. I didn't go into it in terms of value free sociology. I think I knew what I was doing. I was trying to expose the situation. BUSTAMANTE. But at the same time with a view that emphasized gathering data, following a methodology that could be openly discussed and criticized. You stressed the notion of emigration in terms of the whole border, and a research design of traveling to various places throughout the Border. For this you obtained permission from INS to enter the detention centers, and then later for Gil the following year. I remember the first time you sent me to this area. That was 1968, no '69. SAMORA. Well it might be interesting just as an aside. Jorge came and did the participant observation, got caught and was put in jail and all that. It occurred to us, after we had the report, that maybe some day Jorge might want to be a legal immigrant to the United States. So I called up the Immigration and Naturalization Service, to ask for permission to do what he had already done. I told them, what was going to happen. So they set up a special file for him in Chicago, and all that.... That's real cooperation. And after waiting two or three months, we had already written the report, I called them back and said he arrived safely. Then they started calling me. When, what day did he go, because the Border Patrol had shot at him. I think they wanted to reprimand the Patrol. I told them that I really didn't remember. Then, another call, you can't print this report because it says the Border Patrol shoots at people and that's not supposed to happen. I said, well, that's the way it's going to be. We cooperated with you, why don't you cooperate with us. Well, but I can't be censured. I told them I'd give them a footnote, and you see a footnote that the Border Patrol Commissioner said the Border Patrol is not supposed... but we had to protect those two other guys, and we had to protect Jorge. In case something ever happens, he is perfectly clear. I think I.N.S. would kill me if they knew how I did it, but that's the way to do it. They wanted to know the day, where, but they didn't read the report carefully, because this was done in Agosto, maybe? -Yes- yet I always tell them that this was done in December. But we had to protect the Mexican subjects. So you have to tell lies. I don't mind lying. But now the I.N.S. would never cooperate. I think as a social scientist you have to protect your people, your research. These two fellows who came across with you, what would have happened to them. Well,... I learned from Ernesto Galarza a long time ago in a talk, at a bar somewhere... That the people who seek power are very dangerous. Ernesto Galarza has never amounted to anything but he never sought power. I could have taken all these fellowships and said to a student, let's do this, because I'm supporting him, I could have had ten books, with my name, and your work. But I never sought power, because I always figured what is important is what in the best interest of the students. If he wants to go out and do something dumb, let him go do something dumb or good or what have you. But I've known professors who have used students in this way. I've had about 55 students come through that I have supported in one way or another. I have never sought power, and I think if I had sought power I'd be a very different person, and things would be very different... CARDENAS. You've also had a very important role in the development of the political presence of Mexicans in the United States, in terms of your involvements with some of the organizations, ... whether it be the Census committee, or the National Council of La Raza, or before that the Southwest Council of La Raza. So you haven't been personally but you certainly have been involved collectively. I think Professor Joe Scott of Notre Dame, referred to Julian Samora as a silent warrior because of that kind of activist-scholar role. SAMORA. One has to get involved in what Dr. Rodolfo Alvarez calls the scholar activist role. In the first place, there are so few of us that you don't have the luxury to do pure sociology. And particularly at a time when the population is becoming important in the eyes of other people. For example, in the National Institutes of Mental Health where you want Chicanos and American Indians and Blacks and women to be getting grants. So you join those review committees, which is a lot of work. And you insist that Indians be considered, that Blacks be in programs, where money is given to whites in Alabama. You have to do that, to the point where they hate to see you coming because they know what you're going to say. Then you have to be, from their point of view, a safe person, which is not very complimentary. They wouldn't invite you because you'll tell them to go to hell. But they'll invite me because I tell them to go to hell in a nice way, and they can stand it. They have to consider you safe and professional, I guess. But your name gets bandied around and people know that you've done this, or they've read something that you've written. CARDENAS. And neither for Chicano academics. It wasn't until the late seventies that Chicano academics took an interest in the Border, at least to the extent today. In the late sixties in East L.A., to assert ethnic identity, one's Chicanismo, was considered to be a militant act. It was a stance, a position. That was not only symbolic but in a concrete way, implied many things. At that time, we were very critical of people who referred to themselves as Mexican Americans or Latinos, etc.. Therefore, we were critical of people who used the term Spanish-speaking Americans in the forties and fifties. We didn't understand the context in which to assert oneself as a Mexican in the United States was almost militant. We considered ourselves militant in the late 60's because we used the word Chicano. We criticized those persons active with the 50's, maybe even the 60's, who used other identifiers to refer to themselves, and using maybe different kinds of academic concepts in studying Chicano behavior, without understanding the context in which they were forced to operate. LOOMIS. There are so many problems that any times you try to answer one about a thousand others place themselves in night. One thing that has fascinated me is the Mexican American community. For me, the emerging U.S.-Hispanic or Mexican-American community and attendant change is of interest. There been great changes among U.S. Hispanics. Their concept of self and their identification and the kind of pride that goes with this is increasing. This is one of the things that needs to be looked at, understood and somehow furthered. That would be one thing that I would like to do because it's a great change that we know has taken place and we know it's extremely important. I don't know if they would follow the same pattern that's happening with the Blacks. Blacks voting for whole cities, like we have in Chicago and other cities, but something is in the offing that we need to know more about. That would be an approach. As we mentioned, our study also showed some differences in the two cultures, although most of these seemed to kind of evaporate upon investigation. Several of them haven't evaporated. I'd like to know more about those differences.
