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Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023)
00:48:27
An interview with Cecilia Márquez
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Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Anna Lindner
Hello. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Anna Lindner, your host, and today we will be talking to Dr. Cecilia Marquez about her new book, Making the Latino A History of racial formation. Dr. Marquez, thanks so much for coming on today.
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Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Thank you for having me.
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Anna Lindner
Yeah, of course. Dr. Cecilia Marquez is the Hunt Family Assistant professor in History at Duke University. Her research focuses on the history of Latinx people in the US South. Dr. Marquez writes and teaches about the formation of Latinx identity, Latinx social movements, and the importance of region in shaping Latinx identity. Her work has been supported by the Mellon foundation, the Woodrow Wilson foundation, and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. So with that introduction, let's talk briefly about the introduction to the book. I wanted to talk about how you write that the whiteness that some Latinos experienced and the way that they were able to enter that whiteness reflected a strategic claim to whiteness or a deeply held belief, and there was some, some differences there. I was wondering if you could talk briefly what you meant about strategic claim to whiteness or deeply held belief about people's whiteness along with their Latinness.
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Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Yeah. So I mean, I think part of what the book is doing is trying to think about how does Latino history look different when we tell it from the South. Right. And one of the big debates that's been in Latino history is about this question of whiteness. Right. Are some Latinos accessing whiteness as a strategy, as a way to advance civil rights, as a way to advance themselves individually, or is it part of a sort of broader commitment to anti blackness and white supremacy amongst some Latinos. Right. And I think that's a debate that has really vexed a lot of us in Latino history. And what I say is that when we look at it from the south, we don't have the same kind of debate. We don't have. Latinos don't have to fight for Caucasian rights, as some scholars write about. Right. But that they are able to, as I write, come as they are. They're able to access many of the benefits of whiteness. And again, I'm talking here about prior to the 1980s, basically, prior to the 1980s. They're able to access what I call provisional whiteness. And they're not necessarily having to pass as white. They're not necessarily having to make strategic claims to being white. It's something that they just sort of have access to. And that's not a. I'm really clear this provisional whiteness. Right. Isn't a full whiteness. Right. They can't do some things. They can't join, you know, fraternal organizations. They can't join the Klan. They can't. There are certain things that their Catholicism, their language that would preclude them from. But it is a really different story of Latinos and whiteness when we look at the Southeast in particular.
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Anna Lindner
Yeah. And I think those nuances are really important to keep in mind as we're trying to think about those racial formations in the, in the South. And obviously you take a very similar approach to race that I do where you're looking at blackness and whiteness and Latinness kind of all forming each other. So I'm wondering how the racialization of non black, specifically Latinos, shift over the decades. So how do people in these categories diverge from, but also find some similarities with non Latin black people and non Latin whites in kind of an oscillating, context specific way?
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Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Yeah, I mean, so the book runs from chronologically from 1940 to 2010 or 2011, I think is where it roughly ends. And I talk a lot about how race changes really dramatically for non black Latinos over these decades. And one of the important distinctions I make in the book is that when we look at the south, we can see the profoundly different experiences of black and non black Latinos. And so I'm really careful to try and be clear about when I'm talking about non black Latinos and their particular experience. And that's sort of what I'm talking about when I, when I look at these changes. So as I mentioned in the first question, prior to roughly the 1970s or 1980s when we're looking in the Southeast. And I think maybe it's worth pausing for a second to just say what I'm talking about when I talk about the Southeast, because inevitably I get a question about what about Miami, what about Texas and I will say that at the heart of this project is really trying to historicize the new destination South. And so when I say that, that's a term that doesn't mean a lot to a lot of people. But in the late 1990s, early 2000s, a lot of places in the Southeast saw record growth of Latino immigration. These were places that previously had very small Latino populations. And all of a sudden in the 1990s saw really rapid growth. So these are places like Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, places like that. And so those places which were among the fastest growing Latino destinations in the 90s and early 2000s, those are the places that I'm really interested in looking at. And so while Texas and Florida are certainly important in Latino history, and I'm not making necessarily a claim about their legitimacy within the south, those are places that have much longer and more complicated histories of Latino settlement. And so I really wanted to focus on these places where things were pretty new, where Latino settlement