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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).
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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. |
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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 |
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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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Bearing in mind this history, law professor and sociologist Laura E. Gómez's Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race is an imaginative undertaking that examines racial hierarchy in the U.S. Southwest broadly and New Mexico particularly by considering three principal themes. First, grappling with colonialism is paramount because it was "central to the origin of Mexican Americans" (p. 4). The American colonization of Mexico and the American occupation of Mexico City and all or part of the present-day states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming loom large in establishing unequal relationships.4 The role of law in the creation of Mexican Americans as a racial group is the second major theme of the book. The paradoxical nature of legal categories is well-documented in a legal system that has at times classified Mexican Americans as white while social constructions strongly suggest that they belonged to a racially inferior, nonwhite group. Gómez explores how these opposing definitions coexisted as they contributed to establishing Euro-American hegemonic forces. The third theme interprets Mexican Americans as a discernable racial group that restructured the "American racial order in a key period stretching from the [U.S.-Mexican] War to the turn of the twentieth century" (p. 5). |
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With commendable clarity and a sound research base in mostly historical documents and archival materials, Manifest Destinies ambitiously sets out to erase Mexican American racial invisibility through the marriage of the three distinct yet interconnected disciplines of history, sociology, and law. Gómez aims to present a sociological review of race that incorporates statutes and legal institutions in a specific historical context. She is most adept at situating Mexican American history within local, state, national, and even transnational trends. Gómez cogently challenges the "exceptionalism thesis," which contends that New Mexico's Mexican Americans are a separate people with a unique Latino historical experience. Both the academy and larger society have traditionally asserted that ethnic Mexicans within New Mexico have endured racial subjugation and political exclusion at much lower rates than Mexican Americans in California and Texas. Coupled with the New Mexican Hispanic community's propensity to embrace their Spanish heritage rather than their Mexican ancestry, New Mexico has often been dismissed in the annals of southwestern racial discourse. While there is certainly some merit to the distinctive character of New Mexico Mexican American history, culture, and life, Gómez effectively maintains that racial conflict between Mexican Americans and Anglos has been grossly underestimated. |
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The primary strength of Manifest Destinies lies in its ability to survey and synthesize racial ideologies while detailing how those ideologies shaped interracial relations, identity development, and everyday life. This is first accomplished in chapter 2 by outlining how ethnic Mexicans and indigenous communities contended with a "double colonization" experience imposed simultaneously by the Spanish and U.S. regimes. Chronicling ethnic Mexican relations with Native Americans and African Americans, chapter 3 further clarifies how Mexican Americans became a recognized racial group. Chapter 4 provides a careful review of how the multifaceted racial makeup of Mexican Americans complicated questions about their positioning in the American racial order. Many Anglos maintained that Mexican Americans were definitively nonwhite because of their racially mixed Spanish, indigenous, and, to a lesser extent, African ancestry. Yet the across-the-board naturalization of ethnic Mexicans under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo implied that ethnic Mexicans had "white" status because they received naturalization rights that in 1848 were limited to white persons. The legal implication that ethnic Mexicans were white caused controversy by contradicting the widely held discredited theory that ethnic Mexicans were a culturally inferior race with barbaric tendencies. |
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In her concluding chapters, Gómez probes the similarities between African American and Mexican American mistreatment. In the epilogue, she reminds us that nearly 50 percent of Latinas/os, including a significant number of Mexican Americans, identified themselves as "some other race" in the 1980, 1990, and 2000 censuses, thereby rejecting the opportunity to classify themselves as "white."5 Gómez contends that Mexican Americans' propensity to be evenly divided between identifying as "white" or "other" is rooted in their historical experience as colonized, exploited people as well as their "off-white" status.6 |
