People Of Mexican Descent Research Articles

¡Viva George! Celebrating Washington's Birthday at the US–Mexico Border by Elaine A. Peña

Reviewed by: ¡Viva George! Celebrating Washington's Birthday at the US–Mexico Border by Elaine A. Peña Elliott Young ¡Viva George! Celebrating Washington's Birthday at the US–Mexico Border. By Elaine A. Peña. ( Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020. Pp. 199. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Elaine Peña's ¡Viva George! is a much-needed academic analysis of the history and meaning of the binational celebration of George Washington's birthday sponsored by Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, the most significant fete of the first U.S. president's birthday. Peña employs a performance studies lens, using the frameworks of border enactments and border scaffolding to examine the celebration. In addition to using archival research to examine the origins of the event and its ensuing development, Peña conducted ethnographic work on both sides of the border with a variety of celebration actors, including politicians, participants, and observers. The birthday celebration began in 1898 as an effort to Americanize the "dos Laredos" area, which was and still is inhabited overwhelmingly by people of Mexican descent. Peña notes that Mexican American elite (the so-called gente decente) participated in the early years of the celebration and were not antagonistic to its Americanizing goals. The celebration was started by a local branch of a national fraternal organization, the International Order of Red Men, and Peña explains that "playing Indian" was central to the celebration. Elite Laredoans, dressed as Indians, enacted an attack on city hall, engaging in a ritual of inversion in which the actors playing Indians vanquished the building's Anglo and Mexican defenders. The book does not address the role of "playing Black," which was also central to the celebration in the early years, including minstrel performances and the song Dixie. The first two chapters focus on this ethnic cross-dressing, showing how the celebration offered Laredoans a chance to play Indian, colonial, and Mexican. A Mexican-inspired Noche Mexicana event began in 1925 to foster cross-border trade, shopping, and goodwill, but ambivalence about celebrating [End Page 116] Mexican heritage in the Washington celebration led to a behindthe-scenes backlash that suspended Noche Mexicana for another decade. In 1954, Hurricane Alice destroyed the international bridge that served as a vital link between the two cities. Rebuilding efforts led to a dispute when the Laredo construction group announced a new, higher bridge toll. The Nuevo Laredo group simply stopped construction, halting progress for several months. Peña shows how negotiations over the toll ultimately allowed Mexicans to cross into Texas during the Washington Birthday festivities without special visas. This so-called paso libre, beginning in 1957, was all the more surprising because it happened in the wake of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service's Operation Wetback (1954), in which more than a million undocumented Mexicans were rounded up and sent back to Mexico. The final chapter addresses the increasing securitization of the border following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and especially after drug cartel violence spiked in 2006. Even so, one of the birthday celebration's prime rituals of binational friendship, the abrazo (embrace) of figures representing George Washington and Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, along with children representing each country, continued throughout this period. By 2015, following the traditional embrace on the bridge, U.S. law enforcement formed a human chain to prevent Mexicans from slipping across the border. Peña ends by suggesting that Laredo never needed a literal border wall because the children's embrace "differentiates American and Mexican populations symbolically but effectively enough to avoid having to compromise trade and security relationships that actually produce quantifiable benefits" (128). Are the cross-border cooperation strategies inspired by Washington's birthday celebrations a solution to immigration restrictions or are they a sophisticated articulation of a longer history of exclusion on the border? This book provokes these and other important questions. Elliott Young Lewis & Clark College Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento by Cynthia E. Orozco

