‘Access to Women’: Securing Mormon Whiteness in the US Army's Regulation of Commercial Sex in Chihuahua, 1916

This article argues that Mormon colonists – once refugees who had sought freedom from persecution for their sexual practices – asserted a white middle-class respectability as they cooperated with the US Army and corresponded with officers on the management of the soldiers’ sexual conduct. Their success depended heavily on shared understandings of the race and gender of the people involved. That is, they leveraged prevailing assumptions about Black soldiers’ bodies as aggressive and in need of sex, about white Mormon women's bodies as vulnerable and about Mexican women's bodies as racially in-between and thus suitable for the sexual service-work of enlisted men, pliable and ready to be made ‘accessible’ to soldiers. John Pershing, when asked to explain his decision to build the brothel, justified his choice by saying he had all Black troops at the camp and that nearby Mormon colonists had complained of these Black men meeting women outside for sex. This article explains how, why, for whom and to what end Pershing's explanation worked.     

Breaking the Silence: Mexican Children and Women's Confrontation of Bracero Family Separation, 1942–64

On 6 August 1942, the Mexican and US governments’ recruitment of Mexican men into the temporary contract labour programme known as the Bracero Program initiated a process that would deteriorate Mexican children and women's personal wellbeing and relationships to each other. The Bracero Program left children to endure the absence of their bracero fathers, while married women and caretakers transitioned into single motherhood under conditions and terms that drove an uncalculated number of these women into undocumented migration to the United States. Separation from their mothers further devastated children. The silence concerning the programme and the whereabouts and intentions of their immigrant parents alienated children from the mothers and caretakers left to care for them. Hence, mothers, caretakers and teachers came together to listen and talk to their children and each other about the dangerous realities of the programme in order to overcome the alienating silence driving them apart within the borders of Mexico. Using archival sources and the oral life‐histories of fifty Mexican children and women who endured the programme's separation of their families in San Martin de Hidalgo, Jalisco, Mexico, I argue that the anxiety and loss of Mexican children and women inspired mothers, caretakers and teachers to transition into instilling a gendered and transnational understanding of the dangers of the programme to their children and among themselves to prevent the onset of permanent alienation from each other.     

La Jicarilla

La Jicarilla was a distinct sub-region of eastern Apacheria, that seemingly limitless area northeast of early 18th century New Mexico in which various, usually friendly, Apaches lived. It was probably named after one or more of the igneous landforms found in northeastern New Mexico and was situated on the western Great Plains, adjacent to the Rocky Mountains. It was also situated astride the "Taos Trail" the most important transmountain road in northeastern New Mexico, and was of substantial strategic importance to the Spaniards of New Mexico. As Comanche, Ute and French pressure mounted in northeastern New Mexico, both the Spaniards of New Mexico and the Apaches of La Jicarilla saw advantages in the annexation of La Jicarilla by New Mexico and the placement of a presidio, mission and pueblo(s) there. Plans for these settlements were made, but before they could be implemented attitudes and priorities changed and they were never established. Instead, with decreased New Mexican concern for northeastern frontier defenses, the Apaches of eastern Apacheria were displaced by the Comanches, and La Jicarilla as an Apache settlement region ceased to exist. The use of "La Jicarilla" as a place name continued until the late 18th century.     

Averting a global financial crisis: the US,the IMF,and the Mexican debt crisis of 1976

This article explains the politics and diplomacy of the initial use of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) adjustment program as a tactic in a strategy to avert a possible global banking crisis. Scholars typically date the strategy to the Reagan administration's response to the sovereign debt crises in Eastern Europe and Latin America in the early 1980s. This article demonstrates that the approach originated instead during the 1976 Mexican debt crisis – the first potential postwar default by a developing country that threatened international bank failures. Key US and Mexican officials recognized that an IMF program of currency devaluation and austerity would probably fail in its stated objective of reducing Mexico's balance of payments deficit. Nevertheless, US Treasury and Federal Reserve officials, fearing that a Mexican default might lead to bank failures and subsequent global financial crisis, intervened to an unprecedented degree in the negotiations between the IMF and Mexico. The United States offered direct financial support and worked through diplomatic channels to insist that Mexico accept an IMF adjustment program, as a way of bailing out US banks. Mexican president Luis Echeverría's administration consented to IMF adjustment because officials perceived it as the least politically costly option among a range of alternatives.     

