Hispanic American Historical Review

590 HAHR / August

the specificity of the Mapuche being (the identity of the Mapuche in the ontological
sense) as different from the Chilean peasantry, whereas other intellectuals (not the
Allende government advisers) ignored this difference, influenced by an evolutionary and
developmental paradigm. During this period, according to the author, “Mapuche culture
became increasingly visible . . . despite, in conjunction with, or indeed sometimes as a
direct result of government initiatives” (p. 17). She concludes that Allende “acknowl-
edged that the Mapuche had a distinct culture and history, and he engaged with some of
their demands in this regard, but not all and not always,” an ambiguous conclusion that
does not resolve the contradiction between recognition or ignorance (or nonrecognition)
of the specificity of the Mapuches’ issues (pp. 147–48). But this ambiguity is also the
result of the fact that the question of Allende’s stance toward the Mapuche has not been
fully resolved by scholars.
This work reliably follows the documentary evidence and develops a scholarly
apparatus for addressing Mapuche cultural history, though, of course, it does not exhaust
the literature, especially the most recent (which is constantly growing). Crow’s meth-
odology is sound and is presented in clear language. This book is important for its
attempt to make a cultural history and for its attempt at objectivity, the author main-
taining emotional distance from her subject. The book will be of interest to specialists,
students, academics, and activists, Chilean and Mapuche, in the fields of history and
various human sciences.

carlos ruiz rodrı́guez, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Proyecto DICYT

3030952 SM
doi 10.1215/00182168-3601910

Inmigración y racismo: Contribuciones a la historia de los extranjeros en México.

Edited by pablo yankelevich. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2015. Figures.
Notes. Bibliography. 233 pp. Paper.

This book collects six valuable contributions to our knowledge of an important and
often-overlooked aspect of race relations in the Americas in the twentieth century: the
racialist scientific doctrines and racist ideas and prejudices that shaped immigration
policies and legislations in the twentieth century in all the countries of the region, as well
as the complex fashion in which foreign immigrants were racialized and discriminated
against by governments and different social sectors. Three of the essays deal with these
issues from broad regional and historical perspectives, while the remainder discuss highly
specific cases in different provinces of Mexico. Although these perspectives appear
discordant at times, in the end they produce an interesting counterpoint, revealing the
differences, even contradictions, between national laws and their local implementations
and between generalizing racialist ideologies and the varying relations established in
particular social contexts with specific groups of immigrants.
The first two essays present a comparative framework for understanding the
racialist components of immigration policies in the American continent as a whole.

Published by Duke University Press

 Hispanic American Historical Review

Book Reviews / National Period 591

David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martı́n carry out a statistical comparison of all
the migration laws with racial content issued by the governments of the Americas from
the late nineteenth century until the 1960s. They stress that international conditions and
pressures determined the promulgation of racist immigration laws and their eventual
abandonment. More contentious is how they underplay the importance of the politi-
cal mobilization of racialized groups in effecting this change. Andrés Reggiani explores
the influence of eugenic doctrines on immigration policies. He shows how the Pan-
American health institutions created in the early twentieth century became a vehicle for
enthusiastic scientists who sought to extend US and Canadian racist policies of immi-
gration throughout the Americas. However, they were met by active resistance by spe-
cialists from several Latin American countries, which defended their own brand of
national racialist policies, such as mestizaje.
Focusing on Mexico, Tomás Pérez Vejo explores the inextricable relation of
nationalist thought in the nineteenth century with racialist ideologies and racist prac-
tices. Since the essay does not address directly the issue of immigration, its broad gen-
eralizations are contradicted at times by the three case studies of discrimination against
foreigners in Mexico in the twentieth century that follow. Elisabeth Cunin shows, for the
case of the black immigrant laborers from Belize admitted into the territory of Quintana
Roo in southeastern Mexico in the 1930s, that the national regulations that strictly
forbade this kind of migration were circumvented, due to the acute need for the work-
force in the region. This leads her to question the contention that the Mexican state of the
time was systematically racist and to stress the importance of local circumstances and the
interplay between different levels of government and private interests. For the same time
frame in Sonora in northwestern Mexico, Kif Augustine-Adams finds a starkly different
situation for Chinese immigrants and Mexicans of Chinese origin. In the 1930 national
census, officials flouted the official policy of abandoning any racial classification of the
population and used the ambiguities in the legal definition of nationality to racialize this
group and to effectively deny citizenship to both Mexican women married to Chinese
nationals and their offspring. This exclusion led to all these groups’ expulsion from
Mexican territory in the following years. Finally, in a nuanced and detailed essay, Pablo
Yankelevich explores the roots of Mexican anti-Semitism both in Christian traditions
and in modern racist ideologies. He discusses how these repertoires were applied to
Jewish immigrants both in Mexico City and in other regions and how they were used as
rhetorical fodder for right-wing political movements in the 1930s. His conclusion,
however, is that there was no systematic racist discrimination against Jews in Mexico.
Though they may seem discordant at times, these essays, in their differences in
scope and conclusions, actually reflect the protean nature of racialist doctrines and
practices in the twentieth century. On the one hand, they were essential for the con-
struction of nationalist ideologies and the definition of national identities, and they were
also the subject of learned international scientific discourse; as such, they were enshrined
in laws and regulations that affected whole nations and the entire continent. On the other,
these doctrines and practices were deeply embedded in local circumstances and in spe-
cific social and economic relationships between racialized groups that refracted and

