West of Sex: Making Mexican America, 1900-1930

Abstract

In this engaging and insightful book, the historian Pablo Mitchell explores the legal activism of ordinary Mexicans in the turn-of-the-century United States, specifically regarding court trials involving Mexicans and sex. As Mitchell points out, only very rarely do histories of sexuality address the sex lives of Mexicans in the United States, especially in the pre–World War II era. His study unearths not only how Mexicans experienced sex but also the myriad ways sex and sexual discourses served to challenge, as well as maintain, Mexican marginalization in the American West. Mitchell's study explores trial transcripts from appeals filed by Mexicans convicted of involvement in sex crimes in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas in the years 1900–1930. Despite the virulent anti-Mexican social climate in these western states, Mexicans appealed over a thousand criminal convictions to higher courts. Organizing his chapters around thematic sites of sexual contestation—including colonialism, home, prostitution, queer sex, and courtship—Mitchell convincingly argues that such legal appeals offer striking “evidence that Mexicans considered themselves, under the law, entitled to defend their homes, their families, their work habits, their sexual desires, and even their innocence in American courtrooms” (p. 7). Thus, although trial testimony by Anglos more often than not portrayed Mexicans as transient foreigners and racial “others,” courtrooms also represented a key space for members of the Mexican population to oppose rigid racial and sexual differentiation.