Reviewed by: Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento by Cynthia E. Orozco Teresa Palomo Acosta Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento. By Cynthia E. Orozco. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020. Pp. 310. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) By 1970, Adela Sloss-Vento had authored more publications on civil rights than any other Mexican American woman. Guided by her Christian faith and her commitment to justice, she had developed over numerous decades into an unmatched advocate for immigrants, farm laborers, and women, firmly placing her at the center of the Mexican American struggle for civil rights. Her political activism is the soul of Cynthia E. Orozco's superb two-part book. Part one follows Sloss-Vento's decades-long journey as a civil rights leader, public intellectual, and feminist. Beginning at the age of twenty-six, she vigorously helped shape the Mexican American civil rights agenda in stages from 1927 to 1950, from 1950 to 1963, and from 1963 to 1978, remaining an influential voice until 1990. Part two expertly analyzes Sloss-Vento as "a beneficiary of modern gendered selfhood" (171) and provides insights into her role as a public intellectual. Sloss-Vento's commitment to la causa made her a collaborator with Alonso S. Perales, the primary founder of the League of United Latin [End Page 233] American Citizens (LULAC); an archivist of important Mexican American civil rights documents; and a uniquely gifted composer of the "art of lettered protest" (131). Orozco illustrates through extensive chapter sub-sections the overarching theme of her book, that Sloss-Vento was a consummate proponent of Mexican Americans' rights. For instance, she provided support for Comité Pro Defensa Escolar Del Rio, which was crucial to Salvatierra v. Del Rio Independent School District, the first class-action case brought by LULAC against segregated education in Texas. In her writings, Sloss-Vento denounced fascism and endorsed pan-Americanism and the Good Neighbor Policy with Mexico. Her prolific letters and opinion pieces in newspapers and her letters to public officials are noted throughout, illustrating the agenda she undertook. For instance, in a letter to the Valley Morning Star (Harlingen), she proclaimed that a Mrs. L. J. Ring "reveals a lack of Christianity and the lack of democratic principles" (33), while in an essay in El Heraldo of Corpus Christi, she attacked "hatred against people of Mexican descent" (61). In an essay in LULAC News, she abhorred the oppression of women within the Mexican American family, and she wrote to Governor Coke Stevenson about using the press and the law to support racial harmony "in the homes and in the schools" (60). Adela Sloss-Vento also promoted the Chicano movement. In 1967, for example, she supported the walkout by Elsa-Edcouch public school students who demanded classes in "Chicano and Mexican history" (84), and she endorsed La Raza Unida Party as a continuation of the political rights efforts she had entered decades before. In Agent of Change, Cynthia E. Orozco has marshalled in-depth materials that convincingly spell out how Adela Sloss-Vento took on the powerful and proved herself to be a committed, smart, and tough servant of her people. Through her actions and her innumerable writings, Sloss-Vento proclaimed the urgent necessity "to build a better America" (178). This essential and timely book reinforces her significance to that cause and to Mexican American history. Teresa Palomo Acosta Austin, Texas Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas by Stephen Harrigan

Reviewed by: Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas by Stephen Harrigan Randolph “Mike” Campbell Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas. By Stephen Harrigan. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. Pp. 925. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In 2015, the University of Texas Press announced an ambitious publishing project entitled the Texas Bookshelf, which would begin with a new overview of the Lone Star State’s history and continue with thirteen other volumes covering key subjects such as politics, business, music, and sports. Big Wonderful Thing, a title taken from artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s first reaction to seeing Texas, launches the series in the highly readable fashion that those familiar with Stephen Harrigan’s work as a journalist, essayist, and novelist would expect. The book is huge, but it deals with a huge subject—the story of Texas from its prehistory until the first decades of the twenty-first century. Harrigan intends to be inclusive of the great variety of people who built Texas and to tell their stories in ways that would interest and entertain readers today. Accordingly, he begins most of the book’s fifty-six chapters with a vignette describing an individual or a small group who played [End Page 82] notable roles in an important episode or development in Texas’s past. For example, from the Spanish colonial era, famous figures such as Cabeza de Vaca and LaSalle are featured, but so are persons such as María de Jesús de Agreda, “The Lady in Blue,” who likely are not so familiar to most readers. Perhaps the best chapter title of all is reserved for the one dealing with James E. Ferguson, the only Texas governor forced from office by impeachment. It is simply titled “Pa.” Harrigan tells stories of many famous adventures of Texas’s past, such as the revolt against Mexico, the nearly ten years as an independent republic, the cattle drives and great ranches of the late nineteenth century, and the oil booms of the early twentieth century. However, he does not shy away from the ugly aspects of Texas’s past. For example, the chapter on Reconstruction begins with the story of the murder of Lucy Grimes, a freedwoman, by two former Confederate soldiers in Harrison County, a murder that went unpunished in spite of the efforts of the local Freedman’s Bureau agent to bring the killers to trial. He also recounts the brutal treatment handed out by Texas Rangers on the border to sediciosos, people of Mexican descent who were accused of conspiracy and violence against the United States during the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. Virtually all of the biographical vignettes are informative and good reading. For example, sketches of Heman Sweatt and Emma Tenayuca offer fine introductions to minority leaders often unknown in Anglo Texas. Some, such as the one on Lyndon B. Johnson, use the extensive research of others to paint indelible pictures of their subjects. And finally, the notorious, such as Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the much-romanticized killers during the early 1930s, and Charles Whitman, the infamous shooter from the UT Campus Tower in 1966, have their places. Taken together, the biographical sketches create a great impression of Texas as a spectacular place populated over the years by people who in general never knew how to be dull. What Harrigan does not do (and, in fairness, never intended to do) is offer any general interpretation that provides Texans with what historians like to call a “usable past.” Such a history seeks to inform a people about where they have been with the intent of helping them understand where they are now as a guide to what they might try to do next. Big Wonderful Thing is a popular history that does exactly what the author intended: provide highly readable and entertaining coverage of the sweep of Texas history. By contrast, an academic history of the Lone Star State would offer an interpretive account that might ask, for example, if Texas’s heritage is essentially southern, western, or something of an amalgam of the two with a strong Hispanic influence, best called southwestern. Answers to this question differ, and all are hedged...

