Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and the author of The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development, also published by Duke University Press.
Adjudicating Exception: The Fate of the Indio Bárbaro in the U.S. Courts (1869–1954)
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Published:March 2016
2016. "Adjudicating Exception: The Fate of the Indio Bárbaro in the U.S. Courts (1869–1954)", Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo
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This chapter analyzes the competing racial geographies of the United States and Mexico in the newly annexed territory. Mexican Americans challenged Jim Crow segregation in the Southwest through naturalization, segregation, and discrimination cases brought between 1897 and 1954. The mestizo character of plaintiffs flummoxed the racial geography of the United States in the courts, as the plantiffs' mestizaje was illegible from the perspective of a biracial organization of the American polity. Court decisions repeatedly required Mexicans to renounce their indigenous and African heritage to enjoy the privileges of whiteness, while Mexican-Americans' repeatedly claimed a whiteness that resembles mestizaje. The chapter...
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