October 19, 2023
"Race, Labor, Sex: Native American and Mexican American Racialization in the Progressive Era."
In the summer of 1920 two young Paiute women ran away from Stewart Indian School, a federal boarding school in Carson City, Nevada. Finding them in the company of two Mexican American men in California, authorities arrested all four for violating the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910, a charge that suggested the group was engaged in sex work. This talk examines this case study as a trace of Native American-Mexican American intimacy that stitches together the racial histories of these groups. This talk approaches racial formation - the process through which racial categories come into being and acquire new meanings - as relational, where racial ideas about one group impact another, as well as fundamentally tied to labor and capital and discourses about sexuality. The arrest of these four under the White Slave Traffic Act - a law designed to protect White women from non-White, foreign men - demonstrates how presumptions of innocence - about both labor and sex -structured racial ideas about both groups during the Progressive Era.
Further information
- Location:
- Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
- Cost: Free