Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts
How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts
How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts
Ebook347 pages4 hours

How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

Read preview

About this ebook

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans—from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished—to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity.

Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 1, 2014
ISBN9780520957190
How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts
Author

Natalia Molina

Natalia Molina is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is the author of the award-winning Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940 and the co-editor of Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice.

Read more from Natalia Molina

Related to How Race Is Made in America

Titles in the series (49)

View More

Related ebooks

Related articles

Reviews for How Race Is Made in America

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5

1 rating0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    How Race Is Made in America - Natalia Molina

    HOW RACE IS MADE IN AMERICA

    AMERICAN CROSSROADS

    Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, George Sánchez, Dana Takagi, Laura Briggs, and Nikhil Pal Singh


    HOW RACE IS MADE


    IN AMERICA


    IMMIGRATION, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE

    HISTORICAL POWER OF RACIAL SCRIPTS

    Natalia Molina

    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

    Berkeley    Los Angeles    London

    University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

    University of California Press

    Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

    University of California Press, Ltd.

    London, England

    © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

    An early version of Chapter 1 appeared as The Power of Racial Scripts: What the History of Mexican Immigration to the United States Teaches Us about Relational Notions of Race, Latino Studies 8, no. 2 (2010): 156–75.

    An early version of chapter 2 appeared as ‘In a Race All Their Own’: The Quest to Make Mexicans Ineligible for U.S. Citizenship, Pacific Historical Review, May 2010, 167–201.

    An early version of chapter 4 appeared as Constructing Mexicans as Deportable Immigrants: Race, Disease, and the Meaning of ‘Public Charge,’ Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 17, no. 6 (2010): 641–66.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Molina, Natalia.

    How race is made in America : immigration, citizenship, and the historical power of racial scripts / Natalia Molina.

    pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-520-28007-6 (cloth : acid-free paper)—ISBN 978-0-520-28008-3 (paper acid-free paper)

    eISBN 9780520957190

    1. Mexican Americans—Social conditions—20th century. 2. Mexican Americans—Civil rights—History—20th century. 3. Immigrants—United States—History—20th century. 4. Citizenship—United States—History—20th century. 5. Race discrimination—United States—History—20th century. 6. United States—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. 7. United States—Emigration and immigration—Government policy—History—20th century. 8. Deportation—United States—History—20th century. 9. United States—Race relations—History—20th century. I. Title.

    E184.M5M587 2013

    305.868'72073—dc23

    2013018468

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14

    10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

    In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro 100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

    For Ian

    CONTENTS

    LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

    1. Harry Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times

    2. Mexican workers board buses for deportation

    3. Mexican workers arrested in rail yard

    4. The Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris and the Rev. Susan Frederick Gray

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    George Lipsitz once told me that scholarship is done in solitude but not in isolation. I have found this observation to be as insightful as it is concise. In preparing these acknowledgments, I felt both overwhelmed and humbled recalling how many people generously shared their time and expertise with me.

    First, I want to thank American Crossroads series editors George Lipsitz and George Sánchez for their tremendous support. As when I worked with them on my first book, I am very grateful for their ability to suggest new ways for me to think about various aspects of my work. They drew my attention to deeper possibilities in sections of text that I had thought were ready for publication, showing me where more layers could be exposed and additional interpretations teased out. George Lipsitz helped at two critical stages: the first occurred when, after taking the first draft as far as I could, I asked for his help. He provided substantive feedback (and a long reading list) that strengthened the manuscript. After I completed another round of revisions, he read the manuscript again, and I also shared my new draft with George Sánchez. They jointly suggested further revisions in key sections. This book is all the better for their insight, suggestions, and support.

