Ethnic Mexican Research Articles

Debating American Identity: Southwestern Statehood and Mexican Immigration by Linda C. Noel (review)

Reviewed by: Debating American Identity: Southwestern Statehood and Mexican Immigration by Linda C. Noel Miguel A. Levario Debating American Identity: Southwestern Statehood and Mexican Immigration. By Linda C. Noel. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Pp. 264. Notes, bibliography, index) Linda Noel’s Debating American Identity is a comparative study that brings to light the fluid and highly complex strategies of political and cultural identity formation in New Mexico and Arizona during the first third of the twentieth century. Noel focuses on four national immigration debates of exclusion, assimilation, pluralism, and marginalization that erupted after the United States’ expansionist wars of the nineteenth century. National political leaders and anti-immigration groups voiced their reluctance in admitting New Mexico and Arizona into statehood due to their ethnic Mexican and American Indian populations and cultural differences. People of Mexican descent and their mixed heritage disrupted the nativist concept of a homogenous Anglo-Saxon citizenry unified through the English language and customs. As Noel points out, New Mexico and Arizona’s political and social elite formulated differing strategies, pluralism and marginalization respectively, in seeking statehood. The evolving nature of their political strategies and cultural identities is outlined in three parts that follow a trajectory of accommodation and assimilation as political, economic, and social landscapes shifted in the early decades of the twentieth century. New Mexicans and Arizonians were concerned that their territorial status would lump them with the island territories acquired after the Spanish-American War and delay their admittance into statehood since exclusionists adamantly wanted to preserve national homogeneity and unity. The principal strategies of exclusion and assimilation were argued at the national level forcing the former Mexican territories to adapt or risk prolonging their territorial status. New Mexico’s political elite adopted a pluralistic strategy of inclusion that would demonstrate the better [End Page 331] qualities of Americanism, such as European ancestry and class, while allowing New Mexicans to preserve key cultural qualities, such as the Spanish language. On the other hand, Arizona adopted a marginalization approach that reflected the political and economic base dominated by Anglo transplants into the territory. Debating American Identity effectively contrasts the political strategies by Arizona and New Mexico. The political, economic, and social context of each territory yielded to the differing approaches of pluralism by New Mexico and marginalization by Arizona. New Mexico had a bigger and much more politically active Hispano population that was economically versatile. The conflation of middle-class status and an emphasis on Spanish ancestry projected an acceptable image of prosperity and modernity sufficient for statehood. In contrast, Arizona did not house a large Mexican population and Anglos almost exclusively dominated its territorial politics. Marginalization served as a more effective approach towards statehood. In other words, an effectively controlled and marginalized Mexican community coincided with national ideas of Anglo-Saxon homogeneity and unity. Noel effectively portrays the differing political strategies by New Mexico and Arizona seeking statehood. On the other hand, a closer review of the political debate in Washington could shed light on the effectiveness of the differing strategies. Noel does offer some insight to the consequences of marginalization and pluralism after 1912, but it should be understood that these concepts of identity and culture are highly politicized. Nevertheless, Noel offers a keen analysis of demographic change in both states in the 1920s and 1930s and its effect on the ideas of Spanish heritage and class difference. Overall, Noel tackles an incredibly difficult and complex history with great nuance and clarity. Defining American Identity contributes to the ongoing scholarly discussion of the fluidity and potency of political and cultural identity. Readers are privy to a better understanding of the heterogeneity of the American Southwest by reviewing New Mexico and Arizona’s respective political strategies to obtain statehood and their approach to identity formation. Defining American Identity makes a significant contribution to the studies of identity, race, southwestern history, and Mexican American history. Miguel A. Levario Texas Tech University Copyright © 2014 The Texas State Historical Association

“This is where we want to stay”: Tejanos and Latino Community Building in Washington County

During the mid 1960s, Latino families seeking better working conditions and financial prospects began settling in Washington County, Oregon. Many early Tejano (Texas ethnic Mexicans) families abandoned seasonal migrant work to settle permanently in the area and established a strong network of community support systems that helped new arrivals seek healthcare, combat discrimination, and retain cultural identity. Luke Sprunger documents those early community-building efforts through excerpted interviews with five narrators who moved to Washington County during the 1960s. “Their stories give voice to various phases of community growth, activism, and intra-ethnic relations that developed among county Latinos,” and “their efforts and initiatives have aided newly arriving Latinos to Washington County and encouraged respect for and among the county's Latino residents.”

