Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 2013"

Examining Chicana/o history through a relational lens

Abstract: This article argues that we should examine Chicana/os in relation to other racialized groups in order to develop a fuller understanding of how racial categories form and operate. The article highlights different models of relational work by examining key works in Chicana/o history that have employed such a relational methodology. In addition, the article demonstrates how we can use organizing principles besides race to find links between racialized groups. Lastly, the author revisits key events in Chicana/o history, examining them through a relational lens, to demonstrate what may be gained through this methodology.

Anti-prostitution Campaigns in Japan and the American West, 1890–1920: A Transpacific Comparison

Abstract: Prostitution became a thriving business in Japan and Japanese migrant communities in the western United States in the last years of the nineteenth century, and Japanese reformers organized against it on both sides of the Pacific to protect Japan’s reputation as a “civilized” country. By 1920 Japanese prostitution had visibly declined in Pacific Coast cities, whereas it continued to be a regular feature of public life in Japan. This article examines the emergence of transpacific reform networks in the 1890s as well as the different ways the reform movements developed in the two Pacific regions after 1900. It argues that transnational and comparative approaches are not in opposition to but complementary to one another in the historical study of prostitution, social reform, and international migration.

Mujeres Públicas: American Prostitutes in Baja California, 1910–1930

Abstract: This article explores the circuits of migration among American prostitutes in Mexican border towns between the years 1910 and 1930. After California’s Progressive movement shut down the state’s red light districts, American prostitutes found that the vice districts of Mexicali and Tijuana offered opportunities for economic and social advancement not available to them in the United States. As transnational subjects, these U.S. women exploited the ethno-cultural complexities of the border to claim “whiteness” as “Americans” and yet also relied on the Mexican state to guarantee their rights and liberties. Their story contributes to scholarly debates about prostitution and speaks to the absence of research on American women in the historiography of the twentieth-century U.S.-Mexican border.

The S.S. Mongolia Incident: Medical Politics and Filipino Colonial Migration in Hawai‘i

Abstract: On December 23, 1910, the S.S. Mongolia arrived at the Port of Honolulu with 119 Filipinos aboard. The treatment of these passengers resulted in vigorous debates about Filipino labor mobility that impacted U.S.-Philippine relations, Hawaiian business needs, and health policies, as well as continental U.S. labor and sugar interests. From January through April 1911, officials in Washington, D.C., and the Philippines worked hard to stem fears about the health of Filipinos and maintain both the flow of these workers to Hawai‘i and the U.S.-Philippine political-legal relationship. Despite extensive regional protests, the acquisition of labor for sugar plantations and the preservation of U.S.-Philippine colonial ties ended up prevailing over nativist fears about the health and growing numbers of Filipinos in the United States.

The Interdisciplinary Project of Chicana History: Looking Back, Moving Forward

Abstract: Chicana history has come a long way since its inception in the 1960s and 1970s. While initially a neglected area of study limited to issues of labor and class, today scholars in history, literature, anthropology, and sociology, among others, study topics of gender, culture, and sexuality, as well as youth culture, reproductive rights, migration, and immigration. In the process, these scholars contribute to the collective project of Mexican and Mexican American women’s history in the United States, making it diverse in its analytical themes, methodologies, and sources. Indeed, Chicana history is not confined by disciplinary boundaries. Rather, its cross-disciplinary nature gives it life. This article charts that interdisciplinarity and demonstrates its significance in expanding and recasting Chicano history more broadly.

Chicano/a History: Its Origins, Purpose, and Future

Abstract: This article surveys the writing of Chicano/a history since its inception and reflects on why scholars have been concerned with certain issues and how they have written about them. Born from the tumult of the Vietnam era, the field has challenged the status quo and emboldened those communities from which Chicano/a historians come and which they ultimately serve. Given the generation-long development of Mexican American history, this article focuses on Chicano/a historiography, with some commentary on the recent emergence of Latino/a history and the future directions that this field may take. It engages three questions that have driven the field: What forces engendered the ethnic Mexican community in the United States? Who comprises it? And how does the past bear on the present?

“Lord of a Hawaiian Island”: Robert and John Gregg Allerton, Queerness, and the Erasure of Colonization in Kaua‘i

Abstract: This case study of a white male couple (Robert and John Gregg Allerton) on Kaua‘i from the 1930s through the 1960s investigates how their colonization of the island has tended to be erased in accounts that highlight both the supposed acceptance of their homosexuality by the island’s residents and, in turn, the couple’s generous philanthropy. Set against this narrative of what Mary Louise Pratt has called “anti-conquest,” I demonstrate that the Allertons’ lives on Kaua‘i were actually more in keeping with the history of western imperialism than most accounts acknowledge, emphasizing also their own innovative strategies toward making the island their own. The article examines both the specifics of the Allertons’ colonizing of Kaua‘i and, more importantly, how imperialism can be misremembered when the colonizers were queer, connecting that narrative obfuscation to myths about acceptance of gay men in Hawai‘i that live on today.