was new. When we're talking about the 1940s, 50s and 60s. So in the prior to the 1970s and 80s, I talk about Latinos as living with this kind of provisional, what non black Latinos living with this kind of provisional whiteness. And it meant again, they could access a lot of the most important institutions of whiteness, things like attending white schools, living in white neighborhoods, while they may not have been fully embraced as white in other spaces. And then in the 1990s, once we start to see this rapid immigration that I was just talking about, I talk about how we start to see the coalescence of a category of the hard working Hispanic, Hispanicness becomes important in the 1990s. But I'm really clear that unlike, for example, what's happening in the 1990s in California with the rise of Prop 187 and anti immigrant sentiment in the 1990s in places like Georgia that I write about, you see a much warmer welcome, even if it's a complicated one, because it's a warm welcome, certainly largely because of the labor that Latinos are offering to these industries. So in the 1990s, we see a kind of coalescence of hard working Hispanicness. And then in the early 2000s, there's a shift once again to what we might sort of see today looking around the south, which is this real anti immigrant sentiment and the category of illegal alien, basically as a kind of controlling image, to use the language of black feminists. And I talk about that change as occurring for two reasons. One is a result of 9, 11 and the combination of Xenophobia and nativism that emerged after 9 11, but also just the massive investment in surveillance and police enforcement and the way that, that created an infrastructure such that when in 2008 we had the Great Recession, the anti immigrant sentiment that emerged out of moment of economic contraction meant that we had an apparatus in place to detain and deport people more, more quickly than ever before. So you know, it's really after the Great Recession that we start to see states like Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi trying to pass these really draconian anti immigration laws. And that's really where I'm, you know, I come into my, to my graduate school, you know, time in, in 2010 and 2011 and I'm looking around and seeing this, this world that is so deeply anti immigrant, trying to get rid of the same people who were decades earlier hard working and decades before that seen as white. And so that was really where the project comes from. But that's the sort of arc of the story which is about how non black Latinos, you know, from the perspective of the 1940s, it looked like, like the Irish or the Italians that they were going to become white. And it's really about how that doesn't happen for them.
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Anna Lindner
Yeah, I think that broader history is really important to acknowledge and also to talk a little bit more about the broad concerns here. In chapter one you talk a little bit about how these racial formations are intersecting with class.
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Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Yeah.
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Anna Lindner
And I was wondering if you could briefly take us through how you're approaching class and how you're thinking about how those are intersected.
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Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Yeah, I mean, so one of the things that also changes over that time period that I just laid out between 1940 and the 2010s is that the class background of who's immigrating changes pretty dramatically. Right. So when I open in chapter one, I'm opening in Washington D.C. right after World War II. I'm looking at the group of people who came to be a part of the ambassadorial class and the dignitary class, as you know, embassies, the organization of American States, all of these kinds of more global organizations that emerge in D.C. after the, after the U.S. comes up as a sort of global superpower in the wake of the war. You know, this is a mostly elite population, not exclusively though, but a mostly elite population. And by the time that we get to the 1990s with a large scale migration, we're talking about, about working class Mexican, Mexican Americans who are coming to work in poultry processing, who are coming to work in carpet manufacturing, who are coming to work in the construction industry. And again, not exclusively, but when we talk about sort of the demographics, the demographic shifts at the earlier period, we're looking at mostly elite, and by the end, we're looking at mostly working class. And that's part of the reason the shift happens as well. And I sort of track how the class background of these groups, as that changes, also shapes the kind of welcome that they receive. But again, I also think that what's important, again, at the center of the book is when I'm looking at Latin on this, part of what I argue is, yes, class is important, but blackness is actually the most important thing. That's sort of the central argument. So when I talk, for example, in chapter one, there's a young woman, her, it's Betita Martinez, who becomes this important figure in the Chicana feminist movement. But she grows up for a period in D.C. and she tells the story of growing up in D.C. and not. And her neighbors not being able to play with her, her young white neighbors as a little girl because she was Mexican, and certain experiences of exclusion in schools and things like that. Right? And so I think that that story in some ways really encapsulates some of that provisional whiteness, because it's this young woman in these white spaces, in a white neighborhood, in a white school, able to benefit in some ways most materially from whiteness, while at the same time experiencing forms of exclusion. Now, when I look alternatively at someone like Fatima Cortez, who is an Afro Puerto Rican woman who grew up in New York, excuse me, when her school. When she's also a young girl, just like Elizabeth Martinez, when