Racial Fluidity in the Borderlands: Intermarriages between Blacks and Mexicans in Southern Arizona, 1860–1930

Racial Fluidity in the Borderlands:Intermarriages between Blacks and Mexicans in Southern Arizona, 1860–1930 Sal Acosta (bio) Emmett Woodley and Leonicia Terrazas celebrated their wedding in Tucson’s St. Augustine Catholic Church on March 23, 1872.1 The bride and groom met in town, but considerably different journeys had brought them to the new Territory of Arizona. Like countless other Americans, Emmett had recently migrated west. A native of antebellum Virginia, he had served in the United States Army before settling in southern Arizona.2 Leonicia, meanwhile, had ventured north from the border state of Sonora, following a route that Mexicans had wrought for over a hundred years.3 Their working-class backgrounds and similar migrant experiences might have generated a sense of compatibility and reassurance to help them overcome their linguistic and cultural differences, but the couple still had to negotiate two potential obstacles before being able to marry, one with the Catholic Church and the other with Arizona’s miscegenation law.4 Emmett was an African American Protestant, and Leonicia was Catholic and, as an ethnic Mexican, was legally white. The Catholic Church begrudgingly condoned this type of interfaith marriage, and the Arizona Territory had prohibited marriages between blacks and whites during its first legislative session (1864–1865).5 Their plans to marry, nonetheless, proceeded uneventfully: they first obtained a marriage license from the county clerk, and the priest granted an interfaith dispensation.6 While the local church typically approved interfaith marriages—as long as the couple married in a Catholic ceremony—the consent of county clerks did not come automatically when partners belonged to different races. In fact, marriages between blacks and Euro-American whites were virtually nonexistent in Arizona during the life of the miscegenation law (1865–1962). Mexicans, however, occupied an ambiguous racial space: technically, their legal whiteness permitted their [End Page 555] marriages only to other whites, but in practice, county officials frequently sanctioned their marriages to nonwhites. Thus, Emmett and Leonicia benefited from the third socio-racial space Mexicans occupied. This study attempts to identify and explain important facts and incongruities in the history of intermarriages in the Tucson area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on the experiences of black-Mexican couples and their descendants to illustrate how social and cultural attitudes can undermine or contravene racialist definitions and legal directives. It argues that the existence of these relationships in light of an ostensibly strict miscegenation law, the occasional sanctioning of their marriages, and the ambiguous racial classification of multiracial people all demonstrate that race was both meaningful and meaningless in the Southwest. Race had meaning because economic, political, and social entities often used it as differentiating and discriminating factors in their decisions, views, and policies. But race frequently proved meaningless because local officials could and did ignore racially based laws or could not ascertain or agree on the racial identity of some groups, especially of people of mixed ancestry. The very meaning and significance of race also varied by location. During the second half of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth, the American West offered migrants economic opportunities that they could not find in their places of origin, but, in addition to the obstacles all migrants encountered—such as the difficulties in travel, the threat of Indian raids, and the unbalanced sex ratios—racial discrimination added more barriers to the experiences of nonwhites. Yet, Tucson offered blacks a form of social toleration that did not exist in central and northern Arizona and in mining towns. The city did witness racial prejudice, but the relatively small size of Tucson’s black population and its settlement in ethnically diverse areas precluded the type of racial tension that existed in other parts of the West. Indeed, the city, unlike other areas, including Phoenix, did not witness the creation of distinctive black enclaves. Instead, this group, like Chinese immigrants, resided primarily in the numerous Mexican barrios that already existed and where blacks often found the opportunity to marry outside their ethnic group.7 Intermarriage in Mexican American Historiography While historians have long underscored the existence and role of intermarriage among Mexicans...

Recuperating Histories of Violence in the Americas: Vernacular History-Making on the US–Mexico Border

This article examines the 1915 double murder of Jesus Bazán and Antonio Longoria north of the Rio Grande River in Hidalgo County, Texas, and shows that this event is emblematic of the wider use of violence in subject formation and state-building projects in the Americas. This article describes a state-sanctioned period of racial terror and the culture of impunity in which state agents abused their authority and denied protection to ethnic Mexicans within their jurisdiction. This period of anti-Mexican violence continues to be memorialized a century later. Generational memories of this double murder—and the vernacular histories created by local residents in Texas—continue to challenge historical narratives that disavow generational loss and obscure roots of state violence. These histories confront historical narratives that justify the violence inherent in nation-building practices and make transparent the longer legacies of histories of border policing.

Chicano/a History

This article surveys the writing of Chicano/a history since its inception and reflects on why scholars have been concerned with certain issues and how they have written about them. Born from the tumult of the Vietnam era, the field has challenged the status quo and emboldened those communities from which Chicano/a historians come and which they ultimately serve. Given the generation-long development of Mexican American history, this article focuses on Chicano/a historiography, with some commentary on the recent emergence of Latino/a history and the future directions that this field may take. It engages three questions that have driven the field: What forces engendered the ethnic Mexican community in the United States? Who comprises it? And how does the past bear on the present?

