Abstract
Using archival materials, I will examine how the mixed ancestry of African and Mexican Americans was treated, both in law and discourse, in distinctly contrasting ways in the early twentieth century. I will argue that black and Mexican subjects were positioned in qualitatively different ways in relation to whiteness. Furthermore, the singular treatment of ‘black blood’ as a social toxin, a construction emerging within the specific circumstances of American slavery, also informed the subjective positioning of Mexicans, as well as shaping some Mexican Americans’ responses to racism.
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Notes
The geopolitical aspect of this situation should not be ignored. When the federal government moved to create a separate ‘Mexican’ category on the US census in 1930, the Mexican government protested vociferously. Mexicans were returned to ‘white’ category in subsequent Census taking (Foley, 1997, p. 61).
Carey McWilliams’s North From Mexico gives a useful overview of the experiences and social positioning of Mexican Americans in California in the early twentieth century. For more on Mexican Americans’ struggle against segregation, see, for example, Olivas (2006).
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Aragon, M. The difference that ‘one drop’ makes: Mexican and African Americans, mixedness and racial categorisation in the early twentieth century. Subjectivity 7, 18–36 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2014.1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2014.1