Intersectionality in Cultural Development

Dear George J. Sanchez,

While other historians, such as Juan Gómez-Quiñones and Oscar Handlin, enforce a strict dichotomy to view the history of Mexican Americans with, you use intersectionality and, as Brown says, a “non-linear ways of thinking about the world” to consider the nuances of the immigrant experience. In Handlin’s work, The Uprooted, he conflated the experiences of multiple immigrants, creating a homogeneous narrative of American cultural adaptation. Because of his and Gómez-Quiñones’ restricted understanding of this adaptation, they argued that it occurred “in a linear fashion with strict distinctions”. The definitions of “Mexicano” and “Anglo United States” were rigid and in opposition, with Chicano culture lying somewhere in between. This created a sense that Mexican and American cultures were “static” and “impermeable”, which allowed for historians to document ‘cultural persistence’ and what traditions had previously existed, but not the nuanced evolution of various immigrant communities as a product of their environments. Culture is not what already exists, but how people have reacted to their new surroundings and, in turn, how they have contributed to the surroundings’ development. In Becoming Mexican American, you consider the intersectionality of the immigrant experience and understand that cultural development does not occur in isolation, but in conversation, creating neither ”purely American” nor “purely Mexican” cultures and identities. Just as Higginbotham sees race as “a formless, unstable, nebulous condensation,” you view culture as “contested, temporal, and emergent” allowing a complex and comprehensive exploration of history.

Sincerely,
Sophie Devincenti