Awards

• Winner of A Choice Outstanding Academic Book 2002 (United States)

Overview

The history of Mexican Americans is a history of the intermingling of races - Indian, White, and Black. This racial history underlies a legacy of racial discrimination against Mexican Americans and their Mexican ancestors that stretches from the Spanish conquest to current battles over ending affirmative action and other assistance programs for ethnic minorities. Asserting the centrality of race in Mexican American history, Martha Menchaca here offers the first interpretative racial history of Mexican Americans, focusing on racial foundations and race relations from pre-Hispanic times to the present. Menchaca uses the concept of racialisation to describe the process through which Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. authorities constructed racial status hierarchies that marginalised Mexicans of colour and restricted their rights of land ownership. She traces this process from the Spanish colonial period and the introduction of slavery through racial laws affecting Mexican Americans into the late twentieth century. This re-viewing of familiar history through the lens of race recovers Blacks as important historical actors, links Indians and the mission system in the Southwest to the Mexican American present, and reveals the legal and illegal means by which Mexican Americans lost their land grants. Martha Menchaca is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Full Product Details

9780292752542

Table of Contents

Reviews

Menchaca has accomplished an unprecedented tour de force in this sweeping historical overview and interpretation of the racial formation and racial history of Mexican Americans. Antonia I. Castaneda, Associate Professor of History, St. Mary's University

Menchaca has accomplished an unprecedented tour de force in this sweeping historical overview and interpretation of the racial formation and racial history of Mexican Americans. Antonia I. Castaneda, Associate Professor of History, St. Mary's University Documents the diversity and complex identity politics of the country's Muslims, in contrast to their stereotypes in French media and discourse. - Chronicle of Higher Education

At the core of [Recovering History, Constructing Race] is the racialization process that has taken place to define Mexican Americans in the US, which ignores and erases the historical Indigenous, Black, and/or European ancestry of persons of Mexican descent. * JSTOR Daily *

Author Information

Martha Menchaca is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available