Whiteness on the Border

Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White

Lee Bebout

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479883288
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

The many lenses of racism through which the white imagination sees Mexicans and Chicanos Historically, ideas of whiteness and Americanness have been built on the backs of racialized communities. The legacy of anti-Mexican stereotypes stretches back to the early nineteenth century when Anglo-American settlers first came into regular contact with Mexico and Mexicans. The images of the Mexican Other as lawless, exotic, or non-industrious continue to circulate today within US popular and political culture. Through keen analysis of music, film, literature, and US politics, Whiteness on the Border demonstrates how contemporary representations of Mexicans and Chicano/as are pushed further to foster the idea of whiteness as Americanness.
Illustrating how the ideologies, stories, and images of racial hierarchy align with and support those of fervent US nationalism, Lee Bebout maps the relationship between whiteness and American exceptionalism. He examines how renderings of the Mexican Other have expressed white fear, and formed a besieged solidarity in anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. Moreover, Whiteness on the Border elucidates how seemingly positive representations of Mexico and Chicano/as are actually used to reinforce investments in white American goodness and obscure systems of racial inequality. Whiteness on the Border pushes readers to consider how the racial logic of the past continues to thrive in the present.

1

What Did They Call Them after They Called Them “Greasers”?

A Genealogy and Taxonomy of the Mexican Other

Oscar Martínez: Okay, Michael. Both my parents were born in Mexico. And, uh, they moved to the United States a year before I was born.

Michael Scott: Yeah.

Oscar: So I grew up in the United States.

Michael: Wow.

Oscar: My parents are Mexican.

Michael: Wow, that is a great story. That’s the American Dream right there, right?

Oscar: Thank you.

Michael: So let me ask you, is there a term besides “Mexican” that you prefer? Something less offensive.

Oscar: Mexican isn’t offensive.

Michael: Well, it has certain connotations.

Oscar: Like what?

Michael: Like, well, I don’t know.

Oscar: What connotations, Michael?

—“Diversity Day,” The Office, season 1, episode 2

A basic precept of this critical endeavor: the figure of the Mexican Other has long been and continues to be central to the formation of whiteness on the border. For some, this may be a mundane statement—of course, there is a long tradition of Mexican stereotyping in the U.S. racial project. For others, this precept verges upon disciplinary and political heresy. As I began thinking through this project over the past few years, I spoke with family, friends, and colleagues. For some, the reaction was of obvious agreement. Others offered strenuous objections: “Really, aren’t you overstating the matter. Whiteness was actually constructed against blackness. Historically, depictions of Mexican Americans have not been as central” or “Surely, attitudes about Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Mexico have changed over the past two hundred years. You can’t really lump these depictions together, can you?” Regarding the first objection, it rests on the logic of hierarchy. I would not advance the displacement of one pole of the racial dyad for another, substituting brown for black. Paraphrasing Richard Rodriguez, the heart of the U.S. racial imagination is a scary place to which no one should want to lay claim.1 However, white supremacy has thrived through not simply a singular binary but a set of interlocking binaries that form a multidirectional network of differential racialization. This project simply seeks to identify one binary—brown-white—in contribution toward a larger antiracist scholarly effort. As for the second disciplinary response that attitudes toward Mexicans have shifted over time, the purpose of this chapter is to identify, describe, and theorize the figuration of the Mexican Other, offering a genealogy and a taxonomy that form the intellectual foundation for the critical analyses of later chapters. To do this, one may find a useful point of departure in the concluding pages of Arnoldo de León’s critical study They Called Them Greasers.

In the conclusion of his study of Anglo-Texan attitudes toward their Mexican/Mexican American countrymen, de León finds significant changes in race relations in the twentieth century:

Sometime in the fifteen years after World War II, attitudes toward race, “depravity,” loyalty, and other aspects of prejudice underwent a visible change. . . . Legalized segregation ended, political mechanisms designed to obstruct voting toppled, and it became unpopular to be racist publically. . . . If our times are compared with the nineteenth century, Anglo Americans do not regard Mexican Americans as they did in the past. . . . Mexican Americans may no longer be suspected of being un-American, but ethnic slurs and racial epithets carry connotations that they are far from being WASPs. And even if Tejanos are no longer lynched, they are victims of psychological violence in the more subtle forms of discrimination.2

De León suggests that a broad-based Chicano movement and other freedom struggles as well as greater integration have led to improved relations. However, he is far from advancing the notion of a postracial utopian moment. He tempers his findings with another observation: “Still, many Anglos judge Mexican Americans not by their character, but by the difference they see between themselves and Tejanos.”3 How does one make meaning from de León’s two-part conclusion? Are the two points inherently contradictory? Do they suggest a progress narrative where the dream of Martin Luther King that de León invokes through judging based on “character” has yet to be achieved?

