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Reviewed by:
  • Mexicans in the Making of America by Neil Foley
  • Grace Peña Delgado
Mexicans in the Making of America. By Neil Foley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014, 344 pp. $29.95).

Mexicans in the Making of America is a substantial achievement. Foley, a former Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Woodrow Wilson fellow and author of The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (1998) and Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity (2010), turns his attention towards a synthetic history of Chicana/Chicano history in his latest book. In Mexicans in the Making of America, Foley deftly threads immigration and nativism through nearly two hundred years of tumultuous history between Americans, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans. The longue durée, as Foley's book shows, expresses what local and short-term histories cannot: that continuous immigration from Mexico into the United States produced a transnational diplomatic terrain where some leveraging of political rights materialized for Mexicans. In Foley's view, the partial fulfillment of these rights is traceable to the reluctance on the part of the United States to acknowledge its composite culture of racially blended peoples. The collective struggles by Mexicans for racial and social equality, as Mexicans in the Making of America argues, has shaped US culture into something more democratic, egalitarian, accepting of difference, and, in Foley's words, "more American."

Mexicans in the Making of America begins with a presentist view of American immigration and nativism, which is thrown into sharp relief when Foley reminds us that Mexicans were among the first inhabitants of what eventually became the United States. They, along with Native Americans, share an original history of settlement and landownership that was subject to successive conquests between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries: by Spain in 1521; by the republic of Texas in 1836; and, finally, by the United States in 1848 and 1854. Paradoxically, as Foley shows, Mexican-descent peoples living in the United States can be both immigrants and descendants of original Spanish and Mexican families with land-grant concessions. But rightful claims to land and a primordial presence in what became the American Southwest meant little to nothing against the racialization of Mexicans that would follow. After Anglo conquest of the Mexican north, argues Foley, Hispanophilia and the "Spanish Fantasy Heritage" worked to elevate European culture over the indigeneity of Mexican blood. Foley's focus on Hispanophilia and the Spanish Fantasy Heritage, rather than the political history of successive conquests, allows him to bring in a host of forces that would not normally appear in syntheses, most notably the racialized logic for Mexicans to become "Spanish." What Foley finds in the late-nineteenth century American Southwest was a place no less forgiving of dark-skinned people than the American South.

To continue along these same lines, Foley, in a provocative interpretive shift, contends that the 1920s congressional debates on immigration restriction set the stage for the 1930s census category of "Mexican" to emerge for the first and only time in US history. It was, as Foley asserts, a category not meant to recognize and measure the importance of an emerging minority group but rather an opportunity to distinguish and then classify "white Mexicans" from "non-white Mexicans." Foley extends this narrative about citizenship and whiteness by making clear that when it came to racial inclusion, Anglos rarely considered Mexicans as racially white and, in several instances, challenged their claims to [End Page 205] naturalization in court. The legal challenge of Timoteo Andrade v. Buffalo, New York (1935) threw into confusion national laws and common understandings that Mexicans were white. In a move away from conventional legal thinking, Federal Judge John Knight ruled that Andrade was "not a free white person" as defined by Section 359, Title 8, of the United States Code, which accorded naturalization for "aliens being free white persons, [or African]." Most Mexican nationals, asserted Knight, were also ineligible for naturalization due to their race, an unequivocal decision that stood out against the uncertain deliberations of policy makers and immigration officials. Andrade's petition for naturalization was eventually granted when Knight's decision was summarily overturned, but the spirit of Knight's...

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