her school decides to take a trip to Washington, D.C. she's not allowed to attend because she is a black girl. And so both of these are Latina girls, right? They're both these young girls who are experiencing DC in really different ways. And so this. This category of Latino ness, I argue throughout is a really. What is the word? It's a term that doesn't do a great job of capturing in some ways, the diversity of these people's experience. Because when I talk about Fatima Cortez, you know, she's growing up in Washington Heights and she's attending this school with, know, the nephews of Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, with young Korean girls, like. So it's this multiracial group of people, all of whom are able to go to D.C. except for her, because all of these people, while they weren't white, they also weren't black. And I think that's the Important thing is that blackness in particular is the kind of structuring logic of exclusion in the South. And so Fatima Cortez's exclusion, at the same time that Batista Martinez is being included, even if it's provisionally, sort of gets to the heart of the way that Latino ness is fractured along the line along lines of race, specifically, and specifically about blackness and whiteness.
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Anna Lindner
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for laying that out. And along with that, you write about Carla Garlassa and how kind of. So thinking about Southern white supremacy, thinking about Southern Jim Crow specifically, how she was and her family were able to kind of, you know, they were welcomed in certain spaces and they were profiting from whiteness, but then they were protected from it, protected by it for. To a degree, but they were not, you know, like you said, fully white. What. What did. What does that case tell us?
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Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Yeah, so the Carla Galarza case is really an interesting one. So it's the sort of the narrative arc, in some ways, of the first chapter. So she is the daughter, the stepdaughter, excuse me, of Ernesto Galarza, for those who don't know. He's a big farm labor organizer at this time, big in the popular front. He moves his family to D.C. to work as part of the Organization of American States. And Carla has graduated from high school actually, in the D.C. area in Arlington, Virginia, which is, coincidentally where I grew up, a fun overlap when I realized that. And she graduates from a white high school in Arlington, Virginia. And after high school, she decides that she wants to attend a vocational school. She wants to become a fashion designer. And through Ernesto's job, she met this woman, Cordelia Wharton, who's a dress designer in D.C. a black woman. And she decided that Carla decided she wants to study with Cordelia Wharton at the Margaret Murray Vocational School, which is a school that was, as all schools in D.C. were at this time, was segregated, and it was specifically for black. For Black people in D.C. and so she decides she wants to attend it. And shortly, maybe two or three months after she arrives, she is kicked out of the school. She's expelled for being not black. And what ensues is this really interesting conversation about her, about sort of her fitness for the school, about whether or not it was okay for her to attend. And the interesting subject, story of all of this is that she's actually white. She's not actually Latino, because she's the stepdaughter of Ernesto Galariza. But because of her attachment to him, the. The media really takes on the story as a story of this Young Mexican American girl trying to integrate a, quote, unquote, colored vocational school. And so there's this. This kind of paradox, I think, at the heart of the story, which is like, this isn't the story of integration that we're being told. So who is this girl and how do we make sense of her? And there's a lot in the ar, the school board, trying to basically decide what race she is and decide what to do with her. And is she supposed to be in this space? Is she not supposed to be in this space? And so her story gives me the ability to sort of see in real time how administrators were navigating these questions about race and Latino ness. And Ernesto Galarza and Carla Galarza, they appeal the decision. Eventually, the NAACP and the aclu, briefly, they think about taking up the case. They ultimately decide not to. But this question of sort of, what is the role of Latinos within the DC system as DC is becoming more international, becoming more cosmopolitan in the 1940s, like, what do we make of this? And of course, you know, it's not a coincidence, I think in some ways that in 1947, the same year that this is happening, Mendez v. Westminster is happening. Right. So Sylvia Mendez is trying to get into white schools at the same time that Carla Galarza is getting kicked out of a black school. And so it's just this really, you know, and I get into the kind of intricacies of why she was kicked out of that school. And I think that there is a lot of sort of. There's a lot of administrators who are really committed to preserving the few resources that existed for black students, for black students. But the ensuing debate about her is what I get, really what I get into there and how people are trying to navigate her. And so I think what it shows us about Jim Crow, though, is that over and over, what we see the administrator saying is that she is not a Negro. That's a quote. Right? She's not a Negro, therefore, she cannot attend the school. And that's the kind of the central takeaway that I get, which is that her non blackness, more than any kind of claim to whiteness, Latino ness, is really the reason that she cannot be a part of this school and the reason that she needs to be sort of relocated. And. And that's a theme that comes throughout, which is that the way that Latino identity is formed is always in relation to blackness. And so that's really what I learned about Jim Crow when I look at Carla's story.