What are you thinking? Acculturation as an activating event for negative evaluative beliefs among Latinos/as

ABSTRACTNegative evaluative beliefs and other cognitive structures have been tied to psychological distress across various populations but have not been sufficiently incorporated into acculturation models. The current study examines the relationships between acculturation and various activating events and mediating sources of support related to negative evaluative beliefs among people of Mexican descent (N = 319). Overall, model variables explained 26% of the variance in negative evaluative beliefs. Acculturation, marital commitment, and social capital associated with friends were negatively related to negative evaluative beliefs. Conversely, single relationship status, marital reward value, psychosocial stressors, and bridging social capital were positively related, and likely serve as activating events for negative evaluative beliefs. Identifying mechanisms related to psychological distress as well as supportive structures may help in constructing interventions that will address the specific needs of different groups. Future research should continue to explore appraisal and associated beliefs in acculturation models to understand why acculturative experiences may become stressful.

Mapping Opposition in the Sonora- Arizona Borderlands

Federico Ronstadt’s Borderman, a memoir written between 1944 and 1954, recounts the businessman’s immigration to Tucson and his life in the Sonora- Arizona borderlands during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Paradigms of opposition that inform the recovery of early Mexican American memoir and autobiography—centering the life writings of elite, dispossessed Mexican Americans and Hispanic immigrant literature written in Spanish—have discouraged study of Ronstadt’s English-language, seemingly assimilationist memoir. In my critical recovery of Borderman, I argue that it should be read as part of the legacy of oppositional literature written by people of Mexican descent in the United States. I historicize Ronstadt’s writing moment as the decade that culminated in Operation Wetback and introduce images from his archive to support a critical reading of Borderman as oppositional to the anti-Mexican border policies of its era. Building upon Genaro Padilla’s, Tey Diana Rebolledo’s, and Nicolás Kanellos’s discussions of oppositional textual politics, and mobilizing Chicana literary spatial studies, I use the term “cartographic opposition” to evaluate Borderman’s discursive remapping of southern Arizona from associations with the Anglo Southwest to a transfrontera geopolitical and cultural expanse.

