Making the Latino South

"The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. Here, Cecilia Mâarquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of the twentieth century. Structuring her argument around several major themes that frequently signpost the history of the South and of race relations in the United States-- the rise of an increasingly mobile middle class, the civil rights movement and fight over school integration, the growth global connection of the region's economy, and political conflict over immigration -- Mâarquez reveals how Latinx people in the South have confronted both whiteness and antiblackness, and how cultural boundaries to exclude Black people from full participation in the life of the region and nation have been essential to the construction of Latinx as a category"--