How race is made in America; Immigratioin, citizenship, & the historical power of racial scripts by Natalia Molina.
Roper, John Herbert, Sr.
Molina, Natalia. How Race is Made in America; Immigration,
Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2014. xv + 208 pages. Paper, $27.95.
Historian Natalia Molina's previous work, Fit to be Citizens?:
Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (2006), was a monograph
that paid close attention to the issues of public health and treatment
of immigrants in Los Angeles, especially Japanese, Chinese, and
Mexicans. That study, while carefully (even narrowly) focused on issues
of public health and public policy, noted that the concurrent majorities
of voting powers, dominated then by relatively wealthy white
bourgeoisie, discriminated against all ethnic immigrants but was less
oppressive--even occasionally relatively "tolerant"--of
Mexicans in particular and Latinos in general. Despite her precise focus
on health in a bygone era, the heated debates about immigration in
recent years brought her monograph and her ongoing scholarship into much
broader concerns about public policy and race relations, with special
emphasis on race relations in all societal contexts, especially the
processes by which Californians define race--and how they "write
scripts" for such descriptions. That more public and controversial
set of concerns eventuates in this study, How Race is Made in America,
which attempts no less than a description of how power elites interact
with working-class blacks and whites and with immigrants to define race
for each kind of people in the ethnic polyglot that is our largest and
wealthiest state. Her study would be important simply because of
California's size and influence, but it is even more important
since all of the U.S., most especially the Deep South (once so
completely a two-color "script") is trending toward
California, that is, rapidly becoming truly multicultural (a point made
well in 2014 by Tracy Thompson in The New Mind of the South).
Molina's study emphasizes the "salad bowl' of many
diverse ethnic identities (most of which retain clearly distinct
features) rather than the once fashionable "melting pot" in
which assimilation eliminates the differences in such distinctions in
favor of a California/American identity that subsumes Japanese, Chinese,
Mexican, and any other specific Asian or Latin American identities.
Instead, she uses the much more politically charged word race--a
political rather than a biological construct--to examine how the
complexities of debate and action in LA produce definitions for Asians
and for Latinos. And those definitions do acknowledge some agency, being
in large part creations of a self-identifying minority. Nor are those
definitions, even if imposed by white and other ethnic groups, purely
negative. But they are finally political creations--and the
"scripts" are very limiting, that is, ethnically and racially
discriminatory.
Central to her study of such racial projects (a construct of
identity imposed from the outside) is a relational approach looking at
Mexican Americans in dynamic interaction with Japanese and Chinese as
well as with whites of differing ethnicities. Molina says that some
elite owners of capital wealth in the US need racial projects that set
black, white, yellow, brown, red, and religious/ethnic groups against
each other, so that ethnic consciousness gets in the way of class
consciousness. The resulting inter-ethnic rivalries and fighting thus
stymies any broadly based class consciousness that might emerge in a
unified labor movement, and obviously prevents the full fledged
development of a European-style labor party.
Until the 1920s, Mexicans in the U.S. were considered
"white" and were not considered much of a threat to anyone,
especially since most were braceros (manual laborers) who did not live
the entire season in the U.S., largely kept to themselves, and moved
frequently in pursuit of temporary jobs with the crops according to
seasons. There was a legal (and U.S. Census) recognition of Mexicans as
"white," despite the dark hue of some braceros and despite the
very light hue of many African Americans, Chinese, and Japanese. By the
1930s, things had changed: Many Mexicans were staying longer and
attempting jobs in fields other than seasonal farming. They were
becoming educated, generally improving their material lot, and
expressing desires to stay and flourish, as had Jews and Irish and other
ethnic groups increasingly recognized as "white" and fully
American. Consequently, from 1938 to 1965 Mexicans were
"redefined" as brown and "not white"--and those
processes evolved in relationship with Japanese and Chinese being
redefined as hard working, unthreatening, assimilable "knowledge
workers" necessary to a new economy. For Molina, the relational
study of racial projects shows that "capitalism's need for an
exploitable work force" led to changes in ethnic identities and the
resulting rivalries to prevent a class-conscious political movement (p.
10).
That may paint capitalism itself as too anthropomorphic and too
monolithic, but it is certainly the case that power elites who control
wealth in finance capital benefit from lack of cohesion in the ranks of
workers. Thereafter ensued new racial scripts that developed new racial
stereotypes about laziness, irresponsible sexuality, drug abuse, and
over-reliance on government welfare. She certainly makes her case that
race is something "made up" rather than naturally occurring,
and that political elites benefit from the racial scripts, as all
working-class folk suffer under the ethnic prejudices that prevent
unified and coherent political action for redress.
In light of recent hysteria about Mexican immigrants, it is helpful
to see that the hysteria does have a history with a beginning, a
developmental growth, and surely an end as well. Left unexplained is
Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma (1944) in which the black folk,
"indelible immigrants" in Daniel Boorstin's apt but cruel
phrase, persist as unassimilable, and persist as objects of a hysteria
even more remarkable than what is aimed at Mexicans. She faces this
relational dynamism that keeps blacks and Mexicans apart, but cannot
explain where it really comes from or where it is going. But that is
perhaps something for still another book.
How Race is Made in America significantly advances our
understanding of some forces that desperately need understanding as the
U.S. becomes majority/minority with white ethnic groups moving into a
minority position and with Mexican and other brown ethnic groups
becoming the single largest minority in shifting coalitions of
structures that are no longer multicultural in classroom lectures but
rather multicultural in fact. This book needs to be on professors'
shelves, on reading lists, in our libraries, and above all in the hands
of our students.
John Herbert Roper, Sr., Ph.D. Teaching Associate in History
Coastal Carolina University Conway, South Carolina
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Recommended Citation
Roper, John Herbert Sr. (2015) "How Race is Made in America;
Immigratioin, Citizenship, & the Historical Power of Racial Scripts
by Natalia Molina," International Social Science Review: Vol. 90:
Iss. 2, Article 15.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/issr/vol90/iss2/15
