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Examining Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens

Article in Pacific Historical Review · November 2013

DOI: 10.1525/phr.2013.82.4.520

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Examining Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens
Author(s): Natalia Molina
Source: Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Nov., 2013), pp. 520-541
Published by: University of California Press
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 Examining Chicana/o History
through a Relational Lens

NATALIA MOLINA
The author teaches in the departments of history and urban studies and also serves as
associate dean of faculty equity in the Division of Arts and Humanities at the University
of California, San Diego.
This article argues that we should examine Chicana/os in relation to other racialized
groups in order to develop a fuller understanding of how racial categories form and
operate. The article highlights different models of relational work by examining key works
in Chicana/o history that have employed such a relational methodology. In addition, the
article demonstrates how we can use organizing principles besides race to find links
between racialized groups. Lastly, the author revisits key events in Chicana/o history,
examining them through a relational lens, to demonstrate what may be gained through
this methodology.
Key words: Racial formation, Chicano history (or Mexican American history),
Los Angeles, urban history, Zoot Suit riots, Carey McWilliams, Méndez v. Westminster

I remember a graduate school conversation with a fellow

Chicano student about how difficult it was to be one of the few
Chicana/os in our department.1 He argued that it was particularly
challenging for us because we had grown up in predominantly

It has been such a joy to participate in this forum and to exchange ideas with colleagues
whom I have long admired. I would especially like to thank everyone who played a role in
conceiving this special issue and to extend my appreciation to all those who provided
feedback that helped to strengthen the piece, including Ernesto Chávez, Miroslava
Chávez-Garcı́a, Raúl Ramos, two anonymous reviewers, the audience members at the
Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, Seattle 2011, and Mérida
Rúa and Ondine Chavoya of the Latino/a Studies department at Williams College, who
invited me for a visit where I presented an earlier version of this article in a talk. Thank
you to the talented librarians at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Annelise
Sklar and Elliot Kanter, who helped me with the legal research. I am also grateful to Ian
Fusselman who edited the piece at various stages. This article was written with the support
of a UCSD Academic Senate grant.
1. I use the term ‘‘Chicana/o’’ throughout this article to refer broadly to Mexicans
and Mexican Americans alike. I chose to use this term because it references the Chicano
Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the development of the scholarly field of
Chicana/o studies that arose out of it.

Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 82, No. 4, pages 520–541. ISSN 0030-8684
© 2013 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association. All rights reserved.
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 Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens 521

Mexican, working-class barrios. He suggested that we were used to

being members of a community where it was not necessary to
explain our positions because of shared experiences. It was true that
I had grown up in a working-class neighborhood, and it was home to
a large Mexican community, but also to Chinese immigrants, Viet-
namese refugees, Filipino nationals, and working-class whites. Grow-
ing up in such diversity, I was accustomed to finding commonalities
with kids from backgrounds different from mine. We shared similar
experiences as working-class youth. We got ourselves ready for school
in the morning because our parents had already left for work, we rode
the city bus together to and from school, and we let ourselves back
into our homes in the afternoon because our parents worked late.
When we hung out on the corner and the police, who drove by
regularly, stopped to ask us questions, we all felt ill at ease. Being
from a working-class neighborhood produced a kind of solidarity that
cut across the color line.
But, of course, there were also differences. In school, my white
counterparts were more likely to be tracked into programs such as
honors classes, band, ROTC, and theater. I, on the other hand,
despite completing the prerequisites and maintaining a high grade
point average, was told explicitly that I could not enroll in Advanced
Placement classes. The school took the position that, because
English was my second language, I would likely have difficulty suc-
ceeding in these courses.2 Together, my experiences in the neigh-
borhood and at school provided some of my first lessons in
intersectionality.3
It is probably because of these early formative experiences that,
when it came time to write my dissertation, I chose to look at race
relationally. Even after further work on my dissertation resulted in
the publication of my first book, Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and
Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939, I continued my efforts to demon-
strate the importance of placing Chicana/o studies in a relational

2. Although English was my second language, the teachers and administrators had
no way of knowing this. I had no accent, and, given that all of my schooling had been in
English, by the time I reached high school, I spoke English better than Spanish.
3. The following are foundational works that explain the importance of looking at
how concepts of race, class, and gender intersect: Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘‘Mapping the
Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,’’
Stanford Law Review, 43 (1991), 1241–1299; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought:
Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York, 1991).

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522 Pacific Historical Review

framework in my second book, How Race Is Made in America: Immi-

gration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts.4 By rela-
tional, I do not mean comparative. A comparative treatment of race
compares and contrasts groups, treating them as independent of
one another. It also can leave the construction of racial categories
themselves unexamined, thereby, even if unintentionally, reifying
them. A relational treatment of race recognizes that the construction
of race is a mutually constitutive process and demonstrates how race is
socially constructed, hence fighting against essentialist notions. Fur-
thermore, it attends to how, when, where, and to what extent groups
intersect. It recognizes that there are limits to examining racialized
groups in isolation.5
In this article, I discuss the advantages of a relational perspec-
tive and urge others to join me in looking at race relationally. I am
certainly not asking scholars to jump ship and abandon Chicana/o
history or its counterpart fields (e.g., Asian American history). These
fields make an invaluable contribution, first by providing social and
cultural histories of groups and second by documenting the buildup
of structural discrimination, including the development and dissem-
ination of cultural representations of these groups that have simul-
taneously hidden and facilitated such discrimination. What I am
asking is that, recognizing race as a social construction, we zoom
out as we research, write, and teach. We need to ask who else is (or
was) present in or near the communities we study—and what differ-
ence these groups’ presence makes (or made). This is no less than
what Chicana/o historians have been asking those who study the
mainstream to do for decades. Just as the prevailing version of
U.S. history was incomplete without an examination of the influence
of racialized groups, the study of any single racialized group calls for
an understanding of the impact of the experiences of other similarly
situated groups.
In the first section of this article, I examine the literature that
has made a strong case for centering race in the American West.
I then turn to key works that have moved in the direction of a rela-
tional understanding of race. The second section provides possible

4. Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939
(Berkeley, 2006); Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the
Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley, 2013).
5. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the
1960s to the 1980s (New York, 1986).