“California’s Unemployed Feed Themselves”: Conservative Intervention in the Los Angeles Cooperative Movement, 1931–1934

Abstract: This article considers the unemployed cooperative movement in Depression-era Los Angeles, an understudied component of unemployed organizing in the 1930s. Cooperativism allowed unemployed people to avoid material deprivation and build political power, but it also became a site of sharp political contestation. I examine how conservative elites intervened in a movement that was in many ways politically ambiguous. These conservatives saw both danger and possibility in the movement—danger because economic collectivism hinted at a socialist ethos, and possibility because it offered a way for poor people to provide for themselves without state support. To describe how these elites gained influence over the movement, I analyze the proceedings of a cooperative convention held in Los Angeles in 1933. I show how elites at the convention gave material support to cooperative leaders and rhetorically crafted a conservative version of cooperativism that emphasized anti-communism, self-sufficiency, and nativism.

John Muir’s Orchard Home

Abstract: The environmental pioneer John Muir spent most of his adult years living and working on a fruit ranch outside of Martinez, California. His entire domestic life unfolded among the orchards. Yet, repeatedly and explicitly, he rejected the ranch as his true home, claiming instead a spiritual affinity with the Sierra wilderness. That response famously helped launch modern, wilderness-oriented environmentalism, but less noticed was its role in closing an earlier horticultural movement that promoted the combined economic and environmental development of the landscape. Muir’s in-laws, John and Louisiana Strentzel, typified the horticulturalists. Contrasting how the two generations made their homes in the natural landscape demonstrates the diversity of environmental thinking in nineteenth-century California and reveals how much Muir left behind in turning toward the mountains.

Chicano/a Challenges to Nineteenth-Century History

Abstract: This article explores the usefulness of Chicano/a history to teaching and representing the nineteenth-century history of northern Mexico, U.S. imperial expansion, and the constructed nature of borders. Typically considered a twentieth-century discipline, Chicano/a historians have a long history of engaging the subject in the nineteenth century. This focus dovetails with recent critical works on race and gender in the U.S. West as well as transnational approaches to history. This article makes the case that the perspective on the nineteenth century provided by Chicano/a historians forces readers to reframe their understanding of the sweep of U.S. history.

Looking Back on Chicano History: A Generational Perspective

Abstract: In the forty years since the publication of the special issue devoted to Chicano history in the Pacific Historical Review in 1973, the literature on Mexican Americans has flourished. In the early 1970s, the nascent subfield of Chicano history was established, and in subsequent decades it reached maturity as the number of historians writing in this area increased significantly, as did the number of monographs and articles. By the early twenty-first century, the importance of historical studies of Mexican Americans is reflected in the literature of many subfields of U.S. history—labor, women, U.S.-Mexican borderlands, urban, immigration—and in the curriculum of colleges and universities across the nation. This article provides a personal perspective on the origins, foundations, and maturation of Chicano history.

On the Road with Chicana/o History: From Aztlán to the Alamo and Back

Abstract: Chicana/o historians have transformed understandings of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, identity, labor, and space in the United States. In dialogue with the articles for this special issue, my commentary reflects on some of the significant contributions of Chicana/o history, highlighting the themes of complexity and spatial metaphors. I concur with the authors that there still is much historical reconstruction to do, and suggest that this work is important intellectually and politically, given the hostile climate toward Mexicans and immigrants in many parts of the country. This commentary also provides an opportunity to share the course of my scholarly engagement with Chicana/o history and consider its far-reaching influence on my work in the history of medicine and public health in the U.S. West.

“A Pledge Is Not Self-Enforcing”:: Struggles for Equal Employment Opportunity in Multiracial Los Angeles, 1964–1982

Abstract: This article explores African American and Mexican American struggles for equal employment in Los Angeles after 1965. It argues that activists and workers used the mechanisms set up by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to attack the barriers that restricted blacks and Mexican Americans to poor job prospects. It shows that implementation of fair employment law was part of a dialectic between policymakers and regulatory officials, on one hand, and grass-roots individuals and civil rights organizations, on the other. The bureaucratic mechanisms created by Title VII shaped who would benefit from the implementation of the law. Moreover, blacks and Mexican Americans mixed ethnic power and civil rights frameworks to make the bureaucratic system more capacious and race-conscious, which challenged the intentions of the original legislation.

Between Sorrow and Pride: The Morenci Nine, the Vietnam War, and Memory in Small-Town America

Abstract: In July 1966 nine friends left the small copper-mining camp of Morenci, Arizona, for Marine boot camp. Ultimately, within two and a half years, all served in Vietnam, with only three returning alive. Over time, the Morenci Nine, as the group became known, emerged as an important story in the history of the Vietnam War and its impact on people in the Southwest. How people remembered the fallen sons of the copper miners, raised in a segregated company town, became important. The process followed the national pattern of individuals sustaining the memories until the nation finally started to deal with the trauma of the losses after the unveiling of the Vietnam Memorial. The efforts continue today as new forms of memorialization develop for the Morenci Nine even forty years later.