University of California, San Diego

Post-Doc, History

UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow

About

My research and teaching interests concern the economic and social experiences of ethnic Mexicans in the United States in the first forty years of the twentieth century, emphasizing daily life and the relationships between race, labor, family, gender.  I particularly focus on the ways state, community, and family surveillance shape classed and gendered identity formation among marginalized populations.  In doing so, I emphasize the daily ways in which individuals understood, subverted, and built identities around economic and social regulation, illuminating a generally understudied era in Mexican American history and contextualizing subsequent generations within it. 

My dissertation, Spinning the Bottle: Ethnic Mexicans and Alcohol in Prohibition Era Los Angeles, centralizes these interests by examining the ways alcohol, and attempts to regulate it, shaped ethnic Mexican daily life, exclusion, and identity between 1900 and 1940.  In this era, alcohol presented an interesting paradox: it shaped the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion—within the economic and social fabric of Los Angeles, within ethnic Mexican communities, and within families—yet through it individuals also crafted alternate spaces and identities to circumvent this exclusion if they so chose.  I illuminate ethnic Mexicans' experiences, the contested terrain of early twentieth-century race and ethnic relations, and, ultimately, the contours of ethnic Mexican citizenship by examining a range of sources including federal, state, and local court records, police reports, and government inquiries.  Integrating ethnic Mexicans' narratives, from contemporary ethnographers and fourteen original interviews, with traditional and indeed more empowered sources contextualizes and centralizes historical actors decision making while remaining firmly attuned to the ways multiple power structures shaped this decision making and daily life.

As my work demonstrates, Prohibition enforcement shifted state policing of ethnic Mexicans, with liquor regulation sanctioning mass arrests, subjugating Mexican laborers, and rationalizing exclusion.  In this socially and economically stratified landscape, alcohol shaped ethnic Mexican identity formation.  Ethnic Mexicans with aspirations of upward mobility, for example, understood  alcohol's social and political significance in this era, and formed new identities based on temperance, Americanization, and modernity.  Liquor regulation further opened up new economic spaces for ethnic Mexicans, including women, to earn viable wages compared to their other, limited, economic options. As bootleggers and dime dancers (women paid $.10 to dance with men in discotecs during Prohibition), some ethnic Mexican women located markets that Prohibition made possible and profitable.  Often working within the family wage economy, their stigmatized (and, in bootlegging, illegal) labor mandated they negotiate economic need with social norms: devalued laborers gendered as demure ladies, these women crafted unique classed and gendered identities to harmonize with their degraded but economically viable work.

Spinning the Bottle integrates and in several ways expands Chicana/o and Latina/o, Prohibition, gender, labor, and family historiographies.  Relationships between ethnic Mexicans, substance regulation, and state authorities contextualize subsequently—and currently—popular tropes about Mexicans and drugs, and illuminate the intersections of efforts to restrict immigrants and drugs in Latino/a history.  The project further introduces ethnic Mexicans as active agents in Prohibition history, agents who understood, recrafted, and redefined their relationships to alcohol in forming class and gender identities.  Bootleggers and dime dancers expand both contemporary and current ideas about class, labor, and gender in the United States, illuminating new forms of labor available to marginalized individuals and complicating the primacy of wage labor.  Finally, my project offers glimpses into daily life, particularly among ethnic Mexican families, introducing topics such as domestic violence, illicit sex, and vice—illegal and often 'shameful' subjects regularly absent from the historical record that introduce a new spectrum of experiences and identities.  The multiple identities distilling around alcohol further complicate the periodization of Chicana/o history, in which World War II appears as the engine driving identity formation—through my work we see Prohibition propelled ethnic, classed and gendered identities and divides within ethnic Mexican communities in the decades before mobilization.

In my postdoctoral year, I am transnationalizing my dissertation with an article-length social, economic, and cultural history of alcohol in Tijuana, Mexicali, and Southern California.  A business center for smugglers, a way station for northbound Mexican migrants, and a wet playground for US tourists, seeing the borderlands through alcohol signals the myriad cultural survival strategies, social motivations for migration and border crossing, and economic experiences of people in the borderlands.

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