Hemispheric and Transborder Perspectives: Racialization of Mexicans through Time (original) (raw)

Towards a Transborder Perspective: U.S.-Mexico Relations

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2014

This article embeds a discussion of transborder communities -communities spread out in multiple locations in the U.S. and Mexico-in the history of U.S.-Mexico relations. These relations are read through the colonial and contemporary mapping of space, place, people, race, and ethnicity both literally and metaphorically as well as through U.S. immigration policy in the 19 th and 20 th centuries. The concept of "transborder," which can include borders of coloniality, ethnicity, race, nation, and region, can help us to illuminate U.S.-Mexico relationships through time, the racialization of Mexicans in the U.S., and contemporary dynamics of migration and immigration. The crossing of many borders and the carrying of these borders within one's experience allows us to see migration and immigration in terms of family relationships, social, economic, and cultural relationships, communities, and networks.

Transnational Ethnic Processes: Indigenous Mexican Migrations to the United States

Latin American Perspectives, 2014

The experience of migration to the United States of indigenous peoples is producing a change in ethno-racial systems of classification that is not simply reactive but reflects the history of each indigenous people and is expressed both at the institutional level and in the formation of a transnational ethnic subject. The experiences of the Purépechas of Michoacán, the Nahuas of Guerrero, and the Mixtecs of Oaxaca involve different migration histories and processes of ethnicization but share a history of Spanish colonization, subordination in the Mexican social structure, and discrimination as immigrants in the United States. Comparison of these experiences reveals the importance of the instrumental dimension, of the institutional context in the place of destination, and of ethnic agents as creators of emblems of ethnicity under conditions of geographical dispersion. State action continues to organize much of the political and cultural content of subnational identities, and the state remains the interlocutor in processes of ethnic agency every step of the way.

Empire and the Origins of Twentieth-Century Migration from Mexico to the United States

Pacific Historical Review, 2002

he [the migrant] is forced to seek better conditions north of the border by the slow but relentless pressure of United StatesÕ agricultural, Þnancial, and oil corporate interests on the entire economic and social evolution of the Mexican nation. Ernesto Galarza, 1949 1 Preamble In this article we show how the twentieth-century appearance of a Chicano minority population in the United States originated from the subordination of the nation of Mexico to U.S. economic and political interests. We argue that, far from being marginal to the course of modern U.S. history, the Chicano minority, an immigrant people, stands at the center both of that history and of a process of imperial expansionism that originated in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and that continues today.

Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States

deadly profitability. Still, U.S. culture proclaims and inflames a "Mexi can" drug problem. The rush to blame Mexico and Mexicans is not limited to migrants hired by U.S. employers and drug cartels that supply U.S. markets. The spring of 2009 brought another wave of worry about Mexican invasion the HINT swine flu. Fortunately, the influenza proved more debilitating than deadly. Mexicans in Mexico suffered most-in disease, death, and daily restrictions. Still, U.S. media regaled a fearful public with visions of a deadly "Mexican" invader poised to kill susceptible "Americans" until it became likely that the virus had jumped from hogs to humans in a Mexi can community where a U. S.-owned industrial slaughterhouse operated with few environmental and health safeguards. Then focus on the virus as another Mexican invader faded, giving way to a more constructive em phasis on global health in a globalizing world. The flu became another episode of U.S. political and public culture constructing Mexico and Mexicans as others, as antagonists, as invaders or worse. When scholars analyze the historical roles of Mexico and Mexi cans in the United States, we too emphasize invasions and problematic migrations: the U. S. invasion of Mexico in the 1840s to claim vast terri tories, followed by rising waves of Mexican migration into regions of the United States that were once Mexican (and far beyond). Others empha size exclusions: the denial of rights of property and citizenship to Mexi cans in territories taken by the United States, despite the promises of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; later Mexican migrants' exclusion from prosperity and political participation. There can be no doubt that inva sions, migrations, and exclusions, historical and contemporary, matter to the linked histories of Mexico and the United States, and to Mexicans in the United States. But they are not the whole of these histories. This volume aims to depart from established emphases and offer new perspectives on the historical and continuing roles of Mexico and Mexicans in making the United States. We seek to move beyond prevalent perceptions and de bates, public and scholarly, grounded in an enduring but limited under standing of history. Most scholars presume that the nineteenth-century U.S. invasion that turned the Mexican North into the U.S. West led to a pervasive Anglo-American political, economic, and cultural dominance that left peoples of Hispanic ancestry a subordinated and often excluded underclass. Later migrations reinforced that subordination, leaving Anglo ways to persist and predominate. In that context, scholarship about Mexi-0 cn 0 0 N m

Mexican Nationalisms, Southern Racisms: Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the U.S. South, 1908–1939

