Before Chicano
AMERICA AND THE LONG 19th CENTURY
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Before Chicano: Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 18481959
Alberto Varon
Before Chicano
Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 18481959
Alberto Varon
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
2018 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Varon, Alberto, author.Title: Before Chicano : citizenship and the making of Mexican American manhood, 18481959 / Alberto Varon.Description: New York : NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018. | Series: America and the long 19th century | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017044868 | ISBN 9781479863969 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479831197 (pb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Mexican AmericansHistory19th century. | Mexican AmericansHistory20th century. | Mexican AmericansEthnic identityHistory20th century. | Mexican AmericansEthnic identityHistory20th century. | CitizenshipUnited StatesHistory19th century. | CitizenshipUnited StatesHistory20th century.
Classification: LCC E184.M5 V3435 2018 | DDC 973/.046872dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044868
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Contents
Figure 1.1. Cortina, Proclamation, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Figure 2.1. Portrait of Charles Lummis, Lummis in Wild West Dress, undated, Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library.
Figure 2.2. Proclama, Preamble to the Spanish translation of the California Constitution, 1849, California State Archives.
Figure 2.3. Portrait of Seor Adolfo Carrillo, Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1915.
Figure 2.4. Cover of Cuentos Californianos, ca. 1922, courtesy of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project.
Figure 3.1. Still from film Sombrero, from authors personal collection.
Figure 3.2. Cover of The Monterrey Greeter, 1938, from authors personal collection.
Figure 5.1. U.S.-Mexico Puppeteer, illustration from Con Safos Magazine, 1970, p. 20.
Figure 5.2. Picture of Villarreal and Pochos cover from El Excentrico, 1960, Jos Antonio Villarreal Papers, 19502010, Santa Clara University Library.
Against Xenophobic Citizenship
This is not a book about immigration. Or, perhaps put more directly, this is a book about not immigrating. It is a cultural history of Mexican American manhood from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries that underscores Mexican Americans long-standing place in American political and cultural life. Decades before the Border Patrol, Csar Chvez, Dolores Huerta, the Delano grape strike, the Chicano Moratorium, or the 2006 immigration protests, Mexican Americans, living in cities and homes they had occupied for generations, found ways to imagine themselves as U.S. citizens. These Mexican American men and women worked to build safe, happy, and productive lives within the United States and as U.S. citizens, but to do so, found themselves time and again excluded from the country they called home and worked diligently to support.
In turning to an earlier historical period, this book challenges prevailing, facile, and often flawed associations between Mexican Americans and immigration that typecast Mexican Americans as immigrants. To access the long history of Mexican American culture, this book examines manhood and asks how the experience of being a manand how that experience was representedshaped the lives of Mexican American men and women. By focusing on manhood, we can see how Mexican Americans understood themselves as racial, gendered citizens and how that experience impacted the way they organized socially, how they functioned politically, and how they connected to broader, mainstream, and usually white American society. In examining Mexican American manhood during this period, this book reevaluates the Anglocentric focus of existing studies of U.S. manhood and illuminates the myriad ways that Mexican Americans produced competing notions of U.S. citizenship.
