Darius V. Echeverría | Beyond the Black-White Binary Construction of Race: Mexican Americans, Identity Formation, and the Pursuit of Public Citizenship | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.1

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Darius V. Echeverría | Beyond the Black-White Binary Construction of Race: Mexican Americans, Identity Formation, and the Pursuit of Public Citizenship | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.1 | The History Cooperative

Review Essay

BEYOND THE BLACK-WHITE BINARY CONSTRUCTION OF RACE: MEXICAN AMERICANS, IDENTITY FORMATION, AND THE PURSUIT OF PUBLIC CITIZENSHIP

*Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona.* By Eric V. Meeks. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. 342 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $60.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). *Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race.* By Laura E. Gómez. New York: New York University Press, 2007. xii + 243 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 (cloth).
While the history of African American subordination by whites has been assiduously represented in both interdisciplinary and historical scholarship, Mexican American patterns of second-class citizenship have received much less attention. In part this void stems from the exclusion of Latinas/os from the national narrative, a partial product of the black-white, two-pronged paradigm of race.¹ This binary black-white framework not only misrepresents history, but also overlooks the historical experiences of non-African American peoples of color. This unrepresentative perspective has been fueled by the unforgiving legacy of slavery and the subsequent Civil War and Reconstruction Era, which forged the foundational unequal exchanges between Anglos and African Americans. Nonetheless, social inequality among other racial groups merits more attention. This black and white dichotomy has ignored the racist practices and the history of discrimination that is unique to Latinas/os in general and Mexican Americans in particular. Although the last twelve years have produced a steady, if modest, increase in challenges to the one-dimensional academic discourse on race, considerable damage has resulted from deemphasizing the contributions of racial and ethnic others.	1
The two books under review, however, not only widen the scope of stories about societal injustice, but continue to explore and expand the discourse on race that informs and guides the authors' arguments about identity formation, whiteness, racialization, social emasculation, cultural negation, and the process of acculturation. Each respective work sheds light on how many Mexican Americans challenged standards for measuring acceptability and cultural worth separate from Anglo American identities while striving for first-rate citizenship. Building upon earlier writings on the history of ethnic communities in the Southwest, both Laura E. Gómez and Eric V. Meeks gleaned a wealth of information from numerous archives. Although they emphasize different approaches, each author compels the reader to reevaluate mainstream descriptions and explanations of deep-rooted cultural relationships. Because the literature on Mexican Americans is traditionally concentrated on southwestern states such as California, Texas, and to a lesser extent, Colorado, these two books surveying New Mexico and Arizona are sorely needed. Focusing on the least researched among the five southwestern states with the greatest Mexican American populations, both studies help broaden our understanding of race relations that have been wrought by conquest, conflict, and competition between Native Americans, African Americans, Anglos, and ethnic Mexicans.²	2
In the years leading up to the U.S.-Mexican War, the United States and Mexico were moving in different directions. The industrializing United States pursued territorial expansion in the spirit of Manifest Destiny, while Mexico wrestled with how to retain control of the seemingly boundless land it had won from Spain following its drawn-out war for independence. These divergences were further complicated when the United States went to war with Mexico in 1846 and, after two years of war, Mexico signed a peace treaty that gave the U.S. approximately 530,000 square miles of land that equaled almost one-third of prewar Mexico. The U.S. also added to its population significant numbers of men, women, and children already living in the region.³ This is the context for Mexican American identity in its embryonic stages. Today, Mexican Americans are roughly 65 percent of the nation's forty-six million Latinas/os, or about 10 percent of the U.S. population. Mexican Americans as a group have not only long-standing residence, but ongoing international migration within its community.	. . .

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