Transcribed Interview between Henry Lodge and Zeferino Velázquez

Lodge: When and how did you get to these Great States of America?

Velázquez: My first time in America I caught a train from Guadalajara to Kansas to work on in a mine. The second time I walked from Cuidad Jaurez.

Lodge: Do you have a passport?

Velazquez: No

Lodge: How did you get here without a passport?

Velazquez: I told you, the first time I caught the train, a guy told me he would give me a job and pay for my ticket. The second time I didn't have train money so I walked from a friends house in Cuidad Jaurez, then worked in Texas, then caught the train to California.

Lodge: Did you take a literacy tests?

Velazquez: No. I hear that you oppose immigration from Europe, Why?

Lodge: Well, to give you a brief summary of eugenics, Anglo-Americans have a more refined, civil temperament. Those from other regions have a more savage-like nature. And so the issue is that these aliens are overpopulating our nation.

Velazquez: Have you ever been to Mexico? Or Arizona, or Californa, or Kansas?

Lodge: No

Velazquez: Then how could you call these states your when you have never been to them. I have worked their and lived their for all of my life. My homes is in these places.

1) How the pseudo-scientific essentialist argument for Anglo supremacy reconcile the hypocrisy in the violence that Anglo-Americans inflicted on their "barbaric" racial inferiority?

2) The inclusion of non-Anlgo Europeans into the concept whiteness reflected a political fear of Anglos being outnumbered by immigrants and developments in eugenics and scientific racism that focused on macro-racial groups. Is this political threat relevant in the shift to a Latino majority in 40 or so projected years? Does the U.S. Census, in constructing Latinos as an ethnic group and non-racial group, reflect a political move to address this threat?

3) What is the relationship between geography, construction of race, and constructed borders?