The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town by Jennifer R. Nájera

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town by Jennifer R. Nájera Tracy Brown The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town. By Jennifer R. Nájera. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. ix + 177 pp. Photographs, maps, notes, references, index. $45.00 cloth. In her book The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town, Jennifer R. Nájera uses evidence from both public education and the Catholic Church to trace the development of what she calls a “culture of Mexican segregation” in La Feria, a small South Texas town on the United States–Mexico border. Her historical ethnography traces the development chronologically through the 20th century. She concludes that despite the advances in breaking down the culture of segregation—especially following the social movements of the 1960s and the efforts of Mexican American activists in both the public schools and the Catholic Church—practices of segregation “endured well past the passage of the major civil rights legislation” in La Feria (9). Indeed, it appears to exist today, based on her description of class (if not racial) segregation that she witnessed at high school football games that she attended during her fieldwork, which she describes in the book’s epilogue. Nájera uses primary and secondary sources and oral histories to describe how the culture of Mexican segregation developed over time. The strength of the book is that by doing so, she links “global” or structural and racialized processes at work on the US-Mexico border to the local experiences of La Feria residents with those processes. Since racism is alive and well in the United States (despite popular claims that America is “postracial”), Nájera’s finding that a culture of segregation continues to exist in La Feria should not surprise any of her readers. Yet the strength of her work is also a weakness: one wonders if she might have located more archival evidence of La Feria residents’ personal experiences in order to more fully substantiate her narrative. Because she relies on the oral testimony of a small number of individuals as evidence of the local and personal impact of segregation, the evidence can seem anecdotal at points. Nevertheless, the personal and quotidian experiences of segregation outlined in the book should be a welcome addition to the literature on race in the US-Mexico borderlands. [End Page 139] Tracy Brown Central Michigan University Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln