New from the University of California Press:
Natalia Molina,
How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Nov. 2013). The Press describes the book as follows:
How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans—from 1924,
when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United
States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished—to understand how broad
themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the
emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime,
which defined the racial categories that continue to influence
perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and
ethnicity.
Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of
influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail.
Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to
immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is
socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to
other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts,
which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are
linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.
A few blurbs:
"Molina provides a fresh, sophisticated analysis of the powerful racial
'scripts' generated in twentieth-century US political and legal culture,
and of the Mexican population's unique vulnerability in the 1920s and
after as eminently 'deportable.' This book's importance is sadly
substantiated by twenty-first-century headlines about immigration
policy, 'papers please' laws, and urban policing. A critical
contribution." --Matthew Frye Jacobson
"A compelling, briskly written, deeply researched, and closely argued
book that makes signal contributions on many fronts." --David Roediger
More information is available
here.
