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i included a short YouTube video of the history of Mexico. i added it because while it leaves so much out it talks about briefly on how Mexico got its name. From the Mexica indigenous people .

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one of the cultures of Mexico that i find beautiful is The Day of The Dead, ive always found the celebration of the ones who have passed so interesting. with beautiful colors and displays the holiday helps celebrate ones we have lost throughout the years paying homage whether its lost elders to children i cannot imagine a more beautiful holiday than day of the dead.

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ive been having issues on both the app and the browser on uploading videos , for some reason its not allowing my to post vlogs but , a quick summary of my wall

one article of the zoot suit era , something that many dont know about that is a big part of chicano culture. Chicanos would wear theses bog oversized suits part of the chicano style . what ended up happening is that many were seen as criminals hoodlums thugs etc. many males who were seen in the late hours of the night were actually targeted by police

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The History of Mexico | History Lists | History

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On August 3, 2019, a white male in his early twenties drove from Allen, Texas, and targeted people of Mexican descent at the Cielo Vista Walmart in El Paso, Texas. He killed 22 people and injured 24 others. Before embarking on his act of terrorism, he posted a manifesto online that cited the reasoning for his actions being the "invasion" of the United States by Hispanics, and fears of white people being demographically eclipsed. Much of the language in the manifesto echoes political rhetoric circulated in conservative media outlets and spouted by politicians anxious about immigration and the changing demographics of the United States.

As a historian who specializes in studying racialized violence, I have seen this before. The El Paso attack is the latest in a long line in American history of incidents of "private violence." Contrary to "public violence," or punishment sanctioned by the state to enforce social order, "private violence" is carried out by vigilantes outside of the formal legal system. In the United States, much of this private violence has been carried out by whites against minorities, as a means of policing their place within the racial hierarchy. Sometimes individuals are targeted for transgressing social taboos, as is the case in lynching, where individuals are executed by mobs. This horrific practice is most clearly associated with the South and used against African Americans, but in the American Southwest, lynching victims were more likely to be Latinx or Asian. The 2019 El Paso attack was an example of violence targeting an entire community. While this is a twist in the unfortunately frequent narrative of mass shootings in the United States in the past 20 years, minority communities have long been targeted with vigilante violence in the form of race riots. These riots-most common before World War II-were a form of punishing and policing entire communities whom whites perceived as a threat.

My research project for my faculty fellowship with the Humanities Collaborative is building off of work I did in my dissertation on race riots that took place in 1943, in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Harlem, in the midst of World War II. Many smaller cities, including El Paso, experienced riots in the same summer. My research assistant, EPCC student fellow Malia Nelson, and I are investigating the 1943 incident in El Paso to put the wartime experience here on the border in dialogue with what was happening elsewhere across the home front. The political climate and violence today closely resemble the historical context of the 1943 Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles. In the period immediately after World War I, anxieties over demographic change and immigration reached their peak in a wave of race riots in 1919, the renewed rise of the Ku Klux Klan during and after the war, and the passage of the first comprehensive immigration reform in 1924. But Mexicans were not perceived as the primary threat in this decade. As historian Natalia Molina has documented in her book Fit to Be Citizens?, Mexicans were exempt from new immigration quotas placed on European and Asian immigrants due to the need for cheap labor in agriculture and mining. They were the targets of Americanization campaigns, and white Americans thought that Mexicans were fully capable of assimilating into mainstream American culture. The main objection to Mexicans was their Catholicism, as seen with the presence of a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in El Paso in the 1920's-see Shawn Lay's book War, Revolution, and the Ku Klux Klan for their short-lived history. But the Great Depression shifted the narrative. Suddenly Mexican immigrants were painted as stealing jobs and were deported in large numbers, often without due process. Many American citizens were included in these roundups and sent to Mexico.

The dawn of World War II alleviated economic conditions, but not negative ideas about Mexicans. Despite the founding of the Bracero program in 1942, as a formal agreement between the United States and Mexico to provide migrants to fill labor shortages, bad press about Mexicans persisted. In the Southwest, most of the negative press centered on young Mexican-Americans who belonged to the pachuco subculture. These youths were highly visible to the white community due to their trademark clothing style, the zoot suit. When white kids on the East Coast wore the zoot suit, it was described as a silly teenaged fad, as in a 1942 Time Magazine article. But in Los Angeles, Hearst-controlled newspapers described the zoot suit as a "badge of hoodlumism" ("Zoot War" 10). Over and over, the news media described pachucos as gang members and juvenile delinquents. The construction of new military installations bordering Mexican-American neighborhoods resulted in increasing contact and clashes between white servicemen and these Mexican-American youth. In early June 1943, fueled by the steady media coverage of these youths as criminals, white servicemen took to the street and targeted Mexican-American youth over several nights. At first they restricted themselves to stripping and beating any zoot suiter they came across, but then they started targeting Mexicans in general. At first, these men were praised by the media for doing the job they felt had been inadequately done by the police. Only when the violence spun out of control and the national government intervened did the press coverage begin to censor this violence.

(Photo from El Paso Herald-Post, 8 June 1943.)

Miraculously, no one died in the Zoot Suit riots. While local government officials tried to downplay the racial component of this violence, some national papers proclaimed the violence a race riot. Other papers continued to blame the zoot suiters themselves, and many, including the El Paso newspapers, reported negatively on the style, continuing the assumption that the style was associated with delinquency. The Mexican press seized on this as another example of racism in the United States, causing diplomats with the U.S. State Department to have to spin the story by repeating that these white servicemen were targeting delinquents, not Mexicans in general. They went so far as to provide "correct" stories to the Mexican press to publish. Texas, already in a tense relationship with Mexico over treatment of Mexicans and the Bracero program, responded by establishing a Good Neighbor Commission in June 1943 and affirming that visiting Mexican workers would enjoy "white" status in the Jim Crow segregation system.

For Mexican-Americans, World War II proved a turning point in the pursuit of civil rights. Incidents like the Zoot Suit riots and the denial of funeral services to fallen soldier Felix Longoria prompted a renewed sense of activism and a change in strategy for Mexican-Americans in the postwar period. Many veterans participated in challenging local segregation laws in places like Texas and California that had formal segregation, and in pushing for equal access to education and employment.

Will the recent attack in El Paso provoke a similar political awakening and activism? I'm a historian, not a futurist. The charged political narrative over the Second Amendment certainly complicates honest research and conversation about the issue of firearms in the United States. However, a conversation about the importance and weight of words and rhetoric is long overdue and promises to potentially bear fruit in other areas, like immigration reform and addressing white nationalist terrorism, that profoundly affect the Latinx community. When we study history, we can clearly see that we've been here before, but I certainly have faith that the people of El Paso are willing and able to move that narrative forward.

Written by Dr. Melissa Esmacher
Faculty Fellow, El Paso Community College

Works Cited
"Zoot War Still On," San Francisco Chronicle, 10 June 1943, 10.

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On August 3, 2019, a white male in his early twenties drove from Allen, Texas, and targeted people of Mexican descent at the Cielo Vista Walmart in El Paso, Texas. He killed 22 people and injured 24 others.