Mixed Race Studies

Blurred Borders for Some but not “Others”: Racialization, “Flexible Ethnicity,” Gender, and Third-Generation Mexican American Identity

Sociological Perspectives
Volume 53, Number 1 (Spring 2010)
Pages 45–72
DOI: 10.1525/sop.2010.53.1.45

Jessica M. Vasquez, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Kansas

How are the lives of middle-class third-generation Mexican Americans both racialized and gendered? Third-generation Mexican Americans in California experience a racialization process continuum that extends from “flexible ethnicity,” the ability to be considered an “insider” in different racial/ethnic communities, to racialization as nonwhite that is enforced through the deployment of negative stereotypes. Using interview data, the author finds that women are afforded more “flexible ethnicity” than men. Accordingly, men are more rigorously racialized than women. Women are racialized through exoticization, whereas men are racialized as threats to safety. Lighter skinned individuals escaped consistent racialization. These findings have consequences for the incorporation possibilities of later-generation Mexican Americans, as women and light-skinned (often multiracial) individuals are more frequently granted “flexible ethnicity” and less strongly racialized than men and dark-skinned (often monoracial) individuals. Even among the structurally assimilated, contemporary racial and gender hierarchies limit the voluntary quality of ethnicity among third-generation Mexican Americans.

Read or purchase the article here.

Some Observations on Identity Problems in Children of Negro-White Marriages

Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease
Volume 146, Issue 3 (March 1968)
pages 249-256

Joseph D. Teicher (1912-2000)
University of Southern California School of Medicine

The Los Angeles County General Hospital population includes every case, and, inevitably, many Negro-white families present themselves for service at the hospital’s Child Psychiatry Unit. The problems of the children in these families are directly related to the fact that one parent is Negro and the other Caucasian. Such comments as “Any white woman who marries a Negro man is sick!” and “The children are always a mess!” are common, and yet no systematic research has been done in this area. As some of the unit’s staff began to explore the special problems of the children of Negro-white marriages, they became interested in refining the methods of studying these interracial families. The report that follows presents, in brief, a statement of the problem, a review of the literature, three case histories and a description of the study now in progress.

Read or purchase the article here.

Blaxican Identity: An Exploratory Study of Blacks/Chicanas/os in California

National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Annual Conference
35th Annual Conference
2008-04-01
11 pages

Rebecca Romo
University of California, Santa Barbara

This paper explores the life experiences of Blaxicans, or multiracial individuals who are the products of unions that are composed of one biological (or birth) parent who is identified and designated as Mexicana/o or Chicana/o, and one parent who is identified and designated as African American or Black. Most research on racial intermarriage and multiracial offspring in the United States has concentrated on European American unions with African Americans or other people of color and their descendants. Research on “dual-minority unions” and their offspring is scant (Wallace 2001). The examination of how identity formation operates among multiracial offspring whose biological parents are non-white is limited and informs the basis of this investigation of Blaxican identity. In this introduction, I discuss the literature related to Blaxican identity, including: Black identity, Chicana/o identity, and dual-minority multiracial identity. The goal of this paper is to investigate how mixed-race Black and Chicana/o individuals racially identify and to examine the processes that influenced their decision of racial self-identification.

Read the entire paper here.

Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans

Temple University Press
May 1992
352 page
6×9
Paper EAN: 978-1-56639-202-0, ISBN: 1-56639-202-0
Cloth EAN: 978-0-87722-890-5, ISBN: 0-87722-890-6
Electronic Book: EAN: 978-1-43990-364-3

Karen Isaksen Leonard, Professor of Anthropology
University of California, Irvine

This is a study of the flexibility of ethnic identity. In the early twentieth century, men from India’s Punjab province came to California to work on the land. The new immigrants had few chances to marry. There were very few marriageable Indian women, and miscegenation laws and racial prejudice limited their ability to find white Americans. Discovering an unexpected compatibility, Punjabis married women of Mexican descent and these alliances inspired others as the men introduced their bachelor friends to the sisters and friends of their wives. These biethnic families developed an identity as “Hindus” but also as Americans. Karen Leonard has related theories linking state policies and ethnicity to those applied at the level of marriage and family life. Using written sources and numerous interviews, she invokes gender, generation, class, religion, language, and the dramatic political changes of the 1940s in South Asia and the United States to show how individual and group perceptions of ethnic identity have changed among Punjabi Mexican Americans in rural California.

