Funded Projects Query Form
One match

This project reshapes the fields of Mexican American, U.S. Southern, and Mexican history by bringing them into dialogue with one another. The historical actors under study are the thousands of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans who lived and worked in the U.S. South throughout the twentieth century. My book manuscript, the first to recover these migrants' stories, shows how their experiences in the South differed from those of their counterparts in the Southwest, due to the South's distinct racial systems. I show that Mexican state actors, stationed at consulates in the region, both influenced and were influenced by the Jim Crow system, and later, the rise of "color-blind" conservatism. Finally, I demonstrate that the "provincial" U.S. South actually existed within a transnational field of racial politics and ideologies, in which binary ideas of "black" and "white" encountered more flexible and culturally-based racial systems in the form of Mexican immigrants fighting for rights.