III.D. POLITICS [All three scholars present different experiences in regard to the political dimensions of their research, referring to "political" in the broadest sense. University politics have both helped and hindered the development of research projects. Loomis in particular shares some politics of fund-raisinig. And, audience members pose the problem of the effect of broader politics on the development of Border Studies.] LOOMIS. Cultural differences were crucial. We got our first grant form the Carnegie Corporation because I was tied into the Interamerican Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Costa Rica. I had been a colleague in the Department of Agriculture with the Director. We ware able to bring the vice-president of the Carnegie Corporation down to Turrialba and show him how we were trying to advance improved practices in the community. He was interested, and we got a grant, a little one, $ 30,000. As Costa Ricans and Anglos did Ph.D. dissertations on the Turrialba Project, I felt that the research lacked a cross cultural dimension. We needed to be in an arena where at least two cross currents, were evident. Having lived on the border, having tried to understand problems County Agents had in New Mexico getting improved practices accepted, led me to think the U.S. Mexican Border would provide the arena we needed. The people at the Carnegie Corporation saw our need. Because we had been productive in the first five years they upped the total amount to $150,000 for the next five years. In the interim, I became a member of a Screening Committee for financing research in hospital organizations throughout the country and as member of that committee I was able to get $ 150,000 which we used to study hospital organization in different settings. This brought in border-like relations. This led to a kind of way of tying and making for systemic analysis. BUSTAMANTE. At a time when the border was not important, never mind its culture and perhaps society, how did you manage to establish these linkages, that enabled you to give support to so many people? If the border was not important, you probably were more important than the topic to get the money to fund the studies. How did you manage to convince foundations, universities, to support, something that was not in the mainstream? LOOMIS. Well, getting the money is somewhat different than getting scholars to collaborate once you get it. Maybe none of you have confronted the publish or perish problem so prevalent in American academe. If you have supporting funds, it is quite easy to talk social scientists into cooperating. Scholars living along the Border have had an interest in inter-ethnic relations. They just haven't thought of Border relations as something to study. It was not difficult to find able scholars who were glad to cooperate in our larger effort. We did offer some opportunity for scholars to get together and compare notes. That may have been a motivating factor. After getting funds, it requires that the applicant know what the grantors want to accomplish. SAMORA. But consider that back in the fifties a grant of $150,000 was a lot of money. LOOMIS. It's about a tenth of what it would be now. You have to have a million dollars. SAMORA. But you were able to develop a very powerful department of sociology at Michigan State University, with a rural sociology component, an anthropology component, and you tied into the money from the agriculture people. LOOMIS. Yeah, I always had that research and extension kitty. That was a great help, because we always had about $30,000 that was sort of seed money. When the Carnegie Corporation would come and look, we could say all I wanted was just to match what I already had, to improve it. That helped. BUSTAMANTE. The University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, doing Border studies. and U.S. Mexico border studies. Didn't you get a reaction from scholars in the Southwest because you were working in Indiana but getting grants to do studies on the United States-Mexico Border? SAMORA. That doesn't have to be rationalized. When somebody asked me, what do you know about the Border two thousand miles away and why are you doing research? My answer is because you're not doing it and you're living right on the bridge, that takes care of it. To be sure, they're right. I don't know much about the border two thousand miles away, but that doesn't bother me a bit. I do the best I can. But the University of Texas, UTEP, Arizona, California, all, 50 years ago they should have been doing it. For example, I did a study of the Texas Rangers. Who at the University of Texas is going to do this? Americo Parades? But politically, I've never had any great university support. I had to get my own money. I haven't really had a university that says: "O.K., let's go", not like Michigan State. It's all been pretty much an individual effort, trying to get students around you and support them and all that. Now the university has helped, but never..... Institutionally that's too bad because they're missing the boat, really. It's a Catholic university and they're talking about 25% of the Catholics in the United States being Hispanics. One would think that the University would have established an Hispanic research institute, if nothing else, to study the Church and Hispanics. So, the university has been not as helpful as they could have been. At another school it would have been much easier. CARDENAS. Could you describe that Border Studies project in a little bit more detail? That's when Jorge Bustamante, came into Notre Dame became a very important part of it. That was certainly one of the first projects. SAMORA. Well, you have to help me. Memories come and go. I wanted to do a study of Mexican immigration, particularly Mexican illegal. Are you bothered with the term illegal immigrant? BUSTAMANTE. There were other kinds of things that were of interest. Poor communities that existed at that time don't even exist today. They're ghost towns, for example, La Garita. Anthropologists did case studies in New Mexico looking at the legacy from the Spanish period and the village structure. Well, today the village structure is still important in Border Studies, but equally important are studies of major, urban metropolitan areas, industrial sweatshops, etc. Industrial sweatshops didn't exist at the time Charles Loomis was doing his research. There were other kinds of sweatshops--mines, railroads. It was a different reality. In this respect, Border studies has three generations in the United States, but not even one in Mexico. We have still few answers about most border realities of the two countries. Although we have important knowledge particularly regarding cross-cultural phenomenon and important information about particular problems, if we can incorporate the research on immigration that we have done, specifically on immigration that we have done, specifically on immigration, in terms of the relationships between those studies on emigration with Border studies. But I think that for my part, from my perspective in Mexico, our research on immigration has helped to shape a consciousness that hadn't existed before. I'm not suggesting that we created it. Far from that. But that the consciousness didn't exist in the past, we did research, we produced data, and that consciousness exists now. Again, I insist, it's not a causal link that I'm implying. SAMORA. When we set up the Southwest Council of La Raza, we put in money for research and advocacy although we didn't use the terms. And our idea was to incorporate moneys for a researcher to do quick and dirty research. They publish it, and then go lobby Congress. That's the notion we had, but it never, got off the ground because they had to do something else. In other words, do research, spread it out to the people who are affected by it and then go out and get a law, passed, whatever. Certainly there's not enough of it, and hopefully there will be more. CARDENAS. With the respect to the question, I was a little cynical when I said there was no direct impact of Border Studies. It might be more appropriate to look it as a process, in which you also have very contradictory currents. Just look at my graduate studies at Notre Dame, after being a very strong activist in California, Notre Dame seemed to me to be the epitome of the ivory tower. There was a disparity between how the University operated and how the ways to which I was accustomed coming from Cal State and East L.A. College. In a sense, I was problem. Julian's goal from his vantage point was to develop Chicano Studies, to train scholars, to teach people to get moneys, to do publications, and to develop that infrastructural support that's necessary, not just to enhance themselves, but to nurture that which was his goal to educate students, in this case, 55 students. Although representing different political interests, and ways of aligning themselves, we were there because of Julian. I wanted to be there in the first place because he was there. After I left Notre Dame, I went to the University of Texas, perhaps the first Chicano sociologist, certainly one of the few Chicano academics at the whole university. I, in turn, have students, one of whom, aligned himself with working class organization on the Border and did critical studies of the legal process, then he had others students. Through a process initiated the University of Texas, for example, I was consulted by a working class organization because of my expertise, legitimacy and perhaps prestige, in the area of immigration research. to work on a major lawsuit in Texas to try to get children of non-documented parents back into the schools. The Supreme Court then uses the research that I presented in my testimony to make the decision. No one can ever trace this back at Julian but I would. ....The role we had in the Supreme Court decision would not have been possible had Chicano academics not really had the idea to develop a Chicano presence that might have a long term political consequence. That's a full time job, more than one individual can do it, certainly more than just one individual's responsibility and role. People outside of academe will point the finger that you're not doing enough because you're not concretely aligned an immediate basis at the community level. I often get that criticism even though I do a lot of work with community-based organizations, but it's never enough. If I worked to align myself totally at the community level I would make everybody happy, but I would be shortchanging my long range goals, that is, keeping up with the literature, and working to train students, etc.. It's a very contradictory kind of situation. SAMORA. It's very ambivalent. I do very little community work because I don't have time. And then I always felt I could do more at a