Chicano/a History

This article surveys the writing of Chicano/a history since its inception and reflects on why scholars have been concerned with certain issues and how they have written about them. Born from the tumult of the Vietnam era, the field has challenged the status quo and emboldened those communities from which Chicano/a historians come and which they ultimately serve. Given the generation-long development of Mexican American history, this article focuses on Chicano/a historiography, with some commentary on the recent emergence of Latino/a history and the future directions that this field may take. It engages three questions that have driven the field: What forces engendered the ethnic Mexican community in the United States? Who comprises it? And how does the past bear on the present?

Good Neighbors and White Mexicans: Constructing Race and Nation on the Mexico-U.S. Border

ON OCTOBER 5, 1936, the city registrar of El Paso, Texas, Alex K. Powell, announced that from that date onward, government officials would register Mexican Americans as “colored” in birth and death records, a radical departure from the previous racial categorization of “white.” The proclamation sparked impassioned official and popular political debate and mobilization in the United States and Mexico around the racial and legal status of Mexican migrants and their descendants. Working in the context of a detente in foreign relations, Mexican and U.S. officials scrambled to minimize the damage done by the El Paso announcement. Existing within histories of racialization that emerged from similar imperial and liberal origins, but ultimately diverged in the process of each nation’s formation, Mexicans on both sides of the border took offense at the reclassification. Both groups of ethnic Mexicans deemed the use of the term “colored” anathema to their attempts to situate themselves in positions of power and legitimacy. Framed by the decennial federal censuses of 1930 and 1940, the confrontation was part of larger legal debates at local and national levels around whiteness and the citizenship status of ethnic Mexicans in the United States. The El Paso incident and the responses it engendered underscored how issues of migration and historical constructions of race were intimately linked to the definition of the two nations. Whereas at the time of the El Paso incident the predominant U.S. model of white supremacy excluded and separated perceived non-white races, in Mexico, for the most part, elites worked to incorporate, albeit in a limited and paternalistic fashion, the country’s indigenous and other “non-white” populations into a national narrative of mestizaje, or a mixture of Spanish and Indian blood. Despite the different racial categories and hierarchical orders developed in each country (and the varying abilities of individuals to transcend those categories), both nations prioritized white supremacy. It was in this historical context of bi-national racial claims that ethnic Mexicans in

Racial Dynamics in Early Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Jason McDonald (review)

Reviewed by: Racial Dynamics in Early Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Jason McDonald Dwonna Goldstone Racial Dynamics in Early Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas. By Jason McDonald. (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2012. Pp 388. Illustrations, maps, figures, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780739170977, $85 cloth.) In his introduction, Jason McDonald argues that there are few "detailed scholarly comparisons" of the African American and Latino "urban experiences" and that "scholars of ethnicity" have "generally overlooked the potential of comparing the experiences of urban-based nonwhite minorities" (2). McDonald's goal in writing this book, he says, is to "redress that oversight" (1). McDonald selects Austin, Texas, as his case study for two reasons: because of its unique geographical position between the South's "traditional 'black belt'" and the "newly 'Mexicanized" area of the Southwest, and the fact that Austin was the only major city in Texas in which the black and Mexican populations were "reasonably similar in size by 1930" (4). However, McDonald's chart—which states that Austin was 18.6 percent African American and 9.4 percent Mexican—does not seem to fully support this assertion. McDonald emphasizes two themes throughout the book—the impact of World War I on black-white relations and the Mexican response to being racialized by Anglos. The second part was what I found most interesting. McDonald argues that prior to the Chicano movement of the 1960s and [End Page 222] 1970s, many Mexicans sought to "earn acceptance as the racial equals of whites and thereby gain access to the privileges of whiteness" and "rarely if ever displayed genuine solidarity with African Americans" (6). As a result, McDonald writes, for much of the twentieth century, "ethnic Mexicans in Texas were both wittingly and unwittingly complicit in the racialization and marginalization of the state's African American population" (8). Despite trying to distinguish themselves from African Americans by attempting to claim their whiteness, Mexican Americans in Texas faced some of the same de facto discrimination as African Americans did. McDonald begins chapter two with a story about Mexico's Consul General for Texas who was denied service at a restaurant in a small town outside of Austin; yet, he was served at a restaurant in Austin because the rules for Mexican Americans there were sometimes more aligned with those for Anglos. Still, the city of Austin attempted to "codify racial demarcations and further restrict black-white social interaction" by significantly expanding Jim Crow laws, and Mexican Americans increasingly found themselves "viewed and treated as a pariah group by Anglo society" (66). Not surprisingly, by the 1930s, Mexicans and African Americans in Austin were more similar in terms of their "ease and level of" interaction with whites, but the key difference, according to McDonald, was that "while the extent of de facto segregation was virtually the same for both groups, de jure segregation only existed—despite a few attempts to apply it to Mexicans—for African Americans" (66). (McDonald acknowledges, however, that mestizo or indio Mexican farm workers most likely would have faced the same type of de facto and de jure segregation that their African American brethren did.) One of the strengths of Racial Dynamics in Early Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas is the stories that McDonald tells to illustrate the point that he is trying to make—that this "tripartite segregation" that existed in Austin was unique from other cities in the South and Southwest. However, McDonald sometimes extrapolates too much from these stories. I am not sure that it is reasonable to compare the acceptance by white newspapermen of the establishment of a comisión honorífica to look after the interests of Austin-area Mexicans to the hostile reception and beating of the executive secretary of the NAACP by local elected officials when he came to establish an Austin branch in trying to make a point that Mexicans and African Americans were treated differently when they tried to contest white hegemony in Austin. Nonetheless, McDonald has written an ambitious book that gives the reader some understanding as to how three racial and ethnic groups co-existed in Austin in the early twentieth century. Dwonna Goldstone Austin Peay State University Copyright © 2013 The Texas State Historical...

