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Introduction
During the 1920s, both proponents and opponents of Mexican immigration regularly compared Mexicans to other racialized groups in order to portray Mexicans as more or less desirable, respectively. These racial comparisons provided a shorthand through which to construct Mexicans as inferior. It was common, for example, for White Americans to discuss Mexicans as "the negro problem" of the Southwest. White Americans argued that Mexicans were not like them. The best way to make this point clear was to compare Mexicans to other groups who had already been defined and established as non-White, non-normative, and unfit for self-government. As Mexicans became thought of as another "other" and as outside the body politic, they were increasingly positioned alongside groups such as Indians, Asians, or Blacks in immigration discourse. Unlike traditional studies of Mexican immigrants in the United States, I focus on how discourses about these racialized groups were key in informing Americans what "Mexican" meant. When it comes to immigration, we understand each new "other" in relation to groups with which we are already familiar. Thus, this article explores the importance of comparative and relational work when it comes to race and shows how Chicano/a history is a node in a network of racial projects. A case in point is the opening of the 1929 "Report on Immigration" by Roy L. Garis, a professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University, undertaken at the request of Congressman John Box, a fierce opponent of Mexican immigration, to support a bill restricting Mexican immigration:
Abraham Lincoln once said that 'this country could not endure half slave and half free.' When one considers the present effects of immigration from the countries to the south of us, especially from Mexico, he is forced by the logic of the developments to conclude that the United States can not endure part citizen and part foreign. (Western Hemisphere Immigration, 1930, 424)
In his report to Congress, Garis quickly establishes that Mexican immigration would cause a long-term racial problem by linking it to slavery. Garis' arguments carried great weight and parts of his report were reproduced in articles in the popular magazine The Saturday Evening Post (1930a). This example demonstrates how relational notions of race shape racial categories, a concept on which I build in...