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Overview
Sex can be an oppressive force, a tool to shame, divide, and control a population. But it can also be a force for change, for the legal and physical challenge of inequity and injustice. In West of Sex, Pablo Mitchell uses court transcripts and criminal cases to provide the first coherent picture of Mexican-American sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century, and a truly revelatory look at sexual identity in the borderlands.
As Mexicans faced a rising tide of racial intolerance in the American West, some found cracks in the legal system that enabled them to assert their rights as full citizens, despite institutional hostility. In these chapters, Mitchell offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of ethnicity and power in the United States, placing ordinary Mexican women and men at the center of the story of American sex, colonialism, and belonging.
Other chapters discuss topics like prostitution, same-sex intimacy, sexual violence, interracial romance, and marriage with an impressive level of detail and complexity. Written in vivid and accessible prose, West of Sex offers readers a new vision of sex and race in American history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226532738 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 166 |
| File size: | 500 KB |
About the Author
Pablo Mitchell is associate professor of history and comparative American studies at Oberlin College. He is the author of Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880–1920.
Read an Excerpt
West of Sex
Making Mexican America, 1900–1930By PABLO MITCHELL
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2012 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-53269-1
Chapter One
Introduction
There's a restaurant chain in Pittsburgh with fancy Mexican food and a racist name. The chain advertised heavily, and one billboard was especially raunchy: "Take your tongue south of the border," it counseled passersby. I saw this billboard a lot when I lived in Pittsburgh and it always gave me a jolt, and a thrill.
"South of the border," of course, is Mexico, where tourists and outlaws on the run go, both seeking, in their own way, freedom: freedom from posses and overeager sheriffs, freedom from the banal and the boring. Mexico here is framed as a place of racial and national difference and, as the phrase suggests, culinary and sexual possibility.
"Take your tongue West" is not quite the same as "Take your tongue south of the border." Still, "goin' West" suggests a similar set of flights, from bad luck and bad choices, and similar new lands, marked by repeated ruptures in racial and sexual norms. The American West, after all, is considered (and has been for two centuries) America's most racially diverse and mottled region, and accounts of non-normative, even queer, sex in the West (prostitution, miscegenation, same-sex love and intimacy, bachelor societies, and widow land barons) threaten to outpace tales of pioneer families and straight homes on the ranges. At the same time, journeys West into novel racial and sexual lands help sustain, in productive contrast, the rest of America (the non-West) as racially pure and sexually temperate.
So too, south of the border, simultaneously foreign and erotic, promotes a vision of America as white, or at the very least non-Mexican, and sexually bland. Hence the jolt I always experienced upon seeing the billboard: Mexico and Mexican restaurants proclaimed as a destination for American consumers to enjoy lingual delights, pleasures of the tongue, food and, the ad lewdly suggests, otherwise. As a result, we have a billboard, one of many billboards, in a city not unlike many cities, that so elegantly captures a racial and sexual order that casts Mexico as a product to be consumed and Mexicans, and Mexican women specifically, as receptive, consumable, sexual objects.
But there is a slippage here, an incompleteness in the ad that leaves the owner of the lone (and perhaps lonely) tongue unnamed. We are accustomed to reading such absence of markers, the unmarked, as white and male and straight. But what if the unmarked tongue does not belong to a white, male, straight body? Perhaps the billboard offers something else as well. What if the tongue is of a brown and female body? Or what if the journey south is by a man toward another man or a woman toward another woman? This is the thrill that accompanied the jolt I received from the billboard. What if there was more to the billboard than simply the proclamation of Mexican foreignness and sexual difference?
I take two lessons, then, from the billboard. First, in speaking of sex, the billboard speaks of social order as well, specifically racial and national order. Second, sexualized actions of human bodies, real and imagined, with others and with oneself, can be unpredictable and exorbitant, overflowing even, and can produce unintended and unexpected results. Titillating tongues, even those designed to enforce hierarchies of race and nation, could speak of opposition as well as social and sexual order.
* * *
In the history of Western America, talk of sex was no less potent. A century ago, Westerners approached sex from many directions. Social reformers proclaimed the evils of prostitution while medical journals warned of syphilis and masturbation. Men having sex with men were hounded by police and their intimacies harshly condemned by the courts and the press. Intermarriages between those defined as "white," or Anglos, and those portrayed as nonwhite or racially different were similarly policed and reviled. In these sprawling and overlapping accounts of embodied impropriety and deviance, as such sexual discourses certainly were, distinctions of race and nation were rarely far behind.
