Reviews
“Transnational in scope and revisionist in outlook, Corazón de Dixie is a model of how we can enrich and even transform familiar historical narratives through the inclusion of previously understudied subjects.”
“The book is a must read for students and academics from a number of disciplines including history, anthropology, sociology, American studies, Latin American and Latino studies, and southern studies.”
“At its core, Corazón de Dixie is a fine-grained social history of a population long neglected by southern historians. Weise draws upon a mind-boggling diversity of primary sources that will impress and inspire readers. The book weaves census data, oral history, school records, English- and Spanish-language newspapers, family photo albums, and consular records from Mexico City into a historical quilt of immeasurable richness.”
“Corazón de Dixie is a valuable resource for historians and scholars of race, ethnicity, and migration in both Mexico and the United States. The rich and detailed, binational and multi-state archival sources Weise draws on exemplify the type of research required for a deep historical understanding of transnational migration.”
“The anti-immigrant movement that swept the U.S. South starting around 2004 … serves as the starting point for Julie Weise’s compelling study of the past one hundred years of Mexican migration to the region. Drawing on archival sources in both the United States and Mexico and for later periods on oral histories in both Spanish and English, she rejects the common assumption that southerners’ recent hostility to the mostly Mexican immigrants was simply a continuation of Dixie’s particularly deep-rooted commitment to white supremacy.”
“It really is complicated….Readers crave clear answers to explain a complicated world. Yet for Weise to offer anything else would be for her to undercut the surprisingly heterogeneous world of the US South in the twentieth century. And though no conclusion can tuck this history into bed, nice and neat, the fact that the historian is able to raise these questions and explain how the answers depended on place and time constitutes a marked achievement in borderlands literature.”
“The analytic consideration for how Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans negotiated with the Mexican consulate illustrates an important transnational aspect previously understudied by Latinx scholars.”
“In this innovative study of five different urban, rural, and exurban regions of the Mexican transnational U.S. South, Weise explores how “southern distinctiveness,” viewed from the Mexican perspective, offered opportunities locally for Mexicans to negotiate their racial place and space in a region where, in contrast to Texas and the Southwest, racial notions of Mexicans were less entrenched. Based on numerous interviews and a broad range of primary documents, Corazón de Dixie tells the stories of Mexicans in the Deep South in a compelling and deeply engaging narrative of this newest immigrant group to states like Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina.”
“This is an exceptionally well-researched study of an important and overlooked subject that challenges static perceptions about Mexican immigration and the Southern racial system. Weise’s study is innovative in its conceptual and historical framework, its methodology and its conclusions.”
“In this subtle, imaginatively researched study, the historian Julie Weise offers the best account yet of the experience of Mexican immigrants in both the viejo (1910–1960s) and nuevo (1960s–present) New South….Throughout the text, Weise maintains a steady balance of material factors (economic shifts, employment opportunities, working conditions, etc.) and political-cultural analysis (including race relations, role of the churches, anti-immigrant forces, as well as migrant strategy and aspirations).”
“Corazón de Dixie expands public understanding of Mexicans in the U.S. South, demonstrating how Mexicans responded to working conditions, mobilized for their racial and social acceptance, but frequently left an oppressive system of exclusion intact. The stories in this history are vital as activists, both black and brown, continue to fight for a more equitable U.S. South.”
“Corazón de Dixie is a pathbreaking work … Weise does not claim that her cases represent a broader narrative of Mexicano experience in the South. Rather, she has demonstrated a range of possibilities for that history and an attentive vocabulary for future scholarship…. Weise is also creative in her use of sources, turning to Mexican consular communications and family photographs, reading the latter as a kind of text. Both help her to overcome scant records left by mobile subalterns.”
“Weise’s research questions and her impressive historical methodologies demonstrate that Mexican history and Mexican experiences are found beyond the Southwest.”
“Weise draws on traditional historical sources (newspapers, census records), but incorporates oral histories and migrants’ personal photo albums as well … to build an impressive archive that recovers Mexicanos’ own constructions of their daily lives and labor in these new contexts.”
“Corazón de Dixie offers a nuanced understanding of the South, newly illuminating how race worked on the ground from the vantage point of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who labored and lived in the region. Julie Weise successfully makes big claims about the past and its implications for the present and the future.”
“Based on extensive research, Julie Weise’s book presents compelling new analyses of Mexican immigration and racial formation. Corazón de Dixieengages key scholarly debates, and the author’s clear, elegant writing style makes the book a pleasure to read for academics and beyond.”
“Weise’s sweeping examination of Mexican people in the region forces readers to rethink their ideas of Southern history, labor history, and the history of race in America. Corazón de Dixie provides a model to understand both the continuity of social ideas across national boundaries and the situationally specific forces that shape communities over time and place…. The book provides a new kind of labor history that applies to transnational migrant workers.”
“Meticulously researched, thoughtfully argued, and engagingly written, Corazón de Dixie … offers fresh interpretations and promises to become a classic text in Mexican American, borderlands, labor, immigration, and southern history.”
“In recovering the history and agency of Mexicanos in what is sometimes called the Nuevo South, Corazón de Dixie helps build scholarship that points to a new direction in Chicana and Chicano history, one that disrupts geographic essentialism, spotlights interracial relations, and documents the multiple experiences of Mexicanos in the United States.”
“Corazon De Dixie is a capacious study, beautifully written, and told with an eye for nuance. Weise makes a persuasive case for local specificity and how it might complicate and revise our understanding of Mexican and Mexican-American and Southern history, in addition to the politics of race and nativism in the United States.”
“This book makes a significant contribution in that it challenges the traditional geographic and interpretive boundaries of the field and points to new directions for further scholarship.”
“Weise focuses on race and labor and links the experiences and mobilities of Mexican working people with the concurrent out-migration of white and black southerners. She explores the dynamic interplay between Mexican aspirations and struggles for autonomy in the South, and the responses of the array of southerners with whom they interacted. Weise correctly pitches the story at the granular, individual level and eschews any normative fusion of the perspectives of all the groups and institutional structures she examines.”
“By extending borderlands historiography to include the South, Weise sheds light on a little-studied facet of Mexican immigration in the United States., powerfully demonstrating how our concepts of race are inevitably shaped by region, history, and community. Corazón de Dixie expands the scope of borderland studies and establishes a foundation that scholars will build upon for years.”
“By extending borderlands historiography to include the South, Weise sheds light on a little-studied facet of Mexican immigration in the United States., powerfully demonstrating how our concepts of race are inevitably shaped by region, history, and community. Corazón de Dixie expands the scope of borderland studies and establishes a foundation that scholars will build upon for years.”