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 Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens 523

directions and strategies for those who wish to engage in a relational

project. I also revisit some well-known cases in Chicana/o history and
bring in new primary sources from my research to read these cases
through a relational lens in order to show what can be gained from
such an approach.

The relational turn in Chicana/o history

Earlier works in Chicana/o history have made possible the
methodological and theoretical move toward a relational study of
race. The authors of these earlier studies did history ‘‘from the
bottom up.’’ They dug through community newspapers (before they
were digitized!), combed through city directories, and compiled
census data; they were the first to locate sources in the vast labyrinth
of the National Archives. They also provided ways to think about the
relationship among race and power, institutionalized racism, seg-
mented labor markets, community formation, segregation in the
urban landscape, and civil rights outside of a black-white binary.6
Despite these scholarly contributions, Chicana/o history contin-
ued to be marginalized. In an effort to gain a wider audience and
create a more inclusive dialogue, some historians urged a rethinking
of the paradigms and parameters of the field that would provide an
overarching rationale for centering race in our historical narratives.7
For example, in 1992, Antonia Castañeda made an early, but largely
unheeded, call for studying race relationally. While more scholar-
ship on women and communities of color had been produced in the
1980s than in previous decades, Castañeda argued that much of it

6. Examples of these foundational works include Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of their
Brow: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States, 1900–1940 (Westport, Conn., 1976);
Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in
Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); Richard
Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850–1890: A Social History (Berkeley, 1979);
Mario T. Garcı́a, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880–1920 (New Haven, Conn.,
1981); Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin, Tex., 1983); and Rodolfo
Acuña, A Community Under Siege: A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the Los Angeles River, 1945–
1975 (Los Angeles, 1984).
7. To place this shift in historical perspective, see David G. Gutiérrez, ‘‘Significant to
Whom?: Mexican Americans and the History of the American West,’’ Western Historical
Quarterly, 24 (1993), 519–539, and Vicki L. Ruiz, ‘‘Nuestra América: Latino History as
United States History,’’ Journal of American History, 93 (2006), 655–672. See also Adrian
Burgos et al., ‘‘Latino History: An Interchange on Present Realities and Future Prospects,’’
Journal of American History, 97 (2010), 424–463.

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524 Pacific Historical Review

tended to be descriptive, or looked only at people of color vis-à-vis

whites, instead of in relationship to and with one another. Conse-
quently, these works generally ended up replacing a black-white
binary with another type of binary.8 Castañeda asserted that we
should center women of color in our studies, not for the sake of
inclusion but because, by centering them, we would have to acknowl-
edge the presence and importance of issues of power and decolo-
nization. My call for a greater focus on relational notions of race,
like Castañeda’s, goes beyond arguing for a more inclusive narrative
history. I maintain that the very framework that comprises our
understanding of race is necessarily and inseparably drawn from the
experiences of racialized groups vis-à-vis other racialized groups,
and thus it is imperative that we pull the lens back even when exam-
ining the experiences of one racialized group.
Two books from the 1990s in Chicana/o history stand out, both
for their relational perspective on race and for their success in going
beyond a black-white paradigm. Neil Foley’s The White Scourge: Mex-
icans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, a study of race
relations in central Texas, examined how Anglos who migrated from
the southern United States to central Texas brought with them
a racial ideology shaped by a Reconstruction discourse meant to
preserve whiteness as a bastion of privilege. These whites’ interac-
tions with Mexicans alongside African Americans complicated their
prior understandings of race and disrupted the binary racial strati-
fication that had developed within a black-white paradigm.9
Similarly, Tomás Almaguer’s Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Ori-
gins of White Supremacy in California, which focused on nineteenth-
century California and the racialization of Native Americans, Asians,

8. Antonia Castañeda, ‘‘Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western History: The
Discourse, Politics, and Decolonization of History,’’ Pacific Historical Review, 61 (1992),
510–511. Some works stand out as heeding this call, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Border-
lands: The New Mestiza/La Frontera (San Francisco, 1987); Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Ref-
uge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–
1940 (New York, 1987); Deena J. González, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women
of Santa Fe, 1820–1880 (New York, 1999); Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social
World of the California Gold Rush (New York, 2000); Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The
Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York, 1990); Emma
Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington, Ind., 1999);
Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California
Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque, 1987).
9. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton
Culture (Berkeley, 1997).

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 Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens 525

and Mexicans, showed that examining racial groups in a continuum

sheds light on how the racial constructions of various groups affect
one another. Almaguer’s study of California empirically grounded
Michael Omi’s and Howard Winant’s theory that region and histori-
cal period are key in understanding how we come to think of bodies
as racialized.10 Race relations in the nineteenth-century United States
were heavily framed by the black-white paradigm, but the small po-
pulation of African Americans in California, coupled with the diverse
populations of Natives and immigrants, resulted in a racially stratified
hierarchy among Mexicans, Asians, Native Americans, African Amer-
icans and Anglos that defied binary racialization.11
My own work is based on a similar recognition of the impor-
tance of the differential racialization of groups, a specific interest in
California, and a commitment to moving beyond conceptualizing
race in terms of a black-white binary. I chose to focus on Chicana/os
and Mexican immigrants, hoping to contribute to this important
literature. I was broadly interested in what went into constructing
the category ‘‘Mexican’’ and decided to look at public health prac-
tices, institutions, and discourses to demonstrate the structural and
cultural ways that public health helped shape what it meant to be
‘‘Mexican.’’ I settled on Los Angeles as the place of study because of
its large Mexican population. Historically, Los Angeles had once
been part of Mexico (El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los
Ángeles de Porciúncula) until it was annexed, along with much of
northern Mexico, in the aftermath of the United States-Mexico War
(1846–1848). For the next six decades, the Mexican population in
the United States declined rapidly. Beginning in the 1910s, fleeing
the Mexican Revolution, lured by the many opportunities pre-
sented by the growth of large-scale farming, and facilitated by the
ease of movement resulting from the completion of railroad net-
works, Mexicans immigrated to Los Angeles in large numbers. By

10. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States.

11. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in
California (Berkeley, 1994). Other key studies of relational notions of race outside of this
field include Claire Jean Kim, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City
(New Haven, Conn., 2000), and Tiya Miles, Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee
Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley, 2005). In 1990, seeing the need for more com-
parative, relational, and interdisciplinary studies, Ramón Gutiérrez and others founded
the Ethnic Studies department at the University of California, San Diego. Ramón Gu-
tiérrez, ‘‘Ethnic Studies: Its Evolution in American Colleges and Universities,’’ in David
Theo Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).

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526 Pacific Historical Review

1930 Los Angeles could claim a Mexican population second in size

only to that of Mexico City.12
But it was the ethno-racial diversity of Los Angeles that ended
up having the most impact on my study. Early twentieth-century Los
Angeles was a rapidly growing metropolis, fueled by the completion
of railway systems, by the frenzy to build its iconic California bunga-
lows for a bourgeoning population, and by the ease of agricultural
development achieved by importing water from the Owens Valley.
The city needed laborers and attracted a diversity of groups, among
them Japanese farmers, Mexican bricklayers, and Midwestern white-
collar workers. The result was a segmented labor force. It became
clear to me that it would misrepresent the experience of Mexican
immigrants if I ignored the diverse racialized communities that
comprised Los Angeles. Indeed, to be Mexican in Los Angeles
meant to be just one part of a multi-ethno-racial setting that in no
small part shaped how people understood the social, cultural, racial,
and political meaning of ‘‘Mexican’’ in Los Angeles.
Reading about the nineteenth-century medical racialization of
Mexicans convinced me that, in order to understand how the cate-
gory of ‘‘Mexican’’ was shaped, I needed to look at other racialized
groups. Even though, at the time, mine was a mainly twentieth-
century study, I decided to follow the lead of Albert Camarillo’s
precedent-setting Chicanos in a Changing Society to see if the experi-
ences of Mexicans in the nineteenth century shaped their succes-
sors’ experiences in the twentieth century.13 Yet Mexicans were
eerily absent from the nineteenth-century science-based historical
records, as if, in keeping with the precepts of Manifest Destiny, they
had all dutifully died off. The Mexican population that continued to
live in the United States after annexation did not come to the atten-
tion of scientists and health officials as other groups did.14 Instead,
the city health officer’s inaugural report in 1879 revealed that it was
Chinese residents, not Mexicans, who were imagined as the greatest
threat to the city’s well-being. In that first report, Health Officer
Dr. Walter Lindley assured his listeners that Los Angeles had

12. George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in
Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York, 1993), 179.
13. Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society.
14. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-
Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).

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 Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens 527

‘‘everything that God could give’’ a city.15 Among the city’s many
virtues, the doctor emphasized ‘‘the health giving sun [present]
almost every day in the year[,] . . . the ocean breeze just properly
tempered by hills and orange groves[,] . . . pure water pouring down
from a mountain stream[,] [and] . . . the most equable temperature
in the civilized world.’’16 In stressing the importance of improving
sanitary conditions in Los Angeles, he called for the construction of
a municipal sewer system and appealed to the city council to erad-
icate Chinatown, ‘‘that rotten spot [that pollutes] the air we breathe
and poisons the water we drink.’’17 These comments mark the begin-
ning of what became a long tradition among city health officials of
tracing any blemish on the pristine image of Los Angeles—including
all forms of disease and any manner of disorder—to the city’s mar-
ginalized communities, not solely Mexicans.
By the 1910s, with the increase of Mexican immigration, Mex-
icans increasingly captured the attention of health officials.18 In the
intervening years, between the United States-Mexico War and this
new wave of immigration from Mexico, other immigrant groups had
shaped the racial terrain on which Mexican immigrants would now
be understood. They followed in the footsteps of the Chinese, who
had immigrated in the mid- to late nineteenth century, and then the
Japanese, who came as laborers after Chinese immigration was
severely restricted following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882. Beginning in 1907, the Gentlemen’s Agreement cur-
tailed Japanese immigration by allowing only non-laborers, workers
already living in the United States, and their family members to
immigrate. Decades before the influx of Mexicans, Los Angeles
officials had used racial stereotypes and negative representations
of Asian groups to guide their decisions regarding the distribution
of city resources, including where they built (or failed to build)
important infrastructure, such as water and sewer systems, and
which people they let live and work in certain areas of the city. In

15. Walter Lindley was the first head of the city’s public health department. He
delivered the inaugural Los Angeles City Annual Health Officer’s Report on November
13, 1879. Los Angeles City Archives. The quote is from p. 1 of the report.
16. Ibid., 3.
17. Ibid.
18. Unfortunately, the experiences of Mexican youth can also be found in the state
of California’s sterilization records. See Miroslava Chávez-Garcı́a, States of Delinquency: Race
and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley, 2012).

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528 Pacific Historical Review

short, by the early twentieth century, Mexicans became targets of the

personal racism once directed at Asians and bore the burden of the
structural racism embedded in the city.
My first book, Fit to be Citizens?, focused primarily on Mexicans,
although I examined their connections to the experiences of the
city’s Asian residents, demonstrating how immigrants were racia-
lized in relation to one another, which often resulted in the institu-
tionalization of a racial hierarchy. How health officials came to view
and treat Mexicans was directly tied to these officials’ assumptions
about and experiences with Asian residents in Los Angeles. Indeed,
from 1869 until 1920, the city health departments used only two racial
categories: Chinese and the rest of the population.19 ‘‘Mexican’’ was
a category constructed from what it was not: not white, not Chinese,
not Japanese. A relational examination of all four groups clarifies how
racialization projects can differ in their intent, application, and
impact, depending on the specific group targeted.20

Subjects vs. questions

By now you might be thinking, ‘‘That all sounds interesting but
how would I go about thinking about race relationally?’’ A good way
to start is to consider a few methodological principles and become
acquainted with some model studies. It is important to recall a basic
principle for doing research: How you define your research subject
shapes your research process and questions. Thus, when it comes
choosing your research subject, I advocate using units of analysis
or organizing principles other than solely racial categories. If we
choose to question the history of Chicana/os and, for example, their
relationship to a specific institution (e.g., the public school system,
the Catholic Church, or the police), we are likely to turn to well-
known and heavily used sources. This in turn may lead us down only
previously blazed trails.

