Julie Weise discusses Latino migration to the South at Tuesday’s Brown Bag

Julie Weise discusses Latino migration to the South at Tuesday’s Brown Bag

Julie Weise, Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon, discusses her 2015 book, Corazon de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South Since 1910, at a special Tuesday Brown Bag at noon in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory.

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visible in the 1990s, observers and advocates grasped for ways to analyze “new” racial dramas in the absence of historical reference points.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. 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 Mexicanos 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.