Review: Chicana Liberation: Women and Mexican American Politics in Los Angeles, 1945–1981, by Marisela R. Chávez

River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands

In mainstream US sporting discourse, the contributions of Mexicans and Mexican Americans are often ignored or underappreciated, whether as participants, fans, or journalists. In this work, José M. Alamillo examines the multidirectional development of the Mexican diasporic sporting culture that permeated both sides of the US-Mexico border in the first half of the twentieth century and continues to wield a significant impact on US sporting culture today.Deportes centers on the transnational development of Mexican sporting culture in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Alamillo focuses on the Mexican diaspora, also known in some intellectual circles as “Greater Mexico,” and how “Mexican origin” (3) athletes made use of their transnational networks to assert their dignity and place in a US society that often rejected and othered them as “brown.” These connections were bidirectional, however, as the Mexican government realized the potential of reaching out to México de afuera to develop the sports culture within Mexico. In the introduction, Alamillo clearly lays out his five foci, which include the role of US imperialism in creating a Mexican diaspora, the ways in which sports engendered solidarity and pathways to political power for ethnic Mexicans, the importance of understanding the role of the “brown” racial category within US sporting discourse, the impact of gender, and how hybridity helped create a Mexican diasporic sporting identity in the United States. Furthermore, Alamillo argues that the creation of Mexican American and Mexican identities in the United States were “simultaneous rather than sequential” (10).To substantiate his argument, Alamillo relies on meticulous research framed by a thorough investigation of the scholarly literature on Mexican sport, Mexican American sport and politics, US racial relations, and diaspora and identity. In addition, he has scoured several English- and Spanish-language periodicals from the United States and Mexico and employs archival evidence from the US National Archives and Records Administration, the Mexican Archivo General de la Nación, as well as smaller archives and private collections. This myriad of evidence results in a nuanced analysis that incorporates several perspectives on the creation of a Mexican sporting diaspora.Alamillo documents this process through an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. The first chapter centers on the development of “modern” sporting culture in Mexico and the use of sport to “Americanize” “problematic” Mexican immigrants up to the 1920s, with a particular focus on the YMCA and the Spanish-language press in both the United States and Mexico. The second chapter focuses on boxing in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the exploits of Bert Colima, Baby Arizmendi, and Rodolfo Casanova. The immigration issues the latter two encountered provide a completely new understanding of how race impacted ethnic Mexican sporting celebrity in the 1930s. Chapter 3 focuses on the development of a hybrid baseball culture among ethnic Mexicans in the 1920s and 1930s that included attempts to create cross-border solidarity and highlights women's agency through creating their own baseball teams. Chapters 4 and 5 both examine transnational outreach by governmental agencies, with the former analyzing attempts by the Mexican government to build a relationship with the Mexican Athletic Association of Southern California in the 1930s and early 1940s and the latter centering on the US Office of Inter-American Affairs’ efforts to promote sports like American football in Mexico in the 1940s. Chapter 6 examines Mexican American efforts to battle juvenile delinquency, build diasporic ties, and frame a civil rights agenda through sport during and after World War II.The strengths of this book are its thorough research, clear organization, accessible writing style, and balanced approach to the topic at hand. As a result, it offers a picture of Mexican diasporic sporting culture that incorporates the perspectives of sporting bureaucrats, political leaders, celebrity athletes, and lesser-known athletes, including women and youth. The analysis is further infused with a personal touch, as each chapter begins with a biography of a Mexican-origin sports figure or a personal anecdote, such as the author's experiences betting on boxing matches with his family or living through Fernandomania (the hoopla surrounding the exploits of Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela) in the early 1980s. These stories provide some background as to how the author can wade through Mexican American and Mexican historical processes so effortlessly. In addition, he draws special attention to women's participation, particularly in baseball and boxing, portraying them as active agents even if they faced significant racial and gender discrimination.Deportes is the product of an experienced and impassioned historian in tune with current trends in sport historiography. It is essential reading for anyone interested in sport, Mexican, Chicanx/Latinx, or US history and would work well if assigned in undergraduate and graduate courses on those subjects.

