Unruly Borders, Bodies, and Blood: Mexican “Mongrels” and the Eugenics of Empire

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay connects the lynching of Mexican men and poor Mexican women to marriage between wealthy Mexican women and Anglo settlers to argue that these practices composed bodily rhetorics that sanctioned the colonization of the now-U.S. Southwest. Lynching cleared the land, making room for white ownership of the annexed territories through murder and spectacles of extreme violence. Intermarriage between wealthy Mexicans and Anglo settlers transferred lands into white hands through more genteel means. Together, lynching and intermarriage established the “whiteness of property” and suggested the inevitability of Manifest Destiny.