national meeting for the community whether they know it or not, than by devoting hours and hours to local meetings. I do very little work with undergraduates; for example, I decided to concentrate on graduates. CARDENAS. A good example would be Ernesto Galarza, who's been identified as an activist scholar. He is a scholar by training but his main interest has been his alignment with the labor movement especially farm labor. In the 1970's, Galarza published a number of works, the majority of those who know Mexicans in the U.S. know Galarza, but very few know him on a direct face to face basis, or realize the extent of his alignment with farm worker's organizations. Without the money that Julian got at Notre Dame, Galarza's work may not have been published. So Galarza receives credit, rightfully so because he's always been aligned with the organizations, and gains visibility with his literature. Many people benefit from reading his account of those struggles, but there had to be a process behind it for Galarza to get published, I think some academics that are not directing involved in community organization, don't receive the proper credit. SAMORA. Galarza had published one book and he did it on his own. That was Merchants of Labor. If it hadn't been for our involvement and working with the press I don't know whether Galarza would have published another book. CLEMENT. And Fernandez, that's a good example. You know. he's been, for a variety of reasons, pretty much dismissed within the main stream of discussion. He's been dismissed as not very good historian. LOOMIS. Yeah, I think you say something here. CLEMENT. One of the things that political scientists study is the national security. That's a very important ingredient in looking at Border Studies. We have a Border that has been relatively pacified for over a hundred years, in terms of national security. Mexico however is having trouble controlling her border with Central America in terms of migration. Who is the general that made all the statements about 25 million undocumented? (Chapman) It's these kinds of elements that have molded Border Studies into a legitimate field of study. SAMORA. There's no security in terms of the border. I hear we don't have a Chicano ambassador to Mexico precisely for that reason. We had one, Julian Nava. He told me when he was ambassador that they were just waiting for him to make a mistake and get rid of him. In other words, you can send an Englishman to the court of Saint James as ambassador, but a Chicano to Mexico, a very important embassy, you don't know what he might do. That's very interesting. Why doesn't the U.S. use all its resources? That's one reason--national security. CARDENAS. I suspect though that the intelligence community doesn't at present fear Chicanos no matter how things are. They're not concerned about the Border. Because they have it under control from a security point of view, even though there's leakage of commodities going north and south illegally. I think the people that invoke national security as an issue, that is, the academics from New York, and the political community, are basically people outside the intelligence community, people who know nothing about security. They use the excuse to attack United States transnational influences that occur along the border region. To invoke national security issue is a mask to keep the Mexican population subordinated and to regulate the press. Questions like national security are more effective ways to realize control the more traditional means like discrimination or racism. LOOMIS. I was thinking of the Mexican American community. This is something that gets me in trouble here with the group. I think the U.S.-Mexican American community or U.S. Hispanic community has its own Border and if I am going study the Border I want to see what kind of problems they will have in the Mexican American community. CARDENAS. The Mexican American community is sufficiently economically and politically integrated, even though they may be disenfranchised from the whole process. It is not fundamentally a security issue. Rather it's a group that's so oppressed and so marginal, one could fear that in time they may turn against the country in which they reside. Even if Chicanos are politically oppressed, economically they are so dependent upon the country, that there's just no possibility for or the viability the Mexican American community to initiate a separatist movement that would be a security problem. I think the tendency leans toward even more integration despite militancy, political pronouncements and transnational linkage, etc., etc., that's not going to alter these fundamental and integrated kind of changes. LOOMIS. I think that as a sociologist you have to recognize that any time a power structure changes people are going to put masks on and point with fear at those to whom social justice brings power. SAMORA. We have to secure our border, we've got to do this, and those Mexicans, They're pa'lla y pa'ca. But I don't think that at the macro level, not anything really important is going to happen. Neither country can afford to close the border, i.e., to solve the problem. I think the U.S. needs Mexico. Mexico needs the U.S. and they make pronouncements about the border from Washington and from Mexico city, but the border will go on. Life on the border will be better or worse, not because of research or anything like that, but some policy development. But the U.S. will have to spend money to develop a bureaucracy to regulate, say employer sanctions. Amnesty will go through but I don't think it will affect many people one way or the other, because of this tremendously important interdependence of the two countries. VALDEZ. I'm returning to the idea of recapturing the beginning of Border Studies, and its involving more people. I was a little frightened by the recent statement by Kissinger. He, on national television two days ago, said that if something isn't done in Central America, the United States-Mexico border, a 2,000 mile border, would have to be armed. On ABC Nightline. This is a situation which would have more political impact than it would have directly on the border. If you consider this in relation to a cultural border that I think still exists between Mexicans and Chicanos, and the Chicanos and Anglos, the situation becomes clearer. This is one problem. CARDENAS. That's deceptive because he (Kissinger) implies that it is not armed already. Militarily this border is well armed. There are many bases along this border. They are not being dismantled; if anything they're being reinforced and that's what we know. What we don't know might be another story. VALDEZ. Moreover, the Hispanic population, the Chicano population as well as the Anglo population is being affected by statistics that are been popularized, about the undocumented worker. The tension created by reduction in employment for the first time-not only people are moving to the Border but plants are leaving. This phenomenon implies another border--the gender border. It's culturally acceptable for some women to work, they're only temporary, they're not that necessary to the economic process and they always can get husbands. Employment patterns on the Border are changing the image of the United States heavy industry, power situations all being challenged. Men are also being affected heavily by unemployment. But the Hispanic position in the United States is also being affected, heavily by unemployment. But the Hispanic position in the United States is also changing especially in terms of bilateral relationships. If we could eliminate this rigidity that has developed in the sciences and return to the best of the early years of Border Stories, that is, a mulitidisciplinary approach, perhaps we could better understand Border dynamics. CARDENAS. This has been particularly important. Distinct from past efforts their work is primarily an attempt to reconstruct Border history a reanalysis of available data, and thereby generating new kinds of data not previously available concerning the realities of the U.S.-Mexico border. So many third-generation the researchers, Chicanos as well as others, have attempted to seek out hitherto ignored individuals and historical phenomenon to document their experiences on the Border such as labor leaders, so that the sum total adds to the body of knowledge we have on Border studies. For generalization purposes, I'd like to take the liberty of overgeneralizing by suggesting that the class origins of the new Border study people, Chicanos and maybe others, in comparison to past researchers, are more likely to be from working class origins, which prompted them to ask different kinds of questions, that may or may not be in the interests of the groups that they're studying. They have tried to integrate their research into past work and fill in the gaps. Indeed, their working class origins have helped them to do research that would lead to meaningful social action. In some cases, they are aligned with organizations that are affected by the research. This does not mean that the new research is any less objective than the previous research. I think that it as sound as the past research, if not better, better to the extent that they have the past research to build upon, and can avoid errors and problems that beset past researchers. This is not to say it's error free or value free, but it does have the old body of literature to draw from and reflect upon and perhaps go beyond. The question of the oppression for example arises from 1960's. Poverty is not a conjunctural phenomenon, not just accidental or peripheral but integrated into the structure of the Border and the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Chicanos are apart from Mexico and the United States. The definition of the social problem takes on a different analysis. SAMORA. I would like to disagree with the hypothesis of the working class origin of present-day researchers, either disagree with the hypothesis or ask for documentation. I think about 90% of the old order researchers that I know were precisely working class origin. I think you were working class origin. I think you were precisely working class origin. (referring to Loomis) I was, I wasn't even working class, lower that that. CARDENAS. Let me just make a respond to that, if I may. There's a similarity in class origin, but it seems to me that there's a much more conscious acknowledgment of and consciousness about those working class origins. SAMORA. Yeah different times, different places, all those sorts of things. Working class origin is an important variable, it is something else. Mexico has offered a number of fellowships to a number of Chicanos, and I'm wondering. How many Chicanos have come to study in Mexico and what effect has that on border research?