Reviewed by: After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics by Greg Robinson Nancy Kang (bio) After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics, by Greg Robinson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Viii + 328 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN 978-0-5202-7159-3. Readers who approach Greg Robinson’s After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics hoping for a collection of Issei and Nisei survivor stories will be sorely disappointed. Only the third chapter (“Japantown Born and Reborn”), a triangulation of case studies based on resettlement experiences in New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles, inclines in that direction. There are, however, no sustained personal perspectives. Those seeking a non-chronological, “broad-based investigation” (2) of Japanese American pre- and postincarceration life will be gratified by the scope and conscientiousness of this ambitious historical project. After Camp resembles a patchwork quilt of discrete yet cohesive pieces. Divided thematically into five sections, the twelve chapters tackle such diverse issues as President Roosevelt’s plans for postwar resettlement and dispersal of former internees; the negotiation of citizenship values by Nisei (second-generation) intellectuals, politicians, artists, and activist collectives like the Japanese American Citizenship League (JACL); the imperatives of assimilation amid public mistrust and discrimination; and the pre- and postwar connections forged among Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans. There is no core thesis to be proven so much as a multidirectional reconstruction of the cultural milieus into which the former “enemy aliens” found themselves released and expected to thrive. Robinson’s writing is eminently readable, with ample examples conveyed in an accessible yet erudite style that would appeal to general readers as well as fellow historians. Particularly strong are the chapters devoted to the “uneasy” [End Page 104] and “fragile” alliance between African Americans and Japanese Americans from the mid-1950s onward (217). The author traces the evolution of black–Asian solidarity based on common experiences of oppression such as media-fueled racism, housing discrimination, and restricted access to schooling, employment, and property ownership. Robinson deftly calls attention to the precedent-setting cooperation between the JACL and the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Discussing Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in the context of Korematsu v. United States (1944) and Oyama v. California (1948), he expertly underscores how Japanese American legal struggles laid the foundation for postwar civil rights legislation at the national level. The author then dissects frictions that arose between the two groups as the 1960s progressed. Attitudes ranging from avoidance and indifference to “bitter disdain” (226) characterized Nisei reactions to African American civil rights agitation. Others remained loyal to the spirit of camaraderie and mutual striving. Challenges were exacerbated by model minority discourses in the media that pitted assimilated, seemingly unobtrusive Asian Americans against “troublemaking” racial Others. Added to the fray were disagreements over controversial legislation like California’s Proposition 14 (on housing discrimination based on race and religion) and the fallout from the Watts Riots of 1965. This urban upheaval resulted in significant damage to Nisei-owned businesses and corroded the spirit of intergroup dialogue and cooperation. Overall, these incidents acted to diminish the closeness that had germinated decades earlier when, in the wake of Executive Order 9066, a “disproportionate” amount of support was offered by black intellectuals and communities for their Japanese American compatriots (157). Although African American institutional leadership remained largely silent on the matter, voices such as Harvard-educated lawyer Hugh E. Macbeth, writers George Schuyler and Langston Hughes, singer Paul Robeson, reporter Erna P. Harris, and attorney Pauli Murray challenged the long-held misconception that these two populations were largely uninvolved in each other’s historical strivings (161). Robinson’s inquiries whet the scholarly appetite for further investigation on this underexamined topic. In the spirit of crossing barriers, boundaries, and borders, this U.S.-born Canadian academic displays a refreshingly hemispheric approach to the preand postwar struggles of the internees. He does not omit commentary on Japanese Canadian incarceration and also focuses an entire chapter on the career of McGill University sociologist Forrest LaViolette, whom he describes as a political “paradox” (4) and “weak reed in...

