The No Longer ‘Invisible Minority’ 30 Years Later

The old boxes that the construction workers stumbled across in a UCLA library storage room didn’t look like much at first.

But when sociology professor Vilma Ortiz was called over by a librarian to inspect the forgotten files and old computer tapes piled up in Powell Library, she knew they were a find.

Inside the cartons were the original surveys used in the landmark 1970 UCLA study of Mexican Americans that opened the door to exploration of a community that had been mostly disregarded by academics.

Written by three UCLA researchers, “The Mexican-American People: the Nation’s Second Largest Minority,” was a thick volume that drew from interviews with 1,550 residents of Los Angeles and San Antonio. The study revealed both the social mobility and economic disadvantages of Mexican Americans, and was one of the first looks at a burgeoning group often referred to at the time as “the invisible minority.”

“Up to that point, the discussion had been about African Americans and whites,” Ortiz said. “This brought to light a whole other population that had really been ignored.”

As they sorted through the old surveys, Ortiz and her colleagues had an idea: What if they could find the original people who were interviewed and do another study, 30 years after the first?

For the last five years, she and fellow sociology professor Edward Telles, along with a team of graduate students, have been painstakingly tracking down hundreds of people first interviewed in the mid-1960s, hoping to paint a clearer picture of a complicated and diverse population.

Using online directories, voter registration rolls and property records, they have been searching for 750 of the original Los Angeles participants and 400 of the San Antonio residents. So far, they’ve located 80% of the people in Los Angeles and interviewed half of them, and have started the search process in San Antonio.

The current Mexican American Study Project poses questions about ethnic identity, discrimination, education, work history, political involvement and a host of other issues. This time around, the researchers are also interviewing the participants’ children.

What they are finding, Ortiz said, is an increasingly varied community and evidence that will challenge many lingering stereotypes about Mexican Americans.

“We think this will address some dated perceptions,” Ortiz said. “In some ways, people continue to see Mexican Americans as an old community, rooted in history. In other ways, people see them as newcomers, as all poor.”

When Blanca Romero was first interviewed, the young immigrant mother of two had just bought a house in Pacoima with money she made baby-sitting, hairstyling and selling burritos to her brother’s co-workers. Since then, she has owned 11 properties, started two successful companies and raised five children--four of whom have their own businesses.

“There’s been a lot of changes in the community,” said Romero, 56, who came to Los Angeles from Mexico City when she was 7. Her father supported the family as a dishwasher when they arrived. “Mexican Americans have really come a long way. I believe there are no barriers, except the ones you build yourself.”

Like many participants, Romero was surprised that researchers were able to find her after three decades. Some have been flattered that the UCLA sociologists wanted to hear about the courses their lives took; others were more reluctant to share their stories, Ortiz said. All, except those who agreed to be interviewed for this story, will remain anonymous in the study.

Researched during a time of growing Chicano activism in the 1960s, the original study was criticized by some community leaders because it was headed by an Anglo, respected UCLA economist Leo Grebler. The other two authors were sociologist Joan W. Moore and Ralph Guzman, a doctoral student who became a prominent Latino political scientist.

Moore, who went on to be a national expert on gangs and the Chicano community, said there was little support in academic circles for the project.

“There really was not interest in Mexican American people at that point,” she said.

Their three-year study, which was funded with a $650,000 grant from the Ford Foundation and published as a book in 1970, revealed the economic diversity and growing assimilation of Mexican Americans, as well as the educational disadvantages faced by many in the community.

At the time, people of Mexican origin accounted for about 90% of the Latino population in Los Angeles County. Since then, that population has become much more diversified, with growing numbers of people from Central and South America.

Dionicio Morales, president of the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation, said he remembers helping Guzman find housewives in East Los Angeles to interview for the original study.

“I think it came the closest to the reality of what was happening in those days, because they were actually walking the streets of East L.A., talking to the people,” Morales said.

The study highlighted the need for political representation and community-based organizations to serve Mexican Americans, he said, one of the factors that prompted him to found his organization.

It also challenged the stereotype of Mexican Americans as recent immigrants who never acculturated to American life.

“[The book] was really a seminal study in the development of the awareness of Mexican American people in the Southwest,” said Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute in Claremont. “It talked about the permanence of the Mexican American population, rather than the immigrant sojourner myth that still persists somewhat to this day.”

The study became a benchmark that other researchers eventually used as a platform from which to launch further examination of the ethnic group, he said.

Moore said that as a result of the study, textbooks slowly began changing their descriptions of Mexican Americans.

“The myth still persisted that this was a rural population, a folk society, all these sweet, nostalgic reminiscences,” she said. “Our major goal was to emphasize that this was a very urban population . . . and cities better start paying attention.”

When Ortiz contacted Moore a few years ago to tell her she found the original research and wanted to revisit the study, Moore was “delighted that somebody would be crazy enough to want to look for all these people.”

“I thought it would be impossible,” she said. “I think it’s extraordinary what they’ve done.”

The UCLA sociologists have received about $2 million in grants from the National Institute of Child and Human Development, the Ford Foundation and other sources to complete the project, which they plan to finish in the next two years. In addition, they are taking photos of the participants and getting copies of old pictures, and hope to eventually get funding for a documentary.

Participant Salvador Velasquez, 60, hopes that the new report will highlight the great strides made in the Mexican American community.

“I’d like to let people know that Latinos, like other immigrants, make very positive contributions to this community and the nation,” said Velasquez, a former gang member who now runs LA Works, a multi-city job training and employment organization in the San Gabriel Valley.

Velasquez, who emigrated with his family from Jalisco, Mexico, when he was 6 years old, was teaching high school dropouts when he was surveyed in the late 1960s. He eventually got a degree in business and a master’s in education. His daughter attended Harvard, and two of his children are now pursuing graduate degrees.

“I think if people looked around, they would see a lot of success stories about Latinos,” he said. “And it’s only going to get better.”