front cover of Hidden Out in the Open
Hidden Out in the Open
Spanish Migration to the United States (1875-1930)
Phylis Cancilla Martinelli
University Press of Colorado, 2018
Hidden Out in the Open is the first English-language volume on Spanish migration to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This panoramic study covers a period defined by the crucial transformations of the Progressive Era in the United States, and by similarly momentous changes in Spain following the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy under Alfonso XII.
 
The chapters in this volume are geographically wide-ranging, reflecting the transnational nature of the Spanish diaspora in the Americas, encompassing networks that connected Spain, Cuba, Latin American countries, the United States, and American-controlled territories in Hawai’i and Panama. The geographic diversity reveals the different jobs immigrants engaged in, from construction gangs in the Panama Canal to mining crews in Arizona and West Virginia. Contributors analyze the Spanish experience in the United States from a variety of perspectives, discussing rural and urban enclaves, the role of the state, and the political mobilization of migrants, using a range of methodological approaches that examine ethnicity, race, gender, and cultural practices through the lenses of sociology, history, and cultural studies.
 
The mention of the Spanish influence in the United States often conjures up images of conquistadores and padres of old. Forgotten in this account are the Spanish immigrants who reached American shores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hidden Out in the Open reveals the role of the modern migration of Spaniards in this "land of immigrants" and rectifies the erasure of Spain in the American narrative. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of US history and the history of modern Spain and Europe, as well as those interested ethnic and migration/diaspora studies, Hispanic/Latino studies, and the study of working class and radicalism.

Contributors: Brian D. Bunk, Christopher J. Castañeda, Thomas Hidalgo, Beverly Lozano, Phylis Cancilla Martinelli, Gary R. Mormino, George E. Pozzetta†, Ana Varela-Lago.
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front cover of Undermining Race
Undermining Race
Ethnic Identities in Arizona Copper Camps, 1880–1920
Phylis Cancilla Martinelli
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Undermining Race rewrites the history of race, immigration, and labor in the copper industry in Arizona. The book focuses on the case of Italian immigrants in their relationships with Anglo, Mexican, and Spanish miners (and at times with blacks, Asian Americans, and Native Americans), requiring a reinterpretation of the way race was formed and figured across place and time.

Phylis Martinelli argues that the case of Italians in Arizona provides insight into “in between” racial and ethnic categories, demonstrating that the categorizing of Italians varied from camp to camp depending on local conditions—such as management practices in structuring labor markets and workers’ housing, and the choices made by immigrants in forging communities of language and mutual support. Italians—even light-skinned northern Italians—were not considered completely “white” in Arizona at this historical moment, yet neither were they consistently racialized as non-white, and tactics used to control them ranged from micro to macro level violence.

To make her argument, Martinelli looks closely at two “white camps” in Globe and Bisbee and at the Mexican camp of Clifton-Morenci. Comparing and contrasting the placement of Italians in these three camps shows how the usual binary system of race relations became complicated, which in turn affected the existing race-based labor hierarchy, especially during strikes. The book provides additional case studies to argue that the biracial stratification system in the United States was in fact triracial at times. According to Martinelli, this system determined the nature of the associations among laborers as well as the way Americans came to construct “whiteness.”
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