‘Horse tripping’: animal welfare laws and the production of ethnic Mexican illegality

Conflicts over animal practices have long been used to construct dynamics of power. This essay examines how debates over immigrant animal practices contribute to the production of immigrant ‘illegality’ in the contemporary USA. I examine laws banning the ‘horse tripping’ events of the Mexican rodeo enacted in California (1994) and Arizona (2009), situating these laws and related media coverage within the broader landscape of exclusionary anti-immigrant politics. While the activists (including Latinos) who supported the bills were primarily concerned with animal welfare, their concerns were marshalled, out of context and against their will, by nativists who demand border militarization, exclusion and deportation. This essay shows that a range of actors – not just notoriously nativist groups but also Latinos themselves, as well as progressive people and organizations – participate, indirectly and inadvertently, in the production of immigrant illegality.

Priests, Prelates, and Pastoral Ministry among Ethnic Mexicans: San Antonio, 1840-1940

Vincentian, diocesan, and Claretian priests served the predominantly ethnic Mexican congregation at San Fernando parish in San Antonio during the century following the political separation of Texas from the Mexican nation. Bishops also had frequent ministerial contact with parishioners, especially after 1874 when San Fernando became the cathedral of the newly-formed San Antonio diocese. All of these clergy shared common features in their ministries. Their view of ethnic Mexicans was consistently ambiguous: they highlighted their parishioners' strong devotional traditions, but also their perceived ignorance of the Catholic faith and their vulnerability to Protestant proselytizing efforts. They served Spanish-speaking parishioners in their native tongue in order to enhance the effectiveness of their ministries. They were unanimous in their derision of what they saw as the twin perils of Protestantism and the lax morals of contemporary society. Their antidote to these threats was instruction in Catholic faith and morals and active participation in the church's sacramental life, often promoted through involvement in pious societies and devotions. An exploration of their ministries illustrates the historical breadth of what today is called Hispanic ministry, as well as the mutual influence of clergy and ethnic Mexican laity on efforts to foster Catholic faith and religious traditions.

When Borders Cross Peoples: The Internal Colonial Challenge to Borderlands Theory

Struggles, such as those of the Irish in Northern Ireland, Tibetans in China, and Mexicans in the United States, have had much to do with historic claims to homeland, especially around issues involving shifting borders and migration. In the US the perception of Mexicans as aliens in the Southwest derived from the Anglo-American imposition of a borderline across Mexico in 1848. In response to the dominant US view, ethnic Mexicans countered with their own image of the Southwest as Mexico's lost northern borderlands and of the border as immoral and irrelevant. By the 1960s, supporting that image, ethnic Mexicans helped develop “internal colonialism”—a theory dismissed in the 1980s, but persistent. The purpose of this paper is to outline the connections between internal colonial and borderlands theories and to argue for the necessity of the former to understand the historic situations of indigenous and hybrid populations within the borders of modern nation-states.

Section News

Abstract:SECTION NEWSAMERICAN ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY | Caitrin Lynch, ed.ANTHROPOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT SOCIETY | Amelia Moore, ed. “Exploration Science” by Amelia MooreARCHEOLOGY DIVISION | E Christian Wells, ed. “Wendy Ashmore: 2012 Kidder Award Honoree” by Julia A HendonASSOCIATION FOR AFRICANIST ANTHROPOLOGY | Jennifer E Coffman, ed. “Braided Worlds: Long‐term Research and Relationships in Côte d'Ivoire” by Jennifer CoffmanASSOCIATION OF BLACK ANTHROPOLOGISTS | karen g williams, ed. “Social Discontent and New Struggles in Africa” by Janette YarwoodASSOCIATION FOR FEMINIST ANTHROPOLOGY | Damla Isik and Jessica Smith Rolston, eds. “2012 Forman Prize Winners” by Ellen LewinASSOCIATION OF LATINA AND LATINO ANTHROPOLOGISTS | Pablo Gonzalez and Santiago Guerra, eds. “Ethnic Mexican Migrant Families and Property Ownership: Preliminary Ethnographic Data on the Housing Crisis” by Pablo GonzalezASSOCIATION FOR QUEER ANTHROPOLOGY | Marcia Ochoa, ed.Association for the Anthropology of Policy | Vasiliki Neofotistos and Anette Nyqvist, eds. “Anthropology and Transnational Migration: A Focus on Policy” by Marietta L BabaASSOCIATION OF SENIOR ANTHROPOLOGISTS | Paul L Doughty, edBIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY SECTION | Virginia J Vitzthum, ed.CENTRAL STATES ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY | Lauren Anaya and Christina Ortiz, edsCOUNCIL ON ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION | Janet I Hecsh, ed “Council for Anthropology and Education 2012 Program Highlights” by Rosemary HenzeCOUNCIL FOR MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY | Margaret Bruchac, ed.CULTURE AND AGRICULTURE | Susanna Donaldson and Joan Mencher, eds. “Out Standing in Your Field: Research among Iowa Farmers” by Brandi JanssenEVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY SOCIETY | Siobhán M Mattison, ed. “Human Behavioral Ecology and the City” by Montserrat SolerMIDDLE EAST SECTION | Rehenuma Asmi, ed. “The Abandoned Classroom and the Arab Spring: Notes from Morocco” by Charis BoutieriNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE PRACTICE OF ANTHROPOLOGY | Lisa Henry, ed. “NAPA Workshops Committee” by Sabrina Nichelle Scott; “NAPA Mentor Committee” by Niel TashimaNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF STUDENT ANTHROPOLOGISTS | Keri A Canada, ed. “Frequent Flyer” by Julie M GoodmanSOCIETY FOR ANTHROPOLOGICAL SCIENCES | David Henig,, edSOCIETY FOR ANTHROPOLOGY IN COMMUNITY COLLEGES | Lloyd Miller, edSOCIETY FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS | Hillary S Webb, ed.” Message from New Managing Editors of Anthropology of Consciousness” by Rebecca Lester and Peter BensonSOCIETY FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF EUROPE | Othon Alexandrakis, ed. “Social Movements, Crisis and Experiments in Democracy” by Marianne MaeckelberghSOCIETY FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF FOOD AND NUTRITION | Alyson Young and Meredith Gartin, edsSOCIETY FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICA | David Kamper, ed. “Quilt Aesthetics and Social Organization in Cotton Country” by Teri KlassenSOCIETY FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WORK | Jeffrey Hoelle, ed. “A Note from the New Editor of the Anthropology of Work Review” by Sarah LyonSOCIETY FOR CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY | Deborah A Thomas, ed.SOCIETY FOR EAST ASIAN ANTHROPOLOGY | Anru Lee and Bridget Love, eds. “Interviewing China's Revolutionary Artists” by Emily E WilcoxSOCIETY FOR HUMANISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY | Frederic W Gleach and Vilma Santiago‐Irizarry, eds.SOCIETY FOR LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ANTHROPOLOGY | Ronda Brulotte, ed. “American Aesthetics and Chinese Copies: New Politics of Artisanship in Oaxaca, Mexico” by Alanna CantSOCIETY FOR LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY | Mark Allen Peterson and Bonnie Urciuoli, eds. “Language, Health, and Social Justice” by Steven P BlackSOCIETY FOR MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY | Kathleen Ragsdale, ed “Mentoring Series: Working in the Contract Sector” by Jon PoehlmanSOCIETY FOR URBAN, NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL/GLOBAL ANTHROPOLOGY | Susan Falls, ed.SOCIETY FOR VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY | Wendy Dickinson, ed. “On Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives” by Richard Vokes

