Corazón de Dixie

At this writing, Donald Trump has targeted millions of Mexicans by declaring that, if elected president, he will deport 11 million undocumented people from the United States. His incendiary comments are meant to garner support to “make America great again” while inspiring fear in millions. In the award-winning Corazón de Dixie Julie M. Weise complicates and enriches the history of the lived experiences of Mexicanos in the South by challenging the contemporary racial and ethnic narratives of the past and present. Moreover, she offers new methodological examples to position a scholar's work within broader contemporary discussions. Weise has organized her book around the categories of time and place. In five chapters she easily moves from the early 1910s to the present by examining Mexican migration to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina. She takes readers on a tour of a changing South that is rarely mentioned. Mexicans sought assimilation, and they struggled to allow their children to attend better schools. They left Texas and the West in search of employment opportunities. She uses maps to show which states received braceros. In the text, she adeptly interprets the relationships among the workers, landowners, and state officials, and how Mexicans navigated Jim Crow in the South in a time of heightening tensions. She also documents how Mexicans, responding to their living conditions, influenced the Mexican government to respond to racism along the Mississippi delta. In Georgia, Christian conservatives embraced Mexican laborers who preserved their way of life for a few more years. Weise notes how, in more recent years, North Carolina exurban whites welcomed Mexican labor to build their houses and big box stores but embraced anti-immigrant rhetoric when those same workers settled in their communities. To the exurbanites who sought to maintain their middle-class lives on the margins of growing, and more expensive, cities, Mexican immigrants were not entitled to that same life even though they had helped build it. This story has echoed across the South

Art · Ethnic group · Government (linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Racism · Sociology · State (computer science · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law