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Felix Longoria's Wake: Bereavement, Racism, and the Rise of Mexican American Activism
Winner, Tullis Prize, Texas State Historical Association, 2004 Private First Class Felix Longoria earned a Bronze Service Star, a Purple Heart, a Good Conduct Medal, and a Combat Infantryman's badge for service in the Philippines during World War II. Yet the only funeral parlor in his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas, refused to hold a wake for the slain soldier because "the whites would not like it." Almost overnight, this act of discrimination became a defining moment in the rise of Mexican American activism. It launched Dr. Héctor P. García and his newly formed American G.I. Forum into the vanguard of the Mexican civil rights movement, while simultaneously endangering and advancing the career of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who arranged for Longoria's burial with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. In this book, Patrick Carroll provides the first fully researched account of the Longoria controversy and its far-reaching consequences. Drawing on extensive documentary evidence and interviews with many key figures, including Dr. García and Mrs. Longoria, Carroll convincingly explains why the Longoria incident, though less severe than other acts of discrimination against Mexican Americans, ignited the activism of a whole range of interest groups from Argentina to Minneapolis. By putting Longoria's wake in a national and international context, he also clarifies why it became such a flash point for conflicting understandings of bereavement, nationalism, reason, and emotion between two powerful cultures—Mexicanidad and Americanism.
288 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 2, 2018
An important story that should be known by many more people -- but unfortunately becomes an academic parlor game in this book. (Why don't academic theorists realize they're as segregationist-minded as those they condemn?)
Here's my review that appeared in "Texas Books in Review."
In Felix Longoria’s Wake, Robert J. Carroll takes a great story and slowly, inexorably, strangles all the life from it. Longoria, you’ll recall, was the highly-decorated serviceman killed during World War II and later denied a funeral service in his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas because, as the local undertaker said, “the whites wouldn’t like it.”
The blatant discrimination against a Mexican American war hero sparked an international outcry. Lyndon B. Johnson, who had only been in the U.S. Senate for a few days, staged a memorable intervention, quickly arranging a hero’s burial for Longoria in Arlington National Cemetery. The incident’s most far-reaching consequence was to transform Corpus Christi doctor Hector P. García’s veteran’s group, the American G.I. Forum, into a major civil rights organization.
Robert Carroll has written the first book-length treatment of the Longoria incident, published as part of the University of Texas’ Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) Series. Carroll developed relationships with key figures in the case, most notably American G.I. Forum founder Hector García and Felix Longoria’s widow, Beatrice. Mrs. Longoria’s interview with Carroll broke a public silence that she had maintained for nearly fifty years. Carroll also interviewed the widow of the Three Rivers funeral home director and the mayor of the town at the time.
Yet despite the abundant primary sources at hand, Carroll evinces little interest in the actual story. While he recites the basic facts of the case over and over again throughout the book, deeper detail is ignored in favor of a broad, often pedantic historical context. We hear more, for example, about Texas’ 1836 rebellion against Mexico and more about racist commentary made by Anglo-Americans in 1846 than we do about the particulars of funeral arrangements among Mexican Americans in Three Rivers. If Mexicanos were never allowed to use the only funeral home in town, how did they deal with their dead? How to resolve the undertaker’s conflicting accounts about whether or not he had previously served Mexican American clients? Given the much-ballyhooed tension between the Longoria family and his widow, were Longoria’s parents even initially aware that their son’s remains were being returned to Texas? Did Felix Longoria enlist in the Army because of limited economic opportunities in Three Rivers? How many people turned out for the initial protest meeting called by Dr. García in Corpus Christi? Again and again, Carroll demonstrates that he is not interested.
On those rare occasions when Carroll does engage the particulars, the results are not always pretty. Somewhat preposterously, he takes at face value the claim that Lyndon Johnson kept a low profile during the Longoria funeral at Arlington National Cemetery because “This was an affair of honor, and the senator did not want to risk spoiling the ceremony with political grandstanding.” (189) That doesn’t sound like the Lyndon Johnson most of us know. As Robert Caro so ably demonstrates in last year’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, by the time of Longoria’s funeral Johnson had caught plenty of heat from conservative Texas Anglos and he was doing his damnedest to downplay any involvement in the episode. In fact, Caro does a far better job of illuminating LBJ’s role in just a few pages than Patrick Carroll does in the entirety of Felix Longoria’s Wake.
