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Genaro M Padilla, Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 3, December 2024, Pages 610–611, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae232
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Making the Latino South is an often-engaging and capacious reading of the ways non-Black “Latino people” (the author Cecilia Márquez's term) have long been located within, rather than simply peripheral to, the Jim Crow, Black-white, racial script in the South (p. 3). Their centrality lasted, Márquez argues in the final two chapters, at least until recruited labor—initially praised by white people as hardworking, family-oriented, and deeply religious—established permanent communities from the 1980s onward. As she notes in the last chapter, with greater immigration of Mexican, Mexican American, and Central American people, and with the xenophobia that surged after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, these same communities were demonized, turned from model citizens into “illegal immigrant aliens” and subject to deportation (p. 242).
The first three chapters (of five) are conceptualized as case studies on which Márquez frames an argument about the growing presence of Latino people in the South, placing them in the anomalous position of being accorded “provisional whiteness” over and against Jim Crow laws and policies (p. 22). The first, on the Mexican-born labor activist and historian Ernesto Galarza, tells the story of his Pan-American labor research in Washington, D.C., where, Márquez notes, his family lived in a white neighborhood, attended white schools, and, by her reasoning, were “embedded in and benefiting from Southern white supremacy” (p. 34). In a reversal of Jim Crow, when his daughter, Karla, enrolled in a Black vocational school in the late 1940s, she was expelled because she was “not a Negro” (p. 19). Galarza filed a legal suit intended to buttress the judicial arguments for school desegregation that would soon lead to Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The second chapter offers a richly detailed, curious account of a Mexican-themed park—South of the Border—established in 1950, literally on the state line between North Carolina and South Carolina. The park invited southern white tourists to relax in a “Fantasized Mexicanness” oscillating between “seeing Mexicans as perpetually foreign and … as intimately domestic” or harmless. The chapter is a fine case study, but its location in the book makes its relation to the argument tenuous, however suggestive. The third chapter traces the civil rights work of a small group of Latinos who worked in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the 1970s. As in the sampling of Karla Galarza's dismissal from an all-Black vocational school, Márquez presents the political dilemma of four non-Black Latino activists asked to work solely with their white colleagues. This rescripting of Jim Crow was, Márquez argues, both “a failure to create cross-racial alliance” and a reminder for southern Black people that they must remain at “the vanguard of the movement to dismantle Jim Crow” (p. 119).
