‘The Mexican’ and ‘The Cancer in the South’: Discourses of Race, Nation and Anti-blackness in Early Twentieth-Century Debates on Mexican Immigration

Abstract

This article explores the flexible manner in which discourses of anti-black racism were employed within congressional debates on the proposed restriction of Mexican immigration at the end of the 1920s. I examine how both sides of this debate placed Mexicans within a particular historical narrative of race and nation, positioned in relation to a range of other populations, including Chinese and Japanese immigrants, Native Americans, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Within these narratives, slavery and the imagined negro problem were particularly salient, being frequently used to orient racial interpretations of Mexican immigrants as well as the manner in which they were positioned in relation to other ‘racial elements’. Imprinted with US histories of slavery, conquest and empire, these discourses offer insight into the ambivalent interrelationships of American’s multiple trajectories of racism.