misconceptions and one of them is all of the mexicans are immigrants from mexico. but just like the people say we've did not cross the border but the border crossed us. long before the arizona was part of the united states it was a part of spanish then later mexican area so really it was the northernmost

community and later in and the states of sonora. there are mexican families here who has been here seven or eight generations some more with the original group were soldiers who came up in 1776 and founded the community. the u.s. has always been a very racial society. and then if we think of the of black-white relations after the mexican war all of a sudden white americans had to deal with mexican people.

and they didn't consider the of mexicans to beat you white that they were inferior they did not know where to place them in the ratio of hierarchy that existed in the country at that time. they were not sleeves -- slaves or african but definitely they were not white. sometimes they were referred to as the race of mongols between natives and the europeans like the spaniards. so almost from the very beginning there were these patterns of the anglo newcomers tried to dominate the mexicans that were already living here. it wasn't quite as bad as it was in parts of california and texas primarily because

from the 1850's through the 18 eighties, there was not a lot of anglo's settlements arizona was considered a dry and desolate hell hole on the way to california. oh what of people were not attracted to settle here and in fact, for about a 20 year period, most of those anglo newcomers were adult males males, very few women and many of those males would marry the zero mexican women and into the mexican families and also start a business even with mexicans who had been here a long time or those who were moving into the area from sonora.

so a 20 year period there was a biracial and bilingual society where in one sense mexican and assimilated the anglos rather than vice versa but that changed very quickly once the southern pacific railroad came because all of a sudden you could bring the house side goods, more settlers arrived to ranch or to mine, more women arrived so very quickly it became a segregated community. with mexican families to be pushed out of the downtown area by the businesses and push south door west and then as others moved in they went north and east.

so the defacto segregation really took hold even though mexicans remain to the majority of the population through 1910 is as if they had disappeared from the face of the earth pdf beginning in the 1870's no coverage of mexican businessmen or artist the only thing maybe if they got into a knife fight on saturday night and that persisted and still does with many respects. it is interesting. i wrote the history of arizona that the first edition came out 1995 the second edition came out and

2012 and honor of the of centennial. and what i saw then was when arizona became a state with the entire mexican movement interestingly enough those anglo-irish miners. and those who are the best paying jobs to get these anti-mexican measures and later when those were turndown hiv-2 pass more in the legislature. and then to revise my

history i realize we were giving to raise similar period but only this time is coming more from the right the series of laws to make english the official language those of would-be spoken in the government agencies and then with the explosive surge of mexican immigration in the 1990's this sort of anti-mexican and anti-immigrant hysteria rows and rows and then we got bills that would garner

national attention which tries to force the municipal police departments to request immigration papers every time they stopped a mexican looking person for a traffic violation or what ever. we were going through another period of anti- mexican political agitation that was pretty successful in the sense that many of those measures are not passed into law. pat that anti-mexican sentiment was really fuelled by those anglo newcomers to arizona many were retired or moved into the state in the '80s or the '90s who have no

understanding of their own history or of arizona and mexico deep ties with one another through commerce or family of culture and history. and they looked at at all mexican people including u.s. citizens as the brown immigrants from the south that was ruining the u.s. sovereignty. . .

of the role that mexican people have played in the history of the state and history of the country. >> 1979 c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. harvard university economist george borjas is next on booktv "a