III. E. DEFINITION OF THE BORDER [A dynamic and challenging aspect of Border Studies is the discussion about the definition of the Border. Loomis's cohort began to ask the questions that would lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the region. In any event, any definition of the U.S.-Mexican Border is necessarily evolving and fluid and depends on the particular research question. The comments of the audience reflect this peculiarity of Border Studies.] CARDENAS. Let me raise a question. We talk about the Border, but we're certainly not talking bout the same kind of border that we see today. It was a very different reality in 1950. The Border region, the Southwest and northern Mexico was not as populated. Could you perhaps talk a little about that? LOOMIS. This is very difficult and in each person's mind it's different, but it also has changed over time. My own interest in the border centers on the linkage that are involved from different systems, and it's always relative but it keeps changing. So it is something that's very difficult for me to define. I go further because you notice there that one of my early studies was of the Old Order Amish in Pennsylvania. I'm interested in borders, period; but the border for me is the Mexican-American border. SAMORA. May I interject? In those days the Border was not considered important the Southwest, Mexicanos, Mexican Americans were considered unimportant. You were really doing something that wasn't mainline sociology. Who cared about the border in 1955? Or Mexicanos, who are they? But today it's very different. LOOMIS. I think you're probably feeling for a problem. As a social scientist, you couldn't have lived in Las Cruces and have relatives all along the border, as I did, without wanting to understand it. My family in Las Cruces were farming. We were constantly in contact with all kinds of problems. I'm always driven back to try to understand the emerging Mexican American community. All the attitudinal materials about the Mexican American community stands between those of Mexico and the U.S. This is something that's of tremendous interest to me. SAMORA. That's they way we got started in Border Studies, and to be sure, I had this background from Loomis, Saunders, George Sanchez. Never really conceptualized and crystallized as Border. But from the questions I was asking Charlie, you can see that we were involved in health work, we were involved in Border things. That was my background and what I wanted to do was to get Mexican Americans to take Ph.D.'s. get trained, and do research about Mexican American things. Luckily, you two (referring to Bustamante and Cardenas) decided on the Border. And immigration. So did Hinojosa. So did Victor Rios. So did Juan Garcia in Arizona. BUSTAMANTE. When you don't have a challenge to your work in terms of a constituency, as was the case in Mexico for a long time, to whom your studies are addressed, your notions, your concepts about Border Studies, are not challenged. Then they go smoothly in quotations, but all of a sudden that subject becomes important and people begin playing a role. But suddenly they ask you what's the meaning of Border Studies? Are you suggesting that border is a homogeneous entity? To me this is one of the most important changes, because as Dr. Samora said in the early sixties there was no interest in the Border on the part of Mexican scholars. That's a true statement. There was no interest whatsoever, in Border Studies per se. That notion became legitimate several years later. In this respect, the challenge didn't exist. All these realities, were changing in the late sixties and early seventies, with their own particular dynamic. The Border has become more important for other historical reasons. It's a legitimate field now. But then we have to ask ourselves if these academic activities have affected any changes in a historical perspective. What have been those changes? To what extent has research made a difference in the lives, particularly in the realities of the contrast, and contradictions between communities on either side of the border? How much difference have we academicians made, historically speaking, regarding the Border? The production of information, data, knowledge and consequently understanding has been very limited. It is a pervasive notion that realities begin or end at the border, with the other side blank. You find maps, in both the United States with border maps include data or employment, on health conditions and other things, but the data stops at the Border. Then, the question, does reality stop there? People that use this information do not have the tools to understand the connection, the continuation of realities and the process of interaction between the two sides of the Borders. You however were talking about interaction, and the relationship of communities on either side of the Border, in fact, many of your studies actually emphasized that. Nevertheless, when you see the data in those years, the data still stopped at the border. VALDEZ. In back of all presentations Dr. Loomis, Dr. Cardenas, Dr, Bustamante, there was an interest in culture, exchanges, quality of life as it has now been called, activist scholars, but at the same time I think this is where the greatest problem is. We have had a situation that is very definitely related to the importance of knowledge in all countries that can develop a relationship with the Hispanic, Mexican-Americans, Chicano population, but at the same time, at the physical Border itself. We're still lacking a tremendous amount of everyday knowledge about one another. We are still schizoid;, we don't trust one another; we don't know one another. The elites, particularly banking, who are involved in transnational industrialization programs, have caused that. Scholars still don't have the type of contact we have now. We're beginning to have a collaboration in dynamic way. I would say that in 1940, in 1950, in 1960, in 1970, and now going to the 80's. Mexicans know American homes much better than Americans know Mexican homes, and that's because there's a lot of non-documented workers... CLEMENT. There's been much on economics on the Border. When I first became interested in Border Studies as an outgrowth of studying Mexico, I read bibliographies on economics, but very little actually having to do with an analysis of the systems at the intersections on the Border. But that's only become necessary, since there was an interruption in the relationship of the peso to the dollar in 1976. There's two factors that I want to kind of weave in here, one is the economics. I also look at it from a political economic perspective. That's my methodological position. It is significant to look at the fact that the Border economy has been relatively neglected up until the time peso devaluations of recent years... looking at Galarza's work as an example of political economy from a systemic perspective. Our dialogue of the last few minutes has implied, but not stated, an ideological dimension, something that Galarza examined in his work. That's why he was blocked from participation in the academic process. He was ideologically not acceptable to the people who gave grants who published books, who gave jobs. The only real attempts to integrate this kind of systemic point of view were case studies, e.g., Baird and McCone's book on Beyond the Border. I know you that you've used political economic perspectives in many of your things, but there are very few economists who look at the border economy from a systemic point of view. David Barkin is another one that has, but he has not done a book on the border... BUSTAMANTE. Notions such as of social security, which are somewhat removed the daily lives of those living at the border, are often voiced by people far away. You see this more often far away from the Border, in the capitals of the two countries. It has to do with immediate problems for people at the Border, problems of everyday life that require some sort of a harmonious relation. Or rather, that adjoining communities across the border develop complementary structures. The challenge to accommodation or rather adaptation is so dynamic at the Border due to tremendously intensive processes, such as migration, a salient feature of living on the Border, problems in unemployment, in sewage, in transportation, in education and in other areas must be emphasized in the development of harmonious relationships, not necessarily in agreement, but harmonious ones; that's a feature of the Border. You understand many things in terms of accommodation if I tell you the area is a Border region. This intense contrast at the Border between the two countries makes you wonder how harmonious these networks will be, and how this process of accommodation at the Border related to the development of an unequal relationship between the people of the two countries. It makes me wonder about the future of our notions of sovereignty as a dogma, and I still believe in it. Indeed sovereignty is a very important notion and concept but in many respects it is a notion that is not consistent with every day life at the border, and may interfere with the maintenance of many networks. Somehow we have to integrate the notion of sovereignty as your legitimate right to define what you want to be as a country, as a people and as a nation with the effort to increase opportunities of contact between the peoples living on either side of the border. SAMORA. Isn't there another element here? There's such a tremendous interdependence between Mexico and the United States. United States capitalism needs a country like Mexico and Mexico needs capitalistic technology, notions, knowledge, etc.. If we were really serious about solving the problems of the Border, don't you think the U.S. could close the border tomorrow? The interdependence, however, is so great. Does the United States want another Cuba? Mexico is a border. My feeling is that the rhetoric will continue at the macro level.
