How Race is Made in America; Immigratioin, Citizenship, & the Historical Power of Racial Scripts by Natalia Molina

Molina, Natalia. How Race is Made in America; Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. xv + 208 pages. Paper, $27.95. Historian Natalia Molina's previous work, Fit to be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (2006), was a monograph that paid close attention to the issues of public health and treatment of immigrants in Los Angeles, especially Japanese, Chinese, and Mexicans. That study, while carefully (even narrowly) focused on issues of public health and public policy, noted that the concurrent majorities of voting powers, dominated then by relatively wealthy white bourgeoisie, discriminated against all ethnic immigrants but was less oppressive--even occasionally relatively "tolerant"--of Mexicans in particular and Latinos in general. Despite her precise focus on health in a bygone era, the heated debates about immigration in recent years brought her monograph and her ongoing scholarship into much broader concerns about public policy and race relations, with special emphasis on race relations in all societal contexts, especially the processes by which Californians define race--and how they "write scripts" for such descriptions. That more public and controversial set of concerns eventuates in this study, How Race is Made in America, which attempts no less than a description of how power elites interact with working-class blacks and whites and with immigrants to define race for each kind of people in the ethnic polyglot that is our largest and wealthiest state. Her study would be important simply because of California's size and influence, but it is even more important since all of the U.S., most especially the Deep South (once so completely a two-color "script") is trending toward California, that is, rapidly becoming truly multicultural (a point made well in 2014 by Tracy Thompson in The New Mind of the South). Molina's study emphasizes the "salad bowl' of many diverse ethnic identities (most of which retain clearly distinct features) rather than the once fashionable "melting pot" in which assimilation eliminates the differences in such distinctions in favor of a California/American identity that subsumes Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, and any other specific Asian or Latin American identities. Instead, she uses the much more politically charged word race--a political rather than a biological construct--to examine how the complexities of debate and action in LA produce definitions for Asians and for Latinos. And those definitions do acknowledge some agency, being in large part creations of a self-identifying minority. Nor are those definitions, even if imposed by white and other ethnic groups, purely negative. But they are finally political creations--and the "scripts" are very limiting, that is, ethnically and racially discriminatory. Central to her study of such racial projects (a construct of identity imposed from the outside) is a relational approach looking at Mexican Americans in dynamic interaction with Japanese and Chinese as well as with whites of differing ethnicities. Molina says that some elite owners of capital wealth in the US need racial projects that set black, white, yellow, brown, red, and religious/ethnic groups against each other, so that ethnic consciousness gets in the way of class consciousness. The resulting inter-ethnic rivalries and fighting thus stymies any broadly based class consciousness that might emerge in a unified labor movement, and obviously prevents the full fledged development of a European-style labor party. Until the 1920s, Mexicans in the U.S. were considered "white" and were not considered much of a threat to anyone, especially since most were braceros (manual laborers) who did not live the entire season in the U. …