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Book Review
| Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race, New York: New York University Press, 2007. Pp. 272. $35.00 cloth (ISBN 0-8147-3174-1); $21.00 paper (ISBN 0-8147-3205-4).
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| By titling her book, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race, Laura Gómez clearly sets forth the analytic trajectory of her project. Over the course of time, complex institutional and interpersonal interactions—legal, social, political and economic—in the Mexican territories conquered by the United States in 1848, and most particularly New Mexico, made Mexican American a race. Gómez distinguishes race and ethnicity as assigned and asserted identity, respectively, noting the unparalleled role race has played in structuring American society (2–3). The salience of Gómez's explicit assertion of Mexican American as a race culminates in an epilogue identifying the continued challenges Mexican Americans and other Hispanics/Latinos face in negotiating space and place in the racial order of twenty-first-century America. The Manifest Destinies portion of the title plays with justifications of U.S. expansion in the early nineteenth century as natural and inevitable. In Gómez's hands, Manifest Destinies refers less positively to "a cluster of ideas that relied on racism" to justify war against Mexico and "the competing destinies of many groups" that made the Mexican American race (3–4). |
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Gómez argues that the Mexican American race developed as "off-white," because Mexican Americans were "legally white" under some circumstances, but almost always "socially non-white." At a time when federal law limited eligibility for naturalization to "free whites," the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo collectively naturalized large numbers of Mexicans living in territory ceded to the United States. Likewise, Gómez notes apparently uncontroversial naturalizations of individual Mexicans in New Mexico and discusses at length In re Rodriguez, an 1897 federal district court decision from Texas that defined a Mexican as "white enough" to naturalize. At the same time, Gómez cites the late admittance of New Mexico to statehood in 1912 and repeated congressional discussions regarding the racial composition of New Mexico's population as evidence that Mexican Americans were not white enough for the benefits of state citizenship rather than the limited federal citizenship that accompanied territorial status. |
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In a variety of ways, Gómez identifies the middling place Mexican Americans eked out in the U.S. racial order. She analyzes the structure of territorial government in New Mexico where Mexican Americans served as grand jurors, petit jurors, and justices of the peace, but Euro-Americans were judges. She cites the territorial legislature as a locus of Mexican American power, with the caveat that the federal Congress ultimately controlled the territory. Gómez builds a convincing picture of how Mexican American's "fragile claim to whiteness" allowed them distance from Indians and Blacks in the U.S. racial hierarchy, but did not put them on par with Euro-Americans. |
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In developing her arguments, Gómez makes several assertions about the racial/ethnic composition of juries and the territorial legislature. While she ultimately supports those assertions with hard data, that data and the supporting citation often come well into the argument, sometimes pages later. The argument itself would have been stronger with the hard supporting data earlier. |
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A few editing glitches disrupt the flow of Gómez's arguments. For example, on page 60 a sentence is repeated, first in one paragraph and then in another. On at least two occasions, the promised number of explanations or arguments fail to materialize: 1) only two of three "profound ways in which New Mexico's status as a territory shaped its history" are identified as such on page 44; and 2) only the first of "two additional patterns" regarding Indian slavery is made explicit on page 110. Likewise, on page 111, an unnamed "investigator" is quoted on the liberation of Indian slaves. There is, however, no earlier introduction of the investigator or what specifically he is investigating, although with some work I surmised that he was involved with the grand jury discussed six pages earlier, a fact which the footnote confirmed. The footnote names the investigator as "Griffin," a name that doesn't appear elsewhere in the chapter or in the index. These are the sorts of mistakes that a good proofread by fresh eyes other than the author's should catch. |
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I finished Manifest Destinies convinced, as always, of the social construction of race, its slipperiness as an analytic category, its fluidity over time and geography. While she demonstrates the making of "the Mexican American race," social construction also explains Gómez's deployment of similar terms—Spanish, Spanish-Mexican, Euro-American—as something other than race. At the same time, I wonder: If Mexican American is a race, is Mexican also a race, and a distinct one at that? What about American? Few consider American a race, but more will think seriously about Mexican American as a race after reading Manifest Destinies. |
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| Kif Augustine-Adams
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| Brigham Young University |
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