Race and Racial Classification
This sociohistorical process describes how racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed over time.
Racial Formation
This 1917 legislation granted U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans, though without full constitutional rights or voting representation in Congress.
Jones Act
This 19th-century ideology held that the United States was destined to expand across the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
Manifest Destiny
This 1954 U.S. immigration enforcement operation resulted in the mass deportation of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans.
Operation Wetback
This 1948 federal court case successfully challenged the segregation of Mexican and Latino students in California schools, predating Brown v. Board of Education by six years.
Mendez v. Westminster
This term describes the process through which individuals or groups come to be understood, categorized, and treated as members of distinct racial groups.
Racialization
This 1848 treaty promised to protect the property rights and citizenship of approximately 100,000 Mexicans who became U.S. residents, though these protections were largely ignored.
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This 1823 policy declared the Western Hemisphere closed to further European colonization and intervention, asserting U.S. influence over the Americas.
Monroe Doctrine
These 1943 violent conflicts in Los Angeles targeted Mexican American youth, often those wearing distinctive suits, and involved attacks by American servicemen.
Zoot-Suit Riots
During the Jim Crow era, Mexican Americans occupied this contradictory position: legally classified as "white" but socially subjected to segregation and discrimination.
racial positioning of Mexicans in the Jim Crow Era
This analytical framework examines how various forms of inequality and identity—such as race, class, gender, and sexuality—overlap and intersect to create unique experiences.
Intersectionality
During this 1929-1939 event, approximately 60% of those forcibly removed or pressured to leave the United States were actually U.S. citizens.
Great Repatriation
This 1846-1848 conflict resulted in Mexico ceding approximately half of its territory to the United States.
Mexican-American War
This practice targeting Latina women in the 1960s-1970s involved coerced or uninformed consent for permanent reproductive procedures, often while women were in labor.
Forced Sterilizations
These individuals served their country in World War I and World War II but returned home to face continued discrimination, segregation, and denial of basic rights despite their military service.
Latino WWI and WWII Veterans
This economic system produces and exploits racial differentiation for the purpose of capital accumulation and economic exploitation.
Racial Capitalism
This 1949 incident involving a Mexican American veteran exposed the contradiction between having citizenship and military service yet still facing racial discrimination and segregation.
Longoria Affair
This 1898 conflict resulted in the U.S. acquiring Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, marking America's emergence as a colonial power.
Spanish-American War
During the Great Depression, approximately 1-2 million people of Mexican descent experienced this form of social exclusion, with many being U.S. citizens who were forced to abandon homes and possessions.
Great Repatriation
This 1942-1964 bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Mexico brought millions of Mexican workers to the U.S. as temporary agricultural laborers, positioning them as exploitable labor rather than potential citizens.
Bracero Program
These organized efforts seek to interpret, represent, or explain racial dynamics in ways that create, maintain, or challenge systems of racial meaning and hierarchy.
Racial Projects
This concept describes how legal status as a citizen did not guarantee equal treatment or rights for Mexican Americans, particularly during the Jim Crow era when they were legally classified as "white" but socially segregated.
gap between formal citizenship and substantive citizenship (or racial positioning)
This 15th-century legal framework was used by European powers to justify colonization based on the claim that Christian nations had the right to claim lands inhabited by non-Christians.
Doctrine of Discovery
This form of colonialism seeks to replace indigenous populations with settler populations, establishing permanent occupation and claiming sovereignty over the land.
Settler Colonialism
Political factors, economic factors, and social factors are the three main categories of this concept, which helps explain why people leave their home countries and migrate to new locations.
Causes of Migration