... The history that is drummed into the heads of US schoolchildren insists that the country of immigrants was founded and built by Europeans. The invisible underside of this narrative is the imperial narrative of conquest and dispossession that continued until the end of the nineteenth century and upon which the new country of [white] immigrants was built. The country-of-immigrants narrative is very much a narrative of race. Immigrants were conceived as white Europeans (the only people allowed to naturalize), and their presence and comfort depended upon the labor of people who were legally excluded from the polity. Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, Mexicans, like African Americans prior to 1868, were accepted as a necessary evil for their labor and considered unthreatening to the white nature of the country that viewed them as exploitable workers rather than as potential citizens. The history of reliance on Mexican labor coupled with the refusal to grant rights to Mexican workers is a long one indeed. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase (La Mesilla Purchase of 1853) offered US citizenship to Mexican citizens resident in the territories newly taken. By specifying Mexican citizens, the laws excluded the Native American population resident in the area. And by offering citizenship to Mexicans at a time when citizenship was restricted to whites, the laws implied that Mexicans would be considered white. In the midcentury, then, it was possible . . . to be both white and Mexican in the United States. However, as Katherine Benton-Cohn explains in her detailed study of four Arizona border towns, Mexican nationality became racialized as nonwhite during the nineteenth century through work. Where Mexicans were workers, rather than landholders, they came to be legally defined as racially Mexican and disqualified from citizenship. Where Mexicans owned ranches and farms, racial categories were blurry and unimportant. But in the industrial copper-mining town of Bisbee, Mexican workers were segregated economically by their lower pay (Mexican wage) and geographically by new town-planning experiments. To most non-Mexican residents of Bisbee, Mexicans were peon workers or potential public charges, not neighbors or business partners, not coworkers or co-worshipers, and certainly not potential marriage partners. In these areas, where Mexicans became defined as racially Mexican through their laboring status, American increasingly equaled white, and so Mexican came to mean the opposite of both. truth-out.org/news/item/25996-illegal-immigration-is-a-policy-used-to-exclude-and-exploit
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 21:16:08 +0000
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