Pro-immigrant conservatism is back?!
Since I put the finishing touches on Corazón de Dixie in 2015, Trumpism and its anti-immigrant rhetoric have overtaken the Republican Party. The term “pro-immigrant conservatism”—a phenomenon I documented in my chapter on rural Georgia from the 1960s-80s—today seems more than just a little unexpected. It seems downright impossible to imagine. As Duke junior Daisy Almonte writes in her recent Op-Ed about an anti-immigrant bill working its way through the North Carolina legislature, in today’s South Republican politicians race to prove their conservatism by using immigrants as symbolic pawns. But these pawns, as Almonte reminds us, are people.
And then I open the New York Times to find this: “Alabama is more pro-immigrant than you think.” The truth is that since 2011 I’ve only been back to the South to lecture, not to research. So I didn’t actually think one way or the other—I wondered.
In his op-ed, Rev. Alan Cross describes pro-immigrant conservatism, against the tide, reappearing in Alabama in 2019. He posits that his evangelical congregants have tired of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and are returning to (in his view) more faithful interpretations of the Bible that exhort them to welcome the stranger.
I would argue that this is, in fact, the “original” response of Evangelicals to Latino immigration in the U.S. South, at least in the rural areas. Pro-immigrant conservatism always had its pitfalls, as I explore in Corazón de Dixie. The grace of white church people depended on Mexicano workers not organizing their own bases of power, thus leaving their families highly vulnerable when harsh anti-immigrant laws came to Georgia in 2011. Still, over the past hundred-plus years, Latinos in the South have pursued a wide range of strategies to secure their positions in the region. If white Evangelicals are interested in being a part of that story once again, I am glad to hear it. I hope their support will prove more consistent—and less conditional—in the future than it was last time around.
Mexicanos in New Orleans: back to the 19th century
There is some fabulous new research coming out now on the histories of Latinxs in the U.S. South. For example, I just read, “Brokering Modernity: The World’s Fair, Mexico’s Eighth Cavalry Band, and the Borderlands of New Orleans Music, 1884-1910.” This dissertation by Valerie Jiménez, who receives her Ph.D. this week from Northwestern University, explores the ways that Mexican and New Orleans elites negotiated the tensions between their countries and cultures while trying to reap mutual economic benefit from their relationship. Corazón de Dixie discusses the Europeanized image of Mexicanos in New Orleans in the interwar period; well, Jiménez has shown us where that image comes from and how it came to be in the first place.
Earlier in the nineteenth century, as Southern soldiers mobilized to fight Mexico in the war of 1846-8, New Orleans was a center of open hostility towards Mexico. In her research, however, Jiménez found that the 1884 World’s Fair in New Orleans, which featured Mexico’s Eighth Cavalry Band as a prominent act, marked a turning point. Elites on both sides wanted to repair the wounds of the Mexican War to forge closer commercial relations between Mexico and New Orleans. The fair and the band provided an opportunity for such a rapprochement. During and after the fair, the Mexican band became enormously popular and had a significant influence on the New Orleans music scene, including both white and African American jazz musicians. Underlying tensions between Mexicans and white New Orleaneans continued to surface at particular flash points. Nevertheless, a significant change, at least at the elite level, had taken place—and it happened in large part through music and popular culture.
Thanks to Jiménez’s research, perhaps we can now delineate the period of 1884-2005 as the period of Mexicanos’ provisional whiteness in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina then swept in a new Latinx workforce, and with it, an anti-Latinx reaction in the city that continues to this day.
Trump’s inaugural: “Bring back our borders.”
In his inaugural address today, Donald Trump promised to “bring back our borders.” The refrain is inaccurate (U.S. borders were not seriously policed until the 1990s and are more policed today than ever before) but it is familiar.
Lately this line has echoed most loudly in Trump country — rural America, particularly the South. But we can’t forget who started it: California.
In recent Op-Ed pieces, I’ve written about California’s culpability for our current anti-immigrant discourse and reached the conclusion that it was Trump, a New York billionaire, who finally helped nativism conquer the South.
Historians trade in contingency–the idea that while abstract social and economic forces are real and sometimes extremely powerful, individual people and unexpected events can change the course of history. Corazón de Dixie details the social and economic forces that kept Southern power brokers open to (or explicitly encouraging of) Latino immigration through most of the twentieth century. And the electoral success of Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign reminds us how human beings navigate these forces in ways that can be unpredictable.
Business vs. Conservatism redux and the history of immigrant driver’s licenses in NC
All the way back to the proclamation of the “New South” in the late 19th century, Southern business leaders have tried to project an image of their region’s openness and progressiveness to attract and keep investment, while a range of other constituencies, most notably the forces opposing civil rights, have pushed a harsher brand of conservatism. The struggle is in the news again this week as North Carolina’s once business-friendly governor, Pat McCrory, signed a bill overturning any local anti-discrimination protections that gay, lesbian, and transgender people had enjoyed in his state. Meanwhile, his counterpart in Georgia, Gov. Nathan Deal, vetoed a “religious liberty” bill that would have given faith-based organizations explicit permission to discriminate against LGBT people. In both cases, the measures pit religious conservatives against business leaders who feared the loss of investments and events if their states were perceived as intolerant.
