Reconstructing North America

This essay compares the failed secessionist movements of Juan Cortina in south Texas and Louis Riel in Manitoba. Johnson explains that Canada, the U.S., and Mexico “were intent on extinguishing competing sovereignties in the territory that they claimed as their own.” In the borderlands, followers of Cortina and Riel resisted incorporation into national communities in hopes of maintaining autonomy and self-governance, using some of the same liberal capitalist arguments as their oppressors. With the “imposition of Canadian and U.S. sovereignty in Cortina and Riel’s homelands,” “property regimes and legal systems further marginalize[d] ethnic Mexicans and Métis in both economic and political terms.” In both places resistance was ultimately overwhelmed, but “the tragedy lay not only in what befell these communities in a material sense, but also in the foreclosure of the possibility of equitable belonging that had once beckoned Juan Cortina, Louis Riel, and their countless followers.”

Early Identity, Environment, and Experience

Josefina Fierro de Bright served as a political and social activist in the 1930s and 1940s through her participation in the Mexican Defense Committee, El Congreso (the National Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples), and the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, as well as her important efforts to end the violent attacks on ethnic Mexicans in Los Angeles during the Zoot Suit Riots. Fierro participated in organizations focused on human, civil, women’s, and labor rights. She contributed to a cross-cultural “politics of opposition” determined to create a world where true equality might flourish. She used American nationalist and transnationalist approaches. In the United States, Fierro networked with activists, celebrities, and political leaders who supported many of the same causes that she did. Her transnational approach materialized in the form of collaboration with the Mexican consulate, which also sought to secure the human rights of ethnic Mexicans living in the United States during a time of strong anti-Mexican sentiment. In order to understand why and how Fierro emerged as a leader willing to challenge the racism undergirding the segregation and mistreatment of ethnic Mexicans in California in the 1930s and 1940s, this study examines her family’s history of social activism, the fluid sociocultural environment of an American Left in which women played central roles, and her bold and charismatic leadership style.

Chicana/o Ethnography

Chicana/o ethnography is a subfield of Chicana/o anthropology and sociocultural anthropology. There are two ways of looking at the term Chicana/o ethnography: one, as the work conducted and written by self-identified Chicana/o anthropologists and social scientists; two, as the anthropological work produced on Chicanas/os and US-based ethnic Mexicans. Chicana/o ethnography emerges in the late 1960s with the Chicano Power movement in the United States. With the entry of Chicana/o PhDs in the social sciences and in particular anthropology during the 1960s, the field of cultural anthropology became the site of contested counter-narratives by racialized groups in the United States. Those self-identifying as Chicana/o and receiving degrees in the social sciences ushered in a critique of anthropology’s colonial and imperial legacy. In particular, conducting ethnographic fieldwork and writing ethnographies on US ethnic Mexicans by non-Mexicans came under scrutiny by Mexican Americans. Although there have been Mexican and Mexican American social scientists that have studied US Mexican communities since the late 19th century, the emergence of Chicana/o ethnography is situated out of political struggle both in Chicana/o communities and in universities throughout the United States. Since then, Chicana/o ethnography has evolved to include ethnographic studies on expressive culture and folklore, identity formation, transnational migration and communities, community studies, US-Mexico borderlands studies, social movements, and (il)legality and subject formation. Accordingly, this bibliography begins with initial texts and works that contested the ways in which anthropologists and social scientists initially viewed the US Mexican population and the politics of conducting research in Chicana/o communities. This bibliography emphasizes the field of Chicana/o anthropology as it pertains to the production of ethnographic work by Chicana/o anthropologists and the ethnographic work on Chicana/o communities, cultures, and experience. It does not encapsulate all of the ethnographic work conducted by Chicana/o social scientists in fields other than anthropology nor does it include all the ethnographic work conducted on Chicana/o lives by social scientists. Instead, it also incorporates several key works by social scientists that further the field of Chicana/o anthropology and sociocultural anthropology.

White Plague, Mexican Menace

This article examines a debate that emerged in El Paso, Texas at the turn of the twentieth century surrounding the transmission of pulmonary tuberculosis from predominantly Anglo American migrants to the city’s ethnic Mexican population. Reports of Anglo-to-Mexican infections came from cities and towns throughout the U.S. Southwest, but by 1915 El Paso had emerged as the epicenter of the debate. Using popular and professional sources, the article tracks a shift in dominant perceptions of tubercular contagion from an association with white bodies to Mexican ones. An early narrative casts the Mexican female domestic servant as a victim of the infectious indigent white consumptive male health seeker. In 1915, as the Mexican Revolution raged and tensions between whites and ethnic Mexicans in the city sharpened, federal public health authorities published a report dismissing health seekers as a source of contagion to ethnic Mexicans. This article highlights the power of notions of race, gender, and class in shaping perceptions of and responses to epidemics, often with tragic results.