Resignifying Preservation: A Borderlands Response to American Eugenics in Jovita Gonzalez and Eve Raleigh's Caballero

Abstract

By the 1930s, eugenicists had involved matters of blood, inheritance, and reproduction in the creation of a bio-political discourse that made “Americanness” a question of blood relations—a family affair—rather than a question of citizenship. Caballero provides scholars with a rare example of a Mexican–Anglo response to contemporary eugenic discourse. In Caballero, co-authors Jovita Gonzalez and Eve Raleigh reconfigure the discursive net of marriage, citizenship, race, and preservation by engaging two distinct but overlapping discourses of preservation: eugenics, which focuses on preserving racial purity, and ethnography and folklore studies, which focus on preserving the folk in the face of modernization. This essay reads Caballero alongside Jovita Gonzalez's folklore studies and fiction in order to examine how the text critiques eugenics’ and ethnography's either/or rhetoric of preservation and assimilation. This critique allows Gonzalez and Raleigh to envision the preservation of Mexican-American culture through integration and the preservation of whiteness as a joint effort between Mexican Americans and Anglos.

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