    I also acknowledge with gratitude the many invitations I received to present parts of the in-progress manuscript, including those from the Newberry Library Seminar in Borderlands and Latino Studies; the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago; the Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Bologna; the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Denver; the Department of Chicano-Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine; the Latino/a Studies Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the 2010 University of California International Migration Conference, hosted by UC San Diego; the American Studies Department at the University of Notre Dame; Université Paris Diderot; the Latino Studies Department at Williams College; the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers; and the conference Transnationalism and International Migration in Historical Perspective at the University of California, Los Angeles. Through these presentations, I was able to test ideas, field thought-provoking questions, and receive valuable feedback—all of which helped me move past pressure points in the manuscript and see the work from different perspectives. I also appreciate the responses I received at scholarly conferences, including those sponsored by the Organization of American Historians, the Western Historical Association, and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.

    As grateful as I am for the valuable feedback provided at formal talks, I would have had nothing to present had it not been for the help of my generous friends and colleagues who listened, brainstormed, encouraged, and commented on the kind of early draft that is shared only with trusted individuals. In Bird by Bird, writer Anne Lamott recalls E. L. Doctorow’s observation, Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. Conversations with friends and colleagues via email, at conferences and invited talks, and over shared meals and coffee served to light my way. Thank you to Meg Wesling, Nancy Postero, Pablo Mitchell, Jose Alamillo, Laura Briggs, Scott Kurashige, David Serlin, Angela Garcia, John McKiernan-Gonzalez, Alex Stern, Gerry Cadava, John Alba Cutler, Anne Fabian, Mia Bay, Roger Waldinger, Nancy Green, Jason Ruiz, Mérida Rúa, Ondine Chavoya, Ana Rosas, and Faye Caronan. I would especially like to thank Ernesto Chávez, who, during an informal conversation at a conference, suggested the term racial scripts to name what I was describing. I am indebted as well to Vicki Ruiz, Miroslava Chávez-Garcia, and Kelly Lytle-Hernandez. They are not only remarkable historians but are also noble colleagues who share their knowledge without hesitation and with deep generosity. Last, I would like to thank the members of the best running group, In Motion Fit. At times I thought of calling this book What I Talk about When I Run to acknowledge how often I shared my ideas and progress with my Saturday morning runningbuddies. Those conversations forced me to make my arguments clear and compelling to a nonacademic audience.

    Throughout the writing process, as soon as I had something on paper, I reached out for feedback. So many people took time out of their own busy schedules to comment on chapters, including Matt Jacobson, George Lipsitz, Pablo Mitchell, Maria Montoya, John Nieto-Phillips, David Gutiérrez, Susan Chen, and Stevie Ruiz. Luis Alvarez read the entire manuscript and offered insightful comments just as I was about to plunge into major revisions. I also benefited greatly from the University of California Press’s editorial board review and from comments provided by two outside readers, who later identified themselves. Thus I am able to thank David Roediger and Monica Perales here by name. David Roediger’s review gave me new perspectives that revealed meanings and possibilities that I might otherwise have missed. I feel fortunate that Monica Perales, whose writing I’ve long admired, agreed to read the manuscript; her observations and suggestions strengthened the overall narrative. I’d also like to thank Ramón Gutiérrez for his keen editorial eye, his capacious knowledge of the field, and his unstinting generosity. He read every chapter, sometimes more than once, and though he is one of the busiest people I know, he treated my work as a matter of the utmost importance. Last, I thank Ian Fusselman and Katherine Mooney for their sharp editorial skills and gift for bringing clarity to complex ideas. They helped make the narrative more broadly accessible.

    This book was a labor of love. It took six years of research, the bulk of which I did at the National Archives in Washington, 2,694 miles from my home and family. The research would not have been possible without the help I received from archivists Bill Creech, Suzanne Harris, Rod Ross, and Marian Smith. I relied not only on their expertise, experience, and knowledge, but also on their kindness. They screened and pulled records for me in anticipation of my visits. Back at UCSD, Stevie Ruiz and Michael Aguirre spent many hours in the bowels of Geisel Library, searching through the thirty-reel microfilmed index of Immigration and Naturalization Service records to help me prepare for each of my visits to the National Archives. I thank them both, along with my research assistants over the years, Sal Zarate, Rob Hernandez, Liz Bartz, and David James Gonzalez, who helped with many details, from locating an obscure newspaper article to photocopying documents.

