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line of inquiry and examine the intersection of race and class in the territorial incorporation of New Mexico and Arizona. In late 19th and early twentieth century New Mexico,
relations between Anglos and Hispanos were marked by a high degree of ethnic, racial, and
linguistic inclusion, reflecting the fact that the territory’s large population of Hispanos
included many wealthy and well-educated upper-class families who had established
close business relations with white settlers. In order to overcome Congressional opposition
to the incorporation of territories with large non-white populations, New Mexico’s elites
successfully reframed Hispanos as ‘Hispano-americanos’ – Americans of Spanish ethnic
descent – whose ‘pure’ racial, cultural, and linguistic identities were argued to be akin
to those of other Americans of European descent. Thus, even in the heyday of scientific
racism, the upper class status of New Mexico’s Hispanos allowed for a ‘whitening’ of
this group to demonstrate their ‘racial fitness’ for self-government.
Recent scholarship on the contemporary ‘politics of belonging’ (Gedalof 2007; Brubaker 2010; Rytter 2010; Schmidt 2011) has examined ways in which immigration and citizenship policy continue to include and exclude on the basis of social group membership.
The politics of belonging is grounded in the idea that ‘we are who we are by virtue of who
we are not’ (Zolberg 1999, 85). This literature pays close attention to the ways in which the
continued anchoring of identity in social group membership maps onto the construction
of national identity and, by extension, immigration and citizenship policy. Conceptions of
membership, however, are more complex than the binary of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ As Laura
Block asserts, belonging should not be ‘conceptualized as a fixed entity which is either
present or absent, but rather imagined along a continuum from strong to weak membership’ (2016, 1439). Thus, ‘rather than thinking of an “us/them” dichotomy, individuals can
be considered “more part of us” or “less part of us”’ (2016, 1435).
The mulitfacetedness of membership is a reflection of the intersectional nature of identity, which allows for different identity markers to function as convertible forms of capital
(Bourdieu 1986). Until recently, studies of inclusion and exclusion tended to separate the
economic from the cultural (e.g. Hollifield 2004; Joppke 2005; Boswell 2007). As a result,
scholars of the politics of belonging routinely ignored economic factors, as states’ concerns
with identity were argued to be limited to the ‘potential threat … . posed by groups defined
by cultural attributes, including race, religion and language’ (Zolberg 1999, 84). However,
as Elrick and Winter have pointed out, such differentiation between economic and identity
factors hinders ‘our understanding of the links between immigration policy and immigrant inclusion/exclusion, because it overlooks how social stratification plays out at the
intersection of economic and identity related classification’ (2018, 21).
The lack of analytical integration of cultural attributes and economic factors in the politics of belonging is indicative of a broader reluctance within migration scholarship to
recognise the significance of class as an axis of stratification. After the ‘culturalist turn’
of the 1990s, the study of socioeconomic differentiation fell into disfavour as scholarly
work focused on ethnicity, gender, and, most recently, religion, instead (Van Hear
2014). There are some notable exceptions to this pattern, however, that suggest that
migration scholars – like social scientists more broadly – are beginning of recognise
their mistake of ‘[drowning] the class baby … in the identity bathwater’ (Van Hear
2014, S103).
Recent analyses thus have begun to recognise the role of class in the politics of belonging. Writing in the U.S. context, Kevin Johnson demonstrates how ‘race and class interact