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Anna Lindner
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of Sense. And we see this operating in a very different way in the next chapter, which is the whole south of the Border.
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Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Yeah.
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Anna Lindner
Phenomenon. And you write that imagined Latino people like Pedro, who was a mascot that was created by a Jewish man down in Carolina, became weapons for white Southerners to reassert their power and identity. Could you talk us through how that happened and what's going on there?
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Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Sure, I'll zoom out for a second just to explain. South of the Border, for those of you who have been fortunate enough to never see, is a roadside rest stop right at the border of north and South Carolina. It's originally called south of the Border because a bunch of counties in North Carolina go dry in the 1930s. And so it be. It's. It's located in South Carolina. And so the original south of the Border is like, this is a place to get booze, basically. Don't worry, we have booze here. So people, North Carolina would go south of the border to get the alcohol that they couldn't get in their hometowns. So it eventually takes on this Mexican theme. It's created by Alan Shaffer in 1949, and shortly thereafter, it gets a Mexican theme. And the way I would describe it for those who haven't had the opportunity to look at the, I think, really exciting and interesting images in the book, it's sort of like a Disney, a mini Disney theme park that's all Mexican stereotype themed. So it's like Espiedy Gonzalez had a rest stop, basically. And, you know, the way that he. The sort of the Mickey Mouse of the place. The guide is a man, a cartoon character named Pedro that is created by the founder of south of the Border, Alan Shaffer. And so one of the things I noticed when I was looking at the archives of south of the Border, because, you know, most of the book is about actual Latinos in the south. And this is really a chapter that's about ideas about Latinos in the south and how those move over time and space. And so when I'm looking at the archive, one of the things I started to notice was that there were all of these kinds of Southern signals within the category of Pedro. He has a Southern accent in a lot of his writings. And so speaking. I mean, he's a cartoon. So he speaks with what they call Mexi speak. It's this kind of broken English dialect that you would associate, again, with like a Speedy Gonzalez type character. So. But his Mexi speak is infused with Southern drawl, with Southern language, with Southern references. And to me, this was really interesting, right? Because I'm like, oh, like Alan Shaffer could have just taken Speedy Gonzalez, landed him in South Carolina and called it a day. So why make this character Southern, right? Why infuse him with this kind of Southern identity? And, you know, part of the argument that I make is that the world is changing really quickly for a lot of folks in the. For a lot of white folks in the Carolinas, because, I mean, that's really who can attend south of the border. Schaeffer makes this argument at one point that it was one of the earliest roadsides stand, roadside locations that was integrated. But there's absolutely no evidence of this anywhere. So I don't believe that was true. But he. That, you know, the sit in movement is unfolding. The civil rights movement is starting to sort of win some of its first victories. And this becomes a place where people can escape into a different kind of racial. Getting to play with racial difference and racial domination really, in a way that feels safe. And this takes its kind of most extreme form in 1961 when Alan Shaffer, aligned with the centennial of the Civil War, decides to open Confederate land at south of the border. So it becomes this kind of Confederate themed sub theme park. And it includes Fort Pedro and Pedro's Plantation and several other Pedro themed Confederate attractions. And, you know, the people that he invites to the opening are this. This sort of extreme, sort of secessionist, kind of reactionary group of centennial commemorators. And all of these people who are really invested deeply in the Lost Cause. And, you know, it's again, just sort of like having Pedro or, you know, their. Again their version of Mickey Mouse in a Confederate uniform. Right. And so part of what I'm arguing is that at the exact same moment that the sit in movement is happening in North Carolina, Pedro gets to be this kind of lost cause defender for local white people who want to go and play with ideas about race, but also be able to preserve their ideas about white supremacy. And Pedro offers them that. And so one of the bigger arguments is that ideas about Latino ness in that chapter, I should say that ideas about Latino ness are not just being transported straight from the west coast or from the Southwest. They're actually being transformed in the South. And there are particularly Southern ideas about Latino ness for. Specifically for Southern white people that try to repurpose fantasies about Latino ness into the Lost Cause and into the effort to sort of preserve white supremacy as the civil rights movement is starting to really take, to really gain steam in that region. So good, so good.
