$17.27 with 46 percent savings

Digital List Price: $31.99

Sold by Amazon.com Services LLC.

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Pablo Mitchell

Follow

West of Sex: Making Mexican America, 1900–1930 Kindle Edition

by Pablo Mitchell (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

See all formats and editions

Sex can be an oppressive force, a tool to shame, divide, and control a population. But it can also be a force for change, for the legal and physical challenge of inequity and injustice. In West of Sex, Pablo Mitchell uses court transcripts and criminal cases to provide the first coherent picture of Mexican-American sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century, and a truly revelatory look at sexual identity in the borderlands.

As Mexicans faced a rising tide of racial intolerance in the American West, some found cracks in the legal system that enabled them to assert their rights as full citizens, despite institutional hostility. In these chapters, Mitchell offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of ethnicity and power in the United States, placing ordinary Mexican women and men at the center of the story of American sex, colonialism, and belonging.

Other chapters discuss topics like prostitution, same-sex intimacy, sexual violence, interracial romance, and marriage with an impressive level of detail and complexity. Written in vivid and accessible prose, West of Sex offers readers a new vision of sex and race in American history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is a fascinating book, with vivid examples and accessible writing. Mitchell reveals the shifting and contested ground of sex and romance on the U.S.-Mexico border in a cutting-edge analysis that links nascent sexual identities with the political economy of gender, nation and racial formations."—Sarah Deutsch, Duke University -- Sarah Deutsch, Duke University

“Beautifully crafted, tightly argued, and capaciously documented, West of Sex brilliantly shows how Mexican Americans turned to American courts to contest discrimination and to demand their rights as citizens decades before formal civil rights organizations were formed.”

-- Ramón A. Gutiérrez, University of Chicago

“Pablo Mitchell has combed courthouses in the Southwest to bring to life vivid stories of sexual transgression. He persuasively shows how Mexican Americans struggled for both protection from violence and support for unconventional desire. By turns bracing and disturbing, West of Sex lays bare how American colonization of the West reached deep into the people’s intimate lives and how Mexican Americans challenged sexual containment and racial inequality in the first third of the twentieth century. Mitchell offers refreshing insight into the making of a ‘law and order’ world.” -- Nayan Shah, author of Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West

About the Author

Pablo Mitchell is associate professor of history and comparative American studies at Oberlin College. He is the author of Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880–1920.