Reviewed by: The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History by Benjamin Francis-Fallon Felipe Hinojosa The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History. By Benjamin Francis-Fallon. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp 494. Illustrations, notes, index.) To write a history of the rise of the Latino vote in the United States is no easy task. It requires a readiness to confront the unexpected, to merge local and national politics, and to navigate how groups coalesce amidst national and political differences. I will admit to being skeptical about whether the author could pull that off. But not only does he succeed, he does so with grace and a narrative brilliance that keeps the reader engaged through twists and turns by political leaders in South Texas, East Los Angeles, and East Harlem. While the Latino community shares histories of colonialism, immigration, and racial formation, the experiences are vastly different along lines of citizenship, race, and culture. Benjamin Francis-Fallon acknowledges these differences with an impressive analysis of Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban politics even as he highlights their combined political efforts. He takes what are difficult and complex movements and organizes them so readers see the many ways that Latinos have carved political space for themselves. Chronological chapters give equal time to progressive and conservative Latinos as they struggled to become forces within the two-party system. This straightforward narrative history sticks to its main purpose: telling the story of the Latino vote. The book is big—385 pages of narrative in eleven chapters—but rather than creating a cumbersome read, the author keeps readers on the alert with his gripping narrative and [End Page 232] chapters that are precise in their purpose and clear in their arguments. Significant here is the centrality of Mexican American politics in the Southwest to the larger scene of Latino politics across the nation. Even as the "Viva Kennedy" campaign emerged in the Southwest and brought together a cadre of Mexican American politicians, the national scope of the movement helped form coalitions with New York Puerto Ricans. As the author correctly points out, "Kennedy's victory in the historically close 1960 presidential election was in no small part due to Puerto Rican and Mexican-American votes" (62). The book does have its weaknesses. The role of Latinas in forging these politics is almost absent, and the author should have focused more on the role of grassroots radical Latino politics. While the author does devote a few pages to the New York Young Lords and the Texas-based Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), their influence is downplayed. But aside from these criticisms, The Rise of the Latino Vote succeeds on many levels, especially in the way the author recognizes the complexities of Latino politics even as he makes a compelling case for the importance of their struggle to present a united front. This book should be required reading for students of Mexican American history, state and national politicians and anyone interested in understanding the significant role that Latinos have played, and continue to play, in Texas and national politics. Felipe Hinojosa Texas A&M University Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Ignacio M. García's Viva Kennedy offers a vivid glimpse into one of the most interesting, and yet least understood, periods of Mexican American political history. The third volume of a series of books focusing on ethnic politics in the Southwest, Viva Kennedy explores Mexican American activism in electoral politics in the crucial period between the first large-scale Mexican American political mobilizations after World War II and the emergence of the Chicano movement in the mid-1960s. The main contours of this story have been told before, but García breaks new ground by analyzing the establishment and political significance of hundreds of “Viva Kennedy” clubs that emerged among Mexican American and other Latino Democrats during the 1960 presidential campaign. The author is particularly effective in detailing the issues politically engaged Mexican Americans believed to be at stake in the 1960 campaign. As a result of both their participation in the war effort and the slowly changing civil rights atmosphere of the 1950s, Mexican Americans had tasted some limited successes in access to employment, education (particularly through the benefits of the G.I. Bill), and the election of a few government officials at the state and local levels. Moreover, with the establishment of new, aggressive Mexican American advocacy organizations in the Southwest between 1947 and 1959, community activists symbolically announced that Mexican Americans would henceforth be a political force with which to reckon.

Acevedo: California Latino Politics THE CALIFORNIA Journal of Politics & Policy Commentary The Search for a Civic Voice: California Latino Politics, Kenneth C. Burt, Regina Books, 2007 California Latino Politics: The Fight for Inclusion—Then and Now Emily Acevedo* California State University, Los Angeles In The Search for a Civic Voice, Kenneth C. Burt presents his readers with a detailed accounting of Latino involvement in electoral politics. Burt addresses three key issues: what are the origins of modern Latino politics, what lessons can be drawn from these early pioneers, and what www.bepress.com/cjpp Volume 1, Issue 1, 2009 is the state of Latino politics today? Burt contends that the origins of Latino political involvement date back much earlier than academics and activists generally acknowledge. He dates its origins from the evening of April 28, 1939, the first meeting of El Congreso or the First National Congress of Mexican and Spanish American People’s of the United States. Burt’s historical analysis traces the birth of the Latino movement to the early efforts of prominent individuals such as Eduardo Quevedo, Luisa Moreno, Saul Alinsky, Fred Ross, and Edward R. Roybal. The groundswell of political activism coincides with the emergence of a broad coalition of diverse ethnic groups such as Jewish, Japanese, and Mexican Americans and key actors such as labor *Emily Acevedo is an assistant professor of political science at California State University, Los Angeles. Her research interests include Latin American politics, social movements, comparative and world politics, and terrorism and U.S. counter-terrorism.

In Mexican Americans with Moxie, Frank P. Barajas eloquently makes a case that Ventura County was very much a part of the Chicana/o movement and by doing so forces a reckoning with Chicana/o movement historiography that largely omits mixed rural/urban settings. Ventura County is situated only four hours from the US–Mexico border and sixty miles northwest of Los Angeles, making it a top destination for Mexican migrants, who, he claims “also became Chicana-Chicano as they witnessed, participated in, and adapted to the cultural crosscurrents of the time” (p. 5, p.13).Barajas not only expands the regional parameters of the Chicana/o movement, he also argues that the Chicana/o movement was transgenerational and not solely made up of youth activists. He contends “that a collection of people from the Mexican American and Chicana-Chicano generations defined El Movimiento (the Chicano movement) in Ventura County” (p. 3). This transgenerational approach is what makes Mexican Americans with Moxie innovative. For Barajas, the Chicana/o movement was one that included two generations: “one born before World War II that came of age prior to the 1960s, and the other subsequently” (p. 2). He argues, and I agree, that Chicana/o movement historiography needs to move away from categorizing this politicized cohort as solely a youth movement.The book is divided into eight chapters, not including an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter sets up the political landscape of Ventura starting with the arrival of Cesar Chavez in 1958 and the establishment of the Community Service Organization (CSO) a year later (p. 14). Chapter 2 details efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and CSO to end segregation in local schools as well as police brutality. This cross-racial coalition pre-dates the Chicana/o movement and sets the foundation for future efforts in the region to address racial imbalance in Ventura County. The third chapter turns to the formation of the Brown Berets of Oxnard and continues with a discussion of the CSO, Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), and Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). Chapters 4 and 5 situate the legal struggles with the Oxnard Elementary School District to desegregate its schools and expose many of the school board members as successful in institutionalizing racism. These chapters also reveal what scholars of race and ethnicity have already confirmed—that housing segregation mirrors school segregation. For example, “Within schools, district officials created staggered attendance and playground schedules” (p. 115). Chapters 6 and 7 look at farmworker organizing efforts through the help of Chavez's UFW, highlighting the strike of Egg City, one of the nation's largest egg producers, on July 13, 1967, as well as other farm labor rights efforts. When UFWOC “led the men and women on a march through the city's streets,” students at Oxnard High School marched alongside them—demonstrating the cross-generational alliances during El Movimiento (p. 145). The final chapter, Chapter 8, follows the push by college students to bring Chicana/o studies programs to their campuses, especially at Moorpark College, and their efforts to hire Chicana/o faculty. This chapter also highlights how Chicana/o student activists worked with the Black Student Union at Ventura College to secure the Minority Student Center (pp. 176–77).For Barajas, it didn't matter much if one self-identified as Chicana/o, as was the case with César Chávez. What mattered most was the political engagement and consciousness against racist structures. Here, Barajas also emphasizes another important misjudgment of the Chicana/o community in the 1960s. The majority of Chicanas/os resided in mostly urban settings and consequently many had little to no experience working in California's agricultural industry. Yet they espoused, “WE ARE MEXICAN-AMERICANS, non-farmworkers who support Cesar Chavez . . . ” (p. 1). Chávez and the United Farm Workers union resonated with Chicana/o movement activists’ pleas for economic justice. The book demonstrates that indeed the Chicana/o movement was by all accounts and purposes a social movement that transcended generational lines (p.160).Although the book is rich in archival and oral histories, a discussion on the political significance of MAPA, Brown Berets, CSO, and others would have been helpful—mostly to hone in on how Ventura County differs or is similar to organizational chapters elsewhere. The discussion on desegregation could have also used further national context, especially because efforts to desegregate met similar resistance in other regions of the United States, more specifically, the East Coast. This conversation could have strengthened his argument and added to larger historiographical interventions.Mexican Americans with Moxie will undoubtedly be of use in Chicana/o studies, ethnic studies, social movement, history, twentieth-century race and ethnicity, and political science courses. Graduate and undergraduate students will find it an easy and enjoyable read. Barajas's book also serves as a reminder to today's young activists that they are part of a long trajectory of political activism.

Founded in 1968, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) is the Latino equivalent to the NAACP: a source of legal defense for the Latina/o community in cases centered on education, state immigration laws, redistricting, employment discrimination, and immigrant rights. Unlike the NAACP, however, MALDEF was founded by Mexican American activists in conjunction with the larger philanthropic structure of the Ford Foundation—a relationship that has opened it up to controversy and criticism. In the first book to examine this little-known but highly influential organization, Benjamin Márquez explores MALDEF’s history and shows how it has thrived and served as a voice for the Latina/o community throughout its six decades of operation. But he also looks closely at large-scale investments of the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and others, considering how their ties to MALDEF have influenced Mexican American and Latinx politics. Its story crafted from copious research into MALDEF and its benefactors, this book brings to light the influence of outside funding on the articulation of minority identities and the problems that come with creating change through institutional means.

The recent growth of the Latino population can be directly attributed to changes in U.S. immigration law in the mid-1960s. As the share of Latinos who were first-generation immigrants expanded from 20 percent in 1970 to 40 percent in 2000, questions concerning Latino immigrants' impact on Latino political empowerment became salient in the emerging subfield of Latino politics. Among the handful of scholars in the subfield concerned with the political behavior of immigrants, was general agreement that the presence of large numbers of immigrants with limited resources and political experience, along with low rates of naturalization, was major reason why Latinos' demographic ascendance had not translated into greater political empowerment. One study somberly concluded that Mexican immigrants were not a political resource readily available to enhance the political fortunes of the Mexican American community and that there is little reason to conclude that Mexican immigrants will for the foreseeable future involve themselves either in Mexican American issues or in American politics more (Garcia and de la Garza 1985, 562-63). As the empirical evidence showing low rates of naturalization and political participation among Latino immigrants accumulated, some regarded them to be political liability. This general sentiment began to crumble after the passage of Proposition 187 in California. Proposition 187 appeared on the 1994 California ballot as measure designed to stop the flow of illegal immigration to the state by denying public services to undocumented immigrants as well as requiring public officials, including doctors and school teachers, to report suspected immigrants to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Although the initiative passed easily, with 59 percent of the vote, Latino opposition was overwhelming, and the opposition to the initiative showed surprising ability to mobilize foreign-born Latinos to political action. Data on naturalization also clearly showed that Latino immigrants reacted to this initiative and other policy-based attacks by naturalizing in record numbers in the years immediately following this event. Activists asserted that Latinos generally and immigrants in particular were mobilizing, registering, and voting at record rates, set of claims to which most scholars in the subfield long familiar with the political behavior of Latino immigrants reacted with natural skepticism. Past claims of new and rapid Latino mobilizations had frequently proved to be disappointingly premature. Sensing general shift in attitudes and behaviors among our immigrant friends and family members, we were not so sure these activists had gotten it wrong. Adrian Pantoja began developing this article in Gary Segura's Minority Politics Seminar. They refined and presented it at the 1999 Western Political Science Association meeting in San Jose. On the panel was Ricardo Ramirez, presenting his own paper on the effects of political context on Latino and white voting behavior. Ricardo's insights and feedback-and his discovery of critical error in the uncorrected data set-proved to be invaluable, and he was added as coauthor. Citizens by Choice, Voters by Necessity emerged from our discomfort with the prevailing wisdom regarding Latino immigrant political behavior in the discipline and collective effort that transformed the article into an important new finding. Before this article, the Latino behavior literature largely focused on transplanting extant work on Anglos to the Latino context and introducing the relevant considerations of Latino heterogeneity, particularly on dimensions of national origin group and whether the individual was foreign born or U.S. born. Citizens by Choice, Voters by Necessity, represented break with the earlier work because it began with the recognition of new reality, one missed (or at least misunderstood) by others more established (at that time) in the field. …

