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Dissertation Information for Allison Mary Varzally

NAME:
- Allison Mary Varzally

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2002)

ADVISORS:
- Stephen Anthony Aron

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Ruth H. Bloch
- Min Zhou

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Ethnic crossings: The making of a non-white America in the second quarter of twentieth century California

Abstract: This study traces the making of "non-whiteness" in California in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Drawing upon ethnic newspapers, memoirs, oral histories, personal papers, court records, and sociological accounts, it traces the gradual coalescence of minorities around ideas and values distinct from those of white Americans. Since its incorporation into the United States, but especially in this century, California has exhibited a special ethnic and racial diversity. Its peoples have displayed a much wider variety of cultural differences than inhabitants of other parts of the United States. In addition to European immigrants, the state attracted a large number of Mexicans, Japanese, Filipinos, and Chinese. It also drew waves of black southerners to its coast. Subject to similar discrimination in employment, housing, and sometimes education, these minorities bumped into one another with great regularity. Their clustering in the same areas foreshadowed the dynamics of the state and nation in 2002. From an array of neighborhood interactions in the years just before and after World War II, I see emerging pan-ethnic sensibilities and nascent political collaborations among nonwhite Californians.

Works on whiteness have, of course, proliferated in recent years. Many scholars have written about the coming together of European ethnics to create a unique racial identity during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Those excluded from this category are typically understood as necessary foils or receptacles into which these whites projected their submerged longings. In these accounts, non-whiteness appears as a default of whiteness rather than an independent identity.

Alternatively, this work presents non-whiteness as a fragile, but increasingly visible racial construction whose content and membership was determined by individuals of color themselves. Unlike whites pulled together by privilege, minorities drew closer at mid-century because they lacked power. Color also differed from whiteness in that it did not insist upon assimilation to a single set of established norms as criteria for inclusion. Rather, non-whiteness relied upon and promoted a multicultural order; it allowed an assimilation that created multiple, hybrid, and gender altering identities.

MPACT Scores for Allison Mary Varzally

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-18 12:36:17

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Students under Allison Mary Varzally

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None