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Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race. By Laura E. Gomez. New York: NYU Press, 2007. Pp. 256. $41.00 cloth; $21.00 paper.
Races are made, not born, and the making of Mexican Americans as a race, tracked so carefully by Gomez in Manifest Destinies, was highly instructive for me as someone engaged in thinking about the making of Muslim as a race in the post-9/1 1 period. Beginning with an important distinction, that racial group membership is mainly assigned by the dominant group, (although it often comes to be taken up by the racialized group itself), whereas ethnic group membership is chosen by members of the ethnic group themselves, Gomez shows readers how the involuntary nature of racial group membership is intimately bound up with conquest and accumulation. As Hannah Arendt remarked, race thinking, the division of humanity into the deserving and the undeserving according to descent, matured into a full-fledged ideology with imperialism when, attached to a project of accumulation, it became an organizing principle (Arendt 1973:159). What one sees in Manifest Destinies is how race works as an organizing principle in American history. The American racial project, commonly understood as a black/white paradigm, is in fact a complex and fluid system in which every group's status - from recently arrived immigrants to white "ethnic" groups - is overdetermined by race. This insight, more...