Till Death Do Us Part

This book questions the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along lines of race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing. It asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon, so often taken for granted, can tell us about American history broadly. Comparative in scope, and regionally diverse, it looks to immigrants, communities of color, the colonized, the enslaved, rich and poor, and religious minorities as they laid their dead to rest in locales spanning the northeast to the Spanish American southwest. Whether African Americans, Muslim or Christian Arabs, Indians, mestizos, Chinese, Jews, Poles, Catholics, Protestants, or various whites of European descent, one thing that united these Americans was a drive to keep their dead apart. While burial spaces have reflected and preserved cultural and communal identity, particularly in a society as diverse as the United States, this collection argues that the invisible and institutional borders built around them (and into them) also tell a powerful story of the ways in which Americans have negotiated race, culture, class, national origin, and religious difference in the United States during its formative century.

Author(s):  
Allan Amanik ◽  
Kami Fletcher

Till Death Do Us Part emerged from the 2014 OAH conference, which chose “Crossing Borders” as its theme, but has reflected over the course of its development upon seemingly new (and surprisingly dormant) divisions in American society. It takes as its subject the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along communal lines rooted in race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing and asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon can tell us about American history more broadly. This introduction gives a brief outline of each chapter. Comparative in scope, and regionally diverse, chapters look to immigrants, communities of color, the colonized, the enslaved, rich and poor, and religious minorities as they laid their dead to rest in locales spanning the Northeast to the Spanish American Southwest.


Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Chacón ◽  
Susan Bibler Coutin

Immigration law and enforcement choices have enhanced the salience of Latino racial identity in the United States. Yet, to date, courts and administrative agencies have proven remarkably reluctant to confront head on the role of race in immigration enforcement practices. Courts improperly conflate legal nationality and ‘national origin’, thereby cloaking in legality impermissible profiling based on national origin. Courts also maintain the primacy of purported security concerns over the equal protection concerns raised by racial profiling in routine immigration enforcement activities. This, in turn, promotes racially motivated policing practices, reifying both racial distinctions and racial discrimination. Drawing on textual analysis of judicial decisions as well as on interviews with immigrants and immigrant justice organization staff in California, this chapter illustrates how courts contribute to racialized immigration enforcement practices, and explores how those practices affect individual immigrants’ articulation of racial identity and their perceptions of race and racial hierarchy in their communities.


Author(s):  
Ramón J. Guerra

This chapter examines the development of Latino literature in the United States during the time when realism emerged as a dominant aesthetic representation. Beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and including the migrations resulting from the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Mexican Revolution (1910), Latinos in the United States began to realistically craft an identity served by a sense of displacement. Latinos living in the United States as a result of migration or exile were concerned with similar issues, including but not limited to their predominant status as working-class, loss of homeland and culture, social justice, and racial/ethnic profiling or discrimination. The literature produced during the latter part of the nineteenth century by some Latinos began to merge the influence of romantic style with a more socially conscious manner to reproduce the lives of ordinary men and women, draw out the specifics of their existence, characterize their dialects, and connect larger issues to the concerns of the common man, among other realist techniques.


1972 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-440
Author(s):  
Randolph Campbell

It is well known that the initial task of interpreting the Monroe Doctrine as a functional policy in international relations fell largely on John Quincy Adams. Somewhat ironically, the noncolonization principle in Monroe's famed Annual Message of 1823 for which Adams, then Secretary of State, was most responsible, received relatively little attention in the 1820's. Leaders in the United States and Spanish America alike were more concerned with the meaning of the other main principle involved in the Message—nonintervention. What were the practical implications of Monroe's warning that the United States would consider intervention by a European power in the affairs of any independent American nation “ as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States ” ? John Quincy Adams laid the groundwork for an answer to this question in July, 1824, when Colombia, alarmed by rumors of French interference in the wars for independence, sought a treaty of alliance. The President and Congress, Adams replied, would take the necessary action to support nonintervention if a crisis arose, but there would be no alliance. In fact, he added, it would be necessary for the United States to have an understanding with certain European powers whose principles and interests also supported nonintervention before any action could be taken or any alliance completed to uphold it. The position taken by the Secretary of State cooled enthusiasm for the Monroe Doctrine, but Spanish American leaders did not accept this rebuff in 1824 as final.