Contested Cowboys

While most studies of Mexican American suburbanization since the 1970s focus on the transformation of residential (private) space, it is in suburban public space that some of the most important struggles over belonging and rights have occurred. This article builds a theoretical framework to analyze the relationships between public space, democracy, and cultural citizenship for historically marginalized groups in suburbia. It applies the framework to the efforts by two groups of charros (ethnic Mexican cowboys) who tried to hold charreadas (events similar to rodeos) on land leased from municipal governments in suburban Los Angeles during the 1970s. These cases demonstrate that localized histories of racialization intersect with distinct political geographies to shape unequal possibilities for the effective exercise of Latino cultural citizenship in suburbia. Where ethnic Mexican suburbanites resided in isolated neighborhoods, were disconnected from the urban barrio, and struggled for political representation in vast urban districts, they were unlikely to be successful in claiming public space. But in independently incorporated suburbs with historic webs of Mexican settlements and strong ties to the barrio, ethnic Mexican suburbanites succeeded in challenging suburban exclusion and claiming a more inclusive, transformative “right to the suburb.”

Latino Catholic Biography

Latino Catholic Biography* Timothy Matovina Historians have produced various biographies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latinos who were lay Catholics, but examinations of the influence Catholicism had in their lives is often relatively brief or entirely absent. Like many studies of Catholic lives, on the whole extant biographical monographs on leaders recognized as Latino Catholics have examined clergy acclaimed for their faith and apostolic work. Several book-length biographies have explored the struggles and travails of nineteenth-century clergy who lived through the tumultuous period when what is now the Southwest passed from Mexican to U.S. sovereignty. Numerous writings have treated the most widely-known U.S. Latino leader, César Chávez. The selection and treatment of these latter two biographical subjects reflect not only the attraction of the historical figures examined, but also particular emphases among Latino historians on the U.S. conquest of Mexico and on the Chicano movement. Biographies of Latinas and Latinos have lauded heroic figures such as Mother Teresa (Rosa) Solis, I.W.B.S. (1840-1920), the first Incarnate Word sister from the Americas; early California bishops like Mexican-born Francisco García Diego y Moreno, O.F.M. (1785-1846); Catalan-born California bishops Joseph Sadoc Alemany, O.P. (1814-1888), Thaddeus Amat, C.M. (1811-1878), and Francisco Mora y Borrell (1827-1905); and Patricio Flores, the first Mexican American bishop. Several other book-length biographies have examined the lives of non-Latinos who are recognized for their leadership in Hispanic communities and evangelization, such as Italian-born Father Eusebio Kino, S.J. (1645-1711), whose missionary labors in New Spain included the establishment of the first missions in Arizona, and Archbishop Robert E. Lucey of San Antonio (1891-1977), widely known as a tireless advocate for social justice, the catechetical movement, and church outreach to poor and working-class ethnic Mexicans. 1 [End Page 59] Not surprisingly, there are also various biographical studies of Hispanics in the canonization process. Venerable Antonio Margil de Jesús, O.F.M. (1657-1726) is renowned as a Spanish missioner whose numerous accomplishments included the establishment of the most successful of the Spanish missions in Texas, San Antonio's Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo. Blessed Junípero Serra, O.F.M. (1713-1784), is acclaimed as the founder of the California missions. Servant of God Father Félix Varela y Morales (1788-1853) fled to New York in 1823 after the Spanish regime he opposed as a Cuban delegate to the Spanish Cortes (parliament) condemned him to death. In exile, Varela worked as a parish priest and eventually rose to the position of diocesan vicar general. He is recognized both for his dedicated pastoral service in New York and as a forerunner of Cuban pro-independence thought. Blessed Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Santiago (1918-1963) is known in his native Puerto Rico for his love of the liturgy, his translations of Catholic rites into Spanish, and his commitment to teach others about the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. Witnesses who knew him personally extol his virtue and his exemplary efforts to proclaim the ways of Jesus Christ in everyday life. He is the first layperson born in the territories of the United States to be beatified. Servant of God Bishop Alphonse Gallegos, O.A.R. (1931-1991), was born in Albuquerque, joined the Augustinian Recollects, was ordained a priest in 1958, and served as auxiliary bishop in the diocese of Sacramento for the last decade of his life. His cause for sainthood was opened fourteen years after his tragic death from a car that struck him as he tried to push his stalled vehicle to the roadside. 2 [End Page 60] Click for larger view View full resolution Father Félix Varela y Morales (1788-1853). Courtesy St. Augustine Historical Society. Biographies of nineteenth-century Hispanic clergy in the Southwest have sought to correct historical accounts about leaders like Padre Antonio José Martínez (1793-1867) of Taos, the priest most frequently associated with New Mexico's transition from Mexican to U.S. rule. In collaboration with Moises Sandoval, in 1976 Father Juan Romero published the first of such efforts to...