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Anna Lindner
So good.
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Anna Lindner
Yeah, that chapter was very enthralling and horrifying, but very interesting. I did not know about that. So that was very fascinating. And speaking of the civil rights era, so around that time you switched gears a little bit and you talk about people like Maria Varela, who went undercover, quote unquote, to help the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or sncc. As a light skinned Latin person, she was able to kind of have some of the privileges of whiteness, but maybe not necessarily so. I was wondering if you could talk to us about her story and what she did during the civil rights movement.
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Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Yeah. So the fourth chapter is looking at a group of Latino civil rights activists who come to organize with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or sncc, which was the youth led vanguard of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. They were sort of willing to do the more daring direct action work that a lot of other civil rights groups had opted to not engage in. And so when I look at someone like Maria Varela, she is coming to the south not with the intention of going undercover. Right. She's coming to the south as part of her own commitment to social justice, to racial justice. She's coming from New Jersey, but she's moved around a lot of her life. She has a real. She wouldn't have called herself chica at the time, but a kind of emergent racial identity as a Mexican American woman and really understanding herself as a person of color, as a woman of color in the United States at the time. And so she comes down at the invitation of another SNCC activist, Casey Hayden, to organize with sncc. And she originally comes to organize in Atlanta, I think, and then is immediately relocated to Alabama to help do some work there. And what she talks about is being able to work, as she puts it, undercover. And so what's interesting about her story is that at times she talks about it as she's kind of able to fly under the radar because some people might see her as white. But then there are these other moments where she talks about, for example, when she had spent time in Mississippi, she went into this store in Jackson, Mississippi. And this man sort of recognizes her as Mexican and starts making these inappropriate jokes about sort of hypersexual Latinas, et cetera. So there's these moments that she really perceives herself as, I think, potentially being seen as white, but in other moments she's, you know, being seen as Mexican. But that isn't in conflict in a lot of ways with her being in white spaces. And that's the kind of provisionally white category that I talk about. But there's this great story that she tells when she, when I, when she talks about being undercover. She was driving Willy Rex and Stokely Carmichael to the airport. And for those who don't know, Stokely Carmichael was, would become one of the leaders in sncc. Willie Ricks and Stokely Carmichael together are sort of both credited with saying black power for the first time. I mean, these are like well known activists and not exactly super welcome in Mississippi at this time for a lot of white Mississippians. So she's driving them to the airport and the car breaks down and she sees that there's a gas station up ahead and decides that she's going to go and try and get these young white men to help her fix the car. And so Ricks and Carmichael take to hiding, basically. And she goes. And the way she talks about the story is she's like, I put on my best Southern accent. I sort of, you know, put on this kind of Southern femininity that she might have seen as pretty foreign. And she goes over and gets these men to fix the car, these white men, and then she gets back on the road and gets them to the airport. And, and so there's these moments like this where she can tell that she's playing, right? She can tell that she's playing with this idea of race. But, but again, the question of kind of like, are these. I mean, we will never know, right? But do these young men see her as white and therefore want to help her or do they see her as Mexican? And that doesn't feel in conflict, right, with them helping her? Because at this time there's plenty of non black Latinos who are marrying white people, entering into white communities, attending white schools. And so perhaps these, you know, young men just see her as a peer and don't see her, you know, regardless of her, of her racial or racial category, it's as long as she's not black, she's someone who they can, can assist. So, yeah, so that's sort of her story. And there's a few other activists that I Talk about who have similar experiences of this kind of this tension between their own identification as non white Latino and then their experience in the south as being non black and therefore getting access to all these privileges that perhaps they didn't have where they were coming from.
