Available From UC Press

Mexican American racial uncertainty has long been a defining feature of US racial understanding. Were Mexican Americans white or nonwhite? In the post–civil rights period, this racial uncertainty took on new meaning as the courts, the federal bureaucracy, local school officials, parents, and community activists sought to turn Mexican American racial identity to their own benefit. This is the first book that examines the pivotal 1973 Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1 Supreme Court ruling, and how debates over Mexican Americans' racial position helped reinforce the emerging tropes of colorblind racial ideology.

In the post–civil rights era, when overt racism was no longer socially acceptable, anti-integration voices utilized the indeterminacy of Mexican American racial identity to frame their opposition to school desegregation. That some Mexican Americans adopted these tropes only reinforced the strength of colorblindness in battles against civil rights in the 1970s. 

Danielle R. Olden is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah. 

"Finally, a book that unlocks Keyes! As Danielle Olden demonstrates, this pivotal 1973 case is best understood as the Supreme Court's first 'western' desegregation decision, owing to the beyond black-and-white complexities that Mexican Americans introduced into the conceptualization of desegregation and how to implement it. Racial Uncertainties joins a growing body of scholarship that widens the lens for thinking about civil rights history—demographically, geographically, and, as a result, analytically."—Mark Brilliant, author of The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 

"Racial Uncertainties is an innovative, well-researched, and well-written book that pushes the boundaries of the field. Olden takes the story of segregation out of the South and examines it in the context of the regional racial lexicon of the multiethnic, multiracial West. Her analysis shows how Brown v. Board of Education has ramifications far beyond the African American population and demonstrates the multiple complex strategies different groups used to challenge school segregation."—Natalia Molina, author of A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community 

"Are Latinos white or nonwhite? This question has riddled historians and other scholars for a long time. In Racial Uncertainties, Olden argues that the answer depended on the articulation and relationality of Spanish, Indigenous, and Black Identities, with real-world consequences in the arenas of schooling, housing, and law. Her book on Denver—a relatively unexplored urban landscape that is also representative of other southwestern cities—is a critical contribution to our understanding of the Latino past, present, and future."—Geraldo Cadava, author of The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump