Available From UC Press

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans—from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished—to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity.

Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.

Natalia Molina is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is the author of the award-winning Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940 and the co-editor of Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice.

"Molina provides a fresh, sophisticated analysis of the powerful racial 'scripts' generated in twentieth-century US political and legal culture, and of the Mexican population's unique vulnerability in the 1920s and after as eminently 'deportable.' This book's importance is sadly substantiated by twenty-first-century headlines about immigration policy, 'papers please' laws, and urban policing. A critical contribution." --Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of Whiteness of a Different Color and Barbarian Virtues

"Bridging Mexican American history and immigration history, How Race Is Made in America is a fascinating study of how deeply ingrained prejudices structure institutional and social power." --Monica Perales, author of Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community

"A compelling, briskly written, deeply researched, and closely argued book that makes signal contributions on many fronts." --David Roediger, co-author of The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History