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Texas Mexicans and the Politics of Whiteness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Ariela J. Gross
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Extract

These two fascinating articles seek to fill an important lacuna in the burgeoning literature on the legal construction of whiteness. While LatCrit theorists in the legal academy have urged civil rights scholars and race critics to transcend the “black-white paradigm” of U.S. race studies, the majority of legal histories of whiteness have focused on two sets of cases: trials in the southeastern United States in which local courts tried to draw the line between “white” and “negro”; and cases about immigration and naturalization in which Federal courts determined whether particular foreign immigrants were suitably “white” for citizenship. Likewise, although there have been several important social and cultural histories of Texas Mexicans and whiteness in the last fifteen years, they have not considered the legal realm. The time is ripe for attention to the legal history of Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles in Texas, especially as they illuminate the shifting racial identity of Mexican Americans in the Southwest.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , Spring 2003 , pp. 195 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2003

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References

1. See Clare Sheridan, “‘Another White Race’: Mexican Americans and the Paradox of Whiteness in Jury Selection,” and Wilson, Steven H., “Brown over ‘Other White’: Mexican Americans' Legal Arguments and Litigation Strategy in School Desegregation Lawsuits,” Law and History Review 21 (2003): 109–44 and 145–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Gross, Ariela, “Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South,” Yale Law Journal 108 (1998): 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; López, Ian F. Haney, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Tehranian, John, “Note: Performing Whiteness: Naturalization Litigation and the Construction of Racial Identity in America,” Yale Law Journal 109 (2000): 817.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Foley, Neil, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Montejano, David, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987).Google Scholar

4. Martinez, George A., “The Legal Construction of Race: Mexican-Americans and Whiteness,” Harvard Latino Law Review 2 (1997): 321, 334–38Google Scholar (discussing “the marginality of law”).

5. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 252.

6. Foley, The White Scourge, 19, 24, 42, 61.

7. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 235–52.

8. Foley, The White Scourge, 209.

9. López, Ian F. Haney, “Race, Ethnicity, Erasure: The Salience of Race to LatCrit Theory,” California Law Review 85 (1997): 1143, 1165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the census used a variety of methods to count people of Mexican origin in the five southwestern states, including lists of Spanish surnames and the categories “Spanish Mother Tongue,” “Spanish Language,” “Spanish Heritage,” and “Spanish Origin.” Beginning in 1980, the general term “Hispanic” was introduced as an ethnicity category following the “race” question on the census form.

11. ISD v. Salvatierra, 33 S.W. 2d 790, 792–93.

12. Ramirez v. State, 40 S.W. 2d 138, 139 (1931).

13. Carrasco v. State, 95 S.W. 2d 433 (1936).

14. Lugo v. State, 124 S.W. 2d 344 (1939).

15. Sanchez v. State, 181 S.W. 2d 87 (1944); Salazar v. State, 193 S.W. 2d 211 (1946); Bustillos v. State, 213 S.W. 2d 837 (1948); Rogers v. State, 236 S.W. 2d 141 (1951); Sanchez v. State, 243 S.W. 2d 700, 701 (1951).

16. Quoted in Pascoe, Peggy, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Hodes, Martha (New York: New York University Press), 464–65.Google Scholar

17. Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law,” 465.

18. Ibid., 468.

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20. Melville, Margarita, “Hispanics: Race, Class, or Ethnicity?” Journal of Ethnic Studies 16.1 (1988): 67–83Google Scholar; Gomez, Laura, “The Birth of the ‘Hispanic’ Generation: Attitudes of Mexican-American Political Elites toward the Hispanic Label,” Latin American Perspectives 19.4 (1992): 55.Google Scholar

21. Gonzales, Phillip B., “The Political Construction of Latino Nomenclatures in Twentieth-Century New Mexico,” Journal of the Southwest 35 (1993): 158–85Google Scholar; Gomez, “Birth of the ‘Hispanic’ Generation.”

22. Rodriguez, Clara E., “Race, Culture, and Latino‘Otherness’ in the 1980 Census,” Social Science Quarterly 73.4 (1992): 930–37.Google Scholar See also Rodriguez, Clara E. et al., “Latino Racial Identity: In the Eye of the Beholder?” Latino Studies Journal 2.3 (1991): 33–18.Google Scholar

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24. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “Queer Performati vity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel,” GLQ 1 (1993): 35.Google Scholar

25. Balibar, Etienne, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” in Race, Nation, Class, 26.Google Scholar