Promises of the Past Kathleen Mapes (bio) Emilio Zamora . Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II. Foreword by Juan Gomez-Quinones . College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009. xvi + 318 pp. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $60.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper). In April 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law a bill that not only made it legal but required law enforcement officials to question and detain all persons suspected of being in the country illegally. This signing ceremony set off a firestorm that had been brewing ever since the Arizona Legislature passed the legislation weeks before. Critics from across the country and around the world, including President Obama and the Mexican Foreign Ministry, have questioned the fairness of the new law, while supporters claim the federal government has failed to fulfill its role in defending the nation's borders, thereby making it necessary for the state of Arizona to assume responsibility. Critics rightly point out that the law seems to open the door to racial profiling and harassment of those suspected of being in the United States illegally. Emilio Zamora's book, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II, might not seem to have much to tell us about the current state of affairs in Arizona. However, this rich and compelling account of a very different era, one in which it seemed that rights might be on the rise rather than on the decline, provides an important historical perspective by which we can more critically understand our own era. Zamora begins his book by promising to explore "employment discrimination, social inequality, the Mexican cause for equal rights in the United States, and the role that the government played in reinforcing and ameliorating the socially marginalized position that Mexicans filled in the urban and rural settings of Texas" (p. 1). Based on extensive archival sources and building on the works of other scholars as well as his own previous scholarship, Zamora provides an in-depth analysis of the experiences of Mexicans on the Texas home front that transcends traditional historical boundaries. Zamora meticulously explains how the ability of Mexicans to share in the fruits of the wartime economy and gain civil rights depended on the actions and relations among a number of different actors, including ordinary workers, the state agencies [End Page 500] of the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), the United States Employment Service (USES), the U.S. State Department, Mexican officials both in Mexico City and in consular offices throughout Texas, and various civil rights organizations, including, most importantly, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). By detailing the associations, alliances, ties, and antagonism between and among the aforementioned groups and institutions, Zamora provides a fascinating and important account of whether or not the promise of the wartime era—a promise of equality and egalitarianism—would ring true for Mexicans who had long experienced discrimination. During World War II, Texas was transformed by the wartime economy from what Zamora describes as an "industrially underdeveloped state"' to a "modernizing regional economy" (p. 24). The state witnessed the rise and expansion of the petrochemical industry, shipyards, an aircraft industry, and military bases. At the same time, agriculture, the traditional base of the economy, expanded greatly. There was also a corresponding rise in job opportunities and pay rates for those who could take advantage of the invigorated wartime economy. While Zamora notes that Mexicans did make some occupational gains in terms of place of employment (from rural to urban and from agriculture to industry) as well as pay rates, he argues that Anglos, and sometimes even African Americans, made even more substantial progress during the war years. In other words, although opportunities expanded during the war, Mexicans failed to see their proportionate share of that opportunity. Even Mexicans fortunate enough to land positions in the burgeoning wartime industrial economy faced innumerable barriers to upward mobility, much less equal treatment. In most cases, Mexicans could only find employment in the lowest and most segregated sectors of the wartime industries. When Mexicans and Anglos performed the same jobs, the former...
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