    Searching for useful materials in the archived records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, and making the most of the records requires a great deal of follow-up research. I often relied on the talented and extremely knowledgeable librarians at UCSD for help in my ongoing search for information. I would like to thank Elliot Kanter, Kelly Smith, Duffy Tweedy, Annelise Sklar, Gayatri Singh, Rebecca Hyde, and the interlibrary loan staff, all of whom provided generous assistance. Though not a librarian, my lawyer-husband Ian Fusselman helped me with legal research.

    I am deeply thankful for the financial support I received from various programs and institutions. I could not have done the extensive archival research the book required without the generous support of UCSD’s Academic Senate, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, and Latino Studies Research Initiative, and the Faculty-in-Residence program at the University of Bologna, Italy. I also had the opportunity to present a series of lectures as an American Studies Association delegate to the Japanese Association for American Studies conference in Tokyo, sponsored by the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission.

    I feel fortunate to teach at UCSD, where I have so many interlocutors among my students and colleagues. UCSD’s History Department is a good place to call home. Under the steady watch of Chair Pamela Radcliff, the department encourages intellectual dialogue and collegial support that made the completion of the book possible. I have the good fortune not only to be in public conversation with David Gutiérrez, Danny Widener, and Luis Alvarez in articles and books but also to have them as colleagues whom I could call on to test out ideas as they were simmering. I’d also like to thank my colleagues Cathy Gere, Rebecca Plant, and Nayan Shah for their insightful feedback and for inviting me to share my work in their seminars. I owe a special thank you to the perspicacious dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities, Seth Lerer, for creating the position of associate dean of faculty equity, which supports the important work our division does in the area of diversity. I now hold this position, which allows me to bridge my academic and administrative vocations.

    I am very pleased to have published both of my books with UC Press, particularly as part of the American Crossroads series, whose goal is to expand and deepen our understanding of race and ethnicity in the United States, today and in the past. My editor, Niels Hooper, has been a sort of publishing house sherpa, guiding me through the process of publication with expertise and kindness. His assistant, Kim Hogeland, answered every question I had, consistently demonstrating both patience and mastery. The production team at UC Press, Francisco Reinking, Pamela Polk, and indexer Victoria Baker, along with the publishing team at Westchester Publishing Services, headed by Michael Bohrer-Clancy, turned my manuscript into a book by executing dozens of steps that required the ability to simultaneously keep track of small details and the big picture. Thank you.

    I was raised by storytellers and I am grateful to them all. My parents, Mary Molina and Héctor Molina, express their unconditional love and belief in me every chance they get. My brother, David, is my true north. My Tia Vicky is more like a trusted friend than an aunt, and her daughter, Karla, is the sister I never had. Las familias Molina, Tavares, Perea, Pack, Diaz, Porras, Miranda, and Taylor form the touchstone of what I call home. My friends the Montez, Hilsdale-Sachs, and Wesling-Nichols families are the family that I made. In some cases, we share bonds that have held firm for decades. Their support both sustains and inspires me. Last, Ian Fusselman and Michael Molina respect and support my need to retreat, at times, into a different realm in order to do the research and writing that I hope will contribute to a more just world. When I emerge, they are always there for me, vibrant reminders of how fortunate I am. They are my everything.

    Introduction

    How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican immigration from 1924 to 1965 in order to understand how race and citizenship were constructed during this crucial period. I demonstrate that what was unique about these years was the emergence of what I call an immigration regime that remade racial categories that still shape the way we think about race, and specifically Mexicans. Through an examination of a diverse array of legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to the immigration regime, I offer historical answers as to why Mexican Americans are still not deemed fully American and are largely equated with illegality.

