Mixed Race Studies

Mexipino: A History of Multiethnic Identity and the Formation of the Mexican and Filipino Communities of San Diego, 1900-1965

(From T-RACES: a Testbed for the Redlining Archives of California’s Exclusionary Spaces)

University of California, Santa Barbara
June 2007
488 pages

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University

A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfactions of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History

This dissertation examines how a Mexipino identity was forged through the historical interactions of Mexicans and Filipinos in San Diego, California during the years 1900 to 1965. It traces their initial interactions in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries under Spanish colonialism and the Acapuclo-Manila Galleon trade. This laid the foundations for early cultural exchanges. During the twentieth century, San Diego’s rising industries of agriculture, fish canning, construction, service oriented and defense related work, necessitated the need for cheap labor. Mexicans and Filipinos came in to fill that void.

Central to this study is how race and class were key components in the establishments of the Mexican and Filipino communities. Through racially restrictive covenants and other forms of discrimination, both groups were confined to segregated living spaces along with other racial and ethnic minorities. Within these spaces they built a world of their own through family and kin networks, social organizations, music, and other forms of entertainment. As laborers, race and gender were also central factors to their marginalization in the workforce. Their exploitation fueled their militancy. Both Mexicans and Filipinos formed labor unions, and often in coalition fought their employers for higher wages and better working conditions.

All of these historical conditions fostered the interrelationships between Mexicans and Filipinos. Given their shared historical past and cultural similarities these unions were highly successful. Their children, who I define as Mexipinos and Mexipinas, are the result of this long historical connection and the experiences that they collectively shared as community members, workers, and lovers. Mexipino children have also contributed to San Diego’s multiracial and multiethnic communities by living in two cultures, and in the process, forging a new identity for themselves. Their lives are the lens by which we see these two communities and the ways in which they interacted over generations to produce this distinct multiethnic experience.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Vita
Abstract
List of Tables
Introduction
Chapter 1: Historical Antecedents
Chapter 2: Immigration to a Rising Metropolis
Chapter 3: The Devil Comes to San Diego: Race, Space and the Formation of Multiracial and Multiethnic Communities
Chapter 4: Race, Gender and Labor Activism in San Diego
Chapter 5: Filipino-Mexican Couples and the Forging of a Mexipino Identity
Epilogue
Bibliography

List of Tables

Table 1 Estimated Number of Foreign Born White Mexicans in California Counties as of 1930
Table 2 Total Mexican Population in San Diego, 1900-1970
Table 3 Filipino Population Statistics
Table 4 Comparing the Mexican and Filipino Population in the United States,1925-1929
Table 5 Churches with Large Mexican, Filipino, and Other Nonwhite Parishioners

Between Hoax and Hope: Miscegenation and Nineteenth-Century Interracial Romance

Literature Compass
Volume 3, Issue 4 (July 2006)
pages 648–657
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00345.x

Katharine Nicholson Ings, Associate Professor of English
Manchester College, North Manchester, Indiana

This essay surveys recent scholarship on interracial romance during the nineteenth century using the hoax Miscegenation pamphlet of 1863 as a lens. An anonymous and ironic piece of writing that promoted race-mixing from a deceptively Republican perspective, Miscegenation coined the titular term, newly situating interracial relationships within a Latinate, pseudo-scientific framework. It also encouraged romance between white women and black men, an endorsement that was designed to enrage its white male readership but in fact gave hope to some white women who were unable to articulate their interracial desire publicly. Using this double focus, I explore how nineteenth-century authors of interracial romance borrowed the language of science, such as “hybridity” and “crossing”; how they employed the concept of “blood-mixing” as both sexual and medicinal (via transfusions); and I read the Miscegenation pamphlet as a kind of scientific romance fiction itself.

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Illegal fictions : white women writers and the miscegenated imagination 1857-1869 (E. D. E. N. Southworth, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Lydia Maria Child)

Indiana University
2000

Katharine Nicholson Ings, Associate Professor of English
Manchester College, North Manchester, Indiana

This dissertation examines how popular nineteenth-century white women writers depicted interracial romance in their fiction. I focus on E. D. E. N. Southworth, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Lydia Maria Child, authors who composed what I call illegal fictions, largely neglected works that explored the possibilities of interracial unions between blacks and whites. These authors, all abolitionists, denounce slavery in their works while simultaneously reflecting upon the limitations of the feminine roles that they were expected to play in society.

I approach their fictions through three critical lenses: racial theory, sentimental narrative theory, and biography to determine the implications of the hybrid individual, national, and textual identities present in the narratives and in the authors’ lives. On the one hand, these illegal fictions attempt to negotiate the tension between white women and black men and women, each of whom strove to be recognized as citizens. On the other hand, their fictions point to how the idea of miscegenation literally a mixing of races informed the creativity of these women authors during the years spanning the Civil War. At the imaginative level the authors offer visions of either a successful or failed multicultural America; at the generic level they engage in a blending of forms: slave narrative merges with the sentimental novel to initiate a dialogue between African and Caucasian American literary traditions.

