Mexicanos Chapter 4 Summary

In Chapter 4 of Mexicanos by Manuel G. Gonzales it talked about the American southwest of 1848-1900 in four different states: California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. In California, after the Mexican American War, the Spanish –speaking society worsen. On January 24, 1848 gold was discovered by James Wilson Marshall and an employed carpenter named John Augustus Sutter in Coloma. In 1848, miners forced their way into the Sierra foothills, after a year the small stream became a huge spreading into territories. Out of the miners, the most successful were the Latin Americans from South America and Northern Mexico.Most Hispanic miners would reach the gold fields before the other competition. Problems like envy, violence, and racism removed competition, which then drove Spanish-speaking people being called greasers.
There were many mexicanos being abused by the hands of vigilantes and given measurable amounts of racist toward the situation. One of the cases involved a women named Josefa Segovia “Juanita” that killed an Anglo miner that tried to break in her cabin. For that she was plead guilty and sentenced to …show more content…
Within the group, we split the work amongst us in the categories we decided to talk about the main ideas such as: an overview, Revolution, Tiburcio Vasquez, Joaquin Murrieta, Agriculture, culture, marriage, and mining. After the reading of chapter four I’ve never knew so much information on California, I knew about the gold rush, but not so much about the abuse of Mexicans and foreigners had to go through during the mines, and about Joaquin Murrieta and his history. Finding information on marriages was a bit difficult, but at the same time it was interesting. When it came to the class participation, we came up with many different ideas like a quiz, or something similar to asking questions and answers. In the end, the group decided to go with a game “heads up” that hopefully the class would like to