Selling Maize in Mexico: The Persistence of Peasant Farming in an Era of Global Markets

The last decade of the twentieth century was heralded as the ‘end of agrarian reform’ in Mexico and the initiation of a new era of market‐led agricultural policy and practice. The impact of neoliberalism and the North American Free Trade Agreement on smallholder maize production has been widely conceived as negative, associated with ecological degradation, rural emigration and cultural erosion. Yet, some twenty years later, all evidence suggests that smallholder maize production is continuing in Mexico, albeit in evolving structures and forms. This article uses a farm‐level survey implemented in three Mexican states to assess the current condition of maize farming in Mexico. The authors revisit past categorizations of Mexican farmers and apply similar approaches to explore what maize‐producing households are doing with their maize, and what current patterns of production imply for future Mexican maize policy. They find evidence of greater persistence and adaptability in Mexican maize farming than is often presented. On the basis of their analysis, they advocate for a reconsideration of the underlying assumptions of public policy, highlighting the heterogeneity of the maize landscape and the unrealized and generally unrecognized potential this heterogeneity represents.     

Gender and Welfare Reform in Post‐ Revolutionary Mexico

This article discusses the impact a gender and woman's history conference had on the development of my own research and writing. ‘Las Olvidadas’ was a conference held at Yale in the Spring of 2001, and was the first in a series of Mexican women's and gender history conferences organised. My own research, on the gendered nature of the welfare state in Mexico, explores how class and race intersected with gender to produce a welfare system that, while particular to Mexico, also nevertheless had much in common with other Latin American countries. These conferences shaped both my views of gender, but also the importance of the transnational to historical research.     

Elite Leadership,People of Mexican Origin,and Civil Rights: Dennis Chavez and the Politics of Fair Employment

People of Mexican origin lacked broad-based mobilization for civil rights during the mid-twentieth century and failed to gain attention with national leaders unaware of the unique conditions in the Southwest. In the absence of these factors, elite leadership and issue networks filled the gap. In this article I explore the case of New Mexico. I argue that the elite leadership of New Mexico Senator Dennis Chavez helped to shape national debates regarding fair employment and other civil rights legislation. Chavez helped work for the passage of a strong state fair employment law in New Mexico in 1949 and increased awareness of the place of people of Mexican origin in civil rights policy and politics nationally and in New Mexico. Gaining support from African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and labor unions, Chavez helped to include people of Mexican origin in debates regarding civil rights policy. However, a lack of national legislation, policy implementation, and the rise of backlash politics prevented the creation of a strong policy and strong agency.     

Geopolicing Race,Gender, and Class: How the Police Immobilise Urban Allochthones

City landscapes are ever-changing stages for the protagonists that pass through it. For police officers they serve as canvasses to positively and negatively code subjects. As such, geography matters to the body. Rather than taking geographic locations, crime statistics, predictive maps and human bodies as objective truths, I focus on the work of police officers, not in terms of an instrumental-rational “meeting of policy targets” or attempts to reduce crime, but the work required to make raced, gendered and classed geographical differentiations. This process culminates in geopolicing: the spatial imaginations and practices of police officers as to who, what and where to police and, of course, why. Geopolicing includes the aesthetic re-ordering and cleansing of urban “matter out of place”. Police officers perceive exclusionary territories in which landscapes racialised as white and identified as affluent are threatened by urban allochthones identified by class, race, gender, age and residential status. The findings are based on my ethnography among police officers in the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, between 2007 and 2011.     

‘If the miners had been Mexican…’ The Chilean mine rescue as Mexican ‘politics machine’ (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The operation in October 2010 to rescue 33 miners trapped in the San José mine near Copiapó, Chile, which culminated in a technologically and emotionally dramatic rescue after 69 days of captivity and the expenditure of at least 10 million dollars, captured the world's attention. The story acted as a kind of ‘accidental Olympics’, evoking national sentiment and global communitas, and offering more than a billion people the chance to peek into the lives of the miners and their families. But responses to the rescue were not the same everywhere. This article examines responses in Mexico. Whereas elsewhere the story's appeal lay in its capacity to be presented as a ‘politics‐free zone’, this seemed to be less the case in Mexico. Some Mexican publics, at least, were relatively immune to the apolitical ‘inspiration’ offered by the media and enthusiastically taken up elsewhere. This is because many Mexicans see a painful contrast between circumstances in their country and those in Chile. This sense of contrast manifested itself not only in a lower degree of ‘buy‐in’ to the feel‐good aspect of the story in Mexico, but also in a surge of ill‐feeling and protest against the Mexican government, and in a telling spate of jokes that did the rounds in October and November, which were disseminated on Twitter and YouTube and reported in television and print media. The jokes followed the formula: ‘If the [Chilean] miners had been Mexican…’ and drew on strains of social and political satire with a long history in Mexico.     