III. F. BORDER STUDIES METHODOLOGY [Researching a region as complicated as the United States-Mexican Border presents a host of challenges--language, incompatible databases, lack of information, two social systems, etc.. However, as all of the participants explain, the arena provides much material for the development of innovative methodologies in many disciplines, as all have done.] LOOMIS. Well, as I tried to indicate, we were in quest of knowledge. You can't be in quest of knowledge without paying attention to your instruments. We were using the Border quite consciously in an effort to test various kinds of instruments. I can remember that a couple of us made a special trip to Princeton to talk with Hadly Cantrell about their self-anchorage scale which they had developed. We used it. But this was the first time it was ever used in this manner. This so-called self-anchorage scale was not only an effort to quantify but to remove and to place back on the respondent as much responsibility for evaluating as much as possible without making it completely open-ended. Nonetheless, we did use it and we did find some difference between Mexico and the United States reflected by these instruments. In what I've been calling the U.S. Mexican- American or Hispanic community there has been some differences between Mexico and the United States reflected by these instruments. In what I've been calling the U.S. Mexican American or Hispanic community, there has been some rather great changes as indicated by the use of the instrument. Among all those interviewed in 1963, not one informant mentioned ethnicity as a means of identifying himself. In one study done in 1970, one out of four Hispanic laborers in the Yakima Valley in Washington State mentioned ethnicity when the same procedures were used. We believe the civil rights movement involving Blacks and Chicanos have been accompanied by increased reference to ethnicity as a means of identification. Another instrument we used the so-called social distance scale, which was more effective in reflection of differences in informants' attitudes in Mexico as compared with the United States. Over the last forty years this scale, developed by the sociologist, Bogardus , has been used to ascertain to whom various groups desire or are willing to relate themselves to one another. Suffice it to say that our use of the social distance scale revealed important differences in Mexicans, U.S. Hispanics and others. Those interested may read about this in Jeanne Gullahorn's and my study, Comparison of Social Distance Attitudes in the United States and Mexico. The use of the scales demonstrates the importance of finding culturally equivalent terms. For instance, citizenship must mean something different in Mexico than in the United States; the same holds for neighborhood. Mexicans tend to be more prejudiced than Americans in terms of whom they will accept a fellow citizens and/or neighbors from a different culture. Use of the social distance scale shows that Mexicans throw up higher barriers or boundaries to other cultural groups than do Americans, when such terms as fellow citizens, neighbors, work group members and family members are used to find out the acceptability of non-Mexicans to such groups. However, with Mexicans' prejudice scores measured in this manner decrease more with increased education than they do with Americans. In general, if Mexicans had the same level of education as Americans, their prejudice scores as measured by the social distance scale would not be so great as those revealed in our study. SAMORA. The methodology we used on the study of the undocumented workers was a fairly simple, straightforward kind of methodology. I think in the first place, we didn't know what the universe was. We worried a little about the sample, but if you don't know what the universe is you worry about the sample. We did some pretesting of some interments in Illinois. The undocumented got into difficulty, and we got into difficulty. Finally, we decided we'd develop an instrument that basically gave you certain variables like age, education, sex, and that sort of thing. Then we wanted to know, where the people came from, how long they'd been in the United States, whether or not they'd worked, if they were caught, all these things, fairly straightforward. Then we decided to go to three detention centers and having learned that they processed about 300 people in a day, we could take in El Centro one day, one day in El Paso and one day in Port Isabel. That's basically what we did. Over and above that, we did two other things. We did a lot of library research to get at findings. There weren't any books that I know of, a few there and then when we got a fairly decent notion of what the problem was like. We went with our instrument, and went out and gathered information. Then Jorge thought, we ought to do one more thing, participant observation, to reinforce the data that we already had. That was fairly simple, straightforward. CARDENAS. It seems to me that the recent trend in all disciplines is toward quantification. There's been refinements in analytical tools that are available for researchers such that the refinement requires greater rigor and training, a more sensitive statistical type of analysis greater reliance on the computer. In many cases, at least in sociology there's a trend toward the use of large scale national data sets. If research proposal comes in either from a student and to a research center or agency that funds research, the often look at the analytic component of the research proposal more than the statement of the problem with a weak analytic component and the proposal will get shot down. They're really interested in the analysis and with the product, and what comes out of it in a quantitative manner. In Border Studies there seems to be a diverse set of databases available for research... People do look at that today, perhaps more than in the past but there's other areas of concern that are equally important. For example, availability of diverse kinds of data and the ability to significantly utilize databases and do an analysis of a particular problem. It's not just a lack of data anymore but now it's a question of the selection of certain kinds of data to use when analyzing a particular problem, you might have five or six different kinds of databases available or if a researcher wants to integrate them, it becomes a technical problem of how best to synthesize that data, how best to merge the data set records, and match them appropiately. That is one problem, in terms of the field work data gathering question we have a big interest in decent generation. Also in the past there was concern about the use of bilingual interviewers or interviewers of the same cultural background or ethnicity. We spent a lot of time having experts and people on our staff translating the instrument in English and Spanish not just for a loose translation but for very precise one. With all the problems we encountered in translation we spent about 509 hours in establishing language equivalency in the instrument. It was very important. We knew that previous research on the Border would merely have a research instrument that was in English but translated into Spanish simultaneously at the time of the interview which allows for a lot of slippage. With going back and forth sometimes you have an instrument written in Spanish but administered in English, especially if the respondent doesn't understand Spanish, and again there's simultaneous translation. Some of the new research along the Border has to take this into consideration. Even within the same language, there are all sorts of variation in Border Spanish as opposed to what might be useful in the interior of Mexico. LOOMIS. There might he a time dimension there. When I first began cross-cultural research, it was an insult for me to speak Spanish to U.S. Hispanics; for me to go up with my Gringo appearance and try to talk Spanish. We used school teachers who spoke Spanish for interviewing in what I've come to call the U.S. Mexican-American or Hispanic community. As they interviewed illiterate and other Spanish speaking informants, a problem of social class difference presented itself. I think that the training of interviewers is extremely important. They must be made sensitive to those and other problems. I would mention another methodological problem: that of the stereotype. Dworkin used it in his Ph.D. thesis at Northwestern University and in interviewing Mexican immigrants to the U.S. over time; i.e. longitudally. At the beginning, the procedure is open-ended and non-directive. As the results of such interviewing are processed, a list of descriptive words stand out, for example, you might get the word thrifty to describe Americans. You might get less desirable terms to describe Mexicans. One result and conclusion was that attitudes of Mexican immigrants changed over time. The first interviews used many positive words to describe Americans and negative words to describe Mexicans. In later interviews of the same universes, this was reversed, Mexicans used more positive words to describe Mexicans used more positive words to describe Mexicans and more negative words to describe Americans. Their reference groups had changed. In a way, you can say they had "joined" the U.S. Hispanic or Mexican American community that I'm talking about. I. Preface | II. Introduction | III. La Frontera and Its People: The Early Development of Broder and Mexican Amercian Studies | IV. Selective Annotated Bibliography | V. Participants | VI. Acknowledgements | Endnotes IV. Selective Annotated Bibliography Bandelier, Adolphe F. The Delight Makers. