This book collects six valuable contributions to our knowledge of an important and often-overlooked aspect of race relations in the Americas in the twentieth century: the racialist scientific doctrines and racist ideas and prejudices that shaped immigration policies and legislations in the twentieth century in all the countries of the region, as well as the complex fashion in which foreign immigrants were racialized and discriminated against by governments and different social sectors. Three of the essays deal with these issues from broad regional and historical perspectives, while the remainder discuss highly specific cases in different provinces of Mexico. Although these perspectives appear discordant at times, in the end they produce an interesting counterpoint, revealing the differences, even contradictions, between national laws and their local implementations and between generalizing racialist ideologies and the varying relations established in particular social contexts with specific groups of immigrants.
The first two essays present a...
