| Using a combination of archival and historical archaeological methodologies, this dissertation considers the intensification of racism against Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants through a careful examination of the development of Southern California's turn-of-the-century tourism industry. In an era when tourism and consumerism were associated with patriotism and citizenship, it was at places like the famous tourist destination of Los Angeles' Mount Lowe Resort and Railway, which was visited by over three million tourists hailing from all over the globe between 1893 and 1936, where racialization and social stratification took place in the public's eye. By critically analyzing the organization of Mount Lowe Resort and Railway's workers across the landscape, the resort's division and assignment of professions and labor to certain age groups, ethnicities, and genders, and the archaeological remnants of Mount Lowe's Mexican immigrant railway workers' household, this dissertation provides strong evidence that leisure in turn-of-the-century Southern California played a formative role in racializing, stereotyping, and segregating Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants.;Starting from the standpoint that it is in the day-to-day shifts in rhetoric, consumption, labor composition, aesthetics, and built environment that racialization and inequality take shape, I utilize the methodologies promoted by historical archaeology to understand and interpret the material culture of Mexican immigrants employed at Mount Lowe Resort and Railway. This is because archaeological methodologies and analysis focus on micro-change, which can shed new light on the slight, yet significant diachronic shifts that lead to macro social change. |
