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    ‘The Mexican’ and ‘The Cancer in the South’: discourses of race, nation and anti-blackness in early 20th Century debates on Mexican immigration

    Aragon, Margarita (2017) ‘The Mexican’ and ‘The Cancer in the South’: discourses of race, nation and anti-blackness in early 20th Century debates on Mexican immigration. Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora 35 (1), pp. 59-77. ISSN 0261-9288.

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    Abstract

    This article explores the flexible manner in which discourses of anti-black racism were employed within congressional debates on the proposed restriction of Mexican immigration at the end of the 1920s. I examine how both sides of this debate placed Mexicans within a particular historical narrative of race and nation, positioned in relation to a range of other populations, including Chinese and Japanese immigrants, Native Americans, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Within these narratives, slavery and the imagined Negro problem were particularly salient, being frequently used to orient racial interpretations of Mexican immigrants as well as the manner in which they were positioned in relation to other ‘racial elements’. Imprinted with US histories of slavery, conquest and empire, these discourses offer insight into the ambivalent interrelationships of American’s multiple trajectories of racism.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis, available online at the link above.
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Mexicans, African Americans, immigrants, minorities, racism
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
    Depositing User: Margarita Aragon
    Date Deposited: 12 Jan 2017 14:36
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:30
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/17872

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