It would be wise to situate de León’s analysis within the framework Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s concept of racial formation. Omi and Winant contended that race and racism were not fixed transhistorical forces. Race and racism are manifested out of specific historical moments and exigencies. In this way, the discourse and logics of race change over time. Thusly, according to Omi and Winant, following the civil rights struggles of the mid-twentieth century, overt racist discourse and acts have fallen from favor.4 That is, explicit notions of white supremacy rooted in biological differences have largely given way to discourses of cultural and individual deficiencies that explain away racial inequalities. More recently, Winant has advanced the notion of the “racial break,” a global realignment of the racial order wherein white supremacy has incorporated discourses of color blindness, meritocracy, and personal freedom to maintain and advance inequality.5 Taking Omi and Winant’s theorization into account, it is tempting to signify upon de León’s title and ask, “What did they call them after they called them ‘greasers’?” Or more aptly, “What do they call them now?” Embedded within these questions exists the dynamic tension between historical continuity and change.

In stating that the figure of the Mexican Other has long been and continues to be central to the formation of whiteness on the border, I am not suggesting that little has changed since the early nineteenth century. However, I am contending that scholars must not be swept away with the romance of historical change that could blind us to the longue durée of the U.S. racial project. Empire building and race making vis-à-vis white supremacy have been part of the United States since its inception, and together they form the U.S. racial project. While they have certainly changed modes of expression over the years—from settler colonialism and military conquest to economic imperialism and from biological to cultural and neoliberal legitimating discourses of white supremacy—the U.S. racial project continues today. Moreover, empire building and race making converge in whiteness on the border where whiteness is Americanness, and the nation-state is imagined as a racial state.

Reading de León in the context of the early twenty-first century, I cannot share his tempered optimism. It may well be déclassé to use racial pejoratives like “greaser,” but as the epigraph from the popular television program The Office identifies and satirizes, those negative meanings have been attached to more neutral-sounding signifiers. That is, why use pejoratives like “greaser” when the negative connotations course through and charge “Mexican” with abundant racial meaning? In this way, it is not simply that Anglo-American racial attitudes have “softened” over time. Rather, in the post-break United States, white supremacy has disappeared into the air we breathe, making it more difficult to identify and thus more complicated to challenge. For example, when buying our first home in Maricopa County, Arizona, my partner and I noticed that several potential neighbors decorated their front yards with ceramic statues of sleeping Mexicans, eyes covered by a large sombrero and body wrapped in a serape. The neighborhood in which we purchased our first home used this iconic southwestern image of white supremacy on the paving stones for many of the houses built in the early 1980s. Today, the overtly racist trope of the lazy Mexican has been repackaged as lawn decoration and exhibitions of a southwestern aesthetic.

Despite the apparent “softening” of racial attitudes at the symbolic level, we must not overlook how Mexican-descent people remain subject to the various violent manifestations of white supremacy in the United States. In recent years, the United States has been embroiled in yet another immigration debate and its corresponding nativist backlash. States like Arizona, Indiana, and Alabama have begun instituting and enforcing their own immigration laws. In 2014, Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department, known for using a “volunteer posse,” were found to have historically violated the constitutional rights of Latinas/os through years of racial profiling. Moreover, hate crimes against Latinas/os, particularly Mexican Americans, have increased.6 Consider the heart-rending story of David Ritcheson, a Mexican American teenager from Texas who in 2006 was beaten, tortured, and sodomized for five hours by two white high school students. After Ritcheson kissed a white girl, the assailants hurled racial slurs at him, sodomized him with PVC pipe, attempted to carve a swastika into Ritcheson’s chest, and doused his body in bleach. The case made national headlines, and Ritcheson agreed to make his name public and testify before the U.S. House of Representatives. The lasting impact and trauma of the attack and being seen as “that kid” contributed to Ritcheson taking his own life a year after the event, signaling the way in which violence of the assault did not conclude in the early morning hours of April 22, 2006.7 Should we not consider Ritcheson and many others as victims of lynching in the postracial era?8 Doubters might suggest that I overreact—surely, these are but aberrant and abhorrent acts. My historically trained brethren may call me a “presentist.” However, reading They Called Them Greasers in this context, I find de León’s conclusion less a narrative of progress with teleological impulses toward a postracial utopia. Rather, in de León’s final pages exists the dynamic tension between continuity and change, which function as the twin engines of historiography.

