When Latino migration to the U.S. South became increasingly visible in the 1990s, observers and advocates grasped for ways to analyze “new” racial dramas in the absence of historical reference points. However, as this book is the first to comprehensively document, Mexicans and Mexican Americans have a long history of migration to the U.S. South. Their experiences there provide critical lessons to better understand the South’s recent changes as well as the larger histories of the United States and Mexico. Corazón de Dixie recounts the untold histories of Mexicanos’ migrations to New Orleans, Mi ... More

When Latino migration to the U.S. South became increasingly visible in the 1990s, observers and advocates grasped for ways to analyze “new” racial dramas in the absence of historical reference points. However, as this book is the first to comprehensively document, Mexicans and Mexican Americans have a long history of migration to the U.S. South. Their experiences there provide critical lessons to better understand the South’s recent changes as well as the larger histories of the United States and Mexico. Corazón de Dixie recounts the untold histories of Mexicanos’ migrations to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina as far back as 1910. It follows Mexicans and Mexican Americans into the heart of Dixie, where they navigated the Jim Crow system, cultivated community in the cotton fields, purposefully appealed for help to the Mexican government, shaped the southern conservative imagination in the wake of the civil rights movement, and embraced their own version of suburban living at the turn of the twenty-first century. These migrants remained invisible in prior written histories because they left little trace in U.S. archives and local memories. Corazón de Dixie uses U.S. sources creatively, but critically depends on archives in Mexico, oral history interviews, and family photographs to unearth not just the facts of Mexicanos’ longstanding presence in the U.S. South but also their own expectations, strategies, and dreams.