19. After 1920 the city health department expanded its categories to include Mex-
ican, Japanese, and Negro; the county health department used white, Mexican, Japanese,
and other to keep track of the populations under its jurisdiction.
20. In their highly influential study, Racial Formation in the United States, Michael Omi
and Howard Winant define racialization as a ‘‘sociohistorical process by which racial ca-
tegories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed’’ (quote on p. 56). They
emphasize the historically specific and socially constructed nature of racial categories by
drawing attention to ‘‘projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented
and organized’’ (quote on pp. 55–56, emphasis in original).

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 Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens 529

Scholars of Chicana/o history know the ‘‘usual suspects’’ ar-

chives: for example, the Ernesto Galarza Papers at Stanford, the Carey
McWilliams Papers at UCLA, the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) Records at Laguna Niguel, California, and Washington,
D.C., and the Mexican Consulate records in Mexico City. There are
very good reasons for using these archives, but doing so primarily
because they are repositories of records on Chicana/os can be
intellectually limiting. I almost fell victim to this hidden danger
when I received a fellowship at the Huntington Library while re-
searching my dissertation topic.
Subjects or questions. At the Huntington, I was consistently intro-
duced as doing Chicana/o history and thus was repeatedly directed
to the John Anson Ford Papers, a collection routinely mined by
scholars of Chicana/o history because of Ford’s involvement with
racialized communities in Los Angeles. It is a rich collection, but
it contains relatively little that was relevant to my research question
(how does public health inform our ideas about race); instead, there
was a great deal of information about my research subject. Con-
versely, when I contacted the Los Angeles Department of Public
Health, different staff members forewarned me that the department
did not have many materials on Mexicans. Once I started digging
into their records, however, I found they held a lot more of interest
than my contacts realized. The staff’s lack of awareness reflected the
fact that no one before me had used the department records for this
purpose. Moreover, while the records did not include as many ma-
terials on my research subject as some of the well-known archives in
Chicana/o history, they did contain a lot on my research question.
This example underscores the importance of finding more
creative ways to locate new sources and of being tenacious when
mining all sources. Particularly for our first major project, most of
us tend to locate potentially relevant archives by following leads
found in footnotes. If we are exclusively or mainly doing and read-
ing Chicana/o history, we will follow the same leads and keep repro-
ducing the same types of histories. We actually need to be reading
LGBT, Native American, African American, and Asian American
histories alongside Chicana/o history. We need to attend conference
panels even if—no, especially if—we are not in these fields. If race is
the only organizing principle in our research, we will miss the way
other factors may affect the topic we are interested in. If we follow
strategies that expand our horizons and take us into new areas, we

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530 Pacific Historical Review

might find new information about the subject of our studies in

unexpected places: African Americans’ experiences are described
in INS records, and histories of Native Americans in Japanese
internment records, to cite just two real examples.21
Reconsidering the unit of analysis. Another way to approach the
question of thinking about race relationally is to consider using an
organizing principle other than race. Let’s take space as a model
and Boyle Heights, an East Los Angeles neighborhood, as an exam-
ple.22 Boyle Heights is known for having been a very diverse com-
munity from the early 1900s through the 1950s, after which it
gradually became a predominantly Mexican neighborhood. During
the first half of the twentieth century, other areas of Los Angeles
deliberately buttressed the walls of segregation around their com-
munities by writing deed restrictions into housing developments
and permitting only segregated access to public facilities such as
swimming pools. By contrast, at the railway station marking the
entrance to their neighborhood, Boyle Heights officials hung a ban-
ner that read, ‘‘Eastside Greeting: We Welcome All.’’23
Historian George J. Sánchez’s treatment of Boyle Heights
showed us some of the advantages of a more expansive approach
to race. By pulling the lens back and studying this neighborhood,
rather than solely Mexicans, he was able to get at a host of their
interactions and dynamics with other groups and institutions.
Sánchez has long been attracted to this Los Angeles community.
He examined the area in his multi-prize-winning first book, Becoming
Mexican American (1993); he served as a consultant for the Japanese
American National Museum’s exhibition ‘‘Boyle Heights: Power of
Place,’’ mounted in 2002; and he has chosen Boyle Heights as the

21. On the crossed paths of Native Americans and interned Japanese, see Allison
Varzally, Making a Non-White America: Californians Coloring Outside Ethnic Lines, 1925–1955
(Berkeley, 2008), 129–136. In my research using the Records of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service records, I have come across references to how best to racially
categorize African Americans for naturalization purposes, to job competition between
African Americans and Mexicans, and to lynching. See Records of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, Archives I, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
22. Another model study is Albert Camarillo, ‘‘Black and Brown in Compton:
Demographic Change, Suburban Decline, and Intergroup Relations in a South Central
Los Angeles Community, 1950–2000,’’ in Nancy Foner and George M. Fredrickson, eds.,
Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and
Ethnicity in the United States (New York, 2004).
23. www.janm.org/exhibits/bh/exhibition/exhibition.htm, accessed on July 16, 2011.