Faces of Béxar: Early San Antonio and Texas by Jesús F. de la Teja

Reviewed by: Faces of Béxar: Early San Antonio and Texas by Jesús F. de la Teja Linda Noel Faces of Béxar: Early San Antonio and Texas. By Jesús F. de la Teja. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 223. $40.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-401-8.) Faces of Béxar: Early San Antonio and Texas is primarily a compilation of Jesús F. de la Teja's previously published essays, assembled with an introduction so that the author's specialized works might reach a broader audience. Focused on colonial San Antonio—which de la Teja labels as the "most successful settlement" in colonial Texas—this book is primarily geared toward specialists (p. 36). Historians of San Antonio, Texas, and Spanish colonial history will appreciate having these articles and an extensive bibliographic [End Page 937] essay in one volume to assist them with their research. The book may also be useful for a graduate or undergraduate class on southwestern history. De la Teja has compiled ten of his essays in one book to educate others on the colonial and early-nineteenth-century history of Texas before the arrival of Americans and the incorporation of Texas into the United States. The author sees that the history of Tejanos (people of Mexican descent who were born or settled in Texas during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) has been ignored by both Mexican historians, who view Texas as no longer part of Mexico and therefore not worthy of extensive examination, and U.S. historians, who find anything before the struggle for Texas independence in the 1830s irrelevant to American history. He aims to encourage historians to include more information about Spanish Texas and Tejanos in their textbooks and to address what he refers to as perspectives from "south to north" rather than solely "east to west," as most narratives currently emphasize in Anglo-American colonial history (p. xi). He argues that understanding early Texas and the border region is critical to comprehending the history of the United States and Mexico today. The essays proceed somewhat chronologically, allowing the reader to acquire some sense of the development of San Antonio and Texas from "the 1710s to the advent of Anglo-American hegemony in the 1830s" (p. 2). De la Teja approaches his subject from a variety of angles, providing rich details on the settlement, environment, military character, demographic change, and even leisurely pursuits in the area, which show continued connections to Spanish and indigenous cultures. The strongest articles in this book are chapter 3, where de la Teja describes military settlement and settlers' interactions with Apaches and other Native groups in San Antonio de Béxar, and chapter 6, which focuses on marriage and is a rich social history of how the caste or casta system worked in early San Antonio. I can imagine using this latter article to foster a rich discussion that will help students understand the factors that went into determining an individual's casta status and how frequently it could change depending on marriage, socioeconomic status, and the arbitrary decisions of government officials. The author has added two other sections of interest in this book. In the preface, which has not been previously published, de la Teja reveals the trajectory of his career and discusses how and why he wrote each article. Graduate students might appreciate the author's detailed description of his path, as it sheds light on the importance of learning from and working with other historians to interpret and understand the past. De la Teja also includes the art of nineteenth-century French painter Theodore Gentilz before each chapter and on the book's cover. De la Teja appreciates how respectfully Gentilz depicted nineteenth-century Tejano life and feels it is important to include a visual narrative in the text. One of the book's flaws is that, at times, it is repetitive. Some of the same background details—and in one case, a long quotation—are provided in multiple chapters. De la Teja's writing style is very clear but at times a bit dry, and the work is very specialized. For example, de la Teja...

The Family Festival Prevention Model: findings from a pilot of a teenage pregnancy prevention programme conceptualised by and for Mexican American communities

Despite an overall reduction in teenage pregnancy rates in the USA, the decrease for young women of Mexican heritage in the USA has been less significant than the decrease for their White and African-American peers. Furthermore, the availability of teenage pregnancy prevention models that are conceptualised specifically for people of Mexican descent is minimal. Using qualitative focus group data that were triangulated against quantitative survey data and collected from 35 young people and their parents, this paper presents findings from the pilot of a teenage pregnancy prevention model designed for and with input from Mexican American young women and men and their parents. Reflecting a favourable and impactful experience for the participants, the findings present implications for future intervention efforts and research.

Gender Differences in Social Acculturation and Social Capital in Determining Marital and Parental Role Expectations Among People of Mexican Descent

Men and women experience acculturation differently, creating acculturative gaps that may affect traditional family role expectations. In the current study, additive moderation between social acculturation, bonding social capital, and gender in relationship to marital and parental role expectations was explored among Mexican Americans (N = 314). The results indicate that when bonding social capital is at low to moderate levels, women are more committed to marital and parental roles and report more marital reward value as social acculturation increases. However, as bonding social capital and social acculturation increase, women report less marital reward value and marital and parental commitment. The size and quality of personal networks among Mexican American men and women appear to relate to social acculturation’s conditional relationship to family role expectations.

