Quicksilver community: Mexican migrations and politics in the Santa Clara Valley, 1800-1960

This dissertation explores the history of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley, analyzing the formation of the local Mexican community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Newspapers, oral histories, archival collections, and organizational records are the principle sources upon which this study is based. The first chapter surveys the nineteenth-century origins of the local Mexican community and explores ideologies of race based in white settlers' notions of American "Manifest Destiny." The second chapter examines the proletarianization of the region's Mexican workforce by focusing attention on the New Almaden mercury mines, the home to hundreds of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in the decades immediately following California statehood in 1850. After describing mine labor and its effects, the chapter recounts the history of a labor strike during the 1860s. Responding both to local conditions and to contemporary political developments in Mexico, labor activists in the region embodied the transnational nature of Mexican American politics during this period.;The remaining chapters survey the local Mexican American community during the twentieth century. Chapter three focuses on the effects of the Mexican Revolution on the Santa Clara Valley and accounts for rising anti-Mexican sentiment among the area's white residents during these years. Chapter four analyzes local political organizing in the 1930s and argues that historians have often over-emphasized the importance of an emerging new "Mexican American generation" to explain the era's political history. Chapter five focuses on regional transformations during and immediately after the Second World War by drawing attention to Ernesto Galarza, a prominent and influential figure in the local Mexican American community. The final chapter explores the history of the local Community Service Organization (CSO), the most important grassroots, Mexican American movement in the state during the 1950s. A brief epilogue then argues that, as Mexican-origin residents of the Santa Clara Valley have continued to experience patterns of racial inequality since 1960, they have continued to develop new political organizations designed to change local conditions, as well.