Felix Longoria's Wake: Bereavement, Racism, and the Rise of Mexican American Activism. By Patrick J. Carroll. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. xviii, 270 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 0-292-71246-4. Paper, $19.95, isbn 0-292-71249-9.)

Abstract

The experience of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, the largest population of Latino people in the United States, is still, in most mainstream depictions, a minimalist outline of a vague Hispanic presence in the meta-narrative. Unlike the acknowledged and substantive integration of the story of African American society as a fundamental part of American history, Latinos are mostly sketchy attachments. While excellent Mexican American, Chicano, and/or Latino scholarship exists to provide correction of this serious oversight, it still seems to remain (in 2003) for Anglo (the Chicano and Mexican American term for European American) scholars to utilize it. Patrick J. Carroll has done so in his Felix Longoria's Wake. This is an excellent account of one of the seminal events in the post—World War II Mexican American community: the denial in 1948 of the Three Rivers, Texas, funeral chapel for the wake of Felix Longoria Jr., a Mexican American soldier (and citizen of Three Rivers, Texas), because “‘the whites wouldn't like it’” (p. 56). Carroll details the subsequent response by the Mexican American community in south Texas and the counterreaction of the Anglo community with fascinating research that combines up-to-the-moment narrative with careful and detailed description of and analysis of the main protagonists in their evolving relations to the place and time of south Texas and the immediate post—World War II United States. Within the context of racialization, ethnicity and ethnocentrism, economic structures, and the widely divergent American perspectives of entitlement and equal opportunity, Carroll presents the Felix Longoria affair as the major event in the expansion of the American G.I. Forum, the most important postwar organization of the Mexican American generation. He also describes the active participation of Lyndon B. Johnson as a critical moment in the development of lbj as the most accomplished national Anglo politician in American civil rights history. The book's major contribution is the presentation of Dr. Héctor Perez García (1917–1996) as a major figure in Mexican American history or, as Julie Pycior states in the 2003 pbs documentary Justice for My People: The Story of Dr. Hector Garcia, a “giant of the 20th century.”