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Cultural Racism and the Construction of Identity
Clare Sheridan
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Ariela Gross offers a thorough summary
of points made in the two articles in this Forum, and integrates
the articles well. As she notes, taken together, they provide
an examination of the "other white" litigation strategy
employed by Mexican American civil rights lawyers.1
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In her comments on the articles,
Gross asks two main questions of me. First, did changes in legal
strategy create or reflect Mexican identity? How did this affect
Mexican Americans' self-identification? Second, can we distinguish
nativism from racism? To a certain extent, the question of causation
can not be answered. The study of court cases tends to be a study
of elite beliefs. While informed by popular logic, the text (decisions,
arguments, and so forth) is filtered through an elite lens. The
direct testimony of plaintiffs often is unavailable (particularly
in lower court cases). Instead it is interpreted by the lawyers
and judges involved. Moreover, it is these interpretations that
set the parameters within which the plaintiffs must maneuver.
It is this maneuvering that is so interesting. How did lawyers
make sense of the world around them within the strictures of settled,
legal meaning? How did they tweak accepted legal arguments to
their advantage? How did they "spin" popular understandings
to create new meaning? The legal arena is merely one aspect of
a broader cultural milieu, but it is crucial for the struggle
over meaning. As we see in the Hernandez case, the same racial
"reality" can be assigned different meanings. Lawyers
were both creating a new interpretation within the parameters
of the law and reflecting current common knowledge. They were
successful because they managed to reflect the dominant paradigm
and simultaneously harness it to create a new interpretation.
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Gross asks a related question regarding
Mexican Americans' self-identification. This question is interesting,
but beyond the scope of my article, which offers a close reading
of a particular case. However, as I note in the article, I did
find hints of the answer in a monograph discussing the case, published
by Hernandez's lawyers evidently responding to complaints that
their arguments placed their community perilously close to being
identified as non-white. Also there were clues in Paul Taylor's
interviews with Mexican-ancestry laborers in which they clearly
socially distanced themselves from black laborers, while asserting
that it was acceptable for "Mexicans" and whites to
"mix." As Gross suggests, one must find sources beyond
legal cases to understand broader, societal interpretations.
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Perhaps in a more rhetorical vein,
Gross asks of me why one would study the law at all if it has
so little relation to how people "actually" identified.
Here, my answer is straightforward. The courts remained the arena
for hope. As citizens, Mexican Americans had access to the courts,
an advantage "other non-whites" did not have. The courts
provided the stage for Mexican Americans' ability to make citizenship
claims, and they provided a pulpit from which Mexican Americans
posed an alternative view of their identity to a wider audience.
Gross makes the excellent suggestion that further research on
local cases may shed light on Mexican Americans' ways of conceiving
their place in the racial and cultural orders. Mexican Americans
deserve further research precisely because their ambiguous location
in the racial order challenges its boundaries and complicates
our notions of race.
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Gross's second
main question--whether we can distinguish nativism from racism,
and what made the exclusion of Mexican Americans from juries racial--goes
to the heart of these cases. The insidiousness of the denial of
Mexican Americans' citizenship rights lies in the way in which
they were racialized. Elsewhere, I have called Mexican Americans
a "racialized ethnic group." Evidence of their "foreignness,"
such as speaking another language (whether or not they actually
do speak Spanish) is used as proof of their lack of fitness
for citizenship. Language ability becomes a racially marked cultural
practice. In the Progressive Era, Anglos accused "Mexicans"
in Texas of being unfit for citizenship because of their supposed
inability to independently exercise their right to vote. They
were seen as biologically incapable of participating in the democratic
system because of their history and cultural characteristics.
That is, cultural markers were raced. In a recent article,2
I describe the debates in the 1920s about Mexican immigration
in which both pro-immigration and anti-immigration advocates posited
that Mexicans were or were not a threat to American citizenship
based on their inherent biological characteristics. In all of
these examples, the distinction between race and nationality collapses
and nationality (or, what we now think of as ethnicity) is racialized.
Because of this, and because the whiteness of "American"
was obscured by its normativity, we can not distinguish nativism
from racialism in this context. This is precisely what Balibar
means when he talks about cultural racism.3
In the Hernandez case, the language of nationality displaced the
language of race, but it encompassed the same set of biases and
assumptions. Recent claims for "cultural citizenship"
are a response to this racialization of culture and are a demand
for recognition of belonging; they are a demand to decouple whiteness,
Anglo-European culture, and Americanness.4
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I agree with Gross that unless we
arrive at a broader definition of race and racism, we will continue
to impute racial meaning into cultural practices. Yet in today's
rapidly changing racial milieu, there are great opportunities
to disrupt our conception of racism as individual prejudice based
on unchanging, biological markers. That is why the study of such
"in-between peoples" as Mexican Americans and mixed-race
individuals is so vital. Beyond the black-white dichotomy, there's
a world of cultural racism to uncover and destabilize.
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Notes
1.
See Ariela J. Gross, "Texas Mexicans and the Politics of
Whiteness," Law and History Review 21 (2003): 195-205.
2.
Clare Sheridan, "Contested Citizenship: National Identity
and the Mexican Immigration Debates of the 1920s," Journal
of American Ethnic History 21.3 (Spring 2002): 3-35.
3.3.
See Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Race, Nation,
Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991).
4.
William Flores and Rina Benmayor, eds., Latino Cultural Citizenship
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
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