My ancestors a few generations back who lived in the American west (or a generation or two before that were rural peasants in western Europe), and my rural Mexi

My ancestors a few generations back who lived in the American west (or a generation or two before that were rural peasants in western Europe), and my rural Mexican peasant friends today live pretty similarly. You could take many stories of white Americans’ own great-great-grandparents who migrated to the US from Europe, change all the names and places (but few of the other details), and the story would be entirely plausibly that of an undocumented Mexican or Central American migrant today. This is one of the reasons that anti-immigrant hysteria is so ironically and tragically hypocritical. I think it would be fair to call frontier America “non-Western” in the sense of the word used by this discussion. Maybe “non-industrialized” would be a better word. jordigh: if you grew up in a middle class Spanish-speaking family in a city in Mexico, you are most certainly “Western” in the sense used here.