Abstract
There is much to be gained by reading Katherine Benton-Cohen’s book. Borderline Americans contributes to a number of historiographies: the United States/Mexico border, race relations, as well as class and labor conflict. Indeed, one of the book’s many strengths is the sophisticated manner in which it integrates these histories, not as distinct moments but connected parts of an overall transformation in the meanings of “Mexican” and “American”. Its rich evidence, while historical, is timely. The methodological approach itself has analytic import. By examining these histories within micro contexts, skillfully bringing the reader down to Cochise County in the Southern Arizona borderlands, Benton-Cohen shows how macro categories such as race and nation achieve meaning in local communities.
Concentrating on the middle of the nineteenth century to the New Deal era, Benton-Cohen explores why some “borderline Americans”—a term she uses to refer to resident noncitizens with a “tenuous claim on whiteness”—became “white Americans,” while others did not. Why, she asks, did Eastern and Southern Europeans, one group of “borderline Americans” become white, while Mexicans did not? Borderline Americans can be read as another chapter in America’s history of racial formation, as told by Noel Ignatiev in How the Irish Became White. What we are presented with here is an effort to explain how the Mexicans became brown.
Benton-Cohen’s contribution is to show that the conflict between “Mexicans” and “Americans,” which today seems to be timeless and inevitable, was a contingent outcome, motivated in large part by the penetration of industrial capitalism into southern Arizona. This conflict has a curious history containing moments of cooperation and not conflict. Unlike the dominant narratives which examine the social construction of race, Benton-Cohen takes us to the local level and focuses attention not on state actors (although she does not overlook them) but on corporate managers. She helps us to understand that capitalism did not eliminate racial difference, rather it constituted it. The labor process does not suspend difference but rather articulates it. Class conflict is racial conflict, and racial conflict is class conflict.
The chapters outline the historical transformation of a once undefined line between “Mexican” and “white American” into a sharp border. The first four chapters of the book offer the most compelling reads, providing engaging portraits of four different communities in Cochise County. In the first two chapters, Benton-Cohen takes us to Tres Alamos and Tombstone, and exposes us to places where relations between Mexicans and white Americans were characterized, for the most part, by harmony, equal legal protection, and sense of membership in the same community. In Tres Alamos and Tombstone, Mexicans and whites inhabited a “shared world” characterized by a “hybrid borderlands culture of the 1880’s, when Mexican-Anglo intermarriages and business partnerships still flourished.” Benton-Cohen argues that race, at least the racial antagonism between Mexicans and whites, was not a central organizing feature of these communities. In this “shared world,” it was not Mexicans who were the “others”, but a range of groups such as Apaches, Chinese immigrants, and Cowboys—each “other” representing a common enemy for the Mexicans and white Americans. She attributes the prevailing “ecumenical” view of whiteness in these two communities to their agricultural-based economies and the fact that most of the Mexicans residing there were members of the landholding elite.
In contrast, the mining town of Bisbee and its suburb, Warren, the subjects of the next two chapters, tell a different story. In these communities, race was more palatable, as a dual-wage system saw Mexicans receiving lower pay, and residential segregation restricted the cosmopolitan interactions which characterized Tres Alamos and Tombstone. As with the previous two communities, Benton-Cohen claims that the status of race in these towns is a consequence of economic and class conditions. Unlike Tres Alamos and Tombstone, Bisbee was dominated by a mining economy and laboring population. This case is picked up in the remainder of the book, where Benton-Cohen explores how the divide between “Mexicans” and “whites,” indeed the presence of a racial discourse, is connected to the penetration of industrialized capitalism.
As the mining boom took hold, corporations redeveloped the geographic and social ecology of Cochise County. Bisbee expanded and race entered into once unknown places such as Tres Alamos and Tombstone. Along with these corporations, homesteaders from other parts of America moved in, and brought with them understandings of racial difference that were foreign to Cochise County. The “white labor movement” as she names it, gained a strong influence over Arizona politics, and elected officials who saw Mexicans as racial “others.” Over time, the four communities began to resemble each other, as an Anglo/Hispanic color line became a prominent feature of them all.
Borderline Americans paints a picture of mining companies coming into Cochise County and creating the conditions for racial conflict by paying lower wages to Mexicans. In yet another curious part of the history of racial unfolding, it is precisely because managers instituted a dual-wage system, and paid Mexican and “foreign” workers less than their “white” counterparts, that conditions emerged around which white workers expressed their grievances. In the dual-labor system, Mexican workers were more profitable for employees, and white workers began to see these “others” as a threat. But there is a critical gap in this account, as it appears that these corporate managers took already existing differences and mobilized and enforced them. From this perspective we have no clear sense of how Benton-Cohen’s “borderline Americans” came to be “borderline Americans” in the first place—they are presented as having always been in this precarious position, and we are left wondering how and why they got to be this way.
These questions relate to a larger problem in the book, namely, what Benton-Cohen understands as racial division and racial conflict. In the communities of Tres Alamos and Tombstone, where she paints a pre-racial and preindustrial back-in-the-day, Benton-Cohen suggests that Mexicans were white Americans, from their own perspective and that of others. The evidence for this is empirically and conceptually tenuous.
For the most part, Benton-Cohen seems to subscribe to a liberal conception of race, in which she equates racial equality with inclusion, but inclusion into what? We read of equal coverage in local newspapers, Mexican schoolchildren winning prizes at local schools, and racial diversity at various social functions, as evidence of racial equality before the penetration of the mining companies. But this appears to undercut the story she tells later, where racial conflict did not express itself in terms of who attended parties, but who was given work.
While Benton-Cohen intends to clarify which “Borderline Americans” became white and which did not, her book does not fully provide a convincing answer. We are left with a sense that all Mexicans were denied the white status. And again, we are not sure what this might mean. Is it exclusion from social events or economic institutions? Although she says that today the line between Mexican and white American is fully entrenched, we can find multiple instances of what she takes as evidence of nonexistence of racial division: intermarriage, business partnerships, even common enemies (think of the number of Mexicans enlisted in the U.S. armed forces). But it would be naïve to think that this shows the racial division between Mexicans and white Americans does not exist.
Borderline Americans is an important book, written at an important time. Whether the term “postracial” can claim any purchase or not, it is increasingly clear that those who debate its merits restrictively focus only on the history of the relationship between whites and blacks, ignoring another American racial conflict, that between Anglos and Hispanics. Among its many other merits, Benton-Cohen’s book allows us to better think about the dynamics of America’s “other” racial conflict.