Categorizing Mexican Migrant Race and Citizenship in the United States, 1910s-1930s
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Pitti, Stephen
Abstract
This dissertation is critically concerned with how and why it came to be that race and immigration experts during the 1910s through 1930s were convinced that there was such a thing as “the Mexican race” that could be conclusively proved. Focusing on bureaucrats, anthropologists, economists, and eugenicists, I explore the contours and contradictions of an intellectual and cultural landscape defined by both the Mexican Revolution and the Great Depression. Each chapter of the dissertation concentrates on one such group of experts as an in-depth exploration of the technologies and techniques of racial categorization and attendant governance structures that intimately shaped the lives of Mexican migrants during this era. In doing so, I contribute to the fields of Mexican migrant and Mexican American history, immigration history, and the history of race in the United States while combining methods and insights from all of these fields alongside Ethnic studies and Latinx studies.I analyze four separate spheres of race and immigration expertise that shaped understandings of Mexican racialization in the United States from the mid-1910s through the mid-1930s. Chapter 1 begins with the story of a Chinese/Mexican migrant family who lived in the U.S.-México borderlands in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez in the late-1910s. The chapter investigates how U.S. and British imperial immigration bureaucrats across multiple sites of entry and exclusion tried to make sense out of incoherent legal racial classifications in the face of multiracial, -national, and -generational mobility. The second chapter focuses on the research of Mexican nationalist anthropologist Manuel Gamio and his transnational team of research assistants on Mexican immigrants as they attempted to understand the complex social dynamics of Mexican immigrants in the United States in relation to Mexican Americans and Anglo Americans while categorizing their racialization according to a limited imaginary of Indigeneity, mestizaje, and whiteness. Chapter 3 concerns itself with U.S. agricultural and labour economist Paul Schuster Taylor, further solidifying the critical place of the social sciences as a site of immigration expertise in the United States during this era. Similar to Gamio, Taylor dealt with issues regarding Mexican immigration, however, as an economist he did so with a particular focus on the economic vulnerability of Mexican migrants as migratory labourers under U.S. capitalism. The final chapter of the dissertation focuses on U.S.-based eugenicists and their published work on Mexican racialization. These eugenicists focused on pathologizing Mexican racialization as tied to disease and disability, fears of miscegenation, and as a gendered, reproductive threat to the United States. I argue that officials and academics in these arenas were critical to framing how Mexicans were understood more broadly in the United States during an era of mass migration, growing bureaucratic governance, and the rise of social science expertise. The project is an intellectual history of Mexican migration and racial categorization, with a particular focus on how academics and bureaucrats created, contested, and attempted to cohere an understanding of the category “Mexican.” This deep dive into the intellectual histories of different sites of race and immigration expertise demonstrates the irrefutable significance of immigration bureaucracy, anthropology, economics, and eugenics to the crafting of early-twentieth-century understandings of Mexicanness in the United States. Both this era and these sites of knowledge production framed how the category “Mexican” was understood for the remainder of the twentieth century through both direct and indirect ways.
Recommended Citation
Ulysses, Monique Flores, "Categorizing Mexican Migrant Race and Citizenship in the United States, 1910s-1930s" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1075.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1075
