During the 19th and early 20th centuries almost a half-century after the annexation of Texas in 1845, the flow of Hispanics entering were barely a trickle. In fact, there was a significant migration in the other direction according to Times Magazine’s Julia Young whom is currently researching Mexican immigration to the U.S. during the 1920s. According to Young, during the 1890s, new industries in the U.S. Southwest — especially mining and agriculture — attracted Mexican migrant laborers. As the number of different ethnicities from different parts of the world migrated to Texas, Mexicans were sometimes said to have certain positive qualities that made them “better” labor immigrants than the other groups. 

..”Many Mexicans can’t speak fluent English”

As of now there is a negative migration rate to Mexico. But there are still migrations to Texas from Mexico whom have moved to the United States of America, but Hispanics from Mexico migrating to Texas might not be welcomed by their own cultural dialect and cultural traditions. There are several districts of Mexico whose residence may be foreign to those from the Eastern to the Western and Northern to the Southern parts. In 2000 approximately 20 million American residents identified themselves as either Mexican, Mexican-Americans or of Mexican origin, making it the sixth most cited ancestry of all US residents. The National Institute of Statistics and Geography forecasted in 2000 that about eight million Mexican-born individuals live in the United States of America. That is 8.7% of the total Mexican population.

                  In that same year, the Institute stated that the states with the greatest number of emigrants to the United States were Jalisco (170,793), Michoacán (165,502) and Guanajuato (163,338), with the total number of emigrants being 1,569,157. The great majority of these were men. Approximately 30% of emigrants come from rural communities. That same year, 260,650 emigrants returned to Mexico. 

            Many Mexicans can’t speak fluent English and studies show that their ability to speak English doesn’t improve drastically whilst they live in the US. This is largely due to them living in closed communities of other Mexican immigrants which reduces their need to assimilate with America. Just as well, the different Mexican dialect spoken in different regions of Mexico can in turn, create tension between migrants and locals, which in extreme cases, can lead to segregation, crime and violence. 

            In the following months of the Nuestra Voz publication these topics of segregation between the recent Mexican immigrants to Texas and those whom have been accustomed to Texan culture will be studied through interviews of different sources who can justify these differences, which do not enable productive social outcomes for those living as migrants to Texas from those Hispanics who now have to share cultural differences with their new neighbors. 

*This story was printed at an earlier date