Priscila Dorella on Cecilia Márquez’s *Making the Latino South: A History of Racial*

The history of the southern United States is so deeply defined by racial conflicts between whites and blacks that the social, political and economic importance of Latinos, a population that has grown dramatically in the region over the last seven decades, has often been overlooked.  Cecilia Márquez, assistant professor of Latino Studies at Duke University, has added to a small but growing body of historical study with an examination of the changing position of Latinos in the U.S. Southeast between 1945 and 2010, with particular focus on Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama.  Márquez describes a process of racialization when “non-Black latino people went from being racialized as ‘provisionally white’ before the 1970s, to ‘hardworking immigrants’ in the early 1990s , and eventually to being cast as ‘illegal aliens’ in the post-9/11 period” (5).  The examination highlights that for most of the period covered in the book, this population was not repressively marginalized. What factors best explain the shift from inclusion to exclusion?  This is a personal story for Márquez, as her family came to the United States from Venezuela in the 1970s.

The growth of Latino communities after 1945 the southern United States is traced in five chapters interspersed with life stories that allow readers to observe how Latino lives have oscillated between the privileges of whiteness and the recurring prejudice against blackness, with the weakest point being that of black Latinos in the southern United States. In this way, escaping from what Latino means could be like escaping from what has become a category of control that reveals a complicated way of the social, cultural, political and economic diversity of these immigrants. As Márquez discusses, the Latino category is internally fractured along racial lines. Even the current term, Latinx, created to give visibility to part of this marginalized population in the United States due to gender and race issues, encounters limitations. In a public debate on Latinx in the US South, at Duke University, during the pandemic, in 2022, Márquez observed that Latinx academic studies remain a field that still defends whiteness and that, therefore, it needs to a critical examination of how Latino identity connects to the marginalization of black and indigenous people.

Latino immigration to the southern United States is connected to the development of the region, particularly after World War II, when the Jim Crow law of racial segregation was still in force. Jim Crow laws forced all people residing in the South to state whether they were “white” or “black.” With the exception of Texas, where prejudice against Mexicans was long established and legally codified, non-black Latinos enjoyed a limited form of white privilege.  She notes in Washington DC , “although nonblack latino people may have been permitted access to white schools and white neighborhoods, they also were denied access by individual hotel clerks, restaurant managers, and neighbors who served as agents of Jim Crow” (28).  Forms of discrimination regularly found in Texas and California were only inconsistently applied in the southeastern states.  Latin Americans “could seemingly access key benefits of whiteness without being seen as fully white, The flexibility did not extend to Black Latino people or to African Americans” (32). On the other hand, black Latinos did not easily fit into the black category, to the degree that, as Márquez describes, they were not always welcomed into black civil rights organizations like SNCC. The U.S. binary, created to police all aspects of black life, obscured the many stories of people who in the 1960s, despite benefiting from the privileges of whiteness, wanted to fight alongside black people in the Civil Rights Movement.  Márquez explores Latino civil rights activists Luis Zapata and Maria Varela, whose experiences reveal the difficulties of creating interracial alliances in the South at this time.

Analyzing several generations of Latinos in the southern United States, Márquez shows how their presence disrupted an essentialist and binary view of identity to demonstrate that Latinos are not recent newcomers to this region of the southern United States, and that they migrated not only to escape economic problems in their countries, but also because they were recruited to work in some of the fastest-growing southern industries, such as chicken processing plants in Mississippi, sea food processing in North Carolina, construction and rug manufacturing in Georgia. A rapid spurt in Latino migration into the South occurred simultaneously with Congress passing the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and border control agents launching Operation Keeper. Increased immigration control and the militarization of the borders forced many Latino immigrants to choose between living in the United States (legally or not) or returning to their home countries. Changes in immigration control procedures made movement of immigrants back and forth more difficult and dangerous.  Many Latinos chose to go to the southeastern United States and live there permanently to take advantage of the prosperity of the region’s industrial sector.

In the 1990s, Márquez says, there was so much work in the South for Hispanics that Southern businessmen often said that they “loved” Hispanics, who deserved support because they worked hard and did not get sick. This apparent praise signaled a new turn in the racialization of people who found recognition along with the precariousness and exploitation of their jobs. Hispanic customs and communities attracted tourists, contributing to the hardening of new internal borders that promoted white supremacist fantasies of “Mexicanidad.” Social inclusion initiatives, such as the Georgia Project Teachers, created during these years, aimed to develop the education of Latinos in the United States based on the idea of ??cultural integration, but the failures of these projects demonstrated the limits of superficial multiculturalism.

September 11, 2001, proved to be a turning point for Latinos in the South, as in other parts of the United States.   In the aftermath, severe anti-immigration laws were passed, such as ICE’s 187(g) Program, which encouraged more aggressive local policing of immigrant communities for potential violations of national immigration laws. The 2008 economic recession brought an increase in hate crimes, as nativist rhetoric favoring “real Americans” targeted Latinos as intruders and invaders. The racial status of Latinos has become increasingly ambiguous and precarious, politically and economically. In 2024, on the eve of the elections, President Biden signed an executive order legalizing thousands of Latino immigrants who had already been living in the United States for years so that they could work temporarily and have protection against deportation, but without the protections provided by a green card or a path to citizenship.