America, in the
mid-1800s was a very racist country, with legal slavery and a long standing policy of
extermination of Native Americans. What's more, due to large waves of Irish and German
immigrants, a xenophobic (anti-foreigner) movement and political party began at that time. My
point being that racial and ethnic tension didn't emerge at the time, but was rather embedded in
society to begin with.
However, Manifest Destiny and the Gold Rush brought
tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants to the west coast, California in particular, and as they
looked differently, spoke a different language and were not Christian, they were very easy to
discriminate against. Chinatowns on the west coast were simply anti-Asian
segregation.
The large influx of miners and settlers in the newly conquered
western territories pushed Natives off of their tribal lands and hunting grounds, so there was
inevitable conflict between whites and the Sioux, Pawnee, Crow, Apache and Nez Perce tribes,
among others, and anti-Native sentiment rose along with it.
Lastly, there was
a great deal of tension between the Tejanos, Californios and white American settlers, who
suddenly found that they occupied the same land and that Latinos had lost most of their rights
to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment