Claiming Citizenship: Mexican Americans in Victoria, Texas

Abstract

Anthony Quiroz's book is a milestone in Mexican American historiography. He situates Mexican American history within both American consensus and conflict historiography by using the central trope of “citizen.” His basic argument is that the acquisition of full citizenship is the fundamental pursuit of the Mexican American population. By “claiming” their full rights of citizenship, the Mexican Americans of his case study in Victoria, Texas, and throughout the Southwest are simultaneously struggling against the limitation of their rights. It is a “quest for legitimation.” This quest… [is] undertaken within the framework of a bicultural identity that is adaptable to the private Mexican world of home, church, neighborhood, and family as well as the public world of school, work, and politics. Coexistence with Anglo-American society and partaking of the American dream… [is] the desired ideal. (p. xii) Quiroz's text rests on the historian Lizabeth Cohen's study of industrialized workers in Chicago, in which she suggests that workers are united in the public sphere for collective action, while retaining their individualism in the private sphere (Making a New Deal, 1990). For Cohen, as for Quiroz, people struggle harmoniously for a broad notion of citizenship rights against their (narrow) rights, which have been limited by societal-ideological discourses. Quiroz identifies the beginning of this political consciousness to claim citizenship in the 1920s with returning World War I veterans seeking democracy in their communities and with the rise of the middle class, urging Americanism via their two major organizations: the 1929 League of United Latin American Citizens (lulac) and the 1947 American G.I. Forum, which have remained active in Victoria and the Southwest.