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Anna Lindner
Yeah, very interesting story there. And her kind of very strategically engaging in. In whiteness or not whiteness. And then a way that that kind of came back to not work in her favor is that eventually SNCC decided to expel non black people from the organization. Could you talk a little bit about the politics of that, how that happened and what that meant for people? Like.
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Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Yeah, so this is a very historically thorny moment in history that I think There are like 17 more books to be written about. Right. That should be written about this moment. But so in the late 1960s, there's a real turn, not just in SNCC, but I think nationally toward, amongst black activists, towards, excuse me, towards black nationalism and a focus on sort of black led movements in particular. And I think so. So one thing that happens in 1967 is that a group of SNCC activists come together. And again, this is a very contested story, but ultimately what happens is that they decide to vote. The vote is basically white people. We want you to go organize in your community, let us organize in ours. And so what happens is that white people are expelled from sncc and along with them includes Maria Varela. And she talks about how after the expulsion, she returns to the places she was organizing. Sort of not sure if she's going to heed what has been decided and experiences. Some people who see her and sort of expected her to leave were frustrated. She experiences all this rejection other people who feel more complicated about the decision. But ultimately she decides to leave. And part of, you know, the way that this has been written about in the past, specifically with Varela and other Latinos who are expelled in the process, is that this is sncc. SNCC just doesn't really understand the category of Latino yet. Right. And that it's a sort of a misunderstanding and a missed opportunity at some kind of coalitional politics. And what I argue is that looking at the history of the south that I have seen and that I found specifically of Latinos, perhaps what it is is that SNCC is sort of astutely observing the way that race works in the south and that while Latinos might be a category, sort of a group of non white people elsewhere in the country, within the Southeast, where the sncc, the heart of sncc, is they are able to operate as white people. And so the idea that this group of people who had access to all of these privileges would be at the heart or the. Amongst the vanguard of dismantling white suprem supremacy just didn't sit right with sncc. And so the expulsion, what I ultimately see is this really kind of keen observation of how race works in the south and shows us the way that black and non black Latinos were seen differently. And you know, because at the same time, I talk, not in sncc, but I talk about that. The woman who I was speaking about earlier in dc, Fatima Cortez, and she's organizing with core and you know, they talk to her about how she, sorry, the Congress of Racial Equality, they talked to her about, yeah, okay, that's fine, you're Puerto Rican, but you're black, right? You're black here. That's really what you're. That's what matters when we're talking about Louisiana. And so I think that that's, you know, the juxtaposition of Cortez and Varela shows us the way that in this moment, the cat. That these people were experiencing race so differently and that SNCC could see that, that organizers and SNCC could see that. And so rather than a sort of misunderstanding, I reread that moment as a moment where these activists were saying, look, I, I see that you might, that you are Latino. I see what's happening in the West Coast. But when we're talking about here, this is a story about blackness, and this is a story about the way that white supremacy is invested in controlling and controlling black communities. And so we need to be a part, we need to be at the vanguard of dismantling the system.
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Anna Lindner
Yeah. And I think that reading made a lot of sense to me based on the history that you laid out previously in prior chapters. So, yeah, thanks for that explanation. And I also wanted to talk briefly about Dalton, Georgia, and the racial situation there that you explain and what's happening with whiteness, blackness and Latinness there.
