Published as part of the University of North Carolina Press’s New Borderlands History series, Julie M. Weise’s Corazón de Dixie examines the lives of Mexican emigrants and their descendants in a region outside the scope of traditional borderlands scholarship. Rather than analyze migrants’ lives in southern California, New Mexico, or Texas, this work considers those who settled in New Orleans from 1910 to 1939, in Mississippi from 1918 to 1939, in the Arkansas Delta from 1939 to 1964, in rural Georgia from 1965 to 2004, and in Charlotte, North Carolina, from 1990 to 2012. As this brief chapter survey reveals, Corazón de Dixie not only gives scholars a fresh perspective on Mexican immigration to a new region; it also pushes the bounds of more focused studies, providing a portrait of race, nation, migration, and competing ideologies in the long twentieth century.
The author principally asks three questions of her sources:...
