The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture

Abstract

This ambitious and graceful work traces the interactions between Mexicans, whites, and blacks in central Texas from the turn of the century to the 1930s. As the number of Mexicans migrating to Texas sharply increased with the start of the 1910 revolution, cotton production in the region simultaneously shifted from small owners, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers to larger enterprises dependent on wage labor. Neil Foley asks how these three groups dealt with this socioeconomic shift and in the process continually redefined their own racial identities.At the heart of Foley’s analysis is a sophisticated view of the connections between material forces such as landownership, the construction of racial and gender identities, and political ideologies and organizations. Foley is particularly insistent that racial and gender identities are tightly bound and mutually reinforcing. Whiteness implied certain notions of manliness and gender roles, and vice versa.The breakdown of the “agricultural ladder” (the assumption that farm laborers would eventually work their way up to farm ownership) and the increasing competition between whites, Mexicans, and blacks led to a complex swirl of social and political consequences. Women of all races continued to be constrained by agrarian patriarchy even as their workload increased dramatically. Foley interprets the slide of poor whites into the tenancy and farm labor previously dominated by Mexicans and blacks as a “loss of whiteness as well as of economic rank” (p. 88).Agrarian politics bore the marks of these gender and racial forces. In contrast to labor organizers in East Texas and Louisiana, the Socialist party in the teens in Texas proved itself unable to incorporate African Americans on any but the most unequal of terms. Poor whites desperately clung to their whiteness, Foley argues. White socialists were able to grant Mexicans a greater and more equal place in their party and its rural organizations, however, and their description of Mexican organizing “seemed to imply that Mexicans, if not African Americans, had become almost white through their manly opposition to exploitation” (p. 96).Despite the willingness of Mexicans to join their organizations, Texan Socialists proved unable to stem the rise in tenancy and farm labor. Large industrial farms, relying on mechanization, scientific management techniques, and predominantly Mexican workforces, soon accounted for much of Texas’s cotton production. More than any other development, the growth of these corporations “rendered obsolete the notion of rising up from farm laborer to farm owner” (p. 140). The Depression and New Deal agricultural policies further strengthened the hand of these corporations and other major landowners. The aspiration to the status of landowner, in Foley’s eyes, actually impeded organizing efforts in the 1930s. Unlike their counterparts in the rest of the South and in California, white Texans remained too attached to the now-outdated agricultural ladder to form effective, interracial farm laborers’ unions.Latin Americanists in particular will have reason to dissent from the book’s nearly pathological description of agrarianism. The agrarian suspicion of wage labor, and its assumption that a free society depended on widely dispersed landholding, had roots as deep in Mexico as in Texas and could be most appealing to the landless and dispossessed. Some readers may also find that Foley overemphasizes the importance of gender in white understandings of Mexican militancy and that he too quickly racializes elite white views of poor whites. But these questions are themselves the products of Foley’s tight integration of gender and race into a particular rural class structure. This innovative and rigorous work will be of interest to scholars of Mexican Americans, gender and race formations, the U.S. South, and agrarian studies for many years to come.