Cynthia E. Orozco, Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist

Abstract

Reviewed by: Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist by Cynthia E. Orozco Philip Samponaro (bio) Cynthia E. Orozco, Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist. University of Texas Press, 2020. Pp. 254. Adela Sloss-Vento (1901–1998) is not a widely known name. At first glance, this native of Texas's Rio Grande Valley seems a typical borderlander/fronteriza woman of her era. Like most contemporary women of Mexican descent in the region, Sloss-Vento followed the prescribed paths of heterosexuality and domesticity by marrying and raising a family. Born working class, she labored at lower-middleclass jobs available to Mexican American women after graduating high school, first as a secretary during the 1930s and later as a jail matron. But Sloss-Vento broke the mold. She transcended the homosociality that restricted much of the Latina experience of her times by donning the roles of archivist, political activist, and citizen-commentator in the male-dominated Mexican American civil rights and Chicano movements that together spanned the 1920s through 1970s. She publicly critiqued the low wages, poverty, Bracero Program, and exploitative agribusiness that characterized life in the Rio Grande Valley. Sloss-Vento was a Democratic Party activist and, in the 1970s, supported the Raza Unida Party with its challenges to white-only politics. As a fronteriza, she was vocal about Mexico's policies that affected La Raza in Texas. By engaging directly in the masculine domains of civil rights, writing, and politics, Adela Sloss-Vento added the title of feminist to her many accomplishments. Still, Sloss-Vento remains almost invisible. Cynthia E. Orozco, Professor of History at Eastern New Mexico University–Ruidoso, remedies that marginalization with Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist. Orozco analyzes Sloss-Vento's correspondence with male civil rights figures and her numerous opinion pieces and letters published in newspapers from the 1930s into the 1970s. She argues that Sloss-Vento was the most important Mexican American woman civil rights activist and public intellectual in Texas, the only Tejana to write publicly on social issues across seven decades. Ultimately, Orzoco concludes that Sloss-Vento "was one of the most important Mexican American civil rights activists, public intellectuals, political party activists, and feminists of the twentieth century" (171). Orozco is concerned with how Sloss-Vento surpassed gender boundaries through political associations with men. For that reason, she highlights [End Page 141] Sloss-Vento's interaction with leaders of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the seminal Tejano civil rights organization founded in 1929 and a subject on which Orozco is an expert from previous scholarship. Typical of its era, LULAC operated as a male-only homosocial space. Sloss-Vento nonetheless established relations with three of LULAC's founders: J. Luz Sáenz, José Tomás "J. T." Canales, and her personal hero, Alonso Perales. By exploring relevant correspondence, Orozco demonstrates that Adela was a civil rights insider. Simultaneously, Orozco points out that Sloss-Vento wrote her letters at home as a wife and mother, making her "a gendered outsider" (11). The author underscores this theme by stressing that Sloss-Vento steadfastly believed that women had the right to advocate for social justice, affording her the praxis of infusing the civil rights struggle with a feminist framework. In the same manner, argues Orozco, Adela sought to democratize the white male establishment in Texas politics before the social movements of the 1960s gave other women entry after 1970. Orozco is well suited to have undertaken this study. The author is an established historian of Texas, women, civil rights, and politics. Moreover, she has a unique relationship with her subject as the only scholar to have corresponded directly with Sloss-Vento, doing so while an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1970s. Those letters, which Orozco draws upon here, offer invaluable insights. The author also enjoyed access to Sloss-Vento's private archive, still in family hands. Agent of Change contextualizes that resource as having, among other attributes, the most important collection on the Harlingen (TX) Convention of 1927, which led to...