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 Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens 531

subject of his forthcoming book.24 Sánchez is especially interested in

how issues of diversity like those evident in Boyle Heights complicate
models of Americanization and assimilation. His work also reminds
us that, even when we focus on the local level, we still need to
consider the impact of larger structural and institutional factors: For
instance, in 1939 the Federal Housing Administration officially
declared the celebrated diversity of Boyle Heights as ‘‘literally hon-
eycombed with diverse and subversive racial elements,’’ which
impeded funding to the area and had long-term implications for its
development.25
Collaboration. A different example of Sánchez’s approach to look-
ing at race relationally is evident in a 1994 article on Boyle Heights
that he co-authored with Sarah Deutsch and Gary Okihiro.26 Here we
learn another valuable lesson about how to do relational work—
collaborate! In this simultaneously accessible and insightful piece,
the three authors, each drawing on distinct areas of specialization,
worked together to portray this diverse neighborhood without re-
sorting either to a simplistic melting-pot paradigm or a celebration
of harmonious multiculturalism. Instead, in their examination of
this community comprised of Mexicans, Jews, Japanese, and others,
Deutsch, Sánchez, and Okihiro showed how the lived experience of
one group dramatically affected the experience of others. Seventeen
years after first reading this piece, I am still struck by these scholars’
treatment of Japanese internment and its effects on Boyle Heights
Japanese and non-Japanese residents alike. The local high school
lost one-third of its senior class due to internment. An English
teacher at the school began a round-robin letter-writing campaign
to encourage her students to write to their fellow classmates in-
terned in the camps. In another notable case, a Mexican teenager

24. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American; George J. Sánchez, Bridging Borders,

Remaking Community: Racial Interaction in Boyle Heights, California in the Twentieth Century
(Berkeley, forthcoming); Sánchez, ‘‘Disposable People, Expendable Neighborhoods,’’ in
William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds., A Companion to Los Angeles (Chichester, U.K., 2010);
Sánchez, ‘‘‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews’: Creating Multiracialism
on the Eastside during the 1950s,’’ American Quarterly, 56 (2004), 633–661.
25. Quoted in George Lipsitz, ‘‘The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized
Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,’’ American Quarterly, 47
(1995), 373.
26. Sarah Deutsch, George J. Sánchez, and Gary Y. Okihiro, ‘‘Contemporary Peoples/
Contested Places,’’ in Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds.,
The Oxford History of the American West (New York, 1994).

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532 Pacific Historical Review

went to live in the camps to demonstrate solidarity with his friends.

These stories add a different experience to the prevailing ones of
racism directed against the Japanese in the aftermath of Pearl Har-
bor. Perhaps the difference here is that these folks lived in the same
neighborhood, went to the same schools, shared favorite family
foods, and thus were able to form ties more readily in the face of
adversity.27 Examples such as these are startling reminders that
internment had profound reverberations beyond the Japanese com-
munity. In this sense, a relational study of race provides an impetus
for ceasing to consider the experiences of specific groups the prov-
ince of individual area studies, such as Asian American studies, and
instead centering them squarely in U.S. history where they belong.
Being more creative in defining research questions is also likely
to make us more open to and interested in potentially valuable new
sources. For instance, life histories (e.g., oral histories, autobiogra-
phies, memoirs, diaries, and journals) can provide ways to get at
intersectionality.28 Carey McWilliams, noted activist, journalist, and
attorney, was well positioned, both in terms of his politics and his
professions, to do relational work. His own life history offers a rich
example of how an individual’s biography can provide a window into
relational notions of race. From 1939 to 1942, he served as the
director of California’s Division of Immigration and Housing, which
oversaw the living conditions of migrant laborers. In this capacity, he
criss-crossed the state, visiting farms and interviewing Mexican, Fil-
ipino, Japanese, and many other workers of various nationalities. His
criticisms of then-Governor Earl Warren led the governor to dismiss
McWilliams in 1942. Returning to his legal practice, McWilliams
worked on some of the most pressing civil rights cases of the time,
including serving as head of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee.
Beginning in 1953, he took the helm at The Nation; for the next
twenty years, he published many dozens of articles and editorials,
often on issues of social justice.29 Moreover, throughout his career,

27. The oral interviews from the Japanese American National Museum’s exhibition
Boyle Heights: Power of Place suggest as much about solidarity in the neighborhood.
28. An innovative example of using life histories to discuss relational notions of race
employs biographies of two women who fought for similar issues, but for whom no evi-
dence exists of a friendship or alliance. Gaye Theresa Johnson, ‘‘Constellations of
Struggle: Luisa Moreno, Charlotta Bass, and the Legacy for Ethnic Studies,’’ Aztlán: A
Journal of Chicano Studies, 33 (Spring 2008), 155–172.
29. Carey McWilliams, The Education of Carey McWilliams (New York, 1979).

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 Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens 533

McWilliams wrote monographs centered on various racialized

groups: Prejudice: Japanese-Americans: Symbol of Racial Intolerance
(1944); Brothers under the Skin (1943); and A Mask for Privilege: Anti-
Semitism in America. His book North from Mexico (1949) is often cred-
ited as the first book-length study of Mexican American history.30
In all of these writings, McWilliams gave detailed accounts of
each group’s unique history in the United States and pointed out
their shared struggles. But he also had an eye for seeing how the
experiences of one group affected others, even when separated by
space and time. He argued, for instance, that the ‘‘modes of aggres-
sion tried against Indians and blacks easily transferred to the Chi-
nese’’ and that the immigration policies and restrictions first
directed at Chinese were then directed at ‘‘brown’’ immigrants.31
McWilliams’s works are the first extended U.S. histories to center
relational notions of race. Despite these especially fertile conditions,
no one has yet used McWilliams to write a substantial study to shed
light on relational aspects of race in California during and after
World War II, underscoring the fact that there is still much work
to be done in looking at race relationally.
Reconsidering what we already know. Of course, when thinking
about race relationally, we do not always need to re-invent the wheel
or mine new sources. We can take well-known historic moments and
look at them in relationship to one another. We can search for areas
of overlap, ask what the relationship of one event is to the other(s),
and create a sort of timeline ‘‘mash up.’’ Consider, for example, two
momentous events in Chicana/o history: the August 1942 Sleepy
Lagoon murder and subsequent events (including the trial and its
appeal), and the Zoot Suit Riots that occurred in June 1943. The
first was an altercation that broke out at a party and resulted in the
death of a twenty-two-year-old, José Dı́az. His body was found in a Los
Angeles reservoir known as the Sleepy Lagoon. Consequently, police
rounded up hundreds of Mexican youth and arrested twenty-two, all
of whom were tried for murder. Everyone—the media, police, pros-
ecution, and judge—blatantly discriminated against the young

