Culture of Empire

by Gonzalez, Gilbert G.

• ISBN13: 9780292701861
• ISBN10: 0292701861
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of Texas Pr

Summary

"Providing a fresh interpretive analysis...Gilbert Gonzalez argues convincingly that the study of Mexican immigration to the United States, and the delveopment of the Chicano community, demands an understanding of the consequences of America's economic domination of Mexico, which followed the U.S. Civil War." -- Southwestern Historical Quarterly Amidst ongoing efforts to conceptualize the inevitable but often agonistic intersections of Latin American and Latino studies, Gilbert Gonzalez's Culture of Empire comes as a refreshing and valuable intervention. -- The Journal of Latin American Anthropology " Culture of Empire is an intersection of intellectual history with Chicano history, labor history, and Mexican history. It is a historically rich and well-organized study that promises to confirm the author's profile as one of the preeminent scholars of Chicano history and transborder studies." --Zaragosa Vargas, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara A history of the Chicano community cannot be complete without taking into account the United States' domination of the Mexican economy beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writes Gilbert G. Gonzaacute;lez. For that economic conquest inspired U.S. writers to create a "culture of empire" that legitimated American dominance by portraying Mexicans and Mexican immigrants as childlike "peons" in need of foreign tutelage, incapable of modernizing without Americanizing, that is, submitting to the control of U.S. capital. So powerful was and is the culture of empire that its messages about Mexicans shaped U.S. public policy, particularly in education, throughout the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first. In this stimulating history, Gilbert G. Gonzaacute;lez traces the development of the culture of empire and its effects on U.S. attitudes and policies toward Mexican immigrants. Following a discussion of the United States' economic conquest of the Mexican economy, Gonzaacute;lez examines several hundred pieces of writing by American missionaries, diplomats, business people, journalists, academics, travelers, and others who together created the stereotype of the Mexican peon and the perception of a "Mexican problem." He then fully and insightfully discusses how this misinformation has shaped decades of U.S. public policy toward Mexican immigrants and the Chicano (now Latino) community, especially in terms of the way university training of school superintendents, teachers, and counselors drew on this literature in forming the educational practices that have long been applied to the Mexican immigrant community.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	1	(14)
1. The Economic Conquest and Its Social Relations	15	(31)
2. American Writers Invade Mexico	46	(25)
3. The Imperial Burden: The Mexican Problem and Americanization	71	(32)
4. The Peaceful Conquest and Mexican Migration within Mexico and to the United States	103	(25)
5. The Transnational Mexican Problem	128	(25)
6. Empire, Domestic Policy, and the Education of Mexican Immigrants	153	(31)
Conclusion	184
Notes	93	(132)
Bibliography	225	(16)
Index	241