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Summary Of Neil Foley's The White Scourge

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In _The White Scourge_, Neil Foley uses a wealth of archival materials and oral histories to illuminate the construction and reconstruction of whiteness and the connection of this whiteness to power. Focusing largely on cotton culture in central Texas, Foley 's book deconstructs whiteness through a new and detailed analysis of race, class, and gender. The most intriguing aspect of this book is its comparison of the impact of whiteness on various ethno-racial classes and how each struggled in relation to the other to develop a meaningful existence. _The White Scourge_ shows the pathology of a racial system that continues to produce both material poverty and poverty of spirit. The users ' mentality develops in such a way that everyone -- even those who …show more content…

By insisting on their Spanish blood and the absence of any African blood, some Mexicans were able to claim whiteness and purchase land. Whiteness was thus inscribed in Texas law as the precondition for the rights of both citizenship and land ownership. This construction of whiteness separated white Texans from slaves and laborers of such "mongrel" groups as African Americans and Mexicans. Chapter Two, " 'The Little Brown Man in Gringo Land," details the impact of the legalization of Mexican labor and the relaxing of the Immigration Act of 1917 on farm labor and tenancy in central Texas. Large numbers of Mexicans in central Texas replaced African American and Anglo American tenants and sharecroppers, exacerbating tensions among the remaining white tenants. There was a fear that the mixing of white tenants and Mexicans would produce genetically inferior "seed stocks." The discussion of immigration raises questions of who is American. Immigration sustained whiteness, because it allowed farmers and businessmen to import cheap labor, thereby keeping existing laborers and tenants in poverty. Poor whites were unable to see their

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Although the United States needed Mexicans to increase their economy, Mexicans were not welcomed to the US during the 1920s because the US wanted them to work temporarily, they considered the Mexican an inferior race, and considered them “the Mexican Problem”. In the 1920s, Agribusiness was paying labor contractors to recruit farmworkers; consequently, tens of thousands of Mexicans immigrated to the southern looking for labor opportunities, but they were not welcome yet in the United States. According to the class notes, Mexicans were often hired as strikebreakers in Pennsylvania, Detroit, and Chicago. According to Knox, a representative of the Arizona Cotton Growers’

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Each state and territory passed property laws that only affected people of color. In document 29, we see that there were a lot of problems with land, especially in California and Texas. Mexicans in the ceded territories lose their land but also

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The Hispanics were in the newly-acquired territory before the 1840s. When the United States acquired New Mexico, many Hispanics were acquired also. These Hispanics were cattle farmers and sheep ranchers. Despite being on the land for many years, the Hispanics were not allowed citizenship even though they were 50,000 of them compared to 1,000 whites. These Hispanics feared of the new whites taking their land.

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In Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California, Tomas Almaguer (2009) describes how race and racism coincides to facilitate the birth of white supremacy in California during the late nineteenth century. The idea of racial formation allowed groups to establish their power and privilege over defined racial lines. For each of the three racialized groups presented Chapter one combines the historical and sociological framework to describe the transformation of Mexican California. Through highlighting the historical accounts of racialized groups, fear of potential threats to white workers creates white supremacy. He continues by describing the peopling of Anglo-CA from 1848-1900 with the immigration of Irish, German,

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