American Quarterly, 2008

The early twentieth century brought transformative Mexican migrations to places from Texas to Alaska, Michigan to California, and the South was no exception. Examining the case of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the South from 1908 to 1939, this essay shows how international migration, in this case between the United States and Mexico, has shaped the racial ideologies of nations and societies at both ends of migration streams. It traces the arrival of Mexican immigrants to two Southern locations, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta, and discusses their initial experiences of race and class there. It then focuses on the middle- and upper-class community surrounding Mexico’s New Orleans consulate, as well as the self-appointed leadership among poor Mexican sharecroppers in Gunnison, Mississippi, to illuminate the distinctly Mexican strategies which Mexicans of all social classes pursued in their quest to attain and retain white status in the U.S. South. In the early twentieth century U.S. South, there were no Mexican Americans who could call upon U.S. citizenship or claims to be “Caucasian” under the law, nor organizers drawing Mexicans into class-based politics. There, Mexicans’ sole cultural and political claims took the form of Mexico-directed activism, through which the racial ideologies of both immigrants and Mexican government bureaucrats had a discernible impact upon the color line’s shape and foundations. Conversely, it was in the South that Mexican government representatives most directly confronted the black-white eugenic binary of U.S. white supremacy, and did so without the support of U.S.-based institutions or groups. This article argues that during the decade following the Mexican revolution, Mexican immigrants and bureaucrats in the South emphasized Mexico’s pre-revolutionary tradition of cultural whitening, avoiding the official post-revolutionary celebration of race-mixing, or mestizaje. In so doing, they successfully elided questions of eugenic race in their negotiation of the color line. They eventually secured Mexicans’ acceptance as white, a trajectory more closely mirroring national trends for European, rather than Mexican immigrants in the same period.

Defining America’s Racial Boundaries: Blacks, Mexicans, and European Immigrants, 1890-1945

Contemporary race and immigration scholars often rely on historical analogies to help them analyze America’s current and future color lines. If European immigrants became white, they claim, perhaps today’s immigrants can as well. But too often these scholars ignore ongoing debates in the historical literature about America’s past racial boundaries. Meanwhile, the historical literature is itself needlessly muddled. In order to address these problems, the authors borrow concepts from the social science literature on boundaries to systematically compare the experiences of blacks, Mexicans, and southern and eastern Europeans (SEEs) in the first half of the 20th century. Their findings challenge whiteness historiography; caution against making broad claims about the reinvention, blurring, or shifting of America’s color lines; and suggest that the Mexican story might have more to teach us about these current and future lines than the SEE one.

La Frontera and Beyond: Geography and Demography in Mexican American History

Professional Geographer, 2006

The recent publication of an expansive national dataset, the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample, allows for new analyses of the historical geography and settlement of various immigrant and ethnic groups in the United States. The present research explores the growth, development, and geographic dispersion of the ethnic Mexican population, and outlines some of the demographic and social characteristics within significant clusters of this population in the United States across the first half of the twentieth century. The analysis does not attempt to overturn other geographies and ethnographies in Mexican American history, but through its ability to elucidate broad, national patterns it is able to create a more dynamic view of settlement, demonstrating the role of immigrants and of women immigrants in particular. Results indicate that place matters: the geographical context of arrival and settlement were key factors in differentiating communities and the lives of those who lived in them.

Transnational Immigration Politics in Mexico, 1850-1920

2013

This academic adventure began for me in 1996, and along this long journey I have received tremendous support from many people, who encouraged me to not give up on my goal of earning a doctorate degree in history; despite coming across faculty that tried to dissuade me from going to graduate school, remarking that it would be too expensive and not worth it. Nonetheless, putting that negativity aside, from the University of California, San Diego, I thank Eric Van Young for believing in me and encouraging me not to listen to people who doubted my potential. At San Diego State University, the many letters of recommendation given to me by Paula De Vos and Elizabeth Colwill allowed me to continue to pursue a Ph.D. At the University of Arizona, I have to begin by first thanking my doctoral committee, Kevin Gosner and Martha Few for not only having to read a 260 page first draft version of this dissertation, but my advisor William H. Beezley, for promptly giving me back valuable feedback and suggestions throughout the summer to make the manuscript even better. During my graduate school experience at Arizona, I learned to have a more open mind and to not hesitate to share my ideas. Prior to going to Tucson, I had read an article in U.S. News and World Report's annual report on the best graduate schools in America, and it cautioned incoming graduate students not to openly discuss their research ideas, as dissertation topics had been known to be "stolen." Thus, while in my first research seminar at the university, which happened to be with professor Gosner in the fall of 2006, I explained my research topic to my classmate, Stephen Neufeld, and as a result, only a couple of days later, he informed me that he had come across a U.S. Congressional hearing on a black colonization scheme in Mexico from 1895, saying