Marginalising the Marginalised in Wartime: African Americans and Mexican Americans in Austin, Texas, during the World War I Era.

This article examines the impact of war upon a dominant society's attitudes towards and treatment of ethnic minorities. Although recent scholarship suggests that war generally has a negative effect on minorities, this position has been arrived at by focusing almost entirely upon the experiences of enemy-alien groups, while established or newly-arrived outgroups not linked to the external foe have largely been ignored. This poses the question: does war also have a negative effect upon the latter two types of ethny? If so, are their experiences more or less severe than that of enemy-alien groups? These issues are addressed here by examining white perceptions and treatment of non-white minorities during the World War I era in Austin, Texas, which contained sizeable numbers of the three population groups relevant to this discussion: an enemy-alien minority, German Americans; a long-standing ethnic outgroup, African Americans; and a recently established immigrant ethny, Mexicans. This study shows that war not only has a generally negative effect on minorities—with the previously most marginalised ethnies tending to suffer the most, even more so than enemy-alien groups—but that this deterioration in ethnic relations can generate patterns of interaction that survive long after the war has ended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]