White, Transnationally: Mexican Immigrants in New Orleans, 1910–39

While the story of Mexican immigration to Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Chicago between 1910 and 1939 is well known, New Orleans was also a migration destination for Gulf Coast Mexicans who arrived via ship.  The story of their easy assimilation into white New Orleans fundamentally departs from the regional and national stories of Mexicans’ racialization during that period.  It is the first case historians have uncovered so far in which Mexicans’ experiences paralleled those of European immigrants much more closely than that of their Mexican counterparts elsewhere in the United States.  In some ways New Orleans’ story was unique due to the Southern regional obsession with the binary of black and white.  Yet, the imperative of imposing this binary on a city of racial complexity could just have easily led to a harsh othering of all groups considered racially suspect.  In the case of Mexicans, the opposite happened.  The biological racism espoused in the Plessy decision proved not to actually determine the implementation of Jim Crow.

Rather, local and transnational power holders created the fictive terms of racial segregation in New Orleans – a fiction in which Mexicans could enjoy the privileges of whiteness without having to prove their genetic bona fides.  Local politicians and businessmen envisioned their port city as a gateway to Latin American trade opportunities and used the city’s Mexican immigrants as symbols of this Pan-American future.  The Mexican consulate and the middle-class Mexican families that surrounded it emphasized Mexicans’ cultural compatibility with white New Orleans.  And Mexican immigrants themselves seized the opportunity to marry, live, and worship with the city’s whites, thereby opening their own doors to social mobility.  Segregation in New Orleans was harsh and real, but its biological underpinnings proved a pretense that served the needs of both local and transnational actors.