In the 1940s South, it seemed that non-Black Latino people were on the road to whiteness. In fact, in many places throughout the region governed by Jim Crow, they were able to attend white schools, live in white neighborhoods, and marry white southerners. However, by the early 2000s, Latino people in the South were routinely cast as "illegal aliens" and targeted by some of the harshest anti-immigrant legislation in the country. This book helps explain how race evolved so dramatically for this population over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. Cecilia Marquez guides readers through time and place from Washington, DC, to the deep South, tracing how non-Black Latino people moved through the region's evolving racial landscape. In considering Latino presence in the South's schools, its workplaces, its tourist destinations, and more, Marquez tells a challenging story of race-making that defies easy narratives of progressive change and promises to reshape the broader American histories of Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, immigration, work, and culture.
Cecelia Marquez is Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History at Duke University.
Making the Latino South offers a groundbreaking history of how Latino racial identities evolved in the twentieth century, from Latinos being perceived as 'provisionally white' in the mid-twentieth century to being labeled 'illegal' at the beginning of the twenty-first century."--Southern Historical Quarterly Marquez significantly historicize[s] and spatialize[s] Latinx presence in the US South prior to the late twentieth century. . . . [Making the Latino South] call[s] on readers to reject a monolithic definition of latinidad, specifically by paying attention to histories and politics of ethnicity, race, gender, labor, geography, and generational cohorts."--Southern Spaces Wonderfully engaging. . . . Making the Latino South is thought-provoking and raises questions and potential new research threads for future scholars . . . [and] reminds its reader that the South is not a new destination for Latinas and Latinos. Instead, the South is significantly defined by its Latino presence. . . . [A] must-read for those interested in the US South and its history of race, civil rights, and immigration."--Journal of Working-Class Studies Marquez has recovered a fascinating history of racial formation that deserves a wide readership, both among specialists in Latino history, migration/immigration history, and southern history, but also more generally among historians of the US."--Oral History Review "Making the Latino South provides a nuanced historical analysis of the role of Blackness in the racialization of non-Black Latinos by the latter part of the 20th century. . . [and] is grounded by rich archival research across different Southern states and exceptional oral histories that highlight various perspectives histories from activists, veterans, migrants, and their children, among others."--North Carolina Historical Review This is an important contribution to understanding the history of Latinidad in the US through the lens of southern history.. . . Marquez guides readers through the racial landscape of the South, offering a new history of race in the postwar US that uncovers the anti-Blackness and white supremacy embedded in the creation of Latina/o as a racial category."--CHOICE