Moderated Linguistic Acculturation and Perceived Group Social Capital on Economic and Occupational Stress among People of Mexican Descent

Acculturation plays an important role in Hispanics’ work experiences. Differences in acculturation lead to increases in discrimination that impedes economic and social mobility. This study examines the acculturation and social capital associated with various groups on economic/occupational stress. A convenience sample composed of mostly Mexican-Americans (N = 322) pursuing higher education completed several surveys related to acculturation, economic stress, and social capital. Hierarchical regression results indicate that media, social, and linguistic acculturation and the acculturation interaction term were significant in the final model. Social capital gained from friends and community members was also related to economic stress. The findings from this study identify the stressful intersection between various areas of acculturation and economic stress.

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

Self‐care and Subjectivity among Mexican Diabetes Patients in the United States

Type 2 diabetes is considered a public health crisis, particularly among people of Mexican descent in the United States. Clinical approaches to diabetes management increasingly emphasize self-care, which places responsibility for illness on individuals and mandates self-regulation. Using narrative and free-list data from a two-phase study of low-income first- and second-generation Mexican immigrants living with diabetes, we present evidence that self-care among our participants involves emotion regulation as well as maintenance of and care for family. These findings suggest, in turn, that the ideology of selfhood on which these practices are based does not correspond with the ideology of selfhood cultivated in the U.S. clinical sphere. Divergence between these ideologies may lead to self-conflict for patients and the experience of moral blame. We argue that our participants use their explanations of diabetes causality and control as a form of self-making, which both resists such blame and asserts an alternative form of selfhood that may align more closely with the values held by our Mexican-American participants.

Acculturative Stress Among People of Mexican Descent: The Role of Acculturation, Social Capital, and Family Role Expectations

Stressful acculturative experiences alter familial relationships and mental health functioning among Hispanics. However, risk and protective factors for acculturative stress remain unclear. This study examines acculturation, social capital, marital, and parental role expectations, and acculturative stress among people of Mexican descent (N = 313). The hierarchical regression model explained 15% (R 2 = .15) of the variance in acculturative stress. The use of an interaction term revealed that marital reward value was positively related to acculturative stress for individuals reporting high linguistic acculturation while bonding social capital was negatively related. Therefore, relationships between acculturation and value oriented variables may evoke stressful experiences only under conditional circumstances.

Validity Evidence for the Translated Version of the Personal Social Capital Scale Among People of Mexican Descent

Social capital is increasingly of interest to researchers and service providers given its relationship to outcomes ranging from wellness to social and civic participation. However, available instruments measuring social capital have insufficient reliability and validity. The current study tests the reliability and validity of the Personal Social Capital scale–English version. This study focuses on people of Mexican descent (N = 322) because this validation was part of a larger study involving this population. Results from the validation indicate acceptable global (α=.85) and subscale (bonding α=.83; bridging α=.85) reliability. In addition, a confirmatory factor analysis revealed a well-fitting model. The scale demonstrates convergent validity with psychological sense of community (r = .44). However, the statistically significant correlation between a person’s irrational values and social capital (r =.17) does not demonstrate discriminant validity. Further, gender is not a statistically significant predic...

