Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans

Chapter 1: Racial Foundations

1 Racial Foundations Textual Politics I begin the Mexican Americans’ racial history with an overview of their racial foundations. First, however, I offer a critique on why academics have dismissed this theme as a significant area of research. My aim is to illustrate the textual politics of neglect. The recovery of the Mexican Americans’ prehistory has largely been neglected due to lack of interest on the part of mainstream archaeologists and anthropologists. In 1988, when Dr. Fred Valdez and I began teaching our class on the indigenous heritage of the Mexican Americans , the only anthropological source we found that specifically made interconnections between Mexican Americans and prehistorical peoples was the text by James Diego Vigil, From Indians to Chicanos: The Dynamics of Mexican American Culture (1980/1984).1 Vigil was part of the first cohort of Mexican American anthropologists who obtained doctoral degrees in the early 1970s and initiated the recovery of the Mexican Americans’ history and prehistoric past. Prior to that time, only a few Mexican Americans had been admitted to U.S. universities (Rosaldo 1985). Among the first to obtain doctoral degrees were Octavio Romano-V and Thomas Weaver (American Anthropological Association 1999). They were soon joined by Renato Rosaldo, Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, and James Diego Vigil. These pioneering anthropologists approached the study of Mexican Americans from a historical perspective and began challenging the social science assumption that poverty among Mexican Americans was an outcome of their dysfunctional culture. In a 1968 article Octavio Romano-V urgently called upon Mexican American students—and any person who opposed racism—to contest stereotypic and racist propaganda against his people. In ‘‘The Anthro14 pology and Sociology of the Mexican-Americans: The Distortion of Mexican American History,’’ Romano-V asserted that Anglo-American scholars were generating deficit-thinking discourses in efforts to blame Mexican Americans for the social and economic problems generated by Anglo-American racism. He charged that these scholars, particularly anthropologists , ignored the way in which racism historically had been used by Anglo Americans to obstruct the social, economic, and political mobility of Mexican-origin people. Romano-V argued that Mexican Americans were studied ahistorically in order to ignore the vestiges of Anglo-American racism—such as segregation, employment discrimination , racist laws, and police violence. By treating Mexican Americans ahistorically, he asserted, anthropologists conjured an image of them as an immigrant and peasantlike group who had not contributed to the nation’s infrastructure culturally, technologically, or architecturally. Their antiquity in the Southwest was strategically ignored. Romano-V’s article was widely read and influenced the future direction of Mexican American scholarship (Paredes 1978; Rosaldo 1985). Since then most social scientists, including anthropologists, have approached the study of Mexican Americans from a historical and (post)structural perspective, examining the impact of institutional discrimination on the Mexican American family, individual, and ethnic group. Though Romano-V and other scholars successfully dismantled most social-scientific myths claiming that familism, Catholicism, honor, and machismo were the basis of the Mexican Americans’ economic problems, the number of Mexican American graduate students accepted into anthropology doctoral programs did not steadily rise. The traditional failure of anthropology departments to recruit and admit Mexican American graduate students is reflected in the ethnic composition of the discipline. In 1996 less than 3 percent of full-time faculty in anthropology departments were of Hispanic descent, and most of these were not of Mexican origin (Givens and Jabloski 1996:5). To this day there are still few Mexican American anthropologists, and Vigil’s book continues to be the only anthropological source on the Mexican Americans’ ancient origins. In his book entitled The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992) historian David Weber offers observations similar to those of Octavio Romano-V: though abundant literature on the U.S. Southwest has been produced, traditional mainstream scholars have distorted or neglected to recognize the Mexican Americans’ historic roots in the Southwest. Racial Foundations 15 Weber argues that this omission has been the result of a political act and a reflection of the power Anglo Americans have in the production of United States history. According to Weber, since the early nineteenth century Mexicans and Spaniards have been historically situated as villains and savage overlords of the southwestern Indians. This portrayal allowed nineteenth and early twentieth century Anglo-American historians to justify the U.S. government’s annexation of Mexico’s northern...