    The period between 1924 and 1965 is fascinating for anyone interested in the evolution of racial identities in the United States. From 1917 to 1924 a series of legislative acts reduced immigration to the United States by 85 percent.¹ The year 1924 marks the passage of the capstone immigration act, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which limited the number of immigrants permitted entry from specific countries, thereby drastically reducing the entry of southern and eastern Europeans (mostly Jews), who were deemed inferior breeds. The Act also prohibited groups deemed ineligible for naturalization, specifically Chinese, Japanese, and other Asians, who were already facing severe immigration restrictions. The 1924 Immigration Act was the nation’s first comprehensive restriction law. It remapped the nation in terms of new ethnic and racial identities, specifically transforming denigrated European ethnics into whites while simultaneously criminalizing Mexicans as illegal workers who crossed into the United States without authorization.² In the four decades that followed, immigration laws fundamentally shaped the parameters of race in America. I end my study in 1965, which ushered in a new immigration regime with the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, abolishing the quotas established by the 1924 Act.

    As someone who studies the history of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, I have always been fascinated by the fact that the policies and laws that circumscribed or altogether stopped immigrant labor from other nations placed no limits on immigration from Mexico. Anglo-Protestant elites in the Southwest needed low-wage Mexican laborers for a variety of jobs, including as factory workers to fuel mass production and as hired hands to toil in the rapidly expanding agricultural fields propelled by the growth of water projects. The onset of World War II brought a renewed need for even more laborers. Americans felt less politically threatened by Mexicans than by other groups because Mexicans were considered a transitory labor force. In addition, for the most part, Mexicans did not try to become citizens. Mexican labor was also controllable. Mexicans toiled in the lowest sectors of a segmented labor market with limited rights for little pay; if they did protest, unionize, or even try to leave a job, violence and terror were common tactics used against them by employers, law enforcement, and the border patrol.

    Significantly Mexicans were legally classified as white, and thus they could become U.S. citizens. Yet they were often not accepted as socially or culturally white. They attended segregated schools, lived in marginalized neighborhoods, and labored in dead-end jobs in a market stratified by race, all of which significantly affected their ability to accumulate resources and live a life without social or cultural restrictions. Even today, when I ask my students how many races there are, many struggle over how to categorize Mexicans. Are they a nationality, an ethnicity, a separate race, white? In this book, I demonstrate how the period 1924–65 ushered in a new regime of race making and shaped the ways we think about Mexicans today. Thus this book also provides a way for scholars to discursively map the elusive historical construction of race and account for its material consequences in policy, law, and everyday life.

    RELATIONAL NOTIONS OF RACE

    The 1924–65 period was an era of race making for many groups, not just Mexicans. During this time we saw, for example, the Irish become white and the heathen Asians transformed into model minorities. Clearly many dynamic elements led to these transformations, and often the very same factors impacted separate racialized groups in different ways. In order to give appropriate weight to the multidimensional forces that helped to define racial groups, my approach to studying what Mexican meant at any particular moment is fundamentally premised on a theoretical understanding of race as socially constructed in relational ways, that is, in correspondence to other groups. Here I turn to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s formative book, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. The authors describe race as always and necessarily a social and historical process and refer to different moments of racial formation as racial projects, which they see as comprising both social structure and cultural representation.³ I think of social structure as being the scaffolding of race—the laws, customs, and policies—while cultural representation is more about the way we see and experience race, as well as its discursive element. Cultural representations may or may not rely on stereotypes, but even when they do not, they often still rely on certain assumptions, conscious or unconscious, some of which have become so commonplace that we think of them simply as common sense.

    An understanding of racial formation that leads to different racial projects is fundamental to understanding race as a relational concept because it allows us to analyze different racial projects happening at the same time or across time and shows why we need to examine how they are connected. By relational, I do not mean comparative. A comparative treatment of race compares and contrasts groups, treating them as independent of one another; a relational treatment recognizes that race is a mutually constitutive process and thus attends to how, when, where, and to what extent groups intersect. It recognizes that there are limits to examining racialized groups in isolation.

