This innovative and provocative volume focuses on the historical development of racial thinking and imagining in Mexico and the southwestern United States over a period of almost five centuries, from the earliest decades of Spanish colonial rule and the birth of a multiracial colonial population, to the present. The distinguished contributors to the volume bring into dialogue sophisticated new scholarship from an impressive range of disciplines, including social and cultural history, art history, legal studies, and performance art. The essays provide an engaging and original framework for understanding the development of racial thinking and classification in the region that was once New Spain and also shed new light on the history of the shifting ties between Mexico and the United States and the transnational condition of Latinos in the US today.
"The wide range if topics found in this collection-including a highly readable discussion of Chicano film by Adriana Katzew and an interview with the photographer and performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena-engages the reader, as every chapter addresses a new subject with a distinct, invigorating, analytical approach."
Nicole von Germeten, Latin American Research Review
"This useful and enlightening book covers an historical and geographic arc that can only be covered in an edited volume. The combination of original essays on race and caste in the colonial period and the Mexican experience in the US is unique, as is the dialogue between visually oriented essays and social-historical analysis."
Claudio Lomnitz, Columbia University
"This engaging collection offers some of the best recent scholarship on race and ethnicity in Mexico and Mexican America . . . [T]his volume is extremely relevant as the present political and social debates over race and classification in the Unites States and Mexico intensify."
Martina Will de Chaparro, Hispanic American Historical Review