Author(s):  
Teresita Majewski ◽  
Lauren E. Jelinek

The archaeology of the territorial and early statehood periods (1850–1917) in the American Southwest was virtually terra incognita until the advent of government-mandated archaeology in the 1960s. Subsequent work has shown that historical archaeology has much to contribute to a fuller understanding of this dynamic and formative time in U.S. history. Historical-archaeological investigations have demonstrated that although the United States formally exerted control over Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico by the last half of the nineteenth century, the interactions among its Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican inhabitants strongly influenced the territory’s historical trajectory into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter provides a historic context and a selective overview of archaeological studies that relate to the key themes of shifting economies and cultural heterogeneity.


Circulation ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 135 (suppl_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay Fernández-Rhodes ◽  
Mariaelisa Graff ◽  
Jonathan Bradfield ◽  
Yujie Wang ◽  
Esteban J Parra ◽  
...  

Childhood obesity is a global health concern due to its potential to increase cardiometabolic risk across the life course. In the United States (US) the burden of childhood obesity is highest among Hispanic/Latinos, in particular children or adolescents of Mexican descent. Although the genetic epidemiology of childhood obesity has been studied previously, the potential for novel childhood obesity loci in Hispanic/Latinos and the generalizability of previously reported loci to Hispanic/Latino children and adolescents are still unknown. Thus we aimed to conduct a genome-wide association study of childhood obesity in 1,612 Hispanic/Latino children and adolescents (2-18 years) collected as part of one Mexican (n=794 Mexico City Study) and two US (n=362 Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; n=456 Viva La Familia Study) studies, and to generalize 11 previously reported childhood obesity loci from European descent samples to our Hispanic/Latino samples. Obesity cases and controls were defined by BMI-for-age percentiles based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention smoothed and sex-specific growth curves from 2000, wherein cases had percentiles ≥95 th and controls had percentiles ≤85 th . Each study performed a genome-wide logistic regression analysis of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) after adjusting for sex, population stratification and relatedness, as applicable. We combined study results for SNPs >10 minor allele counts and imputation quality ≥0.5 using fixed-effect inverse-variance weighted meta-analysis. A priori, we estimated that in our sample (n effective =1,498) we would have >80% power to detect common SNPs (>15% minor allele frequency) across the genome (p<5x10 -8 ) that increase the odds of childhood obesity of 55% per risk allele. Generalizability at 11 known childhood obesity loci was defined as p<0.05 and directional consistency with the previously reported obesity-increasing allele. We found 5 suggestive childhood obesity loci (p<4x10 -6 ), including a SNP that associated with an increased odds of childhood obesity of 54% per risk allele (73% frequent) at ARHGAP21, which is expressed in an enhancer region in brain, muscle and adipose tissues and has been previously implicated with trunk fat mass in Viva la Familia at another SNP (r 2 <0.08). Of the 11 known childhood obesity loci, 9 were directionally consistent (binomial p=0.03). SEC16B and TMEM18 generalized to Hispanic/Latinos (p≤0.01), corresponding to a 27% and 40% increased odds of obesity per risk allele (22-88% frequency). These preliminary results suggest the presence of novel loci for childhood obesity and the generalizability of genetic loci discovered in samples of European descent to Hispanic/Latinos, albeit with stronger effect sizes. Future work will attempt to identify additional Hispanic/Latino obesity cases and controls to replicate the suggestive associations.


2018 ◽  
pp. 86-115
Author(s):  
Michela Coletta

Given the essentially cultural connotations of the notion of ‘Latin race’, education was widely perceived as a key tool for bringing about a process of national and regional regeneration. ‘The problem of the race’ was closely linked to ‘the problem of education’. What characterised the debate on education in all three countries was a deep concern with the need for a regeneration of the national character. This chapter explores the debates around Latin and Anglo-Saxon education models and the ways in which major contemporary theories of education were incorporated. Intellectual exchanges with the Spanish ‘regeneracionistas’ were key in the case of the pedagogical strand of Krausismo in the River Plate and especially in Uruguay. What approach to education best suited the Spanish American nations? Was ‘Latin’ education the best model to adopt? The ‘spatial’ direction of these exchanges is in itself revealing of the different national tendencies: while the Chileans ostensibly and increasingly looked towards the United States, the River Plate was largely part of a revival of Krausismo through direct contact with a new generation of Spanish krausistas. 


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