Actions of human bodies, then as now, were basic to the elaboration of racial and national differences. American race relations and racial hierarchies, in fact, are incomprehensible without a serious examination of sexuality. Think of the image of the "black beast rapist," or the hyperfertile immigrant woman, or the Latin lover, or the demure warbride, or the effeminate Chinese man, and sexuality emerges in each case as integral to understanding race in America. Interracial sex, for example, has proved especially volatile in the country's history. One of the reasons fears of interracial sex were so acute is the capacity of sex between races to blur seemingly solid racial distinctions and hierarchies, suggesting, for instance, that members of one race could find fulfillment, sexual and otherwise, with members of another race, or that individuals themselves, especially the children of these interracial relationships, could be racially mixed. Sex has also played a critical role in deciding who can and who cannot claim American citizenship in both a strictly legal and a more broadly cultural sense. Respectable individuals from politicians and shopkeepers to schoolteachers and suffrage leaders have for centuries had to assert their sexual propriety in order to be seen as responsible and trustworthy citizens. Restrictions on entering the country have similarly targeted sexual "deviants," juxtaposing supposedly normal American citizens with the purportedly "unnatural" sexual customs of foreigners. Women accused of being prostitutes, in fact, were among the first individuals banned from immigrating to the United States.
Just as "taking your tongue south of the border" produced racial differences alongside sexual innuendo, so too did the production of sexual knowledge (the description, evaluation, and categorization of sexual acts) simultaneously enforce a range of social boundaries in the West. Among the most prominent of those boundaries originated with American colonialism in the region. American colonial rule in the West is pronounced: the appropriation and exploitation of Mexican and Native American property and resources, the enduring US military presence, the resettling, with ample government help, of Anglo families into new homes within this newly occupied land, the dependence on easily exploitable labor from subjugated and impoverished colonial subjects. For Mexicans specifically, American settler colonialism was underway in Texas, New Mexico, and California well before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, and Mexican loss of land accelerated throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, as did the reliance on the labor of Mexican women and men in the expanding agricultural, ranching, and industrial economies of the West. Exploitation and subordination did not cease with increased immigration from Mexico in the early twentieth century. In fact, historians have used terms like "imported colonialism" and "colonized labor" to describe Mexican immigration to the United States over the course of the past century.
The extension of American rule, however—whether as settler colonialism in the West or as imperial power overseas—was two-pronged. Dispossession and the many traumas of occupation were accompanied by a promise, though often deferred, of citizenship and eventual, though distantly imagined, civic inclusion. American colonial order, that is, though committed to vast seizures of land, the overthrow of native economies and cultures, and the supremacy of Anglo America, nonetheless also promoted itself as inclusionary. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century American colonial subjects (Native Americans, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, Mexicans) were depicted by a range of colonial elites as potentially achieving citizenship as long as they cultivated an assortment of correctly managed attributes, including civilized demeanor, deference to Anglo American superiority, and proper gender and sexual comportment. Vicious exploitation of people and resources could coexist, if uneasily, with tender promises of eventual incorporation into American society and citizenry.
For ethnic Mexicans, this unsteady balance of racial difference, on the one hand, and potential inclusion, on the other, was especially acute in the early twentieth century. The first three decades of the century was a period of dramatic growth in the West as industries expanded and the population of cities like Los Angeles swelled with newcomers from both inside and outside the US. Mexicans, whether native-born in the United States and with deep roots in the region or more recent immigrants, were central to this economic and demographic boom. Between 1900 and 1930, the ethnic Mexican population of the United States grew from 400,000 to 1.4 million. In 1900, most Mexicans lived in either Texas or New Mexico, comprising populations of 200,000 and 93,000, respectively. Another 50,000 lived in California, with nearly 40,000 in Arizona. Three decades later, the biggest Mexican populations were in Texas and California, and Mexicans were a significant presence in the states of Arizona and New Mexico.
As colonial subjects, Mexicans possessed important advantages within Anglo-dominated racial hierarchies in the West. While notions that only Anglos qualified as "true" Americans were prevalent, Mexicans nonetheless occupied an intermediate, middle-rung position along the region's racial hierarchy, below Anglo Americans certainly, but above African Americans, Native Americans, and at times Asian Americans. Mexican workers, for instance, formed the backbone of several critical industries in the West, like railroad construction and large-scale farming. They were also widely considered a religious people; as practicing Catholics, Mexicans were differentiated from most Asian immigrants and Native Americans, who were denounced as "heathens." Furthermore, US census categories listed Mexicans, tens of thousands of whom were American citizens who had been born in the United States, as "white" in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Valued workers, Christians, and "white" by government decree, Mexicans were largely exempt from laws banning marriages with "whites," and were allowed to own land, to become citizens, to vote, to run for office, and to testify against Anglos in courts of law. The appearance throughout the West of Anglo-run settlement programs that focused specifically on "Americanizing" Mexican women and men is testament to a widely held belief in the capacity of Mexicans to become—eventually, under careful Anglo tutelage—legitimate American citizens.