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1880. Introduction by Charles Lummis. One of the first anthropologists/archeologists to seriously research and publish about the American Southwest. Bannon, John Francis. The Spanish Borderlands Frontier: 1513-1821. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970. A student of Bolton's, Bannon followed his mentor's interest in exploring the historical formation of the Spanish Borderlands. Banning, Evelyn E. Helen Hunt Jackson. New York: The Vanguard Press, 1973. Beegle, J. Allan, Harold G. Goldsmith and Charles P. Loomis. "Demographic Characteristics of the United States-Mexican Border." Rural Sociology 17 (1960): . An early attempt to arrive at an understanding of Border society. Bogardus, Emory S. "A Social Distance Scale." Sociology and Social Research 17 (1933): 205-271. Bogardus, Emory S. The Mexican in the United States. Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 1934. Clifford, Roy A. Informal Group Actions in the Rio Grande Flood: Report to the Committee on Disaster Studies. Washington, D.C.: National Research Council, 1955. Clifford, Roy A. The Rio Grande Flood: A Comparative Study of Border Communities in Disaster. Washington, D.C.: National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences, 1956. Cumberland, Charles. "The United States-Mexican Border: A Selective Guide to the Literature of the Region." Rural Sociology 25 (1960): 1-236. D'Antonio, William V. "National Images of Business and Political Elites in Two Border Cities," Thesis for degree of Ph.D., Michigan State University, unpublished. D'Antonio, William V. and William H. Form. Influentials in Two Border Cities: A Study in Community Decision-Making. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1965. D'Antonio, William V., William H. Form, Charles P. Loomis and Eugene C. Erickson. "Institutional and Occupation Representations in Eleven Community Influence Systems." American Sociological Review 26 (1961): 440-445. Includes Border cities. This article is based on data from widespread points in the Southwest. Those responsible for the collection of data are William V. D'Antonio, James Officer for Ciudad Juarez, R. Clude McCone, Eugene C. Erickson for El Paso, Sigurd Johanson, Laiten L. Camien for Las Cruces, Orrin E. Klapp and L. Vincent Padgett for Tijuana, Aubrey Wendling for San Diego, Robert C. Hanson for Denver, Edward H. Spicer and James Officer for Tucson, and Frank and Elizabeth Nall for McAllen. De Hoyos, Arturo. "Occupational and Educational Levels of Aspiration of Mexican-American Youth". Thesis for Degree of Ph.D., Michigan State University, unpublished, 1961. Dworkin Anthony Gary. "Stereotypes and Self-Images Held by Native-born and Foreign-born Mexican Americans." Sociology and Social Research 49 (1965): 214-224. Eastlack, Charles L. "Herbert Eugene Bolton (1870-1933)". Thesis for degree of B.A., University of Texas (Austin), unpublished. Erickson, Eugene C. "Three Reputational Techiques in a Crosscommunity Perspective: Selected Problems of Theory and Measurement," Thesis for degree of Ph.D., Michigan State University, unpublished. Form, William H. and William V. D'Antonio. "Integration and Cleaveage Among Community Influentials in Two Border Cities." American Sociological Review 24 (1955): 804-814 . Form, William and Julius Rivera. "The Place of Returning Migrants in a Stratification System." Rural Sociology 23 (1958): 286-297 . Form, William H. and Julius Rivera. "Worked Contacts and International Evaluations: The Case of a Mexican Border Village." Social Forces 37 ( ): . Goldkind, Victor. "A Comparison of Folk Health Beliefs, and Practices Between Ladino Women of Denver, Colorado and Saginaw, Michigan." Thesis for degree of M.A., Michigan State University, unpublished. Goldkind, Victor. "Factors in the Differential Acculturation of Mexicans in a Michigan City." Ph.D. thesis, Michigan State University, unpublished, 1963. Hanson, Robert. "The Systemic Linkage Hypothesis and Role Consensus Patterns in Hospital-Community Relations." American Sociological Review 27 ( ): . The concept of systemic linkage is developed to categorize relationships on the U.S.-Mexican Border . Jackson, Helen Hunt. Ramona. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1934. Reprint. Originally published in 1884 by Roberts Brothers and again in 1912 by Little, Brown and Co. of Boston. Klapp, Orrin. "Mexican Social Types." American Journal of Sociology 69 ( ): . Klapp, Orrin E. and L. Vincent Padgett. "Power Structure and Decision Making in a Mexican Border City." American Journal of Sociology 65 (1960): 400-406 . Kluckhohn, Clyde. Navajo Witchcraft. Boston: Beacon Press. Reprint of 1944 edition. Leonard, Olen E. and Charles P. Loomis. Readings in Latin American Social Organization and Institutions. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1953. Loomis, Charles P. "Wartime Migration from Rural Spanish Speaking Villages of New Mexico." Rural Sociology 7 (1942): . -----------------. "El Cerrito, New Mexico: A Changing Village." New Mexico Historical Review 33 (1958): 53-75 . -----------------. Social Systems: Essays on Their Persistance and Change. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1960. -----------------. "Systemic Linkage of El Cerrito." Rural Sociology 24 ( ): . -----------------. "Toward a Theory of Systemic Social Change." Interprofessional Training Goals for Technical Assistance Personnel Abroad. New York: Council on Social Work Education, 1959. ------------------. "A Comparison of Social Distance Attitudes in the United States and Mexico," in Studies in Comparative International Development 2 , 1966. ------------------. "History and Results of the Michigan State University Carnegie Corporation Border Project. Paper presented to Southwestern Sociological Association, March, 1974, Dallas. -----------------. Loomis, Charles P. and Zoe K. Loomis. Modern Social Theories. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1961. ------------------, and Olen Leonard. Standards of Living in an Indian-Mexican Village and on a Reclamation Project. Report No. 4. Washington, D.C.: Department of Agriculture, Farm Security Administration and Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1938. ------------------, and Julian Samora. "Prejudice and Religious Activity in Mexico and the United States." Sociological Analysis 26 (1965): 212-216 . Loomis, Nellie H. "Spanish-Anglo Ethnic in a New Mexican High School." Ph.D. Thesis, Michigan State University, unpublished. Nall, Frank C. "Role Expectation Patterns Among United States and Mexican High School Students: An Empirical Study of Some Applicabilities of the Social System Schema." Ph.D. thesis, Michigan State University, unpublished, 1959. --------------. "Role Expectations: A Cross-Cultural Study." Rural Sociology 27 (1962): 28-41. Based on data gathered in El Paso and Juarez. -------------- and Joseph Spielberg. ""Social and Cultural Factors in Responses of Mexican-Americans to Medical Treatment." Journal of Health and Social Behavior 8 (1967): 299-308. Padgett, L. Vincent. The Mexican Political System. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1976. Redekop, Calvin W. The Old Colony Mennonities: Dilemmas of Ethnic Minority Life. Forward by Everett C. Hughes. Odell, Ruth. Helen Hunt Jackson. New York: D. Appleton Century, 1939. Rivera, Julius. "Contacts and Attitudes Toward the United Staes in a Mexican Border Community." Ph.D. Thesis, Michigan State University, unpublished. --------------. "Markets to the South: A Look at Some Socio Economic Aspects of Sonora." Arizona Review 12 (1963): 1-12. Samora, Julian. "Conceptions of Health and Disease Among Spanish-Americans." American Catholic Review Winter 1961: 314. --------------. "Education and Social Change in Latin America." Rural Sociology 25 (1960): This is the special issue Samora edited with M.A. Beegle, also associated with Loomis's network. ---------------. "The Social Scientist as Researchers and Teacher in the Medical School." Journal of Health and Human Behavior 1 (1960): . ---------------. Editor. La Raza: Forgotten Americans. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1966. ---------------. Los Mojados: The Wetback Story. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. --------------- with Joe J. Bernal and Albert Peña. Gunpowder Justice: A Reassessment of the Texas Rangers. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1978 --------------- with William V. D'Antonio. "Occupational Stratification in Four Southwestern Communities: A Study of Ethnic Differential Employment in Hospitals." Social Forces 41( ): . --------------- with Ernesto Galarza and Herman Gallegos. Mexican-Americans in the Southwest. Chicago: McNally and Loftin, 1968. --------------- and Richard F. Larson. "Rural Families in an Urban Setting: A Study in Persistance and Change." Journal of Human Relations 9 ( ): . ---------------- and Lyle Saunders. " A Medical Care Program in a Colorado Community." In Health, Culture and Community, Benjamin Paul, ed. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1955. -----------------, Lyle Saunders and Richard F. Larson. "Knowledge About Specific Diseases in Four Selected Samples." Journal of Health and Human Behavior 3 ( ): . -----------------, Lyle Saunders and Richard F. Larson. "Medical Vocabulary Knowledge Among Hospital Patients." Journal of Health and Human Behavior 2 ( ): . Sanchez, George. Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1940. Saunders, Lyle. A Guide to Materials Bearing on Cultural Relations in New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1944. --------------. Cultural Differences and Medical Care: The Case of the Spanish-speaking People of the Southwest. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1954. Spicer, Edward. Ethnic Medicine in the Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977. --------------. A Short History of the Indians of the United States. New York: Nostrand Reinhold, 1969. Includes section about the perceptions of Native Americans about their own history. ---------------. Six Faces of Mexico: History, People, Geography, Government, Economy, Literature and Art. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966. ---------------. The Yaquis: A Cultural History. Tucson: University of Arizona, 1980. ----------------, ed. Perspectives on American Indian Cultural Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Among other articles, contains a study of the Yaquis by Spicer, one on the Navajo by Even Z. Vogt, and another on the Rio Grande Pueblos by Edward P. Dozier. Reference to Loomis in the introduction. ----------------. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico and the U.S. on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962. Stoddard, Ellwyn R. "Catastrophe and Crisis in a Flooded Border Community: An Analytical Approach to Disaster Emergence." Ph.D. thesis, Michigan State University, unpublished, 1961. -------------------. "Comparative Structures and Attitudes Along the U.S.-Mexico Border." In Ellwyn Stoddard, ed., Comparative U.S.-Mexico Border Studies, Occasional Papers, No. 1. El Paso: Border-State University, Consortium for Latin American, 1969. --------------------. Patterns of Poverty Along the U.S.-Mexico Border. El Paso: University of Texas at El Paso, Center for Inter-American Studies and the Organization of U.S. Border Cities and Counties, 1978. ------------------ edited with Richard L. Nostrand and Jonathan P. West. Borderlands Sourcebook: A Guide to The Literature on Northern Mexico and the American Southwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983. Tucker, Charles W., and Robert G. Turley. A Manual for the Analyzed Data from the United States and Mexico. East Lansing: Center for International Programs, 1964. I. Preface | II. Introduction | III. La Frontera and Its People: The Early Development of Broder and Mexican Amercian Studies | IV. Selective Annotated Bibliography | V. Participants | VI. Acknowledgements | Endnotes Discussants
Commentators
The realization of this project would not have been possible without the collaboration of several individuals; I would like to recognize and thank them here. Dr. Charles Loomis, Dr. Julian Samora and Dr. Gilbert Cardenas were all most gracious in sharing their experiences in Border and Mexican American Studies. In particular, I would like to thank Jorge Bustamante, who originally suggested the project, and whose support as President of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte made it possible. Mtra. Mónica Verea Campos, Director of the Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, has also been enthusiastic about the potential of Border and Mexican American Studies, and encouraged me to revise the original project for publication. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Richard Navarro, ex-Director of the Julian Samora Research Institute, for his support in preparing this manuscript for publication. I. Preface | II. Introduction | III. La Frontera and Its People: The Early Development of Broder and Mexican Amercian Studies | IV. Selective Annotated Bibliography | V. Participants | VI. Acknowledgements | Endnotes 1 El Centro de Estudios Fronterizos del Norte de Mexico, now known as the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, is a research institution dedicated to the study of the U.S.-Mexican Border. 2 Michigan State University is the land grant college for Michigan, these institutions of higher learning are charged by national legislation to research rural society and disseminate information to and about it. These universities receive a lot of support from the federal government and agricultural groups. 3 Herbert Bolton. The Spanish Borderlands (New Haven, 1921) p.VIII. Hereafter cited as Borderlands. Even though our study emphasizes this particular publication of Bolton, he was prominent in his profession, and widely recognized in the United States for his teaching and research of Latin American history. Bolton was particularly known and soundly criticized for his theory of Western Hemisphere history. 4 For a useful summary of the Spanish presence in the American Southeast and Midwest, please consult see Estados Unidos de America: Sintesis de su Historia I by Angela Moyano Pahissa, Jesus Velasco and Ana Rosa Suarez Argüello. Also John Tate Lanning, Spanish Missions of Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938, 1938), and Carl Waldman, The Land Called Chicora, The Carolinas Under Spanish Rule (Florida: University of Florida Press, 1956). 5 Bolton, Borderlands, p.x. 6 Bolton, Borderlands, p.x. 7 Since this early Border literature often focuses on some aspect of Mexican culture, be it fiction or non-fiction, it frequently provides a prism through which to view American attitudes toward Mexican people, and by extension, Mexico. American society did not clearly distinquish between Mexico and the Mexican presence in the U.S. Southwest. The generalizations which abound in Border literature tended to reinforce stereotypes about Mexico and Mexican people, including those living in the U.S.. This body of writing, then, is also useful in historical analyses of American attitudes toward Mexico. 8 Cecil Robison, With the Ears of Strangers. This analysis corroborates our point above that American attitudes toward Mexico merged with those toward the Border region and the American Sothwest. 9 Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona (New York, 1935), preface. 10 Evelyn I. Banning, Helen Hunt Jackson (New York, 1935) preface. 11 Not to be confused with the sociologist of a later era, Charles Loomis, whom we will discuss later. 