“Chili Queens” and Checkered Tablecloths

This article examines the modernization of food retailing and the governance of urban space through a connected comparison of southern Italian migrants to New York City and Mexicans living in San Antonio, Texas. Street foods were common and restaurants scarce in the regions of Mexico and of southern Italy that either sent large numbers of migrants to the United States or were incorporated into its national territory. We ask why street foods became iconic symbols of ethnic Mexican food in the United States when ethnic Italian food became associated with restaurants. We consider a number of analytical themes in seeking to explain these divergent histories of street foods, including climate, gendered agency, and racial thinking. We conclude that histories of municipal governance, created through empire building and migration, had a determinant role in situating culinary niches within urban landscapes. As newcomers in a vast metropolis, southern Italians were readily confined to existing restaurant structures, whereas Mexicans in nineteenth-century San Antonio, despite their dwindling numbers and political influence, successfully preserved and expanded traditional patterns of street food retailing.

Settling Out and Fitting In: Family and Migration in the Ethnic Mexican Midwest During the Twentieth Century

THE MICHIGAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 37:2 (Fall 2011): 29-51©2011 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. Settling Out and Fitting In: Family and Migration in the Ethnic Mexican Midwest During the Twentieth Century by Eduardo Moralez Migrants from Texas and Mexico have a long history of settling permanently in Indiana and the Great Lakes region. In 1870 the U.S. Census listed 14 Spanish-surnamed individuals living in Indianapolis; of these, 7 were from Cuba, Mexico, and Spain, and the remaining 7 were from Central and South America. The 1910 census listed 12 persons from Mexico, who were most likely laborers associated with the railroad hub in what is now downtown Indianapolis. At the end of World War I, labor shortages prompted representatives from agricultural and industrial companies in the Great Lakes region to send recruiters to Texas towns and cities, where they promised to pay wages, room and board, and the cost of transportation for workers and their families. The 1920 census recorded 686 Mexicans living in northern Indiana. In 1924 the trickle of ethnic Mexican migrants in Indiana turned into a cascade when approximately 4,000 Mexicans from Michigan who had been working in agriculture arrived to take jobs in the steel mills of Gary and East Chicago. The 1930 census recorded a total of 8,769 people identified as “Mexicans” living in these two cities. During the early years of the Great Depression, massive deportations, both private and federal, removed thousands of ethnic Mexicans from the Great Lakes region. By the close of 1932 town and state officials, together with private businesses, had “repatriated” more than 32,000 ethnic Mexicans from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. Between 1929 and 1939, federal and state sweeps removed 500,000 to 600,000 ethnic Mexicans from the United States.1 1 Dennis Nodín Valdés, Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 19171970 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 2-4, 8-10; Manuel Gamio, The Mexican Immigrant: His Life Story (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 55; idem, Mexican Immigration to the United States: A Study of Human Migration and Adjustment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), 24, 27; Juan Ramon García, Mexicans in the Midwest, 1900-1932 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 41-43, 46, 235-36, 239; Zaragosa Vargas, Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 30 The Michigan Historical Review During World War II migrants began returning north to satisfy the renewed demand of the region’s industries for labor. Nearly six thousand Mexican nationals, known as braceros (derived from the Spanish word for arms), were hired by the U.S. government to work on railway lines connecting the western United States to the Great Lakes region. At the same time that thousands of Mexican nationals were being imported into the region by the railroads, thousands of other individuals who were mostly U.S. citizens were traveling north from Texas of their own accord to work both in agriculture and industry in the Great Lakes region. After several years spent traveling back and forth between Texas and various Great Lakes states (particularly Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio), many of these “Tejanos” left their migrant status behind when they settled out, that is took up permanent residence in the midwestern heartland and used a combination of job skills to maintain permanent residency.2 During the 1950s and 1960s several individuals and institutions affiliated with churches worked to provide basic amenities for migrants streaming into Indiana, Michigan, and the Great Lakes region. These individuals and migrant-advocacy groups confronted growers, farmers, and agricultural corporations, demanding that they provide sanitary living conditions, basic medical care, and adequate wages for migrants from Texas. On occasion their advocates succeeded, forcing state governments, in particular in Indiana, to pass ordinances in favor of migrants. Three Catholic priests helped the Migratory Workers Defense League stage demonstrations and organize strikes in Michigan during the 1950s. Many church groups sought to provide help to former migrants, teaching them about American culture and ideology in an effort to make them into better Americans. In addition, these groups gave these...

Embracing Latinidad: Beyond Nationalism in the History of Education

This article provides a rationale and suggests an approach for investigating the school activism of Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans in the history of education. This more inclusive and comparative approach to Latino activism deepens the understanding of their complex struggles for equality and pluralism in American education. It shows how different groups of Latinos engaged in multiple but parallel struggles for increased learning across space and time and achieved different results. Their efforts expanded, extended, and diversified the historic struggle for education waged primarily by ethnic Mexican activists in the first half of the 20th century.

