who have come more recently from
Mexico.
Anglo-Americans were even more
prone to prejudice against the newcomers
from Mexico. Mexican laborers were
accused of being communist sympathiz-
ers, of being supporters of the outlaw
Pancho Villa, of practicing sexual
debauchery and thievery, of being unas-
similable in American society, and of
being charges of the state. U.S. represen-
tative S. Parker Frieselle of California put
it bluntly in a 1926 debate in which he
opposed restriction of Mexican immigra-
tion: “We, gentlemen, are just as anxious
as you are not to build the civilization of
California or any other western district
upon a Mexican foundation. We take him
[the Mexican immigrant] because there is
nothing else available to us.”THE AGE OF WORLD WARS 139Routes of Immigration from Mexico, 1910–1929
THE FAMILY
BUSINESS
Leonides Gonzales was an example of
middle-class flight from Mexico during
the Mexican Revolution. The mayor of
his hometown in Durango, Mexico, in
1911 he crossed the Rio Grande to
San Antonio, Texas, with his wife
Genevieve, to flee the turbulence of
the revolution. In San Antonio,
Gonzales became managing editor of
the Spanish-language newspaper La
Prensa.In 1916, with the revolution still
raging across the border, his son
Henry Barbosa Gonzales was born.
Inheriting his father’s taste for poli-
tics, Henry Gonzales grew up to win
election to the U.S. House of
Representatives in 1961, becoming
the first Mexican American from Texas
ever elected to national office. He
retired in 1997.Mexican beet workers and the shacks they live in near Rocky Ford, Colorado, 1915
(Library of Congress)