The Mistreatment of Mexican-Americans
Since the Reconstruction Era and the American win in the Mexican-American War, Mexican-Americans have been the victim of inequality. In the Southwest region, Mexican-Americans were lynched at the same rate as African-Americans in the Southeast, and yet, the vast majority of Americans have no idea about this. The goal of this project is to provide context on the suffering of Mexican Americans and how we can address it present day. My project will explore the past abuse of Mexican Americans in different periods, media, and methods.
Civics
Because my goal was to expose this history of maltreatment of Mexican Americans, I needed to provide context and add an event covering this treatment. The purpose of researching the Bracero Program and creating a legislative brief was to show a point in time when the government should have been protecting the rights of Mexican Americans and instead ignored them by entertaining extrajudicial justice. First and foremost, I learned about the suffering Mexican and Mexican-Americans endured from the government and U.S. as their history of lynching and segregation is unknown. Then, I gathered inspiration for my product. Although I initially wanted to create an FBI file, I changed my product to a legislative brief to refocus the topic on civics. That being said, I didn't create a traditional legislative brief; I created a future-tense brief theorizing the Texas state should revisit the Bracero program and reboot it. In this brief, I attempted to propose the benefits of this program while addressing the failures of the past program.
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English
For English, I used vocabulary to discover the context of the words used against Mexican Americans.The purpose of my research and product was to provide a solution for the past ignorance of American history to the suffering of Mexican Americans. I learned about the environment of the Southwest, the social climate of the time (especially racially with Mexican and Mexican-Americans,) and how to better educate students/people on this topic. Unfortunately, this topic is very unknown, so this portion of the project was about how we can effectively educate people on the topic today. So, I created a lesson plan, glossary, article, vocabulary activity, and I hosted a mini discussion with a small group of six students to gauge how the lesson would effect the group, and I was mostly met with surprise. The students had no education on the topic, and it only went to show the importance of my project: we need to educate students on other populations in America in American history. As a nation of immigrants, isn't it important to learn about all immigrants?
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Art
The art portion of my product juxtaposed important events in American history with the harsh realities of the suffering it inflicted on Mexican Americans. The purpose of this research and product was to apply the suffering of Mexican Americans to the mainstream content of America by learning about the topic and following through with a collage of the research. I learned more about sufferings Mexicans who legally crossed had to endure such as: The Jailhouse Holocaust, The Bath Riots, D.D.T. pesticide spraying, Carmelita Torres' disappearance, and the sexual exploitation of lice checks. In the end, I learned most about the emotional suffering and the dehumanizing effect that was left on Mexican and Mexican Americans. By using pictures of these horrific events as a background to infamous pictures, I put the sufferings of Mexican-Americans right where it should be: front-and-center. I used photoshop to cut the overlaying photos out, and then I began collaging the background centered around the overlaid, photoshopped photo. Lastly, I used color washing, splatters, and brush strokes to highlights specific portions of the collage. Within these separate collages, I divided them by decades and movements to create different contexts for each collage.