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Overall, Gómez makes a solid contribution in providing an overview of Mexican American racial maturation. More broadly, this book provides important background for many of the recent discussions centered on how race plays a major role in Hispanic subgroup settlement patterns and identity formation. Although Gómez successfully weaves together her evidence in a coherent and somewhat systematic manner that substantiates much of her conclusions, there is a degree of avoidable repetition. For example, she reiterates numerous times the reluctance to admit New Mexico as a state due to skepticism concerning the advisability of granting full civil rights to a people largely considered racially inferior. Further, the naturalization of more than 115,000 or so ethnic Mexicans under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) is noted several times either to emphasize a point or to review an already-established argument. Even so, Gómez shapes a persuasive argument that Manifest Destiny was not an abstract philosophy but a powerful way of life that filled Anglo Americans with an uncompromising sense of their prerogative to claim seemingly limitless land and to control its inhabitants. |
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As the sixth-largest state by area in the United States, Arizona is diverse in every sense of the word, having every kind of landscape except a seacoast. It features the golden sands outside Yuma, the green pines of Flagstaff, and the curvilinear mountains of Phoenix to encompass a backyard of desert, forest, grasslands, and industrialized cities. Besides its terrain, however, what makes Arizona one of the most diverse states in the nation is its citizens. Arizona has a sizeable population of Anglo Americans, Native Americans, and of course, Mexican Americans. Segmented by history, class, culture, and race, Arizona is a vast panorama of people, a fact that is explored in Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona. Built on the five Cs—cattle, copper, cotton, citrus, and climate—Arizona began to thrive economically after 1880, with the establishment of the Southwestern Pacific Railroad. The newly formed railroad weaved the Cactus State into the rest of the country as ethnic Mexican and Native American communities sought to develop and define their identities. As Eric V. Meeks demonstrates in this study, influential Mexican American and American Indian culture survives in Arizona, separate in some cases from Anglo Arizona, yet inseparable from what makes the state interestingly distinctive. |
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Without moving a single step from their ancestral land, ethnic Mexicans and Native Americans became marginalized citizens inundated with xenophobic and nativist sentiment from much of Arizona society. Meeks early on documents the difficulties that Americans of Mexican and indigenous heritage experienced when seeking political incorporation and social equality in the territories acquired by the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase. To many Anglo Arizonans, Mexican Americans and Native Americans were a simple-minded people at odds with American values, culture, and life. Most Anglos considered ethnic Mexicans to be lazy, dirty, diseased, violent, immoral, cowardly, obtuse, and useless, while Native Americans were considered to be not much better. Instead of being free wage laborers like many Anglos, Mexican Americans worked under a system of labor repression characterized by a dual wage system, occupational segregation, and reserve labor status. Meeks examines these circumstances within a one-hundred-year time span between 1880 and 1980. He does this by focusing on four contiguous counties (Maricopa, Pima, Pinal, and Santa Cruz) to show how ethnic Mexicans and Native Americans became "border citizens" due to the restrictions imposed on them and "because they were redefining what it meant to belong to the U.S." (p. 11). |
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Like Manifest Destinies, Meeks's book illustrates how race relations between Mexican Americans and Anglo Americans proceeded at many levels and in several directions at once. Both works also highlight how race in the Southwest has been complicated by the legal system's predisposition to maintain strict racial boundaries that designate only "white" or "black." As a partial consequence, Mexican Americans often made claims to whiteness in order to become visible persons of merit while at the same time challenging segregation and political and economic exploitation. Unsurprisingly, both authors devote several pages to statehood advancement and imperialist Indiana senator Albert Beveridge at the turn of the twentieth century. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, Beveridge unrelentingly insisted that potential states such as Arizona and New Mexico were ill-prepared for self-government, in large part because ethnic Mexicans were inherently incapable of making meaningful contributions to societal institutions. |