The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary. RAMÓN SALDÍVAR: Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2006.

Américo Paredes (1915-1999) remains a towering figure in Chicano and Borderlands history, and his significant contributions to cultural studies are increasingly recognized in other fields. His 1958 book With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero challenged historical narratives that had long marginalized ethnic Mexicans in the United States. This work opened the door for scholars to consider previously neglected sources, such as the corrido, in order to arrive at a fuller understanding of the history of the border region.

Eliminating Health Disparities

Since the formation of the United States in early times, diversity has always been a reality. With the immigration of diverse whites from Europe, the importation of black slaves from Africa, and the presence of the preexisting Native American populations, diversity has long been a fact of life in this country. However, one of the long-standing priorities of the United States has been "good health" for all the people. The broad diversity of the population has presented a tremendous challenge to health care. This article addresses this important topic by looking at the concept of health disparity from a biopsychosocial perspective and further by describing disparities that are present in the United States among the 2 major ethnic minority groups, African Americans and Mexican Americans. Many other health disparities could be considered in other groups, but space limits of article allow only the 2 major ethnic minority groups to be addressed.

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present

Reviewed by: Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present Virgilio Elizondo (bio) Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present. By Timothy Matovina. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005. 256 pp. $60.00 (hdbk.), $22.96 (pb.) The basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City is the most visited pilgrimage site in the Western Hemisphere. After Jesus of Nazareth, her image is the most reproduced sacred icon in the Americas. Increasingly today the exuberant veneration of Guadalupe is spreading beyond Mexico to the United States and other places throughout the American continent. Shrines dedicated to her are as far north as Johnstown, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. A growing number of Latino Protestant congregations celebrate the December 12 Guadalupe feast; Protestant pastors and theologians like Lutheran Maxwell Johnson have deemed Guadalupe a source of "hope and strength to a people wandering in despair." Most importantly, she continues to appear in the daily lives of her faithful in Mexico and beyond: on home altars, t-shirts, tattoos, murals, parish churches, medals, refrigerator magnets, wall hangings, and in countless conversations and daily prayers. Guadalupe and Her Faithful is the first book that illuminates the core of the relationship between Guadalupe and her devotees as Guadalupan devotion evolved [End Page 110] from its origins following the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica to become a regional, national, and then an international phenomenon. Focused on the parishioners of San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas, whose congregation has sustained their Guadalupan devotion for nearly three centuries and under five different national governments, this volume is a tour de force of religious history, with a deeply theological soul. One of the great contributions of this book is that it by-passes the debates on the historicity and focuses on the history of the devotion as it has spread through generations. There is no other book in any language which traces the development of Guadalupan devotion in this manner. Throughout the book Matovina grounds his analysis in the social forces and historical contexts which shaped congregants' lives and religious experience, while also offering magnificent insights on the Guadalupe-devotee bond which linked heaven and earth in ways that transformed parishioners' faith and everyday struggles. He shows, for example, the historical circumstances which led to Guadalupe's emergence as San Fernando's primary patroness in the century following the 1731 establishment of San Antonio as a rural settlement on the northern edge of New Spain. But in the process he also illuminates the theology of divine providence mediated in Guadalupan devotion, a fluid theology adaptable to devotees' physical environment, economic conditions, longing for security, racial mixing, and aspirations for social advancement, particularly in the settlements of what is now the Southwest like San Antonio, where isolation and the quest for survival bound residents more closely to one another, to God, and to celestial companions like Guadalupe. Furthermore unlike many studies of popular faith expressions which apply pre-determined theoretical constructs to people's everyday prayer, Matovina emphasizes "the insights, convictions, sentiments, and ritual actions of San Fernando Guadalupan devotees," stating explicitly that the goal of the volume "is to offer insofar as is possible a depiction of the subjects under study in which they would have recognized themselves" (21). He does this as only a devotee himself could do, and this is one of the great merits of this work. It is an insightful and truly objective view developed by an insider—a great work of theologian as organic intellectual. Subsequently, Guadalupan devotion at San Fernando was a significant public expression of group pride and identity in the tumultuous decades following the U.S. takeover of the Southwest; in the context of their increasingly subordinate social status the brown-skinned Guadalupe and public processions in her honor were also a visible reminder of ethnic Mexican devotees' ongoing dignity as the daughters and sons of the one they acclaim as God's own mother. As successive waves of Mexican émigrés dramatically increased San Antonio's Mexican-descent population during the early twentieth century, the newcomers refashioned San Fernando's annual Guadalupe feast day...