ABSTRACT
The model of a culturally plural society has come too late to be meaningful for many of Guadalupe’s children who find themselves unable or unwilling to go “home” again. The term “melting pot” seems to have been subverted to mean some thing called “mainstream culture and society,” presumably established early and for all time by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The cultural pattern for future Mexican-immigrant and Mexican-American behavior was being crystallized. The people of Mexican descent who settled in Toledo, Ohio, and gave shape to community, came predominantly from or were channeled through Texas, were mostly from rural or small-town backgrounds, and experienced the homogenizing effect of life in the migrant stream. The Mexican immigrant’s Catholicism differed from that of his German, Polish, and Hungarian neighbors. Mexicans settled first on what was called the old Middle Grounds, an island-like area formed by the Maumee River and one of its tributaries.