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Another important aspect of Border Citizens is its discussion of how people of indigenous and Mexican descent confronted suppressive cultural measures. Chapter 7 adds to the Vietnam War era literature by describing Arizonan activism among Mexican Americans, which is often overshadowed by other historical forces and figures during the classical era of the Chicano Movement from roughly 1965 to 1975. Although well-known individuals such as César Chávez, Reies López Tijerina, Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, and José Angel Gutiérrez helped shape the contours of Chicano activism during the peak of the movement and contributed greatly to its success, the apex of the Chicano Movement did not rest solely on their leadership. It was equally lifted by movimiento trailblazers in Arizona such as Salomón Baldenegro, Joe "Eddy" López and his wife Rosie López, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Alfredo Gutiérrez, Raúl Grijalva, Lauro García, Lupe Castillo, and countless others, including high school and college students hailing from Tempe, Tucson, and Flagstaff. |
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These community leaders are seldom represented in Chicano activist scholarship, and Arizona's significant Mexican American civil rights activities are not often explored or acknowledged. Most scholars either pay scant attention to Arizonan Mexican American activists or provide merely a broad brush of generic information that haphazardly interprets the impact of Chicano activism in this key southwestern state. While most scholars are aware that there was a Chicano Movement in Arizona, there has not been a systematic study dealing exclusively with Mexican American activism there.7 As a starting point, however, Meeks does a sound job of synthesizing Mexican American activist efforts. He uses an impressive array of sources and skillfully covers a wide range of issues within eight tightly woven chapters. He is most adept not only in describing Anglo stereotypes of Mexican Americans and Native Americans but also in carefully conveying ethnic Mexican and indigenous viewpoints. |
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Meeks's book is well crafted, and its shortcomings are few. One minor criticism concerns the lack of discussion of segregated "Mexican Schools." Although Meeks indicates that a number of Mexican Americans attended separate schools and faced discrimination and segregation within public schools, he fails to explore specifically the "Mexican School" phenomenon. Also, Meeks suggests that the Mexican American segregation experience was "somewhat different" from that of African Americans in Arizona. Although that is somewhat true, he should have emphasized that Mexican Americans endured similar modes of second-class citizenship under a southwestern variant of Jim Crow—style segregation. The challenges for Mexican Americans in Arizona to overcome the destructive effect of segregation were no less significant and meaningful than was the parallel struggle of African Americans. Whether in public or private space or by de facto or de jure segregation, Mexican Americans often found themselves separated in places as wide-ranging as movie theaters, restaurants, cafés, barbershops, swimming pools, churches, dance halls, social and country clubs, hotels, housing accommodations, recreational parks, hospitals, drinking fountains, public lavatories, cemeteries, courthouses, jails, university cafeterias and dormitories, city government facilities, and the public educational system. Wherever ethnic Mexicans lived or worked in large numbers, segregation was the rule rather than the exception. |
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Both of these works draw attention to important themes in Mexican American history. Each plainly reveals that Mexican Americans ultimately transformed their own cultural identity even though they were excluded from the national imagination. In the end, both books broaden the historically narrow black-and-white lens scholars have previously utilized to examine the condition of race relations and social inequity. In doing so, each work respectively challenges the exclusionary definition of national identity that has been reinforced by policy makers, marketers, popular culture, and the public at large for the last 160 years. Each is also a potent indictment of the racial and caste system that has kept Mexican Americans for much of American history at lower positions on the social scale. Without question, the efforts of Gómez and Meeks will be useful to scholars in the fields of U.S Border Studies, Southwest History, Comparative Ethnic Studies, Mexican American History, and Latina/o Studies.
Darius V. Echeverría
Rutgers University-New Brunswick
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NOTES
1. Throughout this review essay, I use the panethnic terms "Latinas/os" and "Hispanics" interchangeably to denote the populations of Hispanic, Latin American, and Caribbean descent that reside in the United States.
2. Since much of the Southwest did not differentiate between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, especially with respect to discriminatory practices and policies, the term "ethnic Mexican" refers to all individuals of Mexican heritage regardless of whether they were born in the United States. This term variant is effectively used by David G. Gutiérrez in Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley, CA, 1995).
