The Strange Career of Juan Crow: Latino/As and the Making of the U.S
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The Strange Career of Juan Crow: Latino/as and the Making of the U.S. South, 1940-2000 Cecilia Marquez Arlington, Virginia B.A. Black Studies and Gender Sexuality Studies, Swarthmore College, 2011 M.A. American History, University of Virginia, 2013 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty Of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Corcoran Department of History University of Virginia August 2016 Abstract The Strange Career of Juan Crow examines the social and cultural history of Latinos in the post- World War II South. It traces the history of Latino/as, primarily Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans, during the demise of Jim Crow segregation and their transformation from an ethnic group to a racial one. Based on archival research and oral histories, this project examines the lives of Latino/as in civil rights organizing, military service, and labor. Additionally, the project examines Southern foodways, leisure practices, and visual culture to analyze the representation of Latinos in mass culture. It demonstrates that the anti-Latino sentiment in the South today is a recent invention; prior to the 1980s Latinos benefitted from many privileges associated with whiteness—including using white Jim Crow accommodations. It argues that the South was best characterized as having a black/not-black racial order rather than the commonly held assumption of a black and white binary. My project emphasizes the permeable nature of whiteness and the centrality of blackness in defining whiteness. This project also illuminates how Latino/as, Jews, and Italians came to the South and learned how to distance themselves from blackness in order to gain access to white privileges. 2 The Strange Career of Juan Crow: Latino/as and the Making of the U.S. South, 1940-2000 Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: “Not a Negro”: The Problem of Ethnicity in the Postwar South Chapter 2: “Where’s the Mexican Who Runs This Place?”: The Latino Image in the White Southern Mind, 1945-1965 Chapter 3: “Black, White, and Tan”: The Expulsion of Latino/as from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Chapter 4: Constructing the Hardworking Immigrant: Latino/as in the Carpet Capital of the World, 1980-2000 Conclusion: “The Strange Career of Juan Crow” 3 Acknowledgments I want to first thank the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship at Swarthmore College. The support of the program and especially Allison Dorsey, Rafael Zapata, and Sarah Willie- LeBreton is the reason I went to graduate school. A special thanks to Dr. Dorsey and Cheryl Jones-Walker for taking nine Swarthmore students to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 50th Anniversary, it is at Shaw that this whole project began. I also want to thank the faculty and staff of the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers who prepared me in every way to begin my graduate school journey. I am thankful for the funding I have received to complete this project. The ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Smithsonian National Museum of American History Latino Studies Predoctoral Fellowship, and the African-American History Predoctoral Fellowship from the German Historical Institute all gave me funds to travel for research and the necessary time to complete my writing. The Immigration and Ethnic History Society, American Studies Association, Social Research Council, Organization of American Historians, Modern Languages Association, Institute of Humanities and Global Cultures, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the Raven Society, the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Virginia, and the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia supplied me with funds for research and conference travel so I could produce and share my work. I am endlessly grateful for Grace Hale as an advisor. She has read my work with intense care and always offered incisive intellectual criticism. Her support for me as a whole person has meant a great deal through the PhD process and I am so honored to have been her graduate student. I also thank Lawrie Balfour, Brian Balogh, and Elizabeth Varon who have all separately shaped me as a scholar and a professional. 