Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest.

Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest. Edited by Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker. Introduction by Nancy A. Hewitt. Waiter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, no. 35. (College Station: Published by Texas A&M University Press for the University of Texas at Arlington, 2004. Pp. xxx, 144. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 1-58544-319-0; cloth, $32.95, ISBN 1-58544-297-6.)

Editors Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker have put together a selection of essays that forces a reconsideration of how historians conceptualize both the American South and the operation of race. By pushing the boundaries of the South to more explicitly include Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma and by expanding the concept of southern identity to include Mexican, Cuban, and Chinese immigrants and indigenous peoples, the authors expose the inadequacy of a language centered on a black-white dichotomy to describe social interactions in the American South.

Nancy A. Hewitt's introduction offers Tampa, Florida, as one locale in which racial binaries did not apply. Cuban immigrants of European, indigenous, and African ancestry (or some combination thereof) confounded city officials' attempts to enact Jim Crow legislation. Even the Cuban immigrant population did not fall neatly into one racial category. Similarly, Stephanie Cole demonstrates that white Dallasites found Chinese immigrants difficult to classify racially at the turn of the century. Economic success could "whiten" a Chinese immigrant, and Chinese "blood" could obscure black "blood" in census records. For instance, "Jim Wing's Chinese blood 'trumped' his wife's black blood and made their infant daughter Sing 'Chinese'" (p. 87).

William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb complicate historical interpretations of lynching by examining Mexican victims of white mob violence from 1848 to 1930. Though there were similarities between the lynching of African Americans and Mexicans, the authors also find sharp differences: Mexican victims were rarely accused of committing sexual offenses; incidents of Mexican lynching increased during times of heightened diplomatic tension between the U.S. and Mexico; and the federal government sometimes paid indemnities to the families of Mexican victims of lynchings because of diplomatic pressure from the Mexican government. Moreover, African Americans and Mexicans did not unite in opposition to lynching; instead each group distanced itself from the other. African Americans insisted on the protection of their rights because of their legal status as citizens, while Mexicans based their claims on their whiteness. Neil Foley finds that such differences between Mexicans and African Americans in defining American identity persisted well into the twentieth century with Mexican Americans in Texas asserting their whiteness to demand civil rights.

Sarah Deutsch explores the multicultural and multiracial origins of the black town of Boley, Oklahoma. The Oklahoma state constitution defined any person of African descent as "colored" or "negro" but placed all others under the category of "white" (p. 105). Thus the larger categories of "white" and "negro" subsumed Creek Indian and Afro-Creek identities respectively and ignored distinctions within the black population.

Laura F. Edwards posits that court cases from antebellum North and South Carolina reveal fissures in southern patriarchy. Indeed, on occasion women and slaves did challenge male authority successfully because male household heads and their dependants existed not in isolation but within communities where social ties, kinship, and reputation mattered. Though persuasively argued, Edwards's essay seems geographically and topically out of place in this collection. The other authors consider the margins of the geographical South and its multiracial character, while Edwards's essay focuses on a more familiar South and on interactions between patriarchs and dependents.

The authors draw upon a wide array of evidence such as court cases, newspaper accounts, census records, legislative records, and personal papers to explicate the instability and evolution of formulations of race, American identity, and citizenship and illustrate why groups that were targets of discrimination often did not find common ground.

FAY A. YARBROUGH

University of Kentucky