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"In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the same time, demographers have predicted the 'browning' of the nation's middle class-once considered a de facto 'white' category-over the next twenty years as the country becomes increasingly racially diverse. In this book, Joseph O. Jewell takes us back to the turn of the twentieth century to show how evidence of middle-class mobility among Black, Mexican American, and Chinese men generated both new anxieties and varieties of backlash among white populations. Blending cultural history and historical sociology, Jewell chronicles the continually evolving narratives that linked whiteness with middle-class mobility and middle-class manhood. In doing so, Jewell addresses a key issue in the historical sociology of race: how racialized groups demarcate, defend, and alter social positions in overlapping hierarchies of race, class, and gender. New racist narratives about non-white men occupying middle-class occupations emerged in cities across the nation at the turn of the century. These stories helped to shore up white supremacy in the face of far-reaching changes to the nation's racialized economic order"--

Access to public spaces played an important role in constructing and defining racial boundaries in the late nineteenth century. In 1883, San Antonio's Mexican American elites protested an order permanently barring them from using the dance pavilion in San Pedro Springs Park, resulting in the public censure of the park manager who gave the order and affirmations of Tejano elites' right to equal access to public spaces. The author analyzes this historical case to show the importance of the race-class intersection, specifically racialized class identities, as a resource in racial boundary shifting: the movement of racial boundaries across people. Public exchanges in the "San Pedro Park incident" either challenged or defended Mexican Americans' equal access to a white public space by drawing on competing racial narratives about their fitness for middle-class identity. The author argues that analyses of racial boundary shifting must give careful consideration to how social actors use understandings of class to expand or contract racial boundaries. Reproducing class identities that ensure continued economic domination over racial minorities is a central part of maintaining the racial order.