Pursuing a more equitable political representation of a country's demographics is essential both as a matter of principle and pragmatism (i.e., realpolitik). As such, the goal of the present study was to replicate and expand on research on the impact of voter race/ethnicity and ideology on voting behaviors and interpersonal judgments of political candidates of color from different racial and ethnic groups. After participants (N = 282) saw the same political candidate of color (randomly assigned to identify as Mexican American vs. African American), we assessed interpersonal judgments and behaviors (e.g., expertise, voting intentions), perceived Americanness, and memory for skin tone of the candidate. In support of hypotheses and previous research/theory, white voters expressed more positive interpersonal judgments toward the African American political candidate and rated him to be more American than the Mexican American political candidate. We expanded upon previous research by directly testing the role of perceived Americanness in the differential judgments of political candidates’ race/ethnicity by white voters, with evidence supporting partial mediation. Our findings further showed that judgments toward a political candidate of color were also predicted by voters’ political affiliation. Specifically, conservative (vs. liberal) voters generally expressed less positive interpersonal judgments toward the candidates of color and perceived them to be less American and patriotic. Ramifications related to these findings are discussed.

Latinx Agencies:Emerging Histories of Politicians, Religious Leaders, and Undocumented Migrants Kris Klein Hernández (bio) Benjamin Francis-Fallon , The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. 494 pp. Notes, bibliography, acknowledgments, and index. $36.00 Geraldo Cadava , The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump . New York: Ecco Books, 2020. 418 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $17.99 Tony Tian-Ren Lin , Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 202 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 Benjamin Francis-Fallon, The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. 494 pp. Notes, bibliography, acknowledgments, and index. $36.00 Geraldo Cadava, The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump. New York: Ecco Books, 2020. 418 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $17.99 Tony Tian-Ren Lin, Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 202 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 Michael Fortner's 2015 Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment put forth a controversial thesis: "black middle-class morality" and "members of the black silent majority" compelled this particular Black socioeconomic group to "prioritize public safety over economic and racial inequality. It drove them to rally and rail against 'hoodlums' instead of seeking reform of society." 1 Fortner's analysis of late 1960s and 1970s drug laws and ethnic-racial identity provided a different interpretation into mass incarceration's origins that would continue to proliferate under President Ronald Reagan's "war on drugs." 2 Fortner asked scholars to take "black agency seriously" when considering an African American history that did not reflect Black people simply as victims or as interlocutors in a declension narrative or narrative of dominance. 3 Furthermore, he wrote that specialists could acknowledge Black agency while not maintaining that African Americans had complete control over political outcomes. 4 Historians such as Donna Murch, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Heather Ann Thompson have all disputed Fortner's reconstitution of Black agency for false structural agency, arguing that there are not sufficient sources to reframe one of the origins behind mass incarceration to a Black middle class. 5 Yet Fortner's book leaves its reader with a particular question: if scholars place agency onto racialized communities, [End Page 599] how have people of color contributed to conservative, and at times, racist legislation? I start this review essay with Fortner's consideration of agency for a myriad of reasons. The three books under consideration all examine groups of people who have been understood within the lens of conservativism, traditional (white Euro-American) values, and at times, religious exclusion. Framing an analysis of these monographs through the lens of structural agency helps move past political and cultural attitudes to grapple with the everyday choices that Latina conservatives, Hispanic Republicans, and Pentecostal Mexicans have made over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Like Black Silent Majority, some of the content in these monographs illuminates the lives of people of color who helped forge federal policies that have been characterized as exclusionary or conservative. Benjamin Francis-Fallon's 2019 The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History is one of several recent introductions to post-1960s U.S. politics that detail how Latinos and Hispanics contributed to and ultimately helped shape American government. Francis-Fallon illustrates how scholars of political science and history must reconsider the role that Latinos played within the federal administrations of presidents such as John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and even into the Bush eras (both George H.W. and George W.) In eleven chapters, the author demonstrates how Latino politics even "transformed the [U.S.] Republican Party as well," providing the reader a bird's-eye view into American politics (p. 5). In short, the monograph is a good entry into the growing field of Latinx political history, and will no doubt help spawn further regional studies into Latinx political science and Latinx history. I appreciate how Francis-Fallon begins his monograph with a quick overview into early Cuban, Mexican American, and...