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School Racial Composition and Biracial Adolescents’ School Attachment

Sociological Quarterly
Volume 51, Issue 1 (Winter 2010)
Published Online: 2010-01-15
Pages 150 – 178
DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-8525.2009.01166.x

Simon Cheng, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

Joshua Klugman, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Psychology
Temple University

Despite extensive research on multiracial youth in recent years, to date, no empirical studies have analyzed how racial context may affect biracial adolescents’ sense of belonging in a social institution beyond families. In this study, we examine how the racial makeup of the student body affects self-identified biracial adolescents’ school attachment. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that the proportions of white or black students in school significantly affect the school attachment of Hispanic/black, Asian/black, and American Indian/black biracial adolescents, but school racial composition in general has little influence on biracial adolescents with a partial-white identification (i.e., black/white, Hispanic/white, Asian/white, and American Indian/white). Our analyses also show that on average, students of most biracial groups display lower school attachment than their corresponding monoracial groups, but the differences from the monoracial groups with the lower school attachment are generally small. We discuss the implications of our findings for biracial adolescents’ perceived racial boundaries and contemporary American race relations.

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Demographic Knowledge and Nation-Building: The Peruvian Census of 1940

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Published online 2010-08-03
DOI: 10.1002/bewi.201001471

Raúl Necochea López
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Demographic Knowledge and Nation-Building: The Peruvian Census of 1940. The demographers who organized the 1940 census of Peru portrayed the increasingly mixed-race Peruvian population as indicative of the breaking down of cultural barriers to the emergence of a robust Peruvian identity, a process that, they claimed, would lead to greater national development. This paper analyzes the ways in which demographers constructed cultural heterogeneity as a potential national asset. This reveals how scientific knowledge of miscegenation affected the formation of a nationalist project in the second half of the twentieth century, and also how demographers’ ideological commitments to socialism shaped scientific practice.

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What’s in a name? An exploration of the significance of personal naming of ‘mixed’ children for parents from different racial, ethnic and faith backgrounds

The Sociological Review
Volume 56, Issue 1, February 2008
pages 39–60
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2008.00776.x

Rosalind Edwards, Professor in Social Policy
Families & Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow
Families & Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

This article is concerned with how and why parent couples from different racial, ethnic and faith backgrounds choose their children’s personal names? The limited literature on the topic of names often focuses on outcomes, using birth name registration data sets, rather than process. In particular, we consider the extent to which the personal names that ‘mixed’ couples give their children represent an individualised taste, or reflect a form of collective affiliation to family, race, ethnicity or faith. We place this discussion in the context of debates about the racial and faith affiliation of ‘mixed’ people, positing various forms of ‘pro’ or ‘post’ collective identity. We draw on in-depth interview data to show that, in the case of ‘mixed’ couple parents, while most wanted names for their children that they liked, they also wanted names that symbolised their children’s heritages. This could involve parents in complicated practices concerning who was involved in naming the children and what those names were. We conclude that, for a full understanding of naming practices and the extent to which these are individualised or affiliative it is important to address process, and that the processes we have identified for ‘mixed’ parents reveal the persistence of collective identity associated with race, ethnicity and faith alongside elements of individualised taste and transcendence, as well as some gendered features.

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The Racial Politics of Mixed Race

Journal of Social Philosophy
Volume 30, Issue 2, Summer 1999
pages 276–294
DOI: 10.1111/0047-2786.00018

Lisa Tessman, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies
Binghamton University, State University of New York

Recently there has been an increasing amount of attention given in academic, political, and popular settings in the United States to the experience and identities of mixed-race or multiracial people.  In the academic realm, there is a growing body of work that can generally be called mix-race racial theory, including, for instance, pieces anthologized in Maria P. P. Root’s 1992 and 1996 volumes Racially Mixed People in America and The Multiracial Experience, and Naomi Zack’s 1995 collection American Mixed Race.  There are also many popular autobiographical pieces about mixed race, several periodicals devoted to mixed-race people, a deluge of talk shows on the subject, and both local and national organizations that serve as support groups or political interest groups for mixed-race people.  Much of the more theoretical work emphasizes the issue of individual rights for mixed-race people—particularly the right to an “accurate” racial identity on forms such as the Census.  An enormous portion of the literature also analyzes the experiences of mixed-race individuals from a sociological or psychological point of view. Frequently the discussion of the rights of mixed-race people in fact draws upon the social scientific research that indicates that such things as the lack of opportunity to identify officially as mixed race or multiracial has detrimental effects on the self-concept, self-esteem, and development of mixed-race people, particularly children…

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The Geography of a Mixed-Race Society

Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban And Regional Policy
Volume 40, Issue 4 (December 2009)
Pages 565 – 593
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2257.2009.00501.x

William A. V. Clark, Professor of Geography
University of California, Los Angeles

Reagan Maas
University of California, Los Angeles

The pattern and level of separation among ethnic groups continues to change, and there are certainly more mixed neighborhoods both in cities and suburbs than two decades ago. The immigration flows of the past decade have substantially altered the ethnic mix and neighborhood mixing. In addition, multi-ethnic individuals themselves are altering the level of mixing among racial and ethnic groups. The research in this article shows that those who report themselves of more than one race have high levels of residential integration both in central cities and suburbs. These residential patterns can be interpreted as further evidence of tentative steps to a society in which race per se is less critical in residential patterning. The level of integration, for Asian mixed and black mixed is different and substantially higher than for those who report one race alone. The research in this article builds on previous aggregate studies of mixed-race individuals to show substantial patterns of integration in California’s metropolitan areas.

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