“Navigating Segregated Life in America’s Racial Borderhoods, 1910s-1950s,” Journal of American History, 100:3 (December 2013)

In his presidential address to the 2013 Organization of American Historians annual meeting, Albert M. Camarillo takes a comparative approach to understanding how African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans dealt with urban residential segregation. Pointing to both similarities and differences in these groups’ experiences, Camarillo focuses in particular on the system of segregation of African Americans outside of the South and of Mexican Americans in the Southwest, which he terms James Crow and Jaime Crow. As he demonstrates, in cities across the North and West, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans negotiated barriers by crossing, passing, and sidestepping color lines amid formal and informal attempts to enforce those color lines.