Read chapter 1 here.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Part I: Introduction
  • 1. Exploring Ethnicity
• Part II: The World of the Pioneers
  • 2. Contexts: California and the Punjab
  • 3. Early Days in the Imperial Valley
  • 4. Marriages and Children
  • 5. Male and Female Networks
  • 6. Conflict and Love in the Marriages
• Part III: The Construction of Ethnic Identity
  • 7. Childhood in Rural California
  • 8. The Second Generation Comes of Age
  • 9. Political Change and Ethnic Identity
  • 10. Encounters with the Other
  • 11. Contending Voices
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The Punjabi Mexican American community, the majority of which is localized to Yuba City, California is a distinctive cultural phenomenon holding its roots in a migration pattern that occurred almost a century prior. The first meeting of these cultures occurred in the Imperial Valley in 1907, near the largest irrigation system in the Western hemisphere…

Wikipedia

HapaSC: A Place Multiracial Call Home

Campus Circle News
Los Angeles, California
2010-08-16

Stephanie Forshee

Multiracial students at USC [University of Southern California] like Lauren Perez are devoting time to create a place where you can express every part of yourself. HapaSC is an organization of about 30 USC students that raises awareness for “mixed” students on campus and allows them an opportunity to embrace world change.

The phrase “hapa haole” means “half.” The term was originally used to describe people who were half Asian/Pacific Islander and half Caucasian. It has now been shortened to just “hapa.” HapaSC’s purpose is to create awareness for the rapid expansion of multiracial people. 

“We understand that identity is something you can choose and it’s always developing, so we don’t put people in a box,” says Perez, last school year’s public relations officer…

Read the entire article here.

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

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.

Read the entire article here.

American Mestizo: Filipinos and Antimiscegenation Laws in California

University of California, Davis Law Review
Volume 33, Number 44 (2000)
pages 795-835

Leti Volpp, Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley

This essay interprets the legal history of efforts to prohibit intermarriage between Filipino men and white women in the state of California in the 1920s and 30s. I do this through examining both public discourse and legal discourse, in the form of advisory opinions of the California State Attorney General and the Los Angeles County Counsel, litigation in Los Angles Superior Court and the California Court of Appeals, and state legislation.

Much scholarship examines antimiscegenation laws through the lens of presumptive heterosexuality, and gives enormous explanatory power to race in a way that ignores the role of class and gender. This paper argues that we need to examine the mutually constitutive nature of these forces in shaping antimiscegenation laws. Thus, I examine how the racial identity of Filipinos was shaped by assumptions about racialized sexuality, colonial relations between the United States and the Philippines, the importation of exploitable laborers without political rights, and the intertwining of gender and nationalism.

The question of whether Filipinos should be prohibited from marrying white women reached the California Court of Appeals in 1933 in the guise of the query as to whether Filipinos should be considered “Mongolian.” The state in 1880 and 1905 had prohibited the licensing of marriages between “Mongolians” and “white persons” and invalidated all such marriages. Subsequent legal challenges involving the right of Filipinos to marry whites betray enormous confusion as to whether Filipinos should be classified as “Mongolian,” or as a separate ethnological group, as “Malay.” This racial classification was put at issue in cases where Filipino/white couples sought to marry, and who therefore asserted that Filipinos were not “Mongolians”; in a case where a mother sought to stop her daughter’s marriage; in two cases where annulment of marriage was sought, one by a white woman, the other by a Filipino man; and in one case in which a prosecutor sought to void a marriage so a white wife could testify against her Filipino husband.

The positioning of Filipinos as “Mongolian,” or in opposition to “Mongolians” as the ethnologically different “Malay,” provides a narrative within which the contemporary identity of Filipinos is created. This history demonstrates that there is nothing natural or preordained about racial classification, and provides an example of how race is made.

Read the entire article here.

Framing mixed race: The face of America is changing

Contra Costa Times
2010-02-07

Jennifer Modenessi

Like any proud mother, Janine Mozée sees beauty when she looks at her four children.

But the Benicia resident perceives more than their physical qualities and the various shades and hues of their skin, eyes and hair. For Mozée, 46, it’s a “beautiful thing” that they can take strength and security from their identities, traverse diverse worlds and cultures and fit in where they want.

Bianca, Austin, Weston and Isabella Carr, whose mother is white and father is black, white and Native American, are not alone.

According to the most recent U.S. census, the number of people identifying as mixed race is growing. California‘s mixed-race population, by percentage, ranks fifth in the nation, and data from the 2008 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey estimates that more than 4 percent of Bay Area residents identify as belonging to two or more races. Though that number may seem low and could be attributed to people of mixed heritage choosing to identify with one race, a look at the Bay Area’s diversity suggests the 2010 census could reveal much higher numbers. Still, more youths are being raised in interracial homes, often by mixed-race parents who are encouraging their children to embrace their diverse backgrounds, said sociologist and UC [University of California, ] Santa Barbara professor G. Reginald Daniel. The stories of Bay Area residents such as Carr and her family; Donna and Kim Hunter, sisters whose mother was German and father was black; and Whitney Moses, whose father was black, Native American and white, reflect that trend. And their images, featured in the recent book “Blended Nation: Portraits of Mixed-Race America,” offer further proof that the face of the nation is changing…

Read the entire article here.