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Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Yeah, Dalton, Georgia, the carpet capital of the world. They love to talk about that. It's on like all of their billboards. Roughly 2/3 of all carpet in the US were made in Dalton in the 1990s. So it's, you know, it's a big part of the industry there. It's, it's basically that whole town is sort of built around the carpet industry. And so one of the things that happens in 19, in the 1990s is that the carpet industry sees what's happening with the poultry industry? So in a lot of places in the Southeast, the poultry industry has started to recruit Mexican Americans and Mexicans to come and work in poultry. And there's a couple reasons that this works. The first is that in 1986, Ronald Reagan passes the Immigration Reform and Control act, also known as irca. And what that does is it regularizes the. It gives amnesty to approximately 3 million undocumented immigrants. At the same time, it also beefs up military presence, excuse me, on the border, and makes it harder to cross for future migrants. And so two things happen. One is that those folks who are in the United States who previously were not able to move or leave networks of support because they didn't have of citizenship status, were able to move for the first time. And so people in places like LA Chicago, who are kind of sick of city life, who are like, I just want to be able to buy a house, I want to be able to raise my kids away from crime, I want like a little bit of land, they move to the South. The other thing that happens at that same time, so as people are moving to the south, is that it becomes harder to migrate. And so people who had previously engaged in circular migration are starting to really set down roots. And so people are coming and actively being recruited by peop. By these poultry companies. They like set up billboards and things like that in Mexico being like, come to Alabama and be in the poultry industry. And those people come and it's not as easy to get back to Mexico. So they're coming and they're really sort of setting down routes more permanently. And so that leads to this kind of large scale migration to the Southeast. Because once they're there, the poultry industry starts to create these incentives saying, if you bring people over and they stay for a certain amount of time, we'll give you these bonuses. So it just be quickly becomes Latinos quickly become the source of labor there. And the carpet industry sees this happening and it's like, we want in on that. Basically, we want in on that labor market. And they do something really similar. They start recruiting Latino laborers both in the United States and in Mexico. They start creating these incentive programs to help people to have people recruit their friends and family. And Dalton really quickly changes demographically. It's a pretty small. It's a pretty small city, and it very rapidly becomes very Latino. And so one of the things I write about is in the 1990s, I write about this thing called the Georgia Project, which is this bilingual education program that shows up in the 1990s, again, at the same time that California is passing one of the sort of most anti or yeah, passing some of the most anti immigrant legislation in Prop 187. Georgia is welcoming these immigrants with a bilingual education program. So it's like, what is going on here? Why is this, why is the south, this place that is welcoming folks in a different way? And part of what I argue is that it's. The industry basically is so desperate in some ways for this labor and sees this community as such kind of, as they put it, this is their language, a godsend to the industry that they really frame the welcome of these workers as a boon for the community. And so they talk about them as hard working, family oriented, Christian, good hard workers. Right. And I think there's a couple things that this kind of category of hardworking does. One is we're right on the heels of Reagan, we're right on the heels of the welfare queen. And so the kind of anti blackness that's infused with the language of hardworking is, is pretty thinly veiled. And the other thing that I think it's doing is it's really normalizing the hyper exploitation of these populations. Right. So it's again, sort of saying Latinos are just good hard workers rather than Latino, undocumented Latinos. Some are undocumented Latinos can be worked hard. Right. It's a sort of a slight shift, but this idea that the search for more and more precarious labor people are working harder and harder not because they are good at. No one is naturally good at carpet industry like it's sort of building carpets, but that people are in positions where they need to work to be able to support their families. They see these jobs as a real, a real potential sort of way out of things like poultry. Right. If you can get out of poultry, you go to carpet in places like Georgia. And so this, the kind of coherent. This is the first time in the 1990s that you start to see Hispanicness and hard working Hispanicness come together. And while I think it really starts from the industry, from carpet and carpet elites and things like that, Latinos really take it on when they talk about their value to the community, why they should have access to resources, why they should have access to political power. They talk about themselves as hard working members of the community, as people who have saved industries, saved communities. And they're not wrong. It's just interesting that they, they have sort of taken on that category for themselves and it ultimately ends up being a pretty fleeting category. And One that doesn't protect them when other things happen. But that's really what happens in the 1990s.
