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.

Read or purchase the article here.

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.

Login at HKU to read the dissertation here.

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.

Read the entire article here.

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…

Read or purchase the article here.

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.

Panel: Exploring the Historical Context for Contemporary Stories of the Mixed Experience

Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival
Japanese American National Musuem
National Center for Democracy, Tateuchi Democracy Forum
2010-06-13, 18:30 to 19:30Z

Moderator

Frank Buckley, Co-Anchor
KTLA Morning News

Panelists

Kelly F. Jackson, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University

Farzana Nayani, President
Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC)

Larry Aaronson, Retired public school teacher

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Listen to part 1 (00:31:12) or download the audio here.
Listen to part 2 (00:31:05) or download the audio here.

Shades of Gray

American Jewish Life Magazine
January/February 2007

E. B. Solomont

Lacey Schwartz had the typical middle-class Jewish upbringing in upstate New York. Until her 18th birthday when her mom told her she was the product of an affair with a black man. Now Lacey is making a documentary about her newfound life as a black Jew.

The problem was the boxes on her college application. The ones where you check white or black. Lacey Schwartz didn’t know which to check, so she sent a picture instead, which led the school administrators to enroll her as a black student, one who inexplicably had two white Jewish parents. That’s how she made it 18 years before blowing the lid off the family secret: That her mother had an affair with a black man, that she was the product of their union.

In a certain sense, the boxes still haunt a 30-year-old Lacey — now a Harvard-educated lawyer and successful film producer in New York City. American culture seeks to compartmentalize people, she tells me during a discussion of her work-in-progress documentary about black Jews in America…

Read the entire article here.

The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive

Cinema Journal
Volume 44, Number 2, Winter 2005
pages 50-67

Mary C. Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Texas, Austin

This article interrogates the rise of the “multiculti” action film and the casting of multiracial actors as Hollywood action film protagonists. These trends are examined in light of shifts in U.S. ethnic demographics and youth-oriented popular culture.

Recent Hollywood films such as Romeo Must Die (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2000) and The Fast and the Furious (Rob Cohen, 2001) are notable for their multiethnic casts and stylized urban settings. Correspondingly, the key to the survival of the protagonists in these “multiculti” action narratives is their ability to thrive in environments defined by cultural border crossings and pastiche. Perhaps not coincidentally, the heroes who command these environments increasingly are played by biracial and multiethnic actors, such as Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious and XXX (Rob Cohen, 2002) and Russell Wong, who plays a pivotal role in Romeo Must Die.

This trend reflects contemporary shifts in U.S. ethnic demographics and ethnic identity, while subtly reinforcing notions of white centrism that are the legacy of the urban action movie. In particular, as I shall argue, the new, ethnically ambiguous protagonist embodies contemporary concerns regarding ethnicity and race relations with respect to the nation’s burgeoning cultural creolization and multiethnic population. The analysis presented here shall be situated in the history of Hollywood representations of the multiethnic inner city, as well as in relation to shifts in the country’s ethnic demographics, cultural interests, and popular culture…

Read the entire article here.

White Americans, The New Minority? Non-Blacks and the Ever-Expanding Boundaries of Whiteness

Jonathan W. Warren, Associate Professor of International and Latin American Studies
University of Washington

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 28, Number 2 (November 1997)
pages 200-218

Argues that in the United States the “white” racial category has expanded across time to include groups previously considered “non-white.” The role of blacks in this expansion is explored as well as whether white Americans are really becoming a numerical minority. An alternative racial future to the one frequently forecasted is suggested.

…But are Whites really becoming a minority? Does the escalation of non-European immigrants mean that minorities are becoming a majority? The logic of the argument appears sound enough: Immigration from Asia and Latin America is increasing, and because  these people are non-Whites, then eventually non-Whites will be in the numerical majority. Yet, this argument hinges on an unexamined premise—the essentialist premise that Whiteness is a fixed racial category. In other words, one can only draw the conclusion that Whites are becomin a minority if one assumes that racial categories are static across time and place. However, as the  following experience of Amy Pagnozzi suggests, such an assumption is dubious at best…

…In this article, we will argue that in the United States the “White” racial category has expanded across time to include groups previously considered “non-White.” The Irish will be used as an example of how groups, at one time considered to be neither White nor Black, have been racially repositioned as White. We will then explore the importance of the role of Blacks in the expansion of the White category. Finally, we will return to the question of whether White Americans are actually in danger of becoming a numerical minority, given the sharp increase in Latin American and Asian immigration, and suggest an alternative racial future to the one so often forecasted….

Read or purchase the article here.