Brown University

Graduate Student, American Civilization

About

Although in North from Mexico: the Spanish Speaking People of the United States Carey McWilliams argues that “more Mexicans were lynched in the Southwest between 1865 and 1920 than blacks in other parts of the South,” the history, practice and function of the lynching of Mexicans in the United States has not received sustained and systematic treatment. Robust scholarship on the lynching of African Americans has situated the practice as critical to an understanding of the racialization of African Americans in the United States. Further, this scholarship has focused on techniques of terror, which have served to police movement and behavior and to act as public revocations of the protections and the rights of citizenship. Concentrated work (like that of William Carrigan)must be continued to make visible the lynching of Mexicans in the United States. I explore the critical import of these public violences as communicating events that reinforce and reconstruct ideologies and hierarchies of race and national belonging. In this study I utilize a bilingual, transborder analysis of available scholarship and assemble reportage of the lynching of Mexicans. Because the available archive is diffuse or unassembled, this study seeks an historical recovery that constructs a new archive, making obvious the history of anti-Mexican vigilante violence.Further, I highlight the relationship between the state and "vigilante" violence. I mine the rich Spanish language journalistic tradition and Mexican official correspondence for reports of lynchings. Further, I explore current campaigns of terror through interviews as well as surveys of local and national press reports, and engage in what I call “digital ethnographies.” My methodology makes visible the perennial use of lynching against Mexicans in the United States and transform current understandings of the functionality of the lynching of Mexicans with its attention to Spanish language sources. In addition, because I consider the functionalities of violence, I investigate U.S. landscapes of terror as significantly tied to figurations of the Mexican body. Its structure will explore genealogies of violence along with geographies of violence. Ultimately, this study aims to propose a linkage between the history of the lynching of Mexicans in the period between 1850 and 1930 and current campaigns of terror against those figured as Mexican immigrants.

Contact Information