Congratulations go out to Julie Weise for her contribution to the newly published Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

This book incorporates the writings of diverse scholars to analyze how American political history has been formed by underlining “structures of state power” such as race and gender, as opposed to more typical analyses based on moments of high-profile national crisis.

Weise, in her chapter titled “La revolución institucional: The Rise and Fall of the Mexican New Deal in the U.S. South, 1920–1990,” examines the bracero program, which allowed millions of Mexican laborers to work temporarily in the United States, and the role played by these migrant workers in the politics of the New Deal era.

Learn more about Shaped by the State.

About Julie Weise

Julie Weise is an interdisciplinary historian exploring themes of identity, citizenship, migration, race, and nations in hemispheric and global context. She teaches topical courses on race and immigration for the University of Oregon’s Department of History, including a bilingual Latinxs in the Americas course that she co-developed with Claudia Holguín Mendoza, an assistant professor of Spanish linguistics at the University of California, Riverside.

Weise’s first book, Corazon de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), won the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians in 2016. Her current project, “Citizenship Displaced: Migrant Political Cultures in the Era of State Control,” seeks to place Mexico-U.S. migration in a global context.