Julie Weise’s new book on Mexicanos in the South has just been released by University of North Carolina Press. Julie Weise is an assistant professor in the UO Department of History and an affiliated faculty member of CLLAS.
Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910, by Julie M. Weise (November 2015, University of North Carolina Press) 358 pp., published with support provided by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas; David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History.
See this blog entry with video from UO Today.
Publisher’s synopsis
When Latino migration to the U.S. South became increasingly visible in the 1990s, observers and advocates grasped for ways to analyze “new” racial dramas in the absence of historical reference points. However, as this book is the first to comprehensively document, Mexicans and Mexican Americans have a long history of migration to the U.S. South. Corazón de Dixie recounts the untold histories of Mexicanos’ migrations to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina as far back as 1910. It follows Mexicanos into the heart of Dixie, where they navigated the Jim Crow system, cultivated community in the cotton fields, purposefully appealed for help to the Mexican government, shaped the southern conservative imagination in the wake of the civil rights movement, and embraced their own version of suburban living at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Rooted in U.S. and Mexican archival research, oral history interviews, and family photographs, Corazón de Dixie unearths not just the facts of Mexicanos’ long-standing presence in the U.S. South but also their own expectations, strategies, and dreams.