3. According to many American historians and Latin Americanists, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848, the total number of ethnic Mexicans in the ceded territories numbered between seventy-five thousand and eighty thousand. Historian Oscar J. Martinez and other scholars, however, suggest that the number was closer to one hundred and eighteen thousand. Gómez concurs with the latter, estimating that around one hundred and fifteen thousand ethnic Mexicans immediately became U.S. citizens. Arthur F. Corwin, "Early Mexican Labor Migration: A Frontier Sketch, 1848–1900," in Immigrants—and Immigrants: Perspectives on Mexican Labor Migration to the United States, ed. Arthur F. Corwin (Westport, CT, 1979), 31; Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico (New York, 1968), 52; Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Ribera, Mexican Americans/American Mexicans: From Conquistadors to Chicanos (New York, 1993), 69; Oscar J. Martinez, "On the Size of the Chicano Population: New Estimates, 1850–1900," Aztlán: International Journal of Chicano Studies Research 6, no. 1 (1975): 43–67.
4. Mexican citizens residing within the ceded territory had the option of returning to Mexico or staying and accepting the laws of the United States. The vast majority of Mexicans stayed, with the understanding that they would become U.S citizens after a year, thereby having all the rights and privileges afforded in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The declaration that all ethnic Mexicans in the ceded territories became full-fledged United States citizens as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe is based on the eighth article, which states, "But they shall be under the obligation to make their election within one year from the date of the exchange of ratifications of this treaty; and those who shall remain in the said territories after the expiration of that year, without having declared their intention to retain the character of Mexicans, shall be considered to have elected to become citizens of the United States." According to many historians, the treaty was breached when the United States failed to protect the civil liberties, the cultural and property rights, and the linguistic, religious, political, educational, and occupational freedoms of ethnic Mexicans. For an excellent analysis of the treaty's impact on the entire Southwest, see Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (Norman, OK, 1990), esp.62–86 and 131–53, for a discussion dealing with citizenship and land ownership.
5. Of course, Mexican Americans could easily identify as "Mexican" in the 1930 Census, when for the first and only time this group marker appeared as a separate racial category. The emergence of a "Mexican" category in the 1930 Census and its subsequent removal from the following Census suggest it was a government tool to identify and deport both legal ethnic Mexican citizens (and the expatriation of their American-born children) and deep-rooted Mexican American families during the massive repatriation campaign against people of Mexican origin. In many Arizona towns, relocation was as much a part of the culture and history of Mexican Americans as it was to most Native American tribes. An estimated five hundred thousand Mexican Americans, many of them legal U.S. residents or Arizona citizens by birth, reluctantly crossed into Mexico during the Great Depression. Perhaps with the exception of Japanese Americans in wartime internment, the treatment of Mexican Americans during the 1930s and 1940s involved the worst violation of civil liberties by the American government. For a fascinating account of the illegal trafficking of ethnic Mexicans in and out of the United States, see Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929–1939 (Tucson, AZ, 1974), and Juan Ramon García, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, CT, 1980).
6. According to Gómez, the term "off-white" suggests that Mexican Americans historically have been situated between white and nonwhite. This in-between status is predicated on the fact that Mexican Americans have sometimes been defined as legally white, yet almost always have been deemed as socially nonwhite.
7. A handful of worthwhile scholarship explores in some fashion Mexican American agency in Arizona during the Chicano Movement. These works include but are not limited to the following: Bradford Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix: A Profile of Mexican American, Chinese American, and African American Communities, 1860–1992 (Tucson, AZ, 1994); Rosales F. Arturo, Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston, TX, 1996); and a handful of master's theses and doctoral dissertations, including the author's dissertation, "Aztlán Arizona: Abuses, Awareness, Animosity, and Activism amid Mexican-Americans, 1968–1978" (PhD diss., Temple University, 2006). Other works that discuss the Mexican American experience in Arizona include Thomas E. Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854–1941 (Tucson, AZ, 1986); James E. Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 1536–1856 (Tucson, AZ, 1987); and Linda Gordan, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA, 1999).
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