Remedios: The Healing Life of Eva Castellanoz by Joanne Mulcahy

 Reviews reviews Remedios: The Healing Life of Eva Castellanoz by Joanne Mulcahy Trinity University Press, San Antonio, Texas, 2010. Illustrations, notes. 240 pages. $18.95 paper. In this fascinating book, creative non-fiction writer and folklorist Joanne Mulcahy recounts the story of Eva Castellanoz, a Mexican American working-class healer who migrated from Texas to the Pacific Northwest. Castellanoz follows national migratory patterns that led many Tejanas/os to move to the Pacific Northwest in search of better opportunities. Mulcahy’s work underlines and fills the gap for the much-needed historiography of Mexican American and Chicanas’ experiences in the Pacific Northwest. Migration studies have lagged behind in the Pacific Northwest,having focused mostly in the Southwest and more recently in the Midwest. Remedios: The Healing Life of Eva Castellanoz has made a significant inroad in the historiography of this neglected region and frames gender as the category of analysis through which race and sexuality collide. The author explains the process of Mexican Americans’ marginalization and how social systems of oppression devalue the life and experiences of particular populations in the United States. To center gender as a category of analysis,Mulcahy traces the life of Mexican American healer and artist Eva Castellanoz. The book feels like a metaphor within a metaphor in which Mulcahy’s skill as a creative writer links the non-linear narrative with ethnographic material, re-inscribing a new academic methodology that blends creative nonfiction with testimonios (oral histories). Mulcahy’s creative narrative slowly discloses the world that surrounds Castellanoz’s social realities, her economic and political marginalization . The history of Mexican Americans in the United States is narrated via Castellanoz’s experiences, and her life tribulations mark the oppressive systems that surround this population. Mulcahy follows Castellanoz’s life over a decade and becomes a valued friend as she queries the prominent healer. The book is structured like a book of healing prescriptions for life, interweaving Castellanoz’s powerful life with historical accounts of Mexicans in the Pacific Northwest. Mulcahy opens every chapter with an ailment and a remedy, resembling a session with a healer. In other words, Castellanoz’s life becomes a metaphor for social justice healing,as it were.While this is a historical account of Eva Castellanoz — healer,artist, activist, and community leader — the book also details a life of resistance to the oppression that forced her family to leave their homes in Texas and migrate to the Pacific Northwest, where racial discrimination was also rampant. In her new geographic space,Castellanoz commits herself to social justice that will benefit those who have been systematically marginalized : people of Mexican descent. Mulcahy outlines how Castellanoz conquers public spaces through her healing methods and her art. By creating traditional coronas, centerpieces made of wax flowers and paper for celebrations, Castellanoz counters maledominated geographic locations and thereby establishes a metaphor for change and resistance . According to Mulcahy, Castellanoz re-inscribes the notion of religious faith by feminizing and resisting patriarchal systems of power that control religious belief systems. As an altarista herself, Castellanoz conquers the world of organized religion and its sexist monopoly. Castellanoz, then, is the mediator by which a connection to a higher power is accomplished, challenging the priesthood’s  OHQ vol. 112, no. 3 domination of sacred spaces. Castellanoz creates a new language — a feminine language — to communicate with what she believes to be a higher force. Mulcahy’s organization of the book metaphorically describes her own identification with the subject as well as the vital transformation she underwent as a white, privileged woman working with a Mexican American curandera (healer). Through a series of enfermedades and remedios, Mulcahy reveals Castellanoz ’s trajectory as well as her own while she learned the reality of social and racial discrepanciessurroundingourroutine ,mundanelives. With a curiosity that deserves merit, Mulcahy befriends Castellanoz and finds a place where she may align herself vis-à-vis such a powerful, resilient yet vulnerable woman. Both Mulcahy and Castellanoz advocate social justice and gender equity, yet they approach these topics differently. While Mulcahy writes a text of resistance and ethnographic richness, Castellanoz traces with her own body the lives of Mexican Americans and their struggles against marginalization and outright racial hostility...

Crossing the Rio Grande: An Immigrant’s Life in the 1880s by Luis G. Gómez, and: Remembering the Hacienda: History and Memory in the Mexican American Southwest by Vincent Pérez

