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Dissertation Information for Grace Pena Delgado

NAME:
- Grace Pena Delgado

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2000)

ADVISORS:
- Juan Gomez-Quinones

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Janice L. Reiff
- Jessica Wang
- Min Zhou

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: In the age of exclusion: Race, religion and Chinese identity in the making of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands, 1863--1943

Abstract: American experience and the Chicano/a experience have ignored the impact of Chinese exclusion laws on the lives of fronterizos . This study examines international immigration, economic development and American and Mexican nativism to demonstrate how Chinese exclusion laws formed ethnic identities and closed national borders between Arizona and Sonora. Blending disparate social histories and historiographical trajectories, this dissertation illuminates a more complex view of border culture, politics, and economics during a period of heightened nativism. Sources for this study include Mexican and American government documents, daily newspapers, population censuses, journals, diaries, oral histories and manuscript collections.

At the conceptual level, "In the Age of Exclusion" elucidates three compelling social and economic processes that shaped the contours of citizenship, residential patterns, and ethnicity among Chinese borderlanders. As a precursor to exclusion politics, this dissertation makes clear the connection between the vision of American empire, nativism and the simultaneous movement to politically contain Native Americans. Enforcement of Chinese exclusion laws ignited already-tenuous race relations in the region stemming from violent struggles with Apache Indians. Secondly, this study argues that the enforcement of Chinese exclusion laws altered the social landscape of the borderlands by mandating its closure. Enforcing exclusion laws became an international matter of concern and the region between Arizona and Sonora became its loci of struggle and containment. Third, Chinese on both sides of the border created a politically and economically expedient ethnic space by which they defied and mediated American and Mexican nativism.

This study advances new interpretative themes in the formation of ethnic identity along the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. I argue that southern Arizona Chinese, unlike most immigrants, did not initially Americanize. Rather, in the early years of exclusion, southern Arizona Chinese acculturated toward Mexican-ness. Likewise, the contours of Mexican cultural identity and citizenship transformed because of the enforcement of Chinese exclusion laws. Sonoran Chinese, once considered a crucial sector of norteƱo society, became a casualty of revolutionary economic nationalism at a time when mestizaje , not economic accomplishment, shifted the meaning of citizenship in Mexico. On the eve of the Mexican revolution, the closure of the border produced an expanding context for understanding the making of a transnational. Chinese identity in northern Sonora and southern Arizona.

MPACT Scores for Grace Pena Delgado

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C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
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W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-09-11 16:17:06

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Students under Grace Pena Delgado

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None