AFTER THE FIFTH SUN
Class and Race in North America
by James W. Russell
254 pp. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall. $26
ISBN 0-13-036237-9.
Race first became an issue in the class structuring of North
American societies in 1521 when Tenochtitlan, the capital city of
the Aztecs, fell to Spanish invaders. For the first time
conquerors and conquered were racially different. After the end
of the Aztec era--the fifth sun in Aztec thought--Spanish and later
European colonizers built new societies in which they
occupied the dominant class positions and forced Indians,
Africans, and Asians into subordinate positions. The close
association of class and race in North America thus began during
the colonial past, but it developed in different ways in the
areas that would become the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
In this far-reaching study, James W. Russell comparatively
explores how patterns of class and racial inequality developed in
the United States, Mexico, and Canada from the colonial pasts to
the present. What is revealed is a continent of diverse
historical experiences, class systems and ways of thinking about
race.
Contents:
1. Introduction
2. The Ending of the Fifth Sun
3. Class, Race, and Colonial Reconstruction
4. Three Societies, Two Worlds of Development
5. Contemporary Classes
6. Race and Pigmentocracy
7. Euro-North Americans
8. Indians after the Fifth Sun
9. Afro-North Americans
10. Original and New Asian Communities
11. The Fifth Race
12. The New North American Division of Labor
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