Abstract
Between 1906 and the early 1940s, American state and federal officials, who were predominantly men, decided that the country’s patriotism was in peril. This time period would see not only two world wars but also the Great Depression. Sent off to war, separated from loved ones, or bankrupt from the stock market crash, Americans began to question the greatness of the supposed “American” dream. In response, the US government, corporations, and other social organizations set out to “Americanize” its populations. Many (but not all) Americanization programs reminded citizens and noncitizens alike how different Americans were from other nationalities and sought to create a homogenous national culture that subscribed to a shared belief system (Van Nuys 2002).
“His children [Mexican American and Mexican immigrants] and his children’s children will live here as American citizens. They will help to elect our presidents; they will help to establish our moral, political, and religious ideals and practices. Our future is bound up with theirs. We must think about them; we must come to know them; we must work with them in constructive and worth-while things of life” (McCombs 1925: xi)
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Notes
- 1.
As Cohen reminds us, during one of the most important events in American history, the Boston Tea Party, colonists expressed their desire for America to be an independent nation through the use of goods: “On the eve of the American Revolution of the late eighteenth century, colonists shirked imported British tea and fabrics” (2003: 21).
- 2.
Matt Garcia (1985: 97) also paints a vivid and compelling picture of the unsanitary conditions plaguing the citrus worker “colonias” in Southern California; these conditions likewise tended to be blamed on “Mexican people rather than poverty-level wages, segregation, and civic neglect.”
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Acknowledgements
The author extends her thanks to Suzanne Spencer-Wood, David Sigler, Barbara Voss, Ian Hodder, and Paulla Ebron for providing guidance and extensive feedback on this chapter.
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Camp, S.L. (2013). Reform to Repatriation: Gendering an Americanization Movement in Early Twentieth-Century California. In: Spencer-Wood, S. (eds) Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on Gender Transformations. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4863-1_15
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