El Nuevo Bajio and the New South: Race, Region, and Mexican Migration since 1980

Abstract

My dissertation examines the circular transit of ideas about race and identity. Through transnational archival research and oral histories in North Carolina and throughout Mexico, I argue that migrants' ideas about race differed depending on their sending community. I use the experiences of migrants from Cherán, Michoacán, to emphasize that race making is a fluid process. Though historians conventionally have treated ethnic and racial categories as separate, if often intersecting, I treat them as fundamentally similar and interchangeable. While the majority of historical scholarship on Mexicans in the United States focuses on areas that were once part of Mexico (like the US Southwest), my study attends to how ideas about race form differently in regions traditionally isolated from Mexican migration, like North Carolina. This research reveals that indigenous migrants' identities developed and transformed differently, intimately linked to the ways racial and ethnic histories have been propagated and lived by Mexican citizens in diverse regions of Mexico. My dissertation also demonstrates that migrants not only adopted the racial ideas of their receiving state, but they also transmitted racial knowledge back to their home communities. In doing so, this history of migration to the United States both begins and ends outside of the country. In our increasingly global and transnational context, my project changes our understanding of how racial formations are generated in a transitional world.