30. Carey McWilliams, Brothers under the Skin (Boston, 1944); McWilliams, Prejudice:
Japanese-Americans: Symbol of Racial Intolerance (Boston, 1944); McWilliams, A Mask for
Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (Boston, 1948); McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story
of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Hamden, Conn., 1969); McWilliams, updated by Matt
S. Meier, North from Mexico: The Spanish-speaking People of the United States (New York, 1990).
31. McWilliams, Brothers under the Skin, 90, 96.

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534 Pacific Historical Review

Mexican defendants. This racism provoked a backlash that resulted

in widespread public support from both inside and outside the Mex-
ican American community. A multiethnic coalition, the Sleepy
Lagoon Defense Committee, provided support and raised funds for
the defense of the Mexican youth. In the second case, the Zoot Suit
Riots, long-standing tensions between Mexican youth known as
‘‘Zoot Suiters’’ (because of the outfits they wore) and military servi-
cemen erupted into a week-long race riot in Los Angeles. Mobs of
white servicemen descended on East Los Angeles, aiming to attack
Zoot Suiters and literally strip them of their zoot suits, which the
military men viewed as un-American and unpatriotic. While the
majority of Zoot Suiters were Chicano, African American and Fili-
pino Zoot Suiters also were attacked.
A multiracial coalition of important leaders and supporters of
the Chicana/o youth in the first case, aware that the racism directed
at the defendants did not occur in isolation, strove to bring to the
public’s attention the systematic discrimination occurring at the
time. In their model studies of relational notions of race, historians
Luis Alvarez and Scott Kurashige detail such coalitions. They also
document the extent to which African American community mem-
bers saw their fates as linked with those of Chicana/os, pointing to
the outpouring of support by African Americans for the Sleepy
Lagoon defendants.32 I also found this was the case in my research
into the coverage of the case. One African American newspaper,
the Los Angeles Tribune, compared the treatment of the young men
in the Sleepy Lagoon case to that of nine African American youth
falsely accused of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. The paper
referred to the Chicano youth as the ‘‘Mexican Scottsboro boys.’’33
In an opinion piece featured in the Tribune, columnist Alyce Keys
wrote, ‘‘You don’t have to be a quiz kid to figure out why these boys
were made the victims of such a travesty on [sic] American justice.
Remember our Scottsboro case. It is the same pattern of fascist
racism.’’34

32. Luis Alvarez, ‘‘From Zoot Suits to Hip Hop: Towards a Relational Chicana/o
Studies,’’ Latino Studies, 5 (2007), 53–75; Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and
Resistance during World War II (Berkeley, 2008); Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of
Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton, N.J.,
2008).
33. ‘‘Mexican Scottsboro Boys,’’ Los Angeles Tribune, Dec. 27, 1943.
34. Alyce Keys, ‘‘Key Notes,’’ in ibid., Dec. 6, 1943.

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 Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens 535

In a timeline of the Sleepy Lagoon affair, Alice McGrath, an

activist and executive secretary of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Com-
mittee, listed events related to Chicana/os during this period, but
she also reminded her audience that in April, just a couple of
months prior to these landmark events, Japanese and Japanese
Americans were relocated to interment camps.35 Similarly, Carey
McWilliams commented, ‘‘it was a foregone conclusion that Mexi-
cans would be substituted as the major scapegoat group once the
Japanese were removed.’’36 Juxtaposing these events forces us to
question what message this mass containment, displacement, and
racialization of both Mexican and Japanese residents—actions that
took place just months apart—was meant to convey. It reminds us
that both groups were depicted as enemies of the state during World
War II.
In addition to looking at important historical moments in rela-
tion to one another, we need also to revisit landmark events in
Chicana/o history to see if using our relational notions of race yields
a different understanding of these events. One good candidate for
this kind of reassessment is the 1946 school segregation court case,
Méndez v. Westminster School District. This case, fought at the state level
and appealed at the federal level, challenged the practice of barring
Mexican children from attending ‘‘white’’ schools. It argued that
Mexicans were being denied equal protection under the law. Schol-
arly research suggests this largely forgotten case was actually an
important precursor to the well-known 1954 Brown v. Board of Edu-
cation decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segre-
gated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment and were therefore unconstitutional.37 Thurgood
Marshall, who submitted a brief on behalf of the National Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in support of

35. Alice Greenfield McGrath, ‘‘Sleepy Lagoon Case-Chronology,’’ 1983, Department

of Special Collections, UCLA, www.library.edu/special/scweb, accessed July 29, 2011.
36. McWilliams with Meier, North from Mexico, 206, cited in Kurashige, The Shifting
Grounds of Race, 150.
37. A Family Changes History: Méndez v. Westminster: Fiftieth Anniversary, 1947–1997
(Irvine, Calif., 1998); Philippa Strum, Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican-
American Rights (Lawrence, Kans., 2010); Vicki L. Ruiz, ‘‘‘We Always Tell Our Children They
are American’: Méndez v. Westminster and the California Road to Brown,’’ College Board Review,
200 (Fall 2003), 21–27. Toni Robinson and Greg Robinson, ‘‘The Limits of Interracial
Coalitions: Méndez v. Westminster Reexamined,’’ in Nicholas De Genova, ed., Racial Trans-
formations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States (Durham, N.C., 2006).

