Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants: A Texas History (review)

In Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants anthropologist Martha Menchaca takes a historical and regional approach to issues of naturalization and citizenship, focusing on South Texas. Though she necessarily includes discussion of national immigration law and practice, she focuses on this region because in the nineteenth-century citizenship records were kept at the state level and most Mexicans in the United States resided in Texas. Nevertheless, she asserts that “international policy influences the attitudes of dominant groups” (9) in allowing for the acquisition of citizenship, a thesis that allows her study to have more general implications. Although much has been written about the rights of immigrants, Menchaca’s book compels us to realize that anything less than full citizenship undermines human rights.

The author organizes this regional study by chapter, moving the whole narrative chronologically from 1848 to the present, focusing primarily on events to 1930. Early she notes that Mexicans did not gain naturalization rights through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Even though citizenship was granted to those remaining in the conquered territory, only two hundred or so immigrants naturalized over the next twenty years due to state restrictions on nonwhite citizenship. During the liberal period of Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Naturalization Treaty of 1868 established that Mexicans qualified for citizenship despite their generally mestizo heritage. From the late 1880s to 1910, increasing immigration and the Spanish-American War led nativist movements to restrict the naturalization of Mexicans. The subsequent Mexican Revolution did not improve matters. In Chapter 5 women’s naturalization issues take center stage as the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920. Chapter 6 relates earlier themes to the present in a necessary, but less than effective conclusion as Menchaca unfortunately hastens to the finish.

Despite some problems with organization, the ideas are themselves compelling because Menchaca relates them to current controversies over immigration. The recent “birther movement” that challenged President Barack Obama’s citizenship and contemporary attempts to deny citizenship to the Mexican-American children of “illegal aliens” have roots extending to the Naturalization Act of 1790, which stated that only white immigrants could become citizens. Some Americans have always wanted the United States to remain a white man’s country. Only gradually have such racial qualifications modified. While one may disagree with her political positions, she clearly establishes the long connection between racial ideas and citizenship, challenging readers to see that attacks on the undocumented have often masked attacks on racially distinct citizens.

Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants exhibits solid research. A full bibliography, parenthetical citations, and content endnotes reveal an impressive array of primary and secondary sources. Curiously absent, however, is Richard Griswold del Castillo’s Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1990), a critically important history concerning Mexican American citizenship. Mainly historical rather than anthropological in method, Menchaca’s book rests on archival sources that are political in nature, such as court cases and statutes, rather than on participant observation or cultural interpretation. Because her focus is on Texas, she stresses state naturalization records before centralization of the process by Washington in 1906. Appendices carefully explain the implications of her methodology; a map, tables, and other illustrations dispersed throughout the book reinforce the author’s research and argument in context.

Technical, even quantitative at times, Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants may lose a general audience. The book nevertheless deserves the attention of professors, graduate students, and anyone else interested in the significance of naturalization and citizenship to human equality.