Mexican immigrants

In America, George Washington was a hemp farmer, although it seems that there was little knowledge of the intoxicating properties of the plant until Mexican immigrants later introduced social consumption of the plant. By the 19th century, cannabis use had spread from the Middle East to the artists and writers of Europe, most notably by Le Club des Haschischins (The Club of Hashish Eaters) in Paris, and as a result popular fiction also raised the profile of cannabis use thanks to the... 

President Herbert Hoover creates the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, headed by former Prohibition agent Harry Anslinger. Anslinger focuses much of his efforts on combating the growing popularity of marijuana among Mexican immigrants and jazz aficionados. 

Despite early passive views on cannabis use in the United States, however, a gradual accumulation of momentum in opposition to marijuana developed after World War I. Much of the antipathy was based on cultural fears relating to cannabis use by Syrians in New York, East Indians in California and, principally, Mexicans in the Southwest. Much of the pressure for federal legislation regulating marijuana arose not from the FBN but from local law enforcement agencies in the South and Southwest who saw it as a link to violent crime presumably committed by Mexican immigrants. 

Small businessmen also reaped dollars from the newcomers, and as late as 1930 they fought all attempts to restrict Mexican immigration. Said one Los Angeles shopkeeper ... 

As the numbers of Mexican immigrants began to increase, especially in the border towns of the southwest, they were the object of close scrutiny by the townsfolk. Suspicious and often resentful of these newcomers, the townspeople humiliated, harassed, and abused them to make them feel as unwelcome as possible. When the Mexicans lashed back at their tormentors, their actions were often attributed to the influence of marihuana, which to many Americans symbolized the Mexican presence in America. 

The campaign against the dmg picked up especially during the Depression as marihuana became yet another issue on which to harass Mexican immigrants. The Mexicans were accused of spreading the marihuana vice throughout the nation ... 

The use of marihuana is not uncommon in the colonies of the lower class of Mexican immigrants. This is a native dmg made from what is sometimes called the "crazy weed". The effects are high exhilaration and intoxication, followed by extreme depression and broken nerves. [Police] officers and Mexicans both ascribe many of the moral irregularities of Mexicans to the effects of marihuana. 

The next major American city in which marihuana was allegedly epidemic was New York. While Mexican immigrants had been pouring into the south and midwest, New York s Harlem was the scene of a vast influx of Negroes from the West Indies and the southern United States. By 1930, New York s black population numbered over 300,000. More blacks lived in New York than in Birmingham, Memphis, and St. Louis combined. 

During alcohol prohibition Mexican immigrants were using marijuana, as well as black cavalry units, and eventually use spread to more whites, which began the big panic. (Actually, hashish houses were common in the U.S. in the 1880 s,... 

Maldanado, L. A. (1987). Mexican immigrants and Mexicans An evolving relation. Contemporary Sociology, 16, 682-683. 

A second group of states that enacted criminal laws against the use of marijuana were in the northeastern part of the country. In these states there were few Mexicans, but northeastern residents had heard about the influx of Mexican immigrants out west and about the drug marijuana. These states had just begun to get the morphine addiction problem under control and feared that addicts, cut off from morphine, would substitute some other drug that was not yet controlled. In the absence of any research or medical information, marijuana seemed like a possible candidate for this substitution. So even though marijuana use was virtually unknown in the Northeast at that time, these states also outlawed it. 

It is also known that there is an association between exposure to PBDE ether flame retardants and fecundability in women. A study of Mexican-immigrant women in California showed that those with high blood concentrations of PBDE took a significantly longer period to become pregnant than controls with lower PBDE levels in their blood [3]. A recently published cohort study of more than 150 American children has shown that prenatal exposure to PBDEs results in lower neurodevelopmen-tal test scores in exposed children than in controls [4],... 

Thus, of course, the distinction between whiteness and nonwhiteness never fully lost its salience in American political culture. Mexican annexation, black Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow practices, Indian Wars, Asian immigration and Exclusion, Hawaiian and Puerto Rican annexation, and Philippine conquest—all would keep whiteness very much alive in both the visual and the political economies. But upon the arrival of the massive waves of Irish immigrants in the 1840s, whiteness itself would become newly problematic and, in some quarters, would begin to... 

Relief programs for the unemployed were a related issue. During the 1920s, the Mexican population in Los Angeles alone increased by 226 percent. By 1930, there were over 97,000 Mexicans in the city. When these immigrants lost their jobs and went on relief, the business sector, which had once regarded them as an exploitable asset, now began to view them as an intolerable burden. 

Oregon s capital is less lively than the college towns to the south or the metropolitan Portland to the north. However, the ethnic populations of recent Russian immigrants and Mexican farm-laborers have brought a recent revival to Salem. 

From its inception, therefore, U.S. border enforcement policies have been intimately tied to the management of the labor supply through immigration limitations, the use of militaristic tactics to police Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the... 

Chemical kinetics, the subject of this chapter, evolved from an art into a science in the first half of the twentieth century. One person more than any other was responsible for that change Henry Eyring. Born in a Mormon settlement in Mexico, Henry immigrated to Arizona with his parents in 1912, when the Mexican revolution broke out. Many years later, he became a U.S, citizen, appearing before a Judge who had just naturalized Albert Einstein. 

Partida, J. (1996). The effects of immigration on children in the Mexican-American community. Child Adolescent Social Work Journal, 13(3), 241-254. 

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