The Making of “Mexicans” and “Hispanics”: Historicizing the “Sleeping Giant”

Abstract

The Making of “Mexicans” and “Hispanics”: Historicizing the “Sleeping Giant” J. David Cisneros (bio) Natalia Molina. How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. xv + 207 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper). G. Cristina Mora. Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. xxi + 227 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $85.00 (cloth); $27.50 (paper). If we are to believe one of the most persistent characterizations of Hispanics/Latin@s in contemporary culture, then these groups represent a “sleeping giant” that—through immigration, demographic growth, and/or increasing social power—is finally beginning to “awaken.”1 The unity and preexistence of a Hispanic or Latin@ race/ethnicity is presupposed and becomes fodder for continued prognostications about the community’s cultural and political rousing—whether for good or ill, depending on who is heralding the coming awakening. For some, this sleeping giant constitutes an untapped political or economic force (as is seen in electoral discourses about Hispanics/Latin@s as a “swing vote”), while for others it represents a threat to the nation’s borders and sovereignty (as is seen in a slate of recent restrictive state and local immigration laws). Both of the books reviewed in this essay present important theoretical and historical challenges to this tendency to view Hispanics/Latin@s as a homogenous and “awakening” demographic by illustrating the ways that “Mexican/Mexican American” and “Hispanic” identity categories are not just now arising but rather have been “made” and remade across U.S. history. These books build on and thicken extensive scholarship on the history of Mexicans and Hispanics in the United States, and they help to contextualize contemporary debates about the Hispanic/Latin@ “sleeping giant” and Hispanic/Latin@ immigration. Most importantly, they provide insights about the relational powers and processes that have made and continue to make race and ethnicity. [End Page 550] How Race Is Made in America is a concise historical treatment of immigration restriction policies, administrative directives, and political debates about Mexican immigration between 1924 and 1965. Its specific focus is on how this so-called “immigration regime” helped to racialize Mexican immigrants. Although there is a voluminous literature on Mexican immigration, citizenship, and race, Molina’s book is an interesting addition because it aims to take a professed “relational” approach to the topic. It argues that racialization (the social construction of racial groups as such) occurs “in correspondence to other groups” (p. 3) and that “the racial construction of one group affects others” (p. 5). Molina contends that, whereas past work mostly considers the isolated history of Mexicans, her book explicitly examines how Mexican-ness was constructed and articulated in relation to other racialized groups like African Americans, American Indians, and Asians. The primary heuristic Molina offers for this task is the “racial script,” which describes “how society is predisposed (consciously or not) to utilize historical experience and stereotypes of past groups to define and circumscribe the place and role of future members of U.S. society” (p. 16). After an introduction that lays out these terms and the goals of the study, each of the five main chapters examines a body of administrative policies or laws targeting and racializing Mexican immigrants, and/or the efforts of advocacy groups or citizens to challenge or support such laws. The chapters are separated into two parts that emphasize two different but ultimately connected themes: race and deportability. Chapter one takes as its focus the years shortly after the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act when, as Molina succinctly puts it, “it was as if people looked around them and questioned why the United States had curtailed immigration from Europe and not from Mexico” (p. 21). The chapter analyzes bills, congressional debate, and federal administrative documents concerning Mexican immigration that expressed several longstanding racial scripts and comparisons (Mexicans as indigenous, like American Indians; Mexicans as “off-white,”2 or white but with inherent cultural or biological inferiorities, like Southern/Eastern Europeans, etc.). “Aligning Mexicans with these [racialized] groups” served to racialize and marginalize them as well, and...