Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 2020"

Gender and Intimacy across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Abstract: This special issue of Pacific Historical Review, “Gender and Intimacy across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” is guest edited by Miroslava Chavez-Garcia and Veronica Castillo-Munoz. The articles in the collection reflect the primacy of gender and intimacy as tools of analysis in recovering the experiences of women of Spanish-Mexican and Mexican origin in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century borderlands. As the authors demonstrate, using gender and intimacy, along with race, ethnicity, class, and culture, allow for the recovery of women’s personal and family lives and how they intersected with the economic, political, and social transformations of the region. The result is nuanced understandings of how women negotiated and resisted state-based, patriarchal ideologies and practices that sought to limit their lives and those of their families. The special issue includes a preface from Marc S. Rodriguez, this introduction, and articles by Celeste Menchaca, Erika Perez, and Margie Brown-Coronel.

“Hardhats May Be Misunderstood”The Boycott of Coors Beer and the Making of Gay-Labor-Chicana/o Alliances

Abstract: Drawing on organizational records, the progressive press, and oral history archives, this article explores the development of a multiracial, coalition-backed boycott of Coors beer in the 1970s and 1980s. It focuses on the boycott’s expansion from a localized labor dispute in the San Francisco Bay Area to a national, politicized campaign. It argues that the Coors boycott and its array of backers, representing labor, Chicana/o, queer, black, Native American, and leftist circles, demonstrate the vibrancy, creativity, and evolution of activism in the decades following the civil rights movements. Instead of seeing the move to coalition and consumer movements as conservative, this article identifies the Coors boycott as an example of ongoing grassroots efforts to forge solidarity and oppose business conservatives and the New Right.

Intimacy and Family in the California Borderlands: The Letters of Josefa del Valle Forster, 1876–1896

Abstract: Using personal and family letters written between 1876 and 1896, this article charts the life of a post-conquest Californiana, Josefa del Valle Forster (1861–1943). It argues that the industrial and commercial development that took place in Southern California after 1850 reconfigured family relationships and gender dynamics, shifting understandings of intimacies for del Valle Forster. This discussion of an era and community often overlooked in California history contributes to a fuller picture of how Californianas experienced the late nineteenth century, and it highlights the significance of letters as a historical source for understanding how individuals and families negotiated the transformations wrought by war and conquest.

A “Hindu Mystic” or a “Harrovian Realist”? U.S., Australian, and Canadian Representations of Jawaharlal Nehru, 1947–1964

Abstract: This article analyzes how officials from the U.S., Australia, and Canada represented Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s psychology in diplomatic contexts between 1947 and 1964. Nehru was the representative of a newly sovereign state, whose people were often stereotyped as mystical, spiritual, and irrational. In this article, we show how Nehru was constructed as “irrational,” “primitive,” “effeminate,” and racially resentful by Western diplomats. He was, conversely, also seen as a “Harrovian realist” or “transplanted Englishman” with an attendant air of “superiority.” Cold War imperatives gave these ambivalent cultural and psychological projections a special salience, particularly as each confronted the implications of Nehru’s non-alignment and his global profile as a proponent of Third World nationalism. The ambivalent representations of Nehru that we trace within U.S., Australian, and Canadian foreign policy-making also reveal a shared belief in the “Anglosphere”—the purported transnational unity of white, English-speaking nations—was sustained beyond the decline of the British Empire. Nehru’s “Britishness” demonstrates how he could be tethered to the English-speaking world while simultaneously being seen as its irrational, non-white Other. This ambivalent connection helped to re-draw the boundaries of the transnational Anglosphere in the era of decolonization and to define Cold War assumptions about race, rationality, and foreign policy.