White Immigrant Merchants, the U.S. Mexican Population, and Middleman Entrepreneurship in the Early Twentieth-Century American West

ABSTRACT Studies applying middleman minority theory to white immigrants’ retail enterprise in the United States overlook the possibility that, in the early twentieth-century American West, white immigrants were attracted into merchandizing by opportunities to exploit a sizable and colonized Mexican population. The present study investigates this possibility. Regression analyses of 1930 Census data show that foreign-born whites were most likely to become merchants in those western locations that once belonged to Mexico and had the largest Mexican populations, consistent with the proposition that white immigrants’ middleman retail entrepreneurship was supported by the U.S. Mexican population’s size and colonized status. The results extend internal colonization scholarship by inferring that Mexican populations in the West, similar to black populations in non-western cities, provided white immigrants with a minority consumer market that was leveraged into retail enterprise in the early twentieth century. Thus, white immigrants, like native “Anglos,” benefited from the Mexican population’s subordination.