Published by Duke University Press

 Hispanic American Historical Review

592 HAHR / August

sometimes contradicted national laws and policies. Any full account of the way that
racism operated and operates in the Americas, both against immigrants and against other
groups, should take into account these parallel levels and their complex interaction.

federico navarrete linares, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

doi 10.1215/00182168-3601922

The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race, and the Making ofthe Peruvian State. By paulo
drinot. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Illustrations. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. x, 328 pp. Paper, $24.95.

In The Allure ofLabor, Paulo Drinot analyzes Peruvian state efforts in the 1920s and 1930s
and argues that elites considered the tiny urban industrial labor force a privileged agent
of progress capable of transforming Peru from an uncivilized country into a modern
industrial nation-state. More than economic development, industrialization is better
understood as “an embodied project of racial improvement” establishing citizenship as
nonindigenous (p. 3). Labor’s “allure” is thus its perceived ability to provide a “solution”
to Peru’s much more vexing “Indian problem” by transforming Indians into workers,
converting them from obstacles into agents of modern progress and from national
liabilities into assets (pp. 4–5).
Focusing on the Ministry of Development’s Labor Section, the “barrios obreros”
housing projects, state-funded eateries called “restaurantes populares,” and a 1936 law
providing social security and hospitalization, Drinot draws from the Foucauldian gov-
ernmentality literature in his analysis. This culturalist approach allows him to examine
these agencies as efforts to regulate, manage, and shape the working class, ideologically
and sometimes physically, into a national resource. He relies heavily on the distinction
between rationalities and technologies of government. Rationalities of government are
“the ways in which certain ‘objects’ of government become knowable, calculable, and
administrable”; technologies of government can then work on these objects that gov-
ernments can now see (p. 9). Drinot defines Peru as a “labor state,” which is not so much a
bureaucratic apparatus as it is a “form of power shaping labor relations” that encom-
passes “the conjunction of rationalities and technologies of government that composed a
broader project of governmentality that placed labor . . . at the center of Peru’s quest for
civilization and progress on the basis of industrialization” (pp. 10, 233). Peru saw the
state’s role as protecting and “improving” laborers by changing their environments,
bodies, and morals so that they could best fulfill their roles as agents of progress. Workers
helped shape this labor state, which they considered “an expression of their own aspi-
rations” (p. 11). In each of his case studies, however, workers’ initial enthusiasm rapidly
diminishes as these state efforts betray workers’ expectations.
As Drinot acknowledges, labeling Peru’s governments a “labor state” seems coun-
terintuitive, given the fact that the industrial labor force represents such a small part of
the working population. But labor commanded an inordinate state effort because Per-
uvian elites envisioned only these urban workers as agents of progress (p. 14). Since
“labor was commensurable with progress and indigeneity was commensurable with

Published by Duke University Press