4 The wonderful archivists I encountered throughout my research helped me discover much more than I even knew to look for. Special thanks to the whole staff at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History Archives, Christian Lopez at the University of Georgia’s Richard Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, and Brian Cuthrell at the University of South Carolina’s South Caroliniana Library. This project would not be possible without the oral history participants. Thank you for opening your homes and your memories to me. Thank you to Luis Zapata, Maria Varela, Mary Enriquez, Richard Enriquez, Fatima Cortez, and Ted Hamman. It was a privilege to learn from you and I hope that I have done justice to your stories. I want to thank the network of scholars and colleagues who have been unbelievably giving with their time and their wisdom. Your feedback at conferences and seminars profoundly impacted my work and has made this dissertation better. Special thanks to Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Gerry Cadava, Delia Fernández, Adam Goodman, Perla Guerrero, Ramón Gutiérrez, Cindy Hahmovitch, Felipe Hinojosa, Michael Innis-Jiménez, Monica Martinez, Yuridia Ramírez, and Julie Weise. Additional thanks to all audience members at the Organization of American Historians, Latino/a Studies Conference, American Studies Association, American Historical Association, Southern Labor Studies Association, and Modern Languages Association for your helpful questions and feedback. I would also like to thank the participants of the Newberry Seminar in Borderlands and Latino/a studies and the DC Working Class History Seminar. The community of graduate students at the University of Virginia have been some of the most brilliant and kind friends I could ever ask for. Tamika Nunley, Rachel Moran, and Lauren Turek thank you for your guidance and wisdom as I traversed personal and professional victories and challenges during my time at UVA. Clayton Butler, Benji Cohen, Jon Cohen, Mary Draper, 5 Erik Erlandson, Leif Fredrickson, Shira Lurie, Katy Meinbresse, and Joseph Thompson, thank you for caring for me throughout this process. Your humor, compassion, and copy-editing skills were given so generously and I am very grateful. Special thanks to Jenni Via, Kathleen Miller, and Ella Wood, for insuring that I have health insurance, register for classes, and remember to breathe before important interviews. My community in Charlottesville has been vital to sustaining me throughout this process. I want to thank Kim Rolla, who during my time in Virginia has become family. Thank you for making a home with me. The process of graduate school and writing a dissertation is as much a physical and psychological task as it is intellectual. I would like to thank the family that I built at The Gym for being a home away from my dissertation, my work, and my stress. Thank you to Ann Breza, Willa Brown, Joe Cady, Nicole Deal, Lance Howe, Bernadette Palmeri, Dylan Rogers, Morgan Snell, Justin Tooley, and Toni Zeller. I learned so much about grit, determination, consistency, and strength from the amazing men and women that I have had the privilege of lifting with. My community outside of Charlottesville has also been as important in nurturing me through this process. Stephan Lefebvre, Erika Slaymaker, Mia Fortunato, and Max Beshers, thank you for listening to me complain about my work, reminding me why I began this process, and for opening your hearts and homes to me as a respite. Finally, I want to thank my family for their support throughout this process. The Shack family for letting me stay with you during archive visits and being a break from the isolation of archives. To my amazing sister, thank you for always having faith in me and teaching me so much about perseverance. I rarely believed I could do it and you always knew I could—thank you for that. My mother taught me everything I know about love and compassion. You have 6 been my biggest cheerleader, my most diligent copy-editor, and my most consistent sounding board. My father was 24 when he left Venezuela and moved to Philadelphia. At the time of writing this, I am three years older than he was when he left his home, unable to speak English, in order to imagine a better life for himself. I cannot begin to fathom his courage. Thank you for taking a chance and making this moment possible. 7 Introduction The Strange Career of Juan Crow For most of the twentieth century, Latino immigration was a story about California, Texas, and New York. However, a report by the Pew Center revealed that between 1990 and 2000 that story began to change dramatically as Latino immigrants flocked to the former states of the Confederacy. In that decade, the size of the Latino population increased by nearly 400 percent in North Carolina, 337 percent in Arkansas, 300 percent in Georgia and 278 percent in Tennessee. In the following decade, between 2000 and 2010, the top ten states with the fastest growing Latino populations were all below the Mason-Dixon line. Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee all experienced more than 150 percent growth in their Latino populations between 2000 and 2011.1 In light of these demographic shifts, scholars have begun to study the “New Latino South” or the “Nuevo South.” The scholarly efforts to document this monumental change, have been led by sociologists, anthropologists, and geographers.2 To date little has been written on the history of 1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/03/latino-population-growth_n_3860441.html 2 Jamie Winders, Nashville in the New Millennium: Immigrant Settlement, Urban Transformation, and Social Belonging (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013); Douglas S.