Trailblazers and Harbingers: Mexicans in New York before 1970

“When I saw the skyscrapers I was crazy with joy!” one Ellis Island entrant recalled years later, while another recounted having been detained initially, an ignominious chalk mark on her back.  Such stories resonate with a public often conflicted about today’s immigrants, but in this case the people quoted came not from Europe but from Mexico.  Overshadowed by the vastly larger European immigration, Ellis Island Mexicans matter nonetheless, for they alone embodied both of the main twentieth-century immigration patterns: through Ellis Island, and from Mexico.  Moreover, the first Mexican immigrants to New York, mostly from the Gulf coast by ship (and a few overland from the Mexican interior) anticipated the many Mexicans arriving in New York today.  This overlooked earlier migration is analyzed in the context of New York-Caribbean commercial and labor patterns, and also as one small part of the mass dislocations occasioned by the Mexican Revolution: itself triggered in part by protests over US economic influence.  The small but pioneering Mexican settlement in New York City wielded much less influence, but also suffered less discrimination, than either the growing Puerto Rican community in New York or the major, longstanding Mexican communities of the Southwest.  Like other Mexican immigrants, however, those arriving in New York faced serious problems after enactment of the 1965 immigration law.  Still largely in effect, this act has made it impossible for most Mexicans to receive permission to enter the United States, even as transnational factors have prompted increasing numbers of Mexicans to migrate.  Indeed most of Mexicans who have come to New York have arrived since 1980, and just as they have long constituted the largest immigrant group in the United States, so Mexicans may soon be the largest in New York itself.