How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts by Natalia Molina, and: Reframing the Latino Immigration Debate: Towards a Humanistic Paradigm by Alvaro Huerta (review)

The pervading belief that the United States is a nation of immigrants has produced some misleading conclusions. For instance, it has generated an unwitting belief in democracy’s unmitigated commitment to diversity and inclusivity. The two books under review unsettle this understanding. They argue that U.S. immigration policies, rather than charting the nation’s unwavering adherence to egalitarian principles, make known its racial, gendered, and national preferences along with its compliance with the demands of capitalist growth. Inclusion and diversity are, in this view, the contested values of the nation and not the crowning features of American exceptionalism.

In How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, historian Natalia Molina convincingly details how the growth of the immigration regime from 1924 to 1965 is intricately bound to popular and legal understandings of race in the U.S. While many scholars have tackled this issue, Molina offers a fresh approach. Instead of examining the ways in which immigration laws are largely designed to target a specific group for exclusion, Molina advances the notion of “racial scripts” to call attention to how the exclusion of one racial group develops a racial logic that could be later accessed to justify the exclusion of other nonwhite groups. Employing this conceptual framework, Molina connects the history of Mexican immigration to the broader U.S. immigration history. For Molina, the period between when immigration restriction was at its height in 1924 to when immigration policies liberalized in 1965 deserves special attention, given the wide-ranging debates that took place over race and the right to citizenship. Molina thus centers her study on examining how the racial logic used to deny one nonwhite group the right to citizenship has affected the status of other nonwhite groups and especially Mexicans in the U.S.

In part one of her study, Molina develops in three chapters a thoughtful analysis of how the perceived racial ambiguity of Mexicans in the U.S. shaped the efforts of local campaigns to deny to Mexicans citizenship by naturalization and birthright citizenship. Not only were Mexicans in the U.S. racialized as “birds of passage” (38) or sojourners who were expected to contribute to the economic development of the U.S. but remain socially and culturally marginal, but they were also legally classified as “white” even as popular designations had cast Mexicans as “nonwhite.” Considering how the legal requirements for naturalized citizenship contained a racial qualification of whites-only until 1952, the supposed racial ambiguity of Mexicans, as Molina shows, made them susceptible to questions over whether they were racially qualified for naturalized citizenship, even as the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had legally classified them as white. Unlike European immigrants, Mexicans were not widely assumed to be “whites on arrival.” While earlier court rulings upheld the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Molina details how the Great Depression reinstated efforts to disenfranchise Mexicans in the U.S. Federal judges in California and Texas drew on the “one-drop rule” of black racial classification to make Mexicans ineligible for naturalization, arguing that Mexicans, with strains of Indian blood, were nonwhite. Legal questions over the racial classification of Mexicans ended with the 1940 Nationality Act, which extended naturalized citizenship to indigenous races in the Western Hemisphere. But for Molina, the inconsistencies in federal court rulings were important to documenting the historic link between race and citizenship and how strategies developed to disenfranchise blacks were similarly...