    While scholars agree that relational notions of race provide unique insight into racial formation, most studies of immigration, assimilation, citizenship, and racial identity focus on the experience of single national groups. Though this literature usually does not take a relational approach, or even a comparative one, it has yielded important insights resulting from an in-depth analysis of single groups, and this book builds upon that rich literature. For example, Chicana/o history was instrumental in challenging well-established immigration paradigms that embraced the dominant narrative of the United States as a nation that welcomed all immigrants and treated them equally. By challenging paradigms that viewed assimilation as a uniform, unidirectional process whereby foreign nationals became ethnic Americans, these works exposed the many structural and social barriers to political, economic, and cultural integration.⁴ Whiteness studies and critical legal studies examined the structural forces (e.g., Supreme Court decisions and immigration and naturalization laws) that script race. They analyzed white working-class racism, which ultimately allowed some national groups to assimilate into whiteness while others were excluded.⁵ Together these studies highlighted how race was socially constructed and why different racialized groups occupied various positions in the U.S. racial hierarchy.

    Still, when it comes to understanding racial formation, I believe much is to be gained by studying immigration without the restraints of a specific racial focus. By writing immigration history in a traditional manner, we tend to miss the extent to which immigration debates took into consideration the presence or absence of multiple immigrant groups and of African Americans. In other words, immigration debates were (and still are) about comparisons. When people in the early twentieth century discussed immigration, they perceived races in hierarchies, and they made their decisions about which groups to admit and which to restrict based on their past knowledge and experience with immigrants from various lands. The study of immigration thus begs for a relational approach.

    Starting in the 1990s, two historical monographs stood out as moving away from a focus on one particular group to better understand how race is made. In Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy, Tomás Almaguer examined the ethnically diverse history of California and argued that racial formation in California diverged from the prevailing black-white model of race. He examined the histories of Mexicans, Asians, and Native Americans and how they came to occupy different positions in what he terms a racial hierarchy. Neil Foley’s The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, based in central Texas, similarly examined Mexicans’ shifting position in a changing economic and labor system as they competed with poor whites and blacks jockeying for a better position in the evolving social order. Both books made clear that an understanding of what Mexican meant required appreciating the larger racial landscape surrounding them, which was a first step in paving the way for demonstrating that race is a relational concept, as I do in this book.

    More recently scholars across various fields have produced notable works that examine more than one racialized group, studying the history of relationships between groups.⁷ These works have different goals. Some are interested in showing how different racialized groups formed alliances, acknowledging a shared history that would bring them together and that they could use as a basis to build a more just society. Others demonstrate that it was not only shared politics but also shared cultural spaces and practices that brought different racialized groups together, cultivating relationships that offered alternatives to the dominant culture and could lead to shared political agendas. Still other works have demonstrated the limits of those bonds. While racialized groups may each experience racism and discrimination, these experiences are varied and can pivot along lines of citizenship, class, language, gender, and sexuality, exposing the limits of such bonds. Moreover, at times, racialized groups even competed with one another in attempts to move up the racial hierarchy, even if it meant doing so at the other’s expense. These comparative histories have advanced our understanding of a larger racialized landscape, and this book builds on these insightful histories of conflict or cooperation by showing that shared histories not only served to racialize each group, but in the process, the racialization of one group affected the other, demonstrating that making race is a relational process.

    How Race Is Made in America shows how the racial construction of one group affects others, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes at a much later date. Take, for example, a typical Chicana/o (Mexican American) history survey course. Students are walked through major time line events, such as when, at the end of the U.S. War with Mexico in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo legally classified Mexicans as white and extended eligibility for U.S. citizenship to Mexicans living in lands ceded to the United States.⁸ This provision stood unchallenged until 1897, when a man named Ricardo Rodríguez went before the Texas federal district court to have his application for citizenship approved. At issue was whether

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1