Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights by Gabriela González

Abstract

Reviewed by: Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights by Gabriela González Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights. By Gabriela González. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 261. Paper, $38.95, ISBN 978-0-19-090962-8; cloth, $115.00, ISBN 978-0-19-991414-2.) Against a backdrop of western expansion, legacies of conquest, and the modernization of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, Gabriela González illuminates a binational history of human and civil rights struggles led by ethnic Mexicans. Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights chronicles how fronterizo activists in Texas from varying class backgrounds drew on the promises—and paradoxes—of modernity to inform their cultural, political, and economic agendas. Though activists' goals varied, they shared a vision for the uplift of ethnic Mexicans, particularly the poor and working class who experienced dispossession and proletarianization following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. As the author shows through bilingual archival research, "redeeming" Mexican people and culture in modernizing states was a complex task, which led some reformers to reinscribe racial and class hierarchies, while others looked to more radical politics. The first half of Redeeming La Raza examines activists who centered Mexican nationalism to discredit the "so-called Mexican Problem" by advocating for cultural redemption and searching for or imposing social stability among Mexicans between 1900 and 1929 (p. 58). Chapter 1 tackles these strategies in the context of gente decente (decent people) reformers, including the influential Idar family from Laredo, Texas. The second chapter shows the era's ideological diversity, as González traces the transnational work of liberals and anarchists who sought social change benefiting the Mexican masses. Chapter 3 centers on Leonor Villegas de Magnón, a fronteriza who organized and led medical and economic assistance initiatives during the Mexican Revolution. The second half of the study focuses on activism between 1930 and 1950. Chapters 4 and 5 show how reformers varied in gender and class consciousness. While the Munguías (chapter 4) fought for the uplift of Mexican people, they abided by traditional gender norms: Jose Rómulo Munguía Torres worked in the world of civic engagement and Carolina Malpica de Munguía in education. Emma Tenayuca (chapter 5) worked to improve the condition of working-class people as a communist organizer who fought for labor rights. The final chapter connects the legacies of gente decente reform efforts to the founding and development of LULAC. Throughout the chapters, González traces the evolution, transformation, and, at times, refusal of gente decente ideologies that animated transborder activism in the early twentieth century. She also gives critical attention to gender and its intersections with political development and involvement. González weaves the biographies of men and women enveloped in struggles for rights, and she shows, for example, how activists used "maternal feminism" (p. 3). Maternal feminism acknowledged the patriarchal ordering of society, while allowing women possibilities for organizing outside the home. González contributes to histories of race and ethnicity in the United States. Drawing on Benedict Anderson's work, González argues that "la raza" served as an "imagined community," a constructed, unified ethnic platform that [End Page 414] activists used to further their struggles for human and civil rights (p. 193). One limitation also rests at the nexus of race and ethnicity. Though the idea is not central to the project, Redeeming La Raza makes use of "Jaime Crow" as a Spanish-language transposition of the anti-Black Jim Crow era (p. 10). "Jaime Crow" is not explored for its connections to the nation's legacies of anti-Blackness, but rather serves as a nonanalytical, descriptive term. Further analysis and explication of the regional connections between such racial and ethnic projects are especially important for expanding histories of the U.S. South and Southwest. Overall, Redeeming La Raza is an excellent text that will be of great interest to borderlands and Mexican American historians. Those who research histories of civil rights, modernity, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and culture in a Mexico and/or U.S. context will also find it to be an invaluable addition to studies...