4 3 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W in t e r 2 0 0 8 Crossing the Rio Qrande: An Immigrant’s Life in the 1880s. By Luis G. Gómez. Translated by Guadalupe Valdez Jr. Edited by Guadalupe Valdez Jr. and Thomas H. Kreneck. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. 106 pages, $23.00. Remembering the Hacienda: History and Memory in the Mexican American Southwest. By Vincent Pérez. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. 251 pages, $49.95/$24.95. Reviewed by Rodrigo Lazo University of California, Irvine The ongoing historical recovery and study of writing by people of Mexican descent in the United States poses a series of methodological and critical chal­ lenges, not least of which is how to address a critic’s personal and familial rela­ tionship to the past. Rather than adopt an objective perspective that attempts to ignore personal connections, some critics over the last two decades have incorporated questions about personal investment in literary and cultural his­ tory into their academic work. Remembering the Hacienda and Crossing the Rio Grande are two excellent examples of how critics and scholars who investigate family history can simultaneously produce materials whose importance goes beyond a personal analysis. Although completely different generically, these books are the result of critical commitments to developing a connection between memory (as a personal and communal experience) and the social implications of print culture history. Crossing the Rio Grande is a translation of a Spanish-language memoir orig­ inally published by Luis G. Gómez as Mis Memorias in Rio Grande City, Texas, in 1935. Translated by Gomez’s grandson, the book recounts Gomez’s arrival in the United States and subsequent commitment to work and accumulating a fortune. As a bookkeeper and contractor, Gómez had regular contact with hundreds of laborers of Mexican descent who cleared land, built fences, and loaded rocks onto freight trains. Thus, it is not surprising that the memoir is infused with the language of finance and labor. In the following passage, Gómez discusses a job he had undertaken with his partner, Eleodoro Tamez: “As soon as our people arrived at the new camp, they began cutting wood. I had already begun the project with ten men who were added to the twenty that Tamez had brought along, giving us a total of thirty men who made nine hundred cords of wood within fifteen days for a total of $1,125 at $1.25 per cord” (70). This type of passage, while not the most dramatic, helps to provide a picture of the way the book accounts for daily labor, clearly a major driving force behind late nineteenth-century migration. By translating his grandfather’s book, Guada­ lupe Valdez Jr. reminds us of the central place of work as a determinant in immigrant narratives going back decades. b o o k R e v ie w s 4 3 9 Crossing the Rio Grande offers several incidents of the picaresque variety. A t one point, for example, Gómez jumps a freight train in a rush to collect earnings from a contract but is then tossed off and forced to make his way on foot. Gómez does not structure his memorias along a storyline, and, at times, it is unclear where he is going. A promised second volume, which presumably would complete the account, has not been located. As a historical document, Crossing the Rio Grande would appeal to anyone interested in immigrant narra­ tives, the history of the southwestern United States, and labor history. Like Valdez, Vincent Pérez is inspired by his grandfather’s experiences as an immigrant worker in the United States, but in this case the result is an aca­ demic study of the way the hacienda has emerged as cultural memory in both novels and the personal lives of Mexican Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Remembering the Hacienda is a book that combines forceful literary historical analysis with Pérez’s investigation of conflicting accounts of the hacienda past in his own family. The book offers...

De Leon & Greswold Del Castillo, North Aztlan - A History Of Mexican Americans In The United States

In the century and one-half since the United States gained the northern third of Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the region's Hispanic population has undergone a remarkable transformation. Contact between people of Mexican descent and those of Anglo heritage has changed both groups. Arnoldo De Leon and Richard Griswold de! Castillo present their readers with a passionate, sensitive, and comprehensive examination of the nature of that change.

Myths and the “Politics of Exceptionality”: Interpreting Chicana/o Narratives of Achievement

The author draws from select topical life histories conducted with individuals who enrolled in doctoral programs at UC Berkeley during a ten-year period beginning with 1968. She examines the myths surrounding academic achievement for people of Mexican descent and how these myths affected her initial interpretation of their childhood stories about their parents' relationship to their achievements. She considers the interpretation of these narratives from the perspectives of various schools of thought and argues that the issue of educational achievement by minority groups is subject to a “politics of exceptionality.” Hence, high academic achievement is not considered normative, and students who do achieve are treated as exceptions, not only to the presumed meritocracy, but as exceptions to their racial/ethnic group. By individualizing their achievements and focusing on their characteristics as individuals, the focus of social policies with respect to educational attainment remains focused on the individual achiever and not on the institutional processes and structural opportunities that maximize the possibilities for achievement.

¡Vamos Taximaroa! Mexican/Chicano Soccer Associations and Transnational/Translocal Communities, 1967–2002

This article provides a social history of the most prominent soccer clubs and leagues by people of Mexican descent in Chicago and Detroit between 1967 and 2002. It analyzes the impact of sport clubs and leisure activities in the formation of Mexican American communities. Based on oral history interviews and using concrete examples, the article proposes that soccer clubs have constituted a way to articulate recreational and leisure activities, gain access to public parks and facilities, and succeeded in creating a social place otherwise denied to Mexicanos in the Great Lakes by persistent patterns of segregation and discrimination. Sport clubs have also played a role in the formation of community leadership, the construction and affirmation of a Mexican identity based on the US experience, and the expression of civic and social needs.

