"The success of Mexican Americans in maintaining a distinctive culture in the Southwest did not lie in the fact that they violently or even overtly resisted Anglo Americans’ steady encroachments on their way of life. Rather, the ultimately political and social significant of the perpetuation of distinct Mexican American communities throughout the Southwest lay in the fact that Mexican Americans were able to survive and persist as an ethnically distinct people despite the change in political sovereignty over their homeland. In technical, political terms, although Mexican Americans, by virtue of their new status as American citizens, were no longer Mexicans, American racism and Mexican Americans’ de facto subordinate status in the new social order encouraged them to consider themselves Mexicans in a way they never had before."
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David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity, University of California Press, (March 27, 1995), p. 37
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/History_of_Mexican_Americans
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History of Mexican Americans
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