Citation: Daniel, G. Reginald. 2022. From Multiracial to Monoracial: The Formation of Mexican American Identities in the U.S. Southwest. Genealogy 6: 28. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/genealogy6020028 Received: 25 September 2021 Accepted: 13 April 2022 Published: 20 April 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). genealogy Article From Multiracial to Monoracial: The Formation of Mexican American Identities in the U.S. Southwest G. Reginald Daniel Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA; rdaniel@soc.ucsb.edu Abstract: The racialization of Mexican Americans in northern Mexico, that is, the U.S. Southwest, following the Anglo-Americanization during the second half of the nineteenth century, is an excellent case study of the historical formations of Anglo-American and Spanish American racial orders. Both racial orders were based on a hierarchy that privileged Whiteness and stigmatized Blackness. Yet Spanish America’s high levels of miscegenation resulted in ternary orders allowing for gradation in and fluidity within racial categories, in addition to the formation of multiracial identities, including those of individuals with African ancestry. Anglo-America was characterized by restrictions on miscegenation and more precise definitions of and restrictions on racial categories. This prohibited the formation of multiracial identities while buttressing a binary racial order that broadly necessitated single-race (monoracial) identification as either White or nonWhite, and more specifically, as White or Black, given their polar extremes in racial hierarchy. Within this order, hypodescent applies most stringently to those with African ancestry through the one-drop rule, which designates as Black all such individuals. This article examines monoracialization through historical processes of Mexican– American identity formations. Over the twentieth century, this shifted from White to Brown, but without any acknowledgment of African ancestry. Keywords: multiracial; mixed race; mestizaje; miscegenation; hypodescent; Mexican Americans; Chicanas/os 1. Introduction Beginning in the late seventeenth century, Anglo-America implemented restrictions on miscegenation and stringent definitions of and constraints on racial categories. Multira- cial identities have historically been prohibited due to hypodescent and the monoracial imperative. These social devices categorize multiracials, respectively, according to their most subaltern racial background and necessitate single-racial identification. This line of reasoning supported a binary racial order that has broadly required identification as either White or nonWhite, and more specifically, as White or Black, given their polar extremes in racial hierarchy. Within this order, hypodescent has applied most rigorously to those with African ancestry through the one-drop rule, which designates as Black all such individuals. Spanish America’s extensive miscegenation beginning in the sixteenth century resulted in a ternary order characterized by fluid racial categories, as well as multiracial identities, including those of individuals of African descent. This should not be interpreted to mean that the Spanish American ternary racial order was more egalitarian than the Anglo- American binary one. Their different trajectories were grounded in a shared colonialism involving the conquest, settlement, exploitation of, as well as political-economic domination and control over, large areas of the world. Patriarchy was foundational to both racial orders. Men exercised control over power relations in the private and public spheres generating social structures and practices in which they were able to dominate, oppress, and exploit women. These social forces granted White men the power to control the productive (and to some extent reproductive) labor of not only men of color but also that of White women and women of color (Daniel 2006). Genealogy 2022, 6, 28. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6020028 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy