Racial Faultlines

1 Pages 268 Words

Brief #5-“Racial Faultlines “
The article, Racial Faultlines by Tomas Almaguer, talks about the fact that people experience a variety of different “racialized relationships” in California. Due to a higher multiracial population where more Mexican, Indian, Chinese and Japanese populations live in the state, California had a much less binary racial mix than most areas. In many places, racial relationships are more binary, or black and white. Almaguer discusses how these different peoples are viewed within the social strata of the state using examples of how Mexican Americans are treated differently that Native Americans, although both races are dark complexioned, etc. He discusses how the different cultures were dominated by “whites” and how racial order and class hierarchy was determined by skin color and social conception.
I really enjoyed the point that the author made when discussing the differences in the way indigenous Mexican Americans were treated as opposed to indigenous Indian Americans, although they were both dark skinned and often of shared ancestry. It really does give credence to the idea of race as a social construction. I see a direct correlation here between the local ruling classes of the Californio Elite and the treatment of the Mexican people, if Europeans detected a class system was in place, they would have considered this civilized in many ways. While the Indians had a completely different type of social stratification in their culture and totally alien religion. It is easy to see how people with a certain mindset might have considered them savage. As people often identify with the familiar and consider the unfamiliar to be bad, strange or even evil....