Corazón de Dixie shows how this dynamic played out in the battle over immigration in the South since the 1980s, in which the region’s initial pro-immigrant conservatism (driven by both business and Evangelicals) has more recently given way to widespread GOP support for anti-immigrant measures in the region.
Perhaps the most significant policy that reflected the earlier, more “pragmatic” attitude toward the region’s immigrant newcomers was the fact that Southern states were much more likely to license undocumented immigrants than Western ones (including my home state of California) both before and, for a brief period, after 9/11. A key source for me in exploring this issue in Corazón de Dixie has been Wayne Hurder, former director of licensing for the state of North Carolina, who was a protector of sorts for this policy in his state for many years. In response to my barrage of questions, Wayne has written up an incredible 75-page account, the most thorough coverage of the issue that exists by far. He calls it “Driving Lessons – NC Driver Licenses for Unauthorized Immigrants: How they got it, How they lost it, & How they might get it back” and it is linked here. It is a must-read for advocates anywhere who are working on the immigrant driver’s license issue in their states.
Nuevolutions
North Carolina immigration politics, now and then
Under the leadership of Gov. Pat McCrory, North Carolina has hopped onto the bandwagon of GOP-led states trying to make life as difficult as possible for immigrants, particularly but not exclusively those without papers. I weighed in on this in an Op/Ed in the Raleigh News & Observer and as a guest on WUNC’s The State of Things. It’s so easy to get lost in this moment when it seems the entire GOP has a single and negative view of immigrants, including seemingly everywhere in the South. One of the most important things I tried to show in Corazón de Dixie is just how recently things were so different (eg. ten years ago) and how this current moment has no real precedent in the South in the past century. White conservative support of Mexican and Latino immigrants in the South always came with conditions (don’t organize, or demand too much). But Mexicanos were able to strategically use that support to achieve some of their own goals and at least fight back against overt harassment. I doubt the resurrection of pro-immigrant conservatism (see chapter 4) is coming anytime soon. Casting their lot squarely with the left will leave the South’s Latinos highly vulnerable in the short-term, but at this point really looks like the only viable strategy for the long-term. Unless, of course, I am missing something.
Rafael Landrove, Mississippi activist of the 1920s
Fortunately for me, Mississippi’s most prominent Mexican activist in the 1920s-30s had an unusual name: Rafael Landrove. Because his name was unusual, I was able to learn lots about his background from genealogical records, which I recount in Chapter 2. I found his U.S. records on ancestry.com but for the Mexican records I had to travel to his hometown of Lampazos de Naranjo, in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon. Other records were available at the state archives in Monterrey.
While I learned a lot about the Landrove family from various birth records, I did not think to look for his parents’ marriage record. In the past few days, ancestry.com has launched a new database of Mexican genealogical records, and its use has been free over the weekend through tomorrow (Nov. 2); if this had been available years ago, I would not have had to travel to Lampazos or Monterrey at all.
I argue in Chapter 2 that Landrove was class-conscious above all and sought to deliberately distance himself from the racially denigrated “Mexican” category by falsely telling a Census enumerator his parents were Cuban. Now, the new Ancestry site popped up Landrove’s parents’ marriage record which yields new and intriguing insights into his outlook and background. The marriage record shows that Rafael’s father Rafael Landrove, age 29 at marriage, was born in Barcelona, Spain and was the son of a doctor who continued to reside there. Mother Petra, age 15 at marriage, had a very different background: she hailed from Lampazos where her father was a day laborer.
While the Landrove siblings’ frustration with the unfulfilled promises of late Porfirian Mexico were typical for their generation, one wonders if their financial struggles might have felt still more bitter in light of the family’s elite background on their father’s side. For Rafael the son, crossing the border to Texas and advocating for Mexicans’ rights in Mississippi may then have felt like a series of attempts to reclaim lost economic and social ground.
Of course, none of this explains why Landrove told the Census enumerator his parents were Cuban — was Spanish parentage not enough to de-Mexicanize himself?
Blog de Corazón de Dixie
It’s only been six months since I sent Corazón de Dixie into copyediting, yet already new reading has caused me to reconsider the nuances of some of the things I argued. I am also bursting with things to say about the immigration rhetoric that has enveloped this political season, in light of Corazón de Dixie’s findings (fortunately, I’ve found at least one outlet for such a burst, about Donald Trump!). No doubt both of these things will keep happening, and I look forward to exploring them on this blog. Now that this website is public, I also can’t wait for feedback on how it works (or doesn’t) work as a teaching tool. Please keep me posted, colleagues and teachers, on your experiences with the book and the site. I’ll be able to make adjustments on the site and share/respond to your experiences and critiques on the blog.
¡Adelante!