The field of Mexican American fiction has exploded since the 1990s, yet there has been relatively little critical assessment of this burgeoning area in American literature. Novels and the Politics of Form is a provocative and timely study of literary form that focuses on the fiction of five writers whose work spans a century: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Danny Santiago, and Cecile Pineda.Drawing on the Marxist concept of reification to examine the connections between social history and narrative, Marcial Gonzalez highlights the relationship between race and class in these works and situates them as historical responses to Mexican American racial, political, and social movements since the late nineteenth century.The book sheds light on the relationship between politics and form in the novel, an issue that has long intrigued literary scholars. This timely and original study will appeal to scholars and students of American literature, ethnic studies, Latino studies, critical race theory, and Marxist literary theory.This book explores the relationship between race and class and between politics and literary form in major works of Chicano literature over the last hundred years.

In 1996, there was a pervasive anti-immigrant, anti-Latino mood in the country, caused by passage of Proposition 187 in California and national welfare reform and immigration reform bills. But a few years later attitudes toward Latinos had shifted; laws were reversed and both major political parties were pursuing Latino votes. Substantial research on the general public has demonstrated that events influence public opinion; correspondingly, this shift in the public mood influenced the political concerns of Chicago Mexican Americans. In reaction to the anti-Latino atmosphere, Mexican Americans became more concerned about racism and discrimination. When the anti-Latino mood abated, Chicago Mexican Americans responded by shifting their agenda from an issue that focused on their ethnic identity to issues shared by people of all races and ethnicities: crime, gangs, and drugs. A similar shift is found among noncitizens of Mexican descent.

In the countless conversations about U.S. immigration policy that I have had with Mexican Americans of varied backgrounds and political orientations, seldom have my interlocutors failed to remind me that “We were here first,” or that “This was our land and you stole it from us.” Even a moderate Mexican American politician like former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros sounds the same theme in a national news magazine:It is no accident that these regions have the names they do—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Colorado, Montana.…It is a rich history that Americans have been led to believe is an immigrant story when, in fact, the people who built this area in the first place were Hispanics.

Latino Voices: Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban Perspectives on American Politics. By Rodolfo O. de la Garza, Louis DeSipio, F. Chris Garcia, John Garcia, and Angelo Falcon. Boulder: Westview, 1992. 232p. $11.95 paper. - Volume 88 Issue 2