Professor Cecilia Márquez discusses her upcoming book, Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (University of North Carolina Press). Join us for this book talk on October 26, 2023 from 5:00-7:00 pm at 20 Cooper Square, fourth floor. This event is co-organized with the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.
Registration is required. Please RSVP via Eventbrite.
**Books will be available for purchase after the event.
About the Book:
In the 1940s South, it seemed that non-Black Latino people were on the road to whiteness. In fact, in many places throughout the region governed by Jim Crow, they were able to attend white schools, live in white neighborhoods, and marry white southerners. However, by the early 2000s, Latino people in the South were routinely cast as "illegal aliens" and targeted by some of the harshest anti-immigrant legislation in the country. This book helps explain how race evolved so dramatically for this population over the course of the second half of the twentieth century.
Márquez guides readers through time and place from Washington, DC, to the deep South, tracing how non-Black Latino people moved through the region's evolving racial landscape. In considering Latino presence in the South's schools, its workplaces, its tourist destinations, and more, Marquez tells a challenging story of race-making that defies easy narratives of progressive change and promises to reshape the broader American histories of Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, immigration, work, and culture.
Participants
Cecilia Márquez
Cecilia Márquez is the Hunt Family Assistant Professor in History and previously taught Latino/a Studies at New York University. She earned her MA and PhD in American History at the University of Virginia. She also holds a BA in Black Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies from Swarthmore College.
Cristina Beltrán
Cristina Beltrán is an Associate Professor in the department of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. A political theorist by training, her research focuses on modern and contemporary political theory, Latino and U.S. ethnic/racial politics, and feminist and queer theory. She is author of The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). Along with Libby Anker, she is also co-editor of the journal Theory & Event.