From bipartite to tripartite society: demographic change and realignments in ethnic stratification in Austin, Texas, 1910–301

Abstract

African Americans and Mexican Americans are presently the two largest non-white ethnies in the United States, and also two of the most marginalized. Both groups are disproportionately represented among the ranks of the urban underclass and experience high levels of ghettoization. The plight of America's poor Blacks and Chicanos, one of the most urgent social issues confronting modern-day policymakers, is rooted in a past characterized by prejudice, discrimination, racism, segregation and violence at the hands of the dominant white society. Despite these similarities in the contemporary and historical experiences of African Americans and Mexican Americans, few comparative studies of the two groups have been undertaken. Ethnic relations in Austin, Texas at the beginning of the twentieth century provide an ideal case study for exploring changes in the broad structural outlines of white relations with Blacks and Chicanos because, as a result of Mexican immigration, the city's ethnically stratified population changed during the period 1910–30 from being an essentially bi-ethnic one, composed of Whites and Blacks, into a tri-ethnic one. Building on classical sociological theories about dyadic and triadic relationships and their recent application to the field of inter-ethnic relations, McDonald contends that the transition from dyadic to triadic relationships in an ethnically stratified society sharpens rather than blurs ethnic divisions and further solidifies rather than weakens the position of the dominant ethnie. An examination of the white population's changing worldview shows that, out of the three possible triadic group formations identified by sociologists, the ‘divide and rule’ one is most applicable to the pattern of ethnic relations that took shape in Austin during the 1910s and 1920s.