Fighting for their place: Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the U.S. South, 1910--2008

In the wake of dramatic growth in the U.S. South's Latino population since 1990, many have proclaimed a "Nuevo" New South. This dissertation challenges that "Nuevo" paradigm. It is the first scholarly work to chronicle the histories of the thousands of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans who populated the black-white South throughout the twentieth century. It utilizes case studies to examine the histories of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in five times and places: New Orleans in the interwar years; the rural Mississippi Delta during the same period; the Arkansas Delta at mid-century; rural Georgia in the 1970s--1990s; and the greater metropolitan area of Charlotte, North Carolina at the turn of the twenty-first century.;The project investigates and analyzes historical practices of "placing" Mexicans within the region's most important axes of difference: race, class, and eventually, "legality" under immigration law. It examines these practices in a transnational context, asking how Mexican ideas about race, class, and modernity shaped migrants' actions in the South, as well as Mexican state interventions to influence emigrants' place there. This history depends on archives in Mexico and the United States, government documents, media, the personal papers and photographs of immigrants and their descendants, and oral history interviews with Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, and Southern whites and blacks. It interprets these sources within frameworks from Mexican American, Mexican, and U.S. Southern social, cultural, and political history.