Politics and Money

[chloebware]

Here you go


In North from Mexico: the Spanish Speaking People of the United States Carey McWilliams asserts that ?more Mexicans were lynched in the Southwest between 1865 and 1920 than blacks in other parts of the south.? Hundreds of unrestrained murders of Mexicans and other Latinos have gone largely unrecognized. Previous work on lynching has focused on the murders of African Americans in the South. Those works that have discussed violence against Mexicans in the Southwest in this period conflate lynching murders with generalized stories on ?frontier violence? and ?vigilantism.? In addition, no work has been published that considers ?modern? southwestern lynchings of Mexican.

My sociolegal project tracks racialized violence against Latinos in the U.S., recovering victims expunged from written histories; reconsiders the features of U.S. racialized terror as not solely concerned with the black object; and examines how nation building and the consolidation of national belonging have been constructed through ritualized, performative violence.

I focus on shifting legal structures and approaches. In particular I trace the shift in language?both legal and socially?from naming such acts ?lynching? to the current use of the phrase ?Hate Crime.? How does this linguistic shift reflect social attitudes toward racialized violence and how are these shifts solidified in legal structures?