Transnationalism and Migration: Locating Sociocultural Practices Among Mexican Immigrants in the United States

This review examines recent scholarship on new Mexican immigrant communities in the United States. Organizing their analyses around transnationality, both as analytical principle and as actual condition, these authors establish how immigration flows are changing sending and receiving societies equally, in the case at hand, the United States and Mexico. These analyses should be read as culturally specific to Mexican communities. Critically examining U.S. society as a context contributing to the resignification of these sociocultural experiences is essential for a keener understanding of the impact global processes exert on them, locally and translocally.     

Lead isotope analysis as a new method for identifying material culture belonging to the Vázquez de Coronado expedition

Archaeological evidence has become an increasingly important component of efforts to identify the route of the Francisco Vázquez de Coronado expedition through northern Mexico and the southwestern United States (1540-1542). Here, we report the first high-precision lead isotopic measurements of artifacts from two archaeological sites with strong material evidence for the expedition’s presence: Piedras Marcadas Pueblo in New Mexico and the Jimmy Owens Site in Texas. The analysis of lead and copper armaments from both sites reveals that many artifacts have overlapping or extremely similar isotopic ratios. We propose that the narrow range of lead isotopic ratios measured on these artifacts can be interpreted as a geochemical fingerprint for some of the Coronado expedition’s surviving material culture, and provides evidence that we interpret to suggest the expedition derived lead and copper metal from Mexican sources. Such a geochemical fingerprint presents an empirical method for discriminating between artifacts that belonged to the Coronado expedition and those related to subsequent Spanish, historical, or modern activity in the Southwest U.S. Thus, this method could significantly impact the search for and identification of archaeological sites associated with the Coronado expedition.     

Has Québec Become a Northern Mexico? Public Opinion and America's “Long War”

In contrast with Mexico, a consistent pattern of anti-Americanism has never been present in Québec, but there has been an ostensible upsurge in anti-American sentiment recently. This article asks whether Québec has become a “northern Mexico” with respect to societal attitudes displayed toward the United States. To answer this, we first explore the argument that Mexico is effectively an axiomatically anti-American land. We then examine public opinion in Québec, with a view to contrasting it with Mexican views, especially on the all-important question of the use of force in international politics. We argue that Quebeckers show themselves to be more supportive than Mexicans of the idea that the “international community” in certain instances does have both a right and a duty to intervene in the domestic affairs of states.     

Politicisation but not Responsiveness: Preferences and Experiences of New Zealand Councillors

This article reports the responses of New Zealand local government councillors concerning their preferences for, and experiences of, council officer employment; and the values councillors perceive that council officers adopt in their dealings with councillors. This study received responses from slightly fewer than one hundred councillors in New Zealand local government out of 247 and therefore, the results presented here should be viewed as indicative only because of the small sample. Nevertheless the survey found that 54 per cent to 77 per cent would prefer to have influence over council officer employment, with council officers displaying deference to the authority of councillors. Councillors prefer to have frank and fearless advice but they prefer not to be under pressure from council officers to accept that advice. This ensures that they obtain the type of support they need to carry out the tasks and responsibilities that have been conferred on local authorities; and they – the councillors rather than council officers – remain in control of the council affairs.     

Border food and food on the border: meaning and practice in Mexican haute cuisine

Restaurants and their attendant practices are high-profile sites at which regional and national cuisines are experienced, experimented with, and negotiated. In particular, they are important settings for the consumption and production of national identity—a crucial space through which to understand the coalescing of the material and representational. This article focuses specifically on the production side of the pairing through an examination of restaurants that are part of a prominent culinary movement (alta cocina mexicana) in the Mexican border town of Tijuana. The central argument of the paper is that Tijuana's culinary scene is indicative of the reassertion of boundaries between Mexico and the USA through the intentional rejection of northern stereotypes of Mexican food. The emphasis on traditional Mexican cuisine, rather than an internationally hybrid cosmopolitan approach, suggests that chefs are adhering to a set of rules that reflect Mexicanness. Restaurants propagating alta cocina mexicana work to differentiate the border and act as social devices which both complicate conventional understandings of Mexican food and disrupt hegemonic discourses of the border as productive of hybridity.     

