The Second El Cargadero

One of the things that highly surprised me about the book was the fact that the village that most of his family came from in Mexico seems to have started a mini El Cargadero in Anaheim. Most of the people that were from El Cargadero moved and joined family members in Anaheim. It is almost like the entire community was uprooted and placed in the United States. He mentions how they had parties with people Jerez and all the villages living near there. There were about thousand people present for something like a baptism. The fact that they were all a lot like family has its down sides though, Arellano for example had trouble finding a girlfriend because all of the girls that he met were from El Cargadero and they were all somehow relate to him, distant cousins. But the fact that so many people from this town were able to immigrate to the United States and form decent lives for themselves and managed preserve a lot of what they had back home is a great feat. Most of them kept their Mexican roots in dress, music, food, and parties. I found it really interesting that they were able to do so especially in an Americanized society where assimilation is very difficult to overcome given the pressure from peers and society as a whole. Even if one does not necessarily want to assimilate they may have to do to such pressure, and I think what makes this case so unique is that they practically tried to recreate a similar community or one that blended with the U.S. communities, but still had the same family feel that they had back home, and this was evidently very important to them because they tried to get together as much as they could and recreate this feel. In a sense they were building a more middle-class environment (mean they still had money problems but had a far better living environment than they started off with) and contrary to the idea of what is middle-class--which in many ways defines assimilation and perhaps this is the reason that there is not that much focus on the assimilated because invisibility is what defines assimilation, they have managed to keep a lot of the culture that they had in El Cargadero.