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Introduction “How Do You Make the Invisible, Visible?” Locating Stories of Mexican Peoplehood My story of the Mexican past in the United States begins with a story of the Mexican present. During a long drive from Los Angeles International Airport to the high desert of Lancaster, California, in the summer of 2004, I saw a billboard that would haunt me for days. In bold black letters, the billboard simply stated: “Mexicans Are Leaving on May 14th.” What did this mean, I wondered? My question quickly went from intrigue to concern. Who produced the large billboard? Was it a new antiimmigrant group trying to prepare the public for a xenophobic proposition denying Mexicans the same rights as other American citizens, a reactionary position informed by the fact that Mexican people now make up over 50 percent of the population in Los Angeles? Or had the new California governor, Arnold “The Terminator” Schwarzenegger—who seems to have taken it upon himself to legislate Mexicans out of the state— sponsored it? Was the billboard a political call for a modern “repatriation ” of the entire Mexican people? This was, after all, California—a state that had been trying to “legally” get rid of its Mexicans since the Gold Rush and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. “Are all the Mexican people really leaving on May 14th?” I asked my wife in half-jest and half concern. Sardonically, she replied that what really bothered me was that I hadn’t received the invitation. She was right. I’d been away from California too long. It would be days before I found out that this controversial billboard was promoting the release of Mexican director Sergio Arau’s movie, A Day without a Mexican (Figure 1). On May 14th, in fact, I did leave my home, and, along with hundreds of thousands of other Mexicans across the coun1 try, went to the theaters to watch this poignant and modern story of Mexican peoplehood. The film evokes important historical questions about the political and racial location of Mexicans in the United States.1 Part satire, part social drama, the basic plot of the film develops when a mysterious fog surrounds California, and, in its wake, the Mexican people of the state literally disappear from the landscape. In the scenes that follow, the film shows the varying political, economic, and cultural losses that result from the mysterious disappearance of millions of Mexicans. Arau’s film, then, is a paradoxical story. Despite the literal disappearance of Mexican people from the screen, it is, in the end, a story about the ideological processes in white America that inform the marginalized, modern position of Mexicans in the United States and the normalizing factors that influence the symbolic and real disappearance of Mexican “people” as political actors from the stage of democratic culture. That is, it reveals the colonial project hidden within the discourses surrounding the liberal concept of “the people.” In this way, A Day without a Mexican is a self-reflexive meditation on the colonial logic that has historically constituted Mexicans as political nonentities, personae non gratae, which has led to a modern ambivalence surrounding Mexican collectivity in the United States. In The Emergence of Mexican America, I set out to recover important cultural works that emerged in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century U.S. democratic culture2 that constitute what I am calling “stories of Mexican peoplehood.”3 Building on the foundational work of Critical Race scholars Richard Delgado and Carl Gutiérrez-Jones and political philosopher Rogers Smith, I argue that “stories” in democratic cultures inform the productive and reproductive logic of political “people-making” itself (Delgado 1989; Gutiérrez-Jones 2001; Smith 2003). Stories of Mexican peoplehood, then, are cultural narratives that represent the norms and ideals associated with collectivity in democratic nation-states. By telling their stories, the Mexicans of this study enter the public sphere and transform the very contours of democractic culture that had affected their constitution in the United States as personae non gratae.4 My study of nineteenth - and early-twentieth-century stories of Mexican peoplehood is not only an archival recovery of the early emergence of Mexican cultural narratives in the United States but also an examination of the people-making endeavor that works in relation with the development of Mexican cultural production in the national public spheres from 1821 to 1939.5 I am interested in cultural works that facilitate Mexican peoples’ selfunderstanding as a racialized...

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