At the same time, Mexicans faced multiple hardships during the period—political and economic powerlessness, virulent legal and extralegal violence, widespread public denigration as disease-prone, unhygienic, and sexually deviant. In fact, marginalization of Mexicans seemed to accelerate between 1900 and 1930. Broader anti-immigrant legislation, such as the 1924 National Origins Act, and anti-labor crusades targeting "foreigners" converged with specific, often violent anti-Mexican campaigns like the forcible removal of Mexican miners from Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917, the Anglo terror inflicted on South Texas Mexicans in the 1910s, and the repatriation campaigns of the late 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, Mexicans, designated for decades as "white" in the United States, were reclassified racially as "Mexican" in the 1930 US census enumeration. Racial differentiation and exclusion, in other words, appeared on the rise in the early twentieth century, and Mexicans were prominent targets.
As forces of racial exclusion and differentiation seemed to overpower attempts to integrate and Americanize Mexicans, however, a range of ordinary Mexicans struggled to loosen the tightening racial boundaries in the borderlands and continued to press for the recognition and rights promised them as colonial subjects. This struggle to maintain rights appears with special clarity in the legal realm. For Mexicans, the colonial tender of citizenship, proclaimed first in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, promised that Mexicans remaining in the United States and "elect[ing] to become citizens of the United States" would be "incorporated into the Union of the United States, and be admitted at the proper time (to be judged of by the Congress of the United States) to the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States." In the decades that followed, Mexicans never ceased to press these claims in American courts. Spanish surnames, in fact, consistently appear in legal archives of the second half of the nineteenth century, in Mexican-initiated legal proceedings that ranged from lawsuits over land and voting rights to more ordinary appeals of convictions, writs of habeas corpus, and other sundry petitions and pleadings. 12 The legal system undoubtedly helped enforce racialized difference and, like other American colonial subjects—Native Americans, Hawaiians, and eventually Puerto Ricans and Filipinos—Mexicans suffered greatly under American rule. Mexicans nonetheless often appeared to approach access to the legal system as an important right, one to be both regularly exercised and heartily protected, and in doing so carved out from the law a space of potential inclusion and acceptance.
West of Sex extends this legacy of Mexican legal activism in the United States into the early twentieth century by exploring trial transcripts, some of them hundreds of pages in length, from appeals cases filed to higher courts in the West. During a period in which Mexicans were increasingly targeted as foreigners to American customs and culture and portrayed as unfit for full rights of citizenship, Mexicans appealed over a thousand criminal convictions to appeals courts in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Of the 953 criminal appeals heard by the California Supreme Court between 1900 and 1930, for instance, 41 involved Spanish-surnamed appellants, representing 4 percent of the total. In the Court of Appeal of California, between 1905 and 1930, 166 Spanish-surnamed individuals appealed convictions, accounting for 5 percent of the total criminal appeals (2,972) for that period. During the same period in Arizona, there were 78 Spanish-surnamed appellants (of 531 total) whose cases were heard by the Arizona Supreme Court. In New Mexico, 114 of 411 total criminal appeals (27 percent) decided by the New Mexico Supreme Court were initiated by Spanish-surnamed defendants between 1900 and 1930. In Texas, the number of Mexican appeals cases was even higher. Between 1900 and 1930, 677 Mexicans filed appeals before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, accounting for 4 percent of the nearly 19,000 total appeals cases heard by the court. While the appeals, taken together, were a small percentage of the tens of thousands of total appeals cases in the West, and percentagewise closely reflect the actual number of Mexicans in the West during the period (Mexicans accounted for between 5 and 10 percent of the total population in states like Texas and California), the cases, and the individual trials that I discuss, are nonetheless remarkable, offering a vivid record of the presence of Mexicans in the West in the early twentieth century.
Historians must approach such records with caution, of course. The trials I examine in this book are to an extent one-sided: as appeals cases, all the defendants, after all, were originally found guilty in their first trials. Most trial participants also have considerable interest in the outcome of a trial. Witnesses testify for the defendant or the prosecution, while lawyers draft arguments and induce testimony in the service of a particular verdict or outcome. The success or effectiveness of individual arguments is also difficult to assess. Case files often do not include the names of jurors, much less present their reasoning for deciding in favor of one verdict over another. A guilty verdict in a rape trial, for instance, could be the result of any number of factors (credibility of victim, persuasiveness of evidence, lack of credibility of defendant, absence of alibi, errors on the part of defense lawyers), and the historical record often offers few clues beyond the trial transcript itself to suggest which factor, or factors, in the end convinced the jury of the guilt of the accused. Moreover, the trials occurred in the midst of a critical period of the professionalization and standardization of the American legal system. The success of certain Mexican appellants in convincing judges of errors committed during their trials may have resulted as much from higher courts' attempts to discipline and control lower courts, and lower court judges, as from Mexicans' ability to present themselves as worthy citizens.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from West of Sex by PABLO MITCHELL Copyright © 2012 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsONE / Introduction
TWO / Colonial Convictions
THREE / Home Fires and Domesticity
FOUR / Uncommon Women and Prostitution
FIVE / Sexual Borderlands
SIX / Courtship and the Courts
Conclusion: From the Outskirts of Citizenship