The Race Laws in the U.S. Southwest builds a comprehensive collection of race laws and city ordinances affecting Latinos/as/x and other racial and ethnic groups in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas from 1836 until today. Historians have described segregation laws and policies targeting Mexican Americans as Juan Crow laws. But unlike Jim Crow laws that were first cataloged by Pauli Murray in 1950, there are no comprehensive national or state collections of laws and policies targeting Latinos/as/x. This working group will develop a set of methods to identify and catalogue discriminatory statutes and city ordinances in the Southwest and will document the efforts by people who exposed the impacts of discriminatory practices. Our research provides new relational understandings of race and discrimination in Latinos/as/x studies and U.S. history to prompt more scholarship.

Research Goals

Contribute to the broader field of Latinos/as/x Studies and engender an increasingly

• relational approach to documenting and analyzing race laws in the United States.

• Attend to the relationship between the law, carcerality, and extralegal practices of violence.

• Utilize a relational approach to collecting and contextualizing these race laws by highlighting how laws targeting Mexican Americans were shaped by and also informed other laws targeting Indigenous, Black, and Asian communities.

• Help create a more comprehensive collection of race laws beyond the Southwest.

Research Questions

• How do we define race laws in the Southwest?

• How does the consideration of citizenship and immigration status complicate that question?

• Did racial and ethnic minorities enjoy more rights in some states than in others?

• What research methods can be used to identify both de jure and de facto race laws and local practices?

• How can these methods be tailored to reflect individual state histories and legislative bodies?