The rise and fall of a speculative bubble: geostrategic concerns,public debate and the promotion of an American trans-oceanic canal in the 1820s

The article examines the interest in the United States for the construction of a trans-oceanic canal in Central America. In 1820, William Davis Robinson published a book, Memoirs of the Mexican Revolution, which contained an appendix discussing the practicability of building a trans-oceanic canal including detailed analysis of the potential routes for its construction. The appendix sparked a lively debate among American political and economic leaders. This debate would not abate until the enormity of the financial and engineering realities of the project coupled with the continuing political instability of Mexico, Greater Colombia, and the Republic of Central America dampened investor enthusiasm.     

José Zorrilla in Mexico: Transatlantic Romanticism and the Question of Artistic Labour

This article explores the strategic use of literary form in the Mexican writings of José Zorrilla. The article focuses on México y los mexicanos (1856), a letter Zorrilla wrote to his fellow Spanish Romantic playwright, Ángel de Saavedra, the Duke of Rivas. Zorrilla’s México y los mexicanos is a rare piece of epistolary writing in Spanish Romanticism as well as one of the first literary histories of Mexico. Often overlooked in the letter, however, is Zorrilla’s economic critique of the precarious condition of artists in both Mexico and Spain. A conservative moderado, Zorrilla could not air his concerns publicly without the threat of retribution from his fellow conservative colleagues in Spain. Zorrilla thus used the epistolary form, the article argues, in order to surreptitiously introduce the economic plight of artists into mainstream Spanish as well as Mexican political discourse. Read in this context, Zorrilla’s letter makes visible the fundamental role a transatlantic Romantic vision of labour played in shaping nineteenth-century political discourse in both the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America.     

Fashioning a Cacique Nun: From Saints’ Lives to Indian Lives in the Spanish Americas

New Spain was a land of opportunity for the missionary as well as the conquistador. The controversial proposal to found a convent for women of the indigenous elite illuminates the redefinition of notions of gender and race. Examining testimonies on this question written by priests, this article charts how they transform material that would normally have been presented as hagiography into narratives of a more general nature, and argues that this rhetorical shift contributed to a kind of writing on the Indies which not only shared the comparative and epistemological stakes of ethnography but also considered issues of gender.     

Romita pottery revisited: a reassessment of the provenance of ceramics from Colonial Mexico by LA-MC-ICP-MS

The origin of Romita pottery has been a controversial topic during the last three decades of Colonial Mexico archaeological studies. Lead isotopic analyses of glaze coatings of Spanish and Mexican pottery, and Romita ceramics unearthed from the archaeological site of the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City provide evidence that support a Mexican origin.     

A Geometric Morphometric Study of Regional Craniofacial Variation in Mexico

Spanish speaking populations in the USA have long been categorised under the umbrella term ‘Hispanic’, which is a cultural construct. The term Hispanic ignores the unique ethnohistories and biological variation among Hispanic groups with various European, African and indigenous American influences. Considerable heterogeneity has been identified in pre‐contact America and has continued to influence the cultural and biological compositions of various regions today. The purpose of this research is to examine biological variation in Mexico, which was influenced by indigenous migration patterns and the Old World conquests of the Americans. Using multivariate statistics, this paper compares 16 three‐dimensional craniometric landmarks of samples from northern Central Mexico, northern Yucatan and western Mexico to examine the regional biological variation present in Mexico in both prehistoric and historic groups and also compares Mexican, Spanish and African American groups to examine patterns of Old World conquests. Multivariate statistics detected significant group differences for both size and shape (centroid size, p < 0.0001; shape, p < 0.0001) and showed that while significantly different, all the Mexican groups are more similar to one another except for one prehistoric inland‐western Mexican group, which is morphologically distinct from the other Mexican groups. Previous mtDNA research in these areas shows a low prevalence of African American admixture and a high indigenous component in the northern Mexican groups, which is consistent with the findings of this paper. The prehistoric and historic Mexican groups were the most similar indicating the retention of indigenous admixture after contact. The results from this analysis demonstrate that all groups are significantly different from one another supporting other findings that have shown that the indigenous populations of the New World are heterogeneous and that this variation may also contribute to the heterogeneity of contemporary populations. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Out of this World: Issues of Managing Tourism and Humanity’s Heritage on the Moon

Space tourism has become a reality and is bound to become ever more affordable. It is now time to spend serious thought on how humanity is going to manage the human material culture and heritage sites on the surface of the Moon. After all, the Apollo XI mission is of global human significance inasmuch as it was the first time a human being set foot on another celestial body. Environmental conditions on the Moon are such that what is considered low‐impact visitation on Earth would have devastating consequences for the heritage on the lunar surface. This paper highlights a range of issues, not the least of these being management in an environment without territorial control, neither physically nor legally. The multinational management of Antarctica is proposed as a model for the lunar surface.