Legal Stuff
Casta system
1780s "Racial categorization, therefore, played a significant role in limiting rights and benefits in colonial Mexico"
Public order charges
"... public order charges drove the rise of incarceration in the early Mexican period and still remain leading causes of arrest in the twenty-first-century United States. Public order charges, such as vagrancy, disorderly conduct, and public drunkenness, systematically penalize the landless, homeless, and underemployed. Those who live their lives in public... are the most vulnerable to public order arrests, which effectively imprison them for living... public order charges regulate, limit, and ultimately deny their “right to be” within a territory." Tongva Basin to today
Obruni
Stranger, a word that Hartman is called when she lands in Ghana
Racial scripts
"highlight[s] the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another... Racial scripts function in three main ways. First, they highlight how racialized groups are acted upon by a range of principals... Second, all groups are racialized... Third, racialized groups put forth their own scripts, counterscripts"
US exceptionalism
The belief that the US is particularly special in terms of its democracy, liberalism, and freedoms
Dred Scott decision
1857. "The Dred Scott case is accorded landmark status because it established [Black people] as unfit for citizenship"
Tongva basin
"Many now believe that human life began in the Tongva Basin when Natives sailed south along the great “Kelp Highway” that lines California’s Pacific Coast... Tongva communities have lived in the region for at least 7,000 years" South Cali
Kin
One's family. Hartman argues that, during the transatlantic slave trade, kin separates those who were sold and not, as well as the ways that kin becomes race in the US
Relational notions of race
"relational treatment recognizes that race is a mutually constitutive process and thus attends to how, when, where, and to what extent groups intersect."
Eugenics
The belief and practice that some people are more reproductively desirable than others. Particularly impacted Mexican women and birthright citizenship
Immigration Act of 1924
"first comprehensive restriction law. It remapped the nation in terms of new ethnic and racial identities, specifically transforming denigrated Europe an ethnics into “whites” while simultaneously criminalizing Mexicans as illegal workers who crossed into the United States without authorization."
Neophytes
"By 1785, the priests at Mission San Gabriel had baptized 1,200 Natives." Tongva Basin. These people later were not given their land back
Kosanba
"the spirit child—who dies only to return again and again in a succession of rebirths... The “come, go back, child” braves the wreckage of history and bears the burdens that others refuse. "
Counterscripts
Racial scripts that "alternatives or directly challenge dominant racial scripts." LACFPB uses this to fight back against Operation Round-up, 1953
Dispossession
Shows up in multiple texts such as Blackhawk and Hartman. B: The taking of Native people's lands. H: The taking of people from their land. "Dispossession was our history. That we could agree on."
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
1848. "... legally classified Mexicans as white and extended eligibility for U.S. citizenship to Mexicans living in lands ceded to the United States."
Corporal punishment
Physical punishment that was uncommon to Tongva communities before Spanish came. "... colonial authorities deployed... corporal punishments, such as flogging, hobbling, and shackling, dominated... Corporal punishment reigned because, according to many Spanish authorities, Indigenous peoples were “weak, irrational, and culturally inferior people (gente sin razón)” 19th century
Revolt on St. John
1733, "The deposed members of the ancien régime of Akwamu led the front ranks of the rebellion"
Immigration regime
Molina argues it started in 1965 with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act which ushered in new racialization and criminalization of Mexicans
anticipatory discourse
"We could, however, argue for post-colonialism as an anticipatory discourse, recognizing that the condition it names does not yet exist, but working nevertheless to bring that about"
US Dakota War of 1862
Led to the Dakota death marches
Manifest Destiny
"many Anglo-Americans to believe that they were on the brink of fulfilling what many believed was their “Manifest Destiny” to permanently claim, occupy, and control a massive territory on the North American continent." 1846, provoking the outbreak of the U.S.-Mexico War.
Anthrophagy
"Anthropophagy, the practice of eating the flesh of other human beings, aptly described the devouring of life by the machinery of the slave trade"
Birds of passage
The idea that Mexicans "would work hard for low wages and then return to Mexico" "In the 1920s, especially after 1924, as we saw earlier, the rhetoric of Mexicans as “birds of passage” declined as their permanent population increased. Such a shift required new solutions in terms of how to deal with Mexican laborers, and deportation was increasingly offered as a ready solution."
Rebel archive
"The words and deeds of dissidents constitute what I call a “rebel archive” that evaded LAPD and LASD destruction. Comprised mostly of broken locks, secret codes, handbills, scribbled manifestos, and songs, the rebel archive found refuge in far-flung boxes and obscure remnants. But it also thrives in plain sight."