Just finished "Farmworker's Daughter" by Castillo Guilbault, who grew up in California during the 50's and 60's. It's well written and evocative of that time (not that I'm familiar with the area or with being Hispanic). One thread of her memoir is the distinctions her mother made among people, both race (Yaqui Indians versus not, shades of brown) and class/culture. Her mother took pride in her gentility, even though she was married to a farmworker.
I'd generalize that specialists always make distinctions that generalists don't. When people grow up in an area, they and their neighbors are specialists, making distinctions more or less well-founded. So-and-so isn't just a farmer, he owns a particular farm with particular animals and has a history on the farm. When "outsiders" come in, they can't make these distinctions because they don't have the background knowledge so their eyes can't see what the natives see. But the "insiders" also make generalizations about the outsiders--back in the 50's many in the south would see newcomers or media as "Yankees" and probably troublemakers.
So too in immigration. We now talk of "Asian Americans", lumping together as one group people from many disparate countries. And we talk of "Hispanics/Latinos", lumping together people who speak different versions of Spanish or, perhaps, no Spanish at all (i.e., Brazilians and Indians). And immigrants will make generalizations about the "natives", being more likely to see blacks and whites as Americans and less likely to make racial distinctions than natives.
A similar process takes place when we visit the past, which is a foreign place. Our eyes fail us as we blur out differences. For example, would you be surprised to learn that Illinois had many German-language newspapers between the Civil War and WWI? I was.
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