The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth- Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

MC 281 is the second in the required sophomore sequence for Social Relations and Policy. In this course, we will explore the interactions and experiences between and among various groups in American history. We will consider how Americans both defended and contested prevailing definitions of fitness for citizenship and inclusion in the political process and American life, and how groups sought to gain access to social and political equality. This course focuses on the history of relationships within and between different groups in the United States, and explores the complexities of those relations. Rarely centered solely on race or ethnicity, such interactions were also affected by gender, sexuality, religion, nation, and class. We will also explore the shifting definitions of race and ethnicity. Students will analyze not only the experiences of the different groups, but also the connections between them to assess the larger dynamics and their implications for public policy.

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans.

Working toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White; The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs

To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War. Tera W. Hunter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 311 pp. (Cloth US$29.95)

To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War

THE “FUTURE IMMENSE": RACE AND IMMIGRATION IN THE MULTIRACIAL U.S.-MEXICO BORDERLANDS, 1880-1936 JULIAN LIM, Ph.D. CORNELL UNIVERSITY 2013 This study examines the multiple meanings of citizenship and belonging that emerged in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands from 1880 to 1936. The project focuses on El Paso, Texas, the region’s leading hub of economic activity and immigration during this period. Locating El Paso at the crossroads of multiple boundaries – among them the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the limits of Jim Crow, which ended where El Paso met the New Mexico Territory line – I trace the movements of Mexican, Chinese, and African-American men and women to the El Paso-Juárez region. This project presents a new study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, as diverse people crossed various borders in search of economic opportunities and freedom from popular and institutionalized racism. The project’s purpose is twofold. First, I examine the developments in immigration law and policy that transformed both the United States and Mexico during these years. Analyzing the emergence of racially restrictive immigration policies in Mexico as well as the United States, the project addresses a variety of legal, social, political, and economic changes affecting migration on both sides of the border as well as across it, including the shift from Reconstruction to Jim Crow in the United States, the modernization programs of President Porfirio Díaz and revolution in Mexico, anti-Chinese exclusion campaigns on both sides of the border, and a global economic depression. Second, I show how racialized people used national borders to renegotiate questions about their capacity for “belonging” in the United States and/or Mexico, thereby forcing redefinitions of citizenship and national identity. I argue that although the border harbored multiple perils, it also offered great promise: through it, Mexican, black, and Chinese subjects often challenged the constructions of their non-whiteness and improvised their own democracy. Integrating sources from both regional and national archives in the United States and Mexico, my project demonstrates the unique ways in which marginalized people used their cross-border mobility to blur the lines of state power and identity in the borderlands. Ultimately, however, the project demonstrates the incremental processes of immigration law-making from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and highlights the ways in which binational immigration laws merged at the border and reshaped multiracial alliances into more discrete, segregated race relations. It presents a legal and social history of how the borderlands underwent a sweeping transformation, whereby the “open borders” of the 1880s hardened into much more racially discriminating boundaries – locally, nationally, and internationally – by the 1930s. In the process, as racial ideologies migrated across national boundaries, it became more difficult for racialized bodies to do the same. And as the United States and Mexico each developed more stringent detention, deportation, and exclusion policies based on race, multiracial relations and people were not only made less visible within the national body politic, but were removed from the boundaries of national identity altogether.

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Julian Lim

Papers

The “Future Immense”: Race And Immigration In The Multiracial U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1880-1936