After all, the dreams of Mexican Americans and all Latinos are the same dreams as any other American.
The challenge is to get not only Mexican Americans but American society as a whole to embrace a sense of shared responsibility and destiny in our part of the world, our continental neighborhood.
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My wife, who was born in Guadalajara and came to the United States legally as a child, reminds me that there is friction between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans because Mexicans have a firmer grasp of who they are and Mexican-Americans resent that.
Many of us U.S.-born Mexican-Americans grew up with an unease about our place in the world, too Mexican to be American and too American to be Mexican.
Early on, it was mostly young Mexican-Americans, people born in the U.S., who carried the Mexican flag, and it was mostly immigrants, the people from Mexico, who carry the stars and stripes.
His value is all wrapped up in how well he plays with Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.
Almost immediately there was applause from Mexican-Americans, whose votes the president is trying to court.
That issue more directly impacts Mexicans and Mexican-Americans than, say, Puerto Ricans and Cuban-Americans.
It has refused to honor these Mexicans and Mexican-Americans as American fighting men.
Meanwhile, many Mexican-Americans I know don't feel like they're a part of either.
And in the past 20 years, I've written hundreds of thousands of words in defense of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.
And yet, for Mexico, the really challenging relationship is with the more than 35 million Mexican-Americans living in the United States.
When I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1985, I was one of 35 Mexican-Americans in a class of 1, 600 freshmen.
In 1897, a group of Mexican-Americans in El Paso refused to observe Mexico's independence day, explaining that it meant nothing to them.
As for Cruz, his being endorsed and championed by the tea party makes many Latinos uneasy and suspicious, particularly Mexican-Americans in the Southwest.
Unfortunately (for me at least) the stereotype that Mexican-Americans do all this great work for substandard pay has not held up quite so well.
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Many Mexican-Americans -- who along with naturalized Mexicans, represent nearly 70% of the Latino population -- would never think of voting for a Republican.
So here we have one more thing that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans can use against Rubio to try to take him down a peg or two.
"What's fantastic about my character is that I'm married to a Latina, and there is zero reference to the fact that we are Mexican-Americans, " he says.
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And two, in the minds of the uninformed, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest don't have the same legacy of racism, discrimination and mistreatment that affected African-Americans.
Even for Mexican-Americans, who make up nearly two-thirds of America's Hispanic population and seem particularly suspicious of Mr Romney, immigration reform may matter less than jobs or schools.
Through the inductive reasoning of trial and error, I discovered that the stereotype that Mexican-Americans are honest, hard working, family oriented people who deliver great work is valid.
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Most Mexican-Americans I know would need a whole team of therapists to sort out their views on culture, national identity, ethnic pride and their relationship with Mother Mexico.
Would such a southern reactionary really have made his name in education, made his party reach out to Mexican-Americans, promoted so many blacks or used the United Nations to tackle Iraq?
So when Cuban-Americans do what Rubio has done since arriving in the Senate 16 months ago and take a hardline against illegal immigration, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans have been known to cringe.
Goya is currently building a distribution facility in Texas to more cheaply bring its American-made Latino products to a huge chunk of the Latino population: Mexicans and Mexican-Americans living in Texas and California.
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If at least some Mexicans aren't yet ready to forgive the United States for how it treated Mexico a century and a half ago, then they have to accept the fact that some Mexican-Americans still hold a grudge for how their family members were treated much more recently than that.
They're the orphans of the Southwest -- too Mexican for the Americans, too American for the Mexicans.
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