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536 Pacific Historical Review

the plaintiffs, went on to argue Brown v. Board of Education before the

Supreme Court just eight years later. As the NAACP’s lead counsel,
Marshall cited Méndez as a precedent during the Brown case. Estab-
lishing the links between these two cases helps bring attention to
how segregation goes beyond black-white issues and encourages us
to think about the shared interests between black and brown
communities.38
Méndez v. Westminster School District is significant as a precursor to
Brown, but my research suggests that it is also a good choice to revisit
from a relational perspective. Let’s take a look at the different ways
in which the case makes connections with other racialized groups.
Gonzalo and Felı́citas Méndez (in conjunction with four other fam-
ilies) sued when their children were denied admission to a school in
their local school district of Westminster. But the Méndez family was
living in Westminster only because they had taken advantage of an
opportunity to lease and run a farm there when its owners, the
Munemitsus, were relocated to a Japanese internment camp.39 Fur-
thermore, as the farm overseer, Méndez supervised a crew that
included men contracted under the Bracero Program, a guest
worker arrangement brokered between the U.S. and Mexican gov-
ernments. From 1942 to 1964, the Bracero Program brought 4 mil-
lion Mexican men to the United States to work in agriculture and
other industries, such as railroads, initially as a way to fill World War
II-induced labor shortages. While braceros came to the United
States in search of opportunity, many complained of substandard
room and board provisions and health care, as well as problems
collecting their wages. In contrast, Méndez and the four other fam-
ilies involved in the lawsuit stressed their American identity, both
legally and culturally. They emphasized their rights as American
citizens to have access to public schools rather than questioning the
validity of school district segregation practices. Comparing the status
position of Méndez and the men in the Bracero Program reminds us
of the multiple stratifications within Mexican communities along the
lines of class, skin color, generation, citizenship status, and English
language acquisition.

38. Luis Alvarez and Daniel Widener, ‘‘A History of Black and Brown: Chicana/o-
African-American Cultural and Political Relations,’’ Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 33
(Spring 2008), 147.
39. Strum, Mendez v. Westminster, 36.

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 Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens 537

The Méndez case is rightly touted as a civil rights victory, but the
circumstances surrounding the case get at the histories of other
groups that did not fare as well. The Méndez family’s opportunities
were made possible by the foreclosure of opportunities for other
groups, including Mexican nationals as well as Japanese landowners.
This is not meant as a judgment on the Méndez family’s personal
choices. Rather, it demonstrates how viewing the various groups in
relationship to one another throws into relief the unevenness of
their racialized experiences.
The Méndez case drew the attention of groups not directly
affected by it but nevertheless aware that the Fourteenth Amend-
ment issues at stake in the case were linked to their lives and to those
of all racialized groups. These groups submitted amici curiae
(‘‘friends of the court’’) briefs in support of the plaintiffs.40 In addi-
tion to the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),
Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), and the American Jew-
ish Congress (AJC) all submitted briefs in support of Méndez. The
JACL’s decision to lend support seems significant, since it could be
interpreted as a critique of the U.S. justice system, just a year after
the end of World War II. As they returned to the West Coast from
internment camps, Japanese and Japanese Americans were often
viewed with suspicion and were sometimes victims of hate crimes.
In light of this, the JACL attempted to portray Nikkei as loyal Amer-
icans; they stressed the wartime patriotism of the group as a whole by
drawing attention to the U.S. military veterans in their community
who had fought to defend the United States during the war.41 In their
brief, the AJC explicitly explained how the interests of Jewish Amer-
icans were intertwined with those of the Mexican American commu-
nity: ‘‘We believe, indeed, that the Jewish interests are inseparable
from those of justice and that Jewish interests are threatened when-
ever persecution, discrimination, or humiliation is inflicted upon any
human being because of his race, creed, color, language, or ances-
try.’’42 The AJC contended that the segregation of Mexicans into
separate schools amounted to the creation ‘‘of a legally sanctioned

40. A Family Changes History, 8.

41. Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race, 190–195.
42. ‘‘Brief for the American Jewish Congress as Amicus Curiae’’ in U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Westminster School District of Orange Country, et al. vs.
Gonzalo Méndez, filed Oct. 28, 1946, p. 1.

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538 Pacific Historical Review

political inequality.’’43 In short, the groups that submitted friend of

the court briefs viewed segregation as a violation of democratic prin-
ciples, an act that affected them all, and not just as a transgression
against a single racialized group.
One of the ways the Méndez plaintiffs established their children
as worthy candidates for non-segregated schools was by presenting
them as able-bodied. In their petition, they argued that ‘‘All peti-
tioners are taxpayers of good moral habits, not suffering from dis-
ability, infectious disease, and are qualified to be admitted to the use
of the schools and facilities, within their respective districts and
systems.’’44 On the one hand, there existed a real and pressing need
for the plaintiffs to pursue this line of argument. Since the mid-1800s,
with the rise of Manifest Destiny as a discourse and ideology, Mex-
icans and Indians had been portrayed as biological inferiors who
would eventually die off. This cultural representation followed them
through the twentieth century. In the 1910s and 1920s, Mexican
immigrants were viewed as such a danger that the U.S. Public Health
Service deloused Mexicans who crossed at the U.S.-Mexican border
and bathed them in kerosene to ensure that they would not bring
disease into the United States.45 From the 1920s to the early 1940s,
notions of race, biology, and crime worked to pathologize Mexican
and black young men of color as ‘‘deviant’’ with institutionalization
and forced sterilization seen as the solution.46 During the Zoot Suit
Riots in 1943, Los Angeles Sheriff Edward Ayres laid responsibility for
the violence on ‘‘the inborn characteristics’’ of ‘‘the Mexican ele-
ment,’’ which had a ‘‘desire to use a knife or some [other] lethal
weapon.’’47 Three years later, the school district superintendent in
the Méndez case made the argument that Mexicans needed to be

43. Ibid., 7. For more on Jewish and Mexican alliances in Los Angeles during this
period, see Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-
Century Los Angeles (New York, 2010).
44. Westminster School District of Orange County et al. v. Méndez et al., No. 11310, U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit 161 F.2d 774; 1947 U.S. App. Lexis 2835, April 14,
1947, p. 2.
45. Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in
Modern America (Berkeley, 2005), chap. 2.
46. Chávez-Garcı́a, States of Delinquency.
47. ‘‘Statistics: The Nature of the Mexican American Criminal,’’ Sheriff Edward
Duran Ayres, Foreign Relations Bureau, Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee Records,
Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles, available
through www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb6m3nb79m/? brand¼oac4, accessed Oct. 25,
2011.

