Mexican “otherness” in the rhetoric of Mexican Americans

Problematizing "New Media": Culturally Based Perceptions of Cell Phones, Computers, and the Internet among United States Latinos

“…United States Latinos are different from Latinos in Latin America because, as Stavans (1995) suggests, the former "live in the hyphen," or the intersection of two very different cultures. Feelings of "otherness" often characterize the United States Latino experience and influence much of the group's behavior (Gonzalez, 1990;Ramos, 2002); this behavior is often identified as maintenance of Latino cultural values, with an incorporation of United States norms and practices. Latinos who migrate to the United States have a tendency to acculturate rather than assimilate to new cultures (Korzenny, 1999;Korzenny & Abravanel, 1998).…”

Reies Lopez Tijerina's “the land grant question”: Creating history through metaphors

“…Gonzalez (1990) demonstrated that a "significant cultural inheritance" among Mexican Americans in northern Ohio explains much about their discourse (p. 276). That inheritance includes a long history of dealing with disastrous events and betrayals, which has separated Mexican Americans from their past.…”

The Mexican Diaspora: A Critical Examination of Signifiers

“…For people of Mexican descent, fragmentation began 500 years ago with the Conquest, continued through various invasions, colonizations, and social ruptures, and lives today in continuing economic and discursive colonization and internal psychic multiplicity. González (1990) wrote "like the Mexican, the Mexican American is forever fragmented, he/she can never be from one country" (p. 285). The ambivalence of otherness is expressed in the dialectic of diasporic separation and inclusion: "For Ohio Mexican Americans, the discourse of otherness becomes a symbolic enactment of the sense of historical loss" (p. 289).…”