The Similarities between African American Civil Rights and Latino Civil Rights

In class whether we are talking about slavery in the United States or the United States-Mexican border patrol, two themes are always prevalent. These two themes are: “aliens” and “brutality”. Both African Americans and Mexicans experienced being “aliens” or the “foreign” and also they experienced “brutality” during their time of oppression in the United States. Another main concept that these two groups shared when being oppressed by the United States was that they both were used for work in the United States but when they were no longer needed they got dumped with no support or anything from those that they were working for.
We are always taught about the brutality of the slave holders to their slaves and we learn in Migra! and also a movie in class of how bad the brutality is and the horrible conditions that the Mexicans had to stay in when they were crossing over the border into the United States. The embarrassment that came with this brutality is not to go unmentioned either as we learned that men would have to strip completely naked in front of each other as they got tested on every part of their body before being able to go to the United States to do back breaking work for basically no money at all. Another place where we see a huge problem with United States- Mexican brutality is in the Bracero Program where we saw Mexicans being absolutely exploited beyond their means for work during World War II. During this time they also had to go through lots of embarrassing checks before they were sent into the United States to do ridiculous work for next to nothing.
Even though the African American Civil rights movement is well known through out the United States one movement that we do not hear about as much is the Chicano Movement. This movement took place during the 1960’s and was much like the African American Civil Rights movement because how how African Americans tried to gain their equality and civil rights, Mexicans at this time were doing the same thing.
Even to this day both parties are trying to gain their full equality and rights in the United States. We see this in one example with African Americans in the “Black Lives Matter” movement. And Mexicans to this day are also trying to gain not just full equality but full acceptance as well. In Latino Threat we read that it takes three full generations of being in the United States before being able to fully be apart of the United States community: “Latino first- and second- generation interviewees engaged the least in this form of transnational activity.”(65). Along with this acceptance and full rights to education as well their is an HBO movie named “Walkout” that was filmed in 2006 about a group of Chicanos who were not getting full rights to education in their Denver school so they started protesting and they preformed a “walkout” where all the Chicanos walked out of the school at the same time to preform their protest. In this day we see many protests being the way for people to get their views of what they want whether it is a Chicano movement of a walk out or an African American movement and they are holding a “Black Lives Matter” protest.