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 Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens 539

segregated because they had ‘‘lice, impetigo, [and] generally dirty

hands, face, neck, and ears’’ and they did not have the ‘‘mental ability
of the white children.’’48 While this reference to disability is brief, it is
significant in that Mexican American plaintiffs meant to distance
themselves from the disabled in order to better position themselves.
Assessments of biological deficiency were not fundamentally equiva-
lent to disability, but Mexicans’ declarations of able-bodiedness con-
tested racial inequalities by establishing themselves as part of the
norm versus questioning its parameters.49

What’s the payoff?

In this article, I have argued that we should examine Chicana/os
in relation to other racialized groups in order to develop a fuller
understanding of how racial categories are formed and operate.
Thinking about race relationally will continue to be of importance
in the future not just for trends in the scholarship but for the world we
live in. Indeed, those of us who study history often do so to under-
stand the relationship between racial representations and structural
forces, power and inequality, and how these relationships change
over time in order to understand how to bring about change in our
present.
A very cogent, contemporary example of how race operates
relationally was inspired by the activism seen in response to the
‘‘Compton Cookout’’ party organized by some University of Califor-
nia, San Diego (UCSD) students in February 2010. Held during
Black History Month, the party boasted a ‘‘ghetto theme’’ and per-
petuated racist stereotypes through actions such as claiming that
chicken, watermelon, and malt liquor would be served at the party.
Furthermore, the invitation encouraged women attending the party
to come dressed as ‘‘ghetto chicks.’’ Critics protested the degrada-
tion and homogenization of African Americans, compounded by
class and misogynist stereotyping. The protests were met by more

48. Méndez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County, Petitioners’ opening
brief, Sept. 20, 1945, pp. 20, 6.
49. For more on the links between race and disability, see Natalia Molina, ‘‘Medi-
calizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the Early-Twentieth-Century
United States,’’ Radical History Review, issue 94 (2006), 22–37. For an excellent essay on
how disability discourses help structure inequalities, see Douglas Baynton, ‘‘Disability and
the Justification of Inequality in American History,’’ in Paul Longmore and Lauri Umans-
ky, eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York, 2001), 33–57.

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540 Pacific Historical Review

virulent actions, most notably the hanging of a noose, historically

a symbol of the violence directed at blacks through lynchings, on the
campus library.50
In response to such actions, undergraduate students in the
Black Student Union (BSU) spearheaded demands that university
administrators address the immediate incidents and also take steps
to change the campus climate to avoid such events in the future.
The BSU received support from a wide range of allies, including, but
not limited to, the Chicana/o student group, MEChA (Movimiento
Estudiantil Chican@ de Aztlán), Asian Americans and Asian Pacific
Islanders at UCSD, the Medicine Diversity Coalitions, the Anthro-
pology Graduate Student Coalition, Community Members and
Scripps Oceanography Institute, the Critical Gender studies pro-
gram, and the departments of literature, ethnic studies, history, and
music. Such support is reminiscent of the broad cross-racial coali-
tions discussed earlier in this article, such as in support of Méndez.
These groups offered support through walking out, sitting in, teach-
ing out, meeting with administrators, holding public forums, giving
public speeches, and circulating statements of support. In addition,
a host of university community members, including staff, faculty,
janitors, graduate students, and undergraduates, showed up at the
many events and marches to show their support. They connected
their own struggles as Jews, Middle Easterners, Palestinians, gays,
lesbians, transsexuals, and transgender individuals, first-generation
college students, members of racialized groups, and the disabled to
those of the African American students. The strong response of non-
African Americans to this purportedly African American issue de-
monstrates the ways in which people recognize power struggles and
can connect their own experiences as a non-dominant disenfran-
chised group in ways that question larger structures of power.
The protests over the ‘‘Compton Cookout’’ coincided with
organized protests for a seemingly unrelated issue—the continued
fee raises at the University of California, system-wide.51 Dubbed as

50. My discussion of these events is drawn from my own participation in the protests,
as well as consulting the resources at the UCSD Black Student Union’s website, online at
blackstudentunion.ucsd.edu/ and stopracismucsd.wordpress.com/, accessed Dec. 12,
2011. See also Another University Is Possible (published by University Readers at UCSD,
2010); available through Amazon.com.
51. ucsdcoalitionforeducationaljustice.wordpress.com/about/, accessed Dec. 12,
2011.

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 Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens 541

a ‘‘Day of Action,’’ protesters aimed to bring attention to and contest

the skyrocketing fees that, they argued, made public universities
inaccessible to working-class and middle-class individuals alike. They
drew connections between class and educational barriers, but also
racial barriers. They critiqued the public university system for failing
to reflect the diverse demographics of the state in terms of its stu-
dent body, as well as faculty. If tuition continued to soar, they
claimed, public education would become even more inaccessible
and threaten to exacerbate already existing inequalities. They thus
recognized how the lives of marginalized communities are linked
across time and space and thereby affect one another, even when
they may not appear to do so.52 It is this ability to see commonalities
with people different from us in order to make social change that
a relational notion of race approach, above all, seeks to achieve.

52. I expand on how marginalized communities are connected using my theory of

‘‘racial scripts’’ in Molina, How Race Is Made in America.

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