Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 by Julie M. Weise (review)

Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 “recovers and recounts” the experiences of Mexican and Mexican American working people in the South while offering a framework for understanding “race, class, citizenship, and national belonging” in the region, and in the United States and Mexico more broadly (p. 3). By focusing on the changes brought by a diverse group of Mexicanos over a century, Julie M. Weise argues counterintuitively that “from the perspective of Mexican American history, there is no regional continuity of racial exclusion in the U.S. South” (p. 13).

Weise focuses on race and labor and links the experiences and mobilities of Mexican working people with the concurrent out-migration of white and black southerners. She explores the dynamic interplay between Mexican aspirations and struggles for autonomy in the South, and the responses of the array of southerners with whom they interacted. Weise correctly pitches the story at the granular, individual level and eschews any normative fusion of the perspectives of all the groups and institutional structures she examines.

This book has five case studies across time and space, focusing on New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta, the Arkansas Delta, rural Georgia, and Charlotte, North Carolina. Each chapter combines individual stories with an exploration of the social and economic lives of migrants in new systems of local culture and power. Weise touches on everything from sartorial choices to music, religion, spatiality of housing, labor structures, racial and class formations, and strategies of resistance. It is a complicated tale, which, if not as entirely innovative in coverage as it claims, is engagingly told.

Weise has done impressive transnational archival research in Mexico and across the United States, while tapping the large literature related to the southern themes with which her story intersects. She makes use of interviews and a fair number of images, which, for reasons that are not entirely clear, she terms “nontraditional forms of evidence ...to comprehend the imaginative lives that migrants led outside the surveillance of local, national, or international institutions” (p. 7). It is unclear why the use of oral histories, interviews, and images should be presented as a novel or transgressive approach when it is really quite common, especially in works examining contemporary eras and issues of migration and labor. Indeed, the same approach is readily apparent in the quite large interdisciplinary literature on Latino immigration to and experience in the South in the works of scholars like Altha J. Cravey, Holly R. Barcus, José María Mantero, Leon Fink, Hannah Gill, and Mary E. Odem, among many others too numerous to mention.

The photographs Weise has unearthed, including many from family collections, are striking. Some photographs are used in illuminating ways, such as in the arresting albums of farmworkers in Georgia. In other instances, the book indulges in unfortunate American studies–style approaches by investing pictures with a causal significance that is rather elusive or nonexistent. For example, in an otherwise persuasive and well-supported chapter on Charlotte, where “racial difference disrupted spaces imagined to be nearly all white,” Weise presents two elementary school class photographs and writes that the content of the pictures themselves produced changes (p. 181). Ironically, using these pictures in this manner invites a racial gaze that in some ways inadvertently echoes the discussion in the text.

Corazón de Dixie is an ambitious project, and it is accomplished with thorough research and clear writing. Weise resituates the history of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the South and within southern historiography to broaden understanding of the experience of Mexican working people across the region.