- [41:27]
Anna Lindner
Yeah, that shift was very interesting to read about because I. Well, I wasn't around in the 70s and 80s, but I definitely have only known that whole illegal alien stereotype. So it's very interesting to hear about what comes first. And I also just wanted to. This book recently came out very. So I want to talk a little bit about where you are now with your research. Are you continuing to do work on this specific topic? Are you branching out a little bit? Do you have other kind of related work you're doing or where are you right now with all of that?
- [42:09]
Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Yeah, so right now I'm spending a lot of time talking about this book, which is fun. My current research is. Has taken a sort of a turn away from the region I am looking. It's sort of a more national project. So one of the things I was really interested in this, in this project was the ways that Latinos were implicitly and then sometimes explicitly involved in white supremacy. Right. And so then the current project is looking at Latino involvement in right wing and far right wing organizing. And so it comes out of, it comes partly out of this project. It partly comes out of like living in this world. You know, the origin of the project is really after the murder of Trayvon Martin. I was interested to see how the media covered George Zimmerman and particularly how right wing media refresh, you know, sort of attached to him as this Latino figure and how they talked about his racial identity in, in connection to accusations of him committing this hate crime. And so I became interested in looking, I looked at sort of right wing media's response to him and became interested more broadly in how Latinos are both being imagined by and participating in these movements. And so that's really where the project, the, the current project is. I'm still spending time in the south, obviously. I'm interested in, you know, in most, the most contemporary way, the way that the Latino electorate has. Certain chunks of it have really been captured by these right wing movements. But in general, I'm looking back to roughly the 1970s and trying to understand how Latinos were involved in the, the big culture wars of the 1970s and 80s and, and how they fit into the, to the predecessors of something like the Proud Boys.
- [44:13]
Anna Lindner
Yeah, that's so fascinating. I actually, I teach a graduate level class called Communication Culture and Conflict and we talked about Trayvon Martin's case and Zimmerman and his racial ambiguity a few days ago actually. And it's a. It's an interesting case.
- [44:32]
Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Yeah.
- [44:33]
Anna Lindner
To think about how those kind of racial formations are kind of negotiated and butting up against each other and the implication of Latin people in white supremacy and how they're getting kind of sucked up into that world. Tanya Pateri Hernandez talks about this in Racial Innocence Unmasking Latino Anti Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality. I did an interview with her earlier this year, so she's doing interesting work too. Yeah, you read a great.
- [45:07]
Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Yes.
- [45:07]
Anna Lindner
Yeah.
- [45:07]
Dr. Cecilia Marquez
No, and I think her book in so many ways is connected and tied up in my own thinking about. I mean, her earlier work. But that book in particular is connected to my own thinking about this, which is the way that Latino ness as a category really masks some pretty profound differences along lines of race, specifically around blackness and non blackness and the way that it. Some people can use it as a kind of a way of inoculating themselves against accusations of anti black racism, anti indigenous racism and commitments to white supremacy. And so I see her work as really leading the field and sort of thinking about this. And I think what I find exciting about my work is the way that the South, I think, shows very clearly in some ways that if we look at Latino ness and Latino history through the south, it lays bare in a lot of ways the arguments that she and others are making about this fracture within the category. Yeah.
- [46:07]
Anna Lindner
Because you're a historian and. And she's not, if I remember correctly,
- [46:13]
Dr. Cecilia Marquez
she's a law professor.
- [46:14]
Anna Lindner
Yeah, yeah.
- [46:15]
Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Right.
- [46:15]
Anna Lindner
So she's definitely looking at more contemporary work. So you being able to look back and. And kind of find those antecedents to where we are now, I think is. Is so valuable and it's going to be amazing work that I really look forward to reading and learning more about in the future.
- [46:33]
Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Well, thank you. I've really enjoyed getting to talk to you about this today.
- [46:36]
Anna Lindner
Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on and we look forward to seeing where the book goes and seeing where your research goes.
- [46:43]
Dr. Cecilia Marquez
Thank you.
- [46:44]
Anna Lindner
Thank you.