12 The Southwest Museum in Pasadena, California, is devoted to preserving and publicly displaying historical artifacts of the U.S.'s Native American cultures. Although the Museum houses a fine library, and holds artifacts from many Native American cultures, it is most famous for its remarkable collection of baskets, implements and other materials from Southern California's many Native American groups. 13 Ironically, real estate advertising in the Land of Sunshine was part of a regional movement to attract settlers from the East, but at the cost of those individuals who held the original land grants issued by the Mexican government and allegedly guaranteed by the Tratado de Guadalupe, Hidalgo. 14 The original transcripts of many those interviews are to be found in the archives of the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley. 15 Teaching at the University of Texas and living there early in his career, as well as spending many summers examining documents in Mexican archives, emphasized to Bolton the urgency of understanding that historical link between the American Southwest and Spanish colonialism. 16 Bolton, Borderlands. p.x. 17 For more information, please see Lewis Hanke, ed. Do the Americas Have A Common History (New York, 1964). 18 Essay by John W. Caughey in Turner, Bolton and Webb; Three Historians of the American Frontier (Seattle, 1965), p. 65. 19 Charles Loomis was raised in a farming family in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and although he later left to pursue his education, that early experience on the Border seems to have left deep impressions on him about the unique nature of the U.S. Mexican Border. Loomis earned his bachelor's degree at the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts in 1928, his Master's in Sociology and Economics at North Carolina State College in 1929 and his Ph.D. in Sociology and Economics at Harvard University in 1933. 20 Charles Loomis, et. al. The Standard of Living of Farm and Village Families in Six South Dakota Counties (Washington, D.C., 1938). 21 Charles Loomis, et.al., Standard of Living in Four Southern Appalachian Counties (Washington, D.C., 1938) 22 Charles Loomis, "The Development of Planned Rural Communities," Rural Sociology, December, 1938. 23 Charles Loomis, "Negro Sharecroppers and Wage-Laborer Families in the Arkansas Valley," Farm Population and Rural Life Activities, April 15, 1939. 24 Charles Loomnis, "Social Agencies in the Planned Rural Communities," Rural Sociology, December, 1938. 25 Charles Loomis, "Measurement of Dissolution of In-Groups in the Integration of a Rural Resettlement Project," Sociometry, April, 1939. 26 Although Spanish-surnamed New Mexicans use a variety of self-identity terms (Hispanics, Latin Americans, etc.), we will respect those that Loomis used. 27 Charles Loomis, "Wartime Migration from the Rural Spanish Speaking Villages of New Mexico," Rural Sociology, December, 1942. 28 Charles Loomis, et. al, "Spanish Americans: The New Mexican Experiment in Village Rehabilitation," Applied Anthropology, June 1943. 29 Charles Loomis, et. al., "The Taos County Project of New Mexico-An Experiment in Local Cooperation Among Bureaus, Private Agencies, and Rural People." Applied Anthropology, June, 1944. 30 Charles Loomis, "Ethnic Cleavages in the Southwest as Reflected in Two High Schools," Sociometry, February, 1943. 31 Charles Loomis, "Extension work at Tingo Maria, Peru," Agriculture in the Americas, February, 1944. 32 The Department of Sociology under Dr. Loomis's tutelage developed studies of leadership patterns in local, rural communities that could help the Agricultural Extension Service personnel evaluate decision-making politics. Agricultural professionals, such as Home Economists, are often obligated to implement programs in rural areas but frequently without the tools needed to be effective. 33 The support for research generated by the land grant colleges and universities such as Michigan State cannot be overestimated. The USDA provides annual moneys, as well as national and regional academic networks and channels of distribution, to the Colleges of Agiculture located at all fifty land grant schools. Each school also has an Agricultural Extension Service that functions as a multi-purpose liaison with the rural community. 34 Roy A. Clifford, The Rio Grande Flood:A Comparative Study of Border Communities in Disaster. Washington, D.C. The National Research Council, 1956. 35 See Julian Samora and Lyle Saunders, "A Medical Care Program in a Colorado Community", in Health, Culture and Community, Benjamin Paul, ed., New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1955. Samora and Saunders not only studied the broad cultural context of the delivery of medical care but a specific setting of the Border, i.e., the Mexican American community. 36 Even a cursory revision of Spicer's work reveals an anthropologist committed to grappling with precisely those cultural phenomenon of the border, difficult to research but most characteristic of an arena of intense multi-cultural encounters. 37 While Cumberland is mostly known for his research on the Mexican Revolution, it is no coincidence that Loomis included an individual that had access to material about the region both sides of the Border. 38 After graduating from Adams State College in Colorado in 1942, Samora taught high school and college courses at Adams State before receiving his Masters from Colorado State in 1947. He spent a short time in Wisconsin as a research assistant before studying and receiving a doctorate in sociology from Washington University in St. Louis. 39 The original research about Mexican inmigration to the United States generated by those theses represents an important contribution to the literature about Mexican inmigration. Topics include a Marxist analysis of immigration, the discretionary power of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the bracero program, among money others. 40 See Barbara A. Driscoll, " ", in El Orgullo de Ser 41 Dr. Loomis and some of his collaborators developed a theory of social systems entitled Systemic Linkage. Although today the notion seems rather old-fashioned, the concept did apply easily to the multi-cultural milieu of the Border and did influence early Border research. 42 James Officer is now Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and has researched and published extensively about Native Americans and Hispanics. In 1987, for example, Officer published Hispanic Arizona 1536-1856, an exhaustive historical analysis of the Mexican American community of Arizona. 43 Loomis provides more details, "When I left the Department of Agriculture and went to Michigan State there were problems. How am I going to get sociology off the ground? It was really on the ground at Michigan State. Social work was part of the department and curriculum and Ags there hated social work. They told me." 44 The University of Notre Dame must have listened to Dr. Samora's suggestion because Dr. Jay Dolan, a widely recognized scholar of American Catholic history and member of the university's Department of History, is presently studying U.S. Hispanic Catholics as part of a larger project about American Catholicism. 45 Loomis elaborates, "Let's assume you are an interviewer approaching an American. You hand the interviewee a card on which words designating peoples of various countries are printed. You also show the interviewee a card with a ladder with steps on it, saying that you would like him to indicate which of the peoples are the most friendly and place the designation of this group at the top. Then you find what group will be placed at the bottom in terms of perceived friendliness. You then get the interviewee to put the other groups in terms of friendliness. For a given universe one may get an average score (step on the ladder) for a given country. Americans can be compared with Mexicans as informants for one country/rate, the other in term of ladder." 46 We should note that Emory Bogardus was a researcher active in the 1920s and 1930s, known as much for his publications on immigrants and immigration as his more strictly sociological research. I. Preface | II. Introduction | III. La Frontera and Its People: The Early Development of Broder and Mexican Amercian Studies | IV. Selective Annotated Bibliography | V. Participants | VI. Acknowledgements | Endnotes |
|
|
|
For more information, contact: |
