Shameful Victory Summary

A thought-provoking source that John H.M Laslett used in researching for his book Shameful Victory is George J. Sanchez’s 1993 book Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. His this book, Sanchez places a platform about Mexican American identity that stretches before World War II. The main argument is that Chicano history does little to explore the development of cultural adaptation. And he seeks to render that. Even through hardship and discrimination, the Mexican American identity evolved. He establishes his argument by analyzing the reasoning for Mexican immigration in the early twentieth century. He expands to the second-generation Mexicans willingness to be active in their rights. By analyzing the Mexican immigrant’s transition

With Anglo Americans stressing this belief of Americanization and the Mexican government urging loyalty, the Mexican American communities found themselves stuck between two nations (124). Sanchez explains that there is a dim stereotype of Mexican immigrants. Because of this, the American government organized an Americanization program to shape immigrants into American voters. They encouraged learning English, establishing a healthier American diet, and maintaining a cleanliness familial environment (148). These things fostered around an idea that Mexican immigrants needed to assimilate into American society. Moreover, the Mexican government encouraged a strong sense of national loyalty. Sanchez states that this was done in hopes that the immigrants would return to Mexico, realizing that their hard-working class left due to the revolution (121). Therefore, there was a clash of cultural loyalty between the American and Mexican government, and the individual immigrant learned to balance each segment in the creation of a new