Figure 1.1. A paving stone with the sleeping Mexican motif illustrates how racialized depictions infiltrate mundane outdoor aesthetics. Photo by author.

Importantly, the emphasis of change over continuity need not be a progressive narrative. Drawing upon Winant’s theorization of the racial break and the endurance of white supremacy in the twenty-first century, Jodi Melamed offers an intellectual and political history of racial capitalism after World War II. Melamed examines literary texts to expose how writing by racially aggrieved communities can be deployed as part of official state antiracist projects that ultimately render invisible the oppressive link between race and capital. As Melamed traces the shifts from racial liberalism to liberal multiculturalism to neoliberal multiculturalism, the arc of historical change is far from progressive. Through its adaptations over the years, white supremacy has become harder to identify and contest.9 In this way, Melamed finds common ground with Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and other scholars who have rightly noted that while white supremacy thrives today, it does so often under the radar of its beneficiaries—repackaged, it is embedded in the dominant cultural logics, making it more difficult to pinpoint and challenging to disrupt.

In order to contend that the figure of the Mexican Other has long been and continues to be central to the formation of whiteness on the border, this chapter is organized into two complementary sections. To begin, I offer a genealogy of the Mexican Other. Then, the chapter concludes with a taxonomy, a working system to classify the tropes of the Mexican Other and how they function to construct whiteness. Over the past two decades, there has been a growing body of scholarship concerning U.S. representations of Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans. Because of disciplinary conventions, however, these works have largely emerged independently from one another, potentially exacerbating the potential for the Mexican Other to be both ubiquitous and elusive.10 By reading these works beside and against each other, this genealogy offers at least three essential outcomes. First, it traces the continuities and changes in the Mexican Other over a vast historical sweep, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Second, this genealogy identifies a lineage of scholarship that courses through and beyond Chicana/o studies. Ultimately, this growing scholarly tradition lays the foundation for the later chapters of this project and turning the critical gaze from representations of Mexican-descent people to how those representations forge manifestations of whiteness. Finally, fostering a conversation between seemingly isolated texts allows the theoretical insights of scholars like Arnoldo de León, Shelley Streeby, William Nericcio, Leo Chavez, and others to placed beside and against one another and extrapolated beyond the chronological or methodological boundaries of their studies. If the genealogy offers a rough chronological sweep of scholarship and representation, the taxonomy that follows moves tropologically. This section identifies disparate representations of Mexico, Mexicans, and Chicanas/os in order to briefly explore how they have functioned vis-à-vis whiteness across time. From the early nineteenth century to the present day, the Mexican Other has been figured through tropes of the Infernal Paradise; the Violent, Savage Mexican; the Lawless Mexican; the Erotic, Exotic Mexicana; the Nonindustrious Mexican; the Mexican Invasion; and others. Beyond simply identifying trends of white supremacy, I contend that reading tropologically provides a necessary strategy for considering and working against the resilience of these racial hauntings. That is, recognizing the continuity and change between contemporary depictions of the Mexican Other and their nineteenth- and twentieth-century forebears is foundational to building antiracist strategies.

A Genealogy of the Mexican Other; or, Constructing a Burkean Parlor

The existing scholarship on the Mexican Other has yet to be placed in a full, dynamic conversation. Many of these works derive from distinct disciplinary traditions—from literary studies and history to film studies and anthropology—but they can all be positioned within the scholarly traditions of Chicana/o studies and American studies. Perhaps inadvertently cleaving the fields from one another, many of these works locate the origins of the Mexican Other in the material conditions and political exigencies of the time under examination. In other words, these scholarly works emphasize the depictions of Mexican-descent people within specific historical moments and thus implicitly reinforce an emphasis on change over time. U.S. settlement and conquest, capitalist expansion, and the development of the print industry, railroads, and photography gave shape and substance to renderings of Mexican-descent peoples. Consider William Nericcio’s innovative Tex{t}-Mex. Nericcio opens his examination by historicizing the image of the Mexican in the U.S. imagination.11 For Nericcio, the years of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) were critical. During that time not only did the United States occupy Mexico and engage in an eleven-month punitive expedition in a quest for Pancho Villa, but also the popularization of photography and the postcard led to the mass transborder circulation of images of Mexico and Mexicans.12 For Nericcio, this ocular currency sets the stage for later Hollywood figurations of the Mexican. Nericcio’s focus on the visual and historical confluence structures his argument. But what happens when the critical gaze moves from these images to their word-image predecessors? In American Sensations, Shelley Streeby locates the origins of the Hollywood Mexican not in postcards and the Mexican Revolution but in U.S. expansion and the sensational literature...