Recovering History, Constructing Race
Recovering History, Constructing Race
The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book, 2002
The history of Mexican Americans is a history of the intermingling of races—Indian, White, and Black. This racial history underlies a legacy of racial discrimination against Mexican Americans and their Mexican ancestors that stretches from the Spanish conquest to current battles over ending affirmative action and other assistance programs for ethnic minorities. Asserting the centrality of race in Mexican American history, Martha Menchaca here offers the first interpretive racial history of Mexican Americans, focusing on racial foundations and race relations from prehispanic times to the present.
Menchaca uses the concept of racialization to describe the process through which Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. authorities constructed racial status hierarchies that marginalized Mexicans of color and restricted their rights of land ownership. She traces this process from the Spanish colonial period and the introduction of slavery through racial laws affecting Mexican Americans into the late twentieth-century. This re-viewing of familiar history through the lens of race recovers Blacks as important historical actors, links Indians and the mission system in the Southwest to the Mexican American present, and reveals the legal and illegal means by which Mexican Americans lost their land grants.
At the core of [Recovering History, Constructing Race] is the racialization process that has taken place to define Mexican Americans in the US, which ignores and erases the historical Indigenous, Black, and/or European ancestry of persons of Mexican descent.
Menchaca has accomplished an unprecedented tour de force in this sweeping historical overview and interpretation of the racial formation and racial history of Mexican Americans.
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Racial Foundations
- 2. Racial Formation: Spain's Racial Order
- 3. The Move North: The Gran Chichimeca and New Mexico
- 4. The Spanish Settlement of Texas and Arizona
- 5. The Settlement of California and the Twilight of the Spanish Period
- 6. Liberal Racial Legislation during the Mexican Period, 1821-1848
- 7. Land, Race, and War, 1821-1848
- 8. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Racialization of the Mexican Population
- 9. Racial Segregation and Liberal Policies Then and Now
- Epilogue: Auto/ethnographic Observations of Race and History
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
