Unruly Borders, Bodies, and Blood: Mexican “Mongrels” and the Eugenics of Empire

ABSTRACT

This essay connects the lynching of Mexican men and poor Mexican women to marriage between wealthy Mexican women and Anglo settlers to argue that these practices composed bodily rhetorics that sanctioned the colonization of the now-U.S. Southwest. Lynching cleared the land, making room for white ownership of the annexed territories through murder and spectacles of extreme violence. Intermarriage between wealthy Mexicans and Anglo settlers transferred lands into white hands through more genteel means. Together, lynching and intermarriage established the “whiteness of property” and suggested the inevitability of Manifest Destiny.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the editor Christa Olson and reviewers Lisa Flores and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz for their insightful and generous guidance in drafting this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The concept of familialism links familism, or the culturally-determined importance of the family unit, to capitalist concerns regarding welfare and healthcare support structures (see Boucher 2014).

2. I use “Mexican” from here on to stress that, although they were made United-Statesians by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, people of Mexican descent were still perceived as Mexican culturally and socially. Whether made Mexican Americans by the treaty or born as Mexican Americans afterward, they were amalgamated under the generic Mexican “mongrel” figure unless “made” white. Today, many Mexican-origin people identify and are identified as Mexican despite being U.S.-born.

3. Despite many broken treaties between the U.S. and Native tribal nations, U.S. political and commercial entities were forced to recognize Indigenous sovereignty to authorize their own colonial land claims (Karuka 2019, 2).

4. Manu Karuka speaks of this issue in terms of “rumors,” which “sounding through the caverns of colonial archives … appear at a remove from their community of meaning and interpretation” but nonetheless give rise to interpretive communities grounded in shared experiential knowledges (2019, 3–4).