Dis-connections in “American” Citizenship and the Post/neo-colonial: People of Mexican Descent and Whitestream2 Pedagogy and Curriculum

In efforts to create “good” and “responsible” citizens, social educators have sought solutions (assimilation, acculturation, etc.) to the “problem” of racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity in U.S. society (Houser & Kuzmic, 2001). The “greater good” of this neo-colonial endeavor often focuses on maintaining the privileges of the white, upper middle class, whose cultural capital is the model of its hegemonic social normality (Cary, 2001). This article uses a postcolonial and cultural studies lens to challenge this denial of connected citizenship to historically colonized, subaltern groups in U.S. society, since being “American” has historically implied and still implicitly implies being “white” (Ladson- Billings, 2004). The main focus of this article is on Chicana/o educators as they reflect on their K-12 social studies experiences and how these experiences shaped their notions of their citizenship status in U.S. society. The narratives reveal an unequal, denied, racialized, and disconnected membership in U.S. society. The article concludes by examining the implications of this study for current and future practices of social and citizenship education.

"Don't Let Them Make You Feel You Did a Crime": Immigration Law, Labor Rights, and Farmworker Testimony

Now as farmworker women, we're educating ourselves. We're helping other farmworker women to know their rights. We have conferences where we teach women how to defend themselves, how to get legal assistance, how to sue.... We also have conferences on domestic violence, sexual harassment, pesticides, and AIDS (Rothenberg 57). Maria Carmona, one of founders of Women's Leadership Project, illustrates how migrant workers deploy various strategies of resistance through which they struggle against forms of coercion exercised by state and transnational capital. The Farmworker Women's Leadership Project, as well as unions such as United Farm Workers (UFW) and Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), represents strategies of formal, organized opposition. The struggle for a safe working environment, a living wage, and a measure of control over workplace has been at center of migrant laborers' political battles. Yet, these battles are waged not only through picket line, strike, and ballot box but also through production of narratives that articulate forms of oppositional knowledge and identity. Transnational capital generates discursive strategies that create racial, national, and gendered divisions of labor that target specific bodies for specific kinds of work. Producing truth claims, these discourses seek to contain resistance and coerce workers into compliance. In worker testimony, we witness how farm laborers analyze, critique, and resist these discourses. Through narrative, workers engage in struggle over truth claims produced by power. Migrant laborers not only generate oppositional knowledge about workplace and their labor, but also redefine the family and the self. In this essay I analyze hegemonic narratives about migrant labor, and I consider forms of cultural resistance produced by workers through testimony. (1) I discuss novel Under Feet of Jesus, arguing that Helena Maria Viramontes not only critiques prevailing discourses of criminality that serve to legitimize exploitation of migrant labor but also offers tools for intervention into current legal and representational practices that seek to define migrant workers through essentializing race and gender stereotypes. Contemporary narratives featuring stereotype of illegal alien suppress long history of migration between United States and Mexico. Putting aside for a moment larger issues raised by Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and United States appropriation of land formerly owned by Mexico, United States has relied upon labor from Mexico throughout twentieth century. In first quarter of last century, agricultural interests began to pressure US government to facilitate use of Mexican agricultural workers in fields. In 1925, one year after Border Patrol was created, Department of Labor and Immigration Bureau initiated programs attempting to restrict Mexican immigration to those who were either already employed or guaranteed employment on US farms. Some of very same immigration laws which had been used to exclude Chinese in nineteenth century (the head tax, literacy requirements, public charge provisions, and Alien Contract Labor Law) were waived to ensure flow of Mexican farm workers into fields. During Depression, these immigration laws, still on books, were used to restrict Mexican immigration, and, in Los Angeles from 1929 to 1935, 80,000 people of Mexican descent, regardless of their legal right to be in United States, were deported to Mexico. In 1942, as World War II produced another labor shortage, an Executive Order initiated bracero program which recruited four to five million Mexicans to work in United States. At end of war, while employers were still bringing in workers, federal government instituted large-scale expulsions of Mexican immigrants in mass militarized roundups of 1954 and 1955. …