Carroll’s largely abstract view of the Longoria episode plods along relatively harmlessly for much of the book. It only takes an ominous turn near the end, when it becomes evident that Carroll’s real interest is to use the Longoria case as a model to test the efficacy of several analytical methodologies popular among sociologists. This allows Carroll to argue that:
The accommodative, culturally pluralistic model of integrative ideology that emerged out of the hybrid structuralist and antistructuralist process explaining how the Longoria incident took place provided activists like Dr. Héctor Pérez García with a blueprint for building a climate of constructive cooperation and coexistence between Anglos and Tejanos in spite of periodic strains in the two subcommunities’ relationships with one another. (212)
Despite the truly impressive command of jargon, Carroll’s hyper-analysis does not always succeed. In some instances, such as his assessment of public reactions to the event, Carroll’s own evidence contradicts his conclusions.
He argues that those in regions without a substantial Hispanic presence (i.e., the northern states) tended to condemn the funeral director’s “unpatriotism” rather than his racism. That argument might be more compelling if Carroll hadn’t reprinted an editorial cartoon from the Detroit Free Press depicting the funeral director in a KKK hood with the word “bigotry” emblazoned on it.
Conversely, Carroll argues that people within Hispanic regions tended to emphasize the funeral director’s racism, rather than his lack of patriotism. Again, the evidence contradicts this assertion. Hector García’s initial telegram to LBJ, for example, pointedly referred to Longoria’s status as a war hero and it decried the funeral director’s “un-American action.” By Carroll’s reckoning, then, Hector García must qualify as a Yankee.
Carroll’s eagerness to plug the events of the Longoria episode into pre-conceived methodologies is not only intellectually suspect, it also craters whatever reading audience might exist for the book. By making the dramatic, important story of Felix Longoria’s burial inaccessible to all but a narrow coterie of theory-devoted academics, Carroll loses a unique opportunity to share the story with succeeding generations. Regrettably, for a book that so forcefully decries institutionalized segregation, Carroll’s seemingly willful obfuscation contributes to a very real intellectual segregation.
Felix Longoria’s Wake is an academic parlor game, not a book intended for reading. Scholarship doesn’t have to be this way. One need look no further than the founder of CMAS, the late Américo Paredes, to find a model for a first-class scholar who communicated abstract concepts with clarity and grace—while never losing sight of the story itself.
Here's my review that appeared in "Texas Books in Review."
In Felix Longoria’s Wake, Robert J. Carroll takes a great story and slowly, inexorably, strangles all the life from it. Longoria, you’ll recall, was the highly-decorated serviceman killed during World War II and later denied a funeral service in his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas because, as the local undertaker said, “the whites wouldn’t like it.”
The blatant discrimination against a Mexican American war hero sparked an international outcry. Lyndon B. Johnson, who had only been in the U.S. Senate for a few days, staged a memorable intervention, quickly arranging a hero’s burial for Longoria in Arlington National Cemetery. The incident’s most far-reaching consequence was to transform Corpus Christi doctor Hector P. García’s veteran’s group, the American G.I. Forum, into a major civil rights organization.
Robert Carroll has written the first book-length treatment of the Longoria incident, published as part of the University of Texas’ Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) Series. Carroll developed relationships with key figures in the case, most notably American G.I. Forum founder Hector García and Felix Longoria’s widow, Beatrice. Mrs. Longoria’s interview with Carroll broke a public silence that she had maintained for nearly fifty years. Carroll also interviewed the widow of the Three Rivers funeral home director and the mayor of the town at the time.
Yet despite the abundant primary sources at hand, Carroll evinces little interest in the actual story. While he recites the basic facts of the case over and over again throughout the book, deeper detail is ignored in favor of a broad, often pedantic historical context. We hear more, for example, about Texas’ 1836 rebellion against Mexico and more about racist commentary made by Anglo-Americans in 1846 than we do about the particulars of funeral arrangements among Mexican Americans in Three Rivers. If Mexicanos were never allowed to use the only funeral home in town, how did they deal with their dead? How to resolve the undertaker’s conflicting accounts about whether or not he had previously served Mexican American clients? Given the much-ballyhooed tension between the Longoria family and his widow, were Longoria’s parents even initially aware that their son’s remains were being returned to Texas? Did Felix Longoria enlist in the Army because of limited economic opportunities in Three Rivers? How many people turned out for the initial protest meeting called by Dr. García in Corpus Christi? Again and again, Carroll demonstrates that he is not interested.
On those rare occasions when Carroll does engage the particulars, the results are not always pretty. Somewhat preposterously, he takes at face value the claim that Lyndon Johnson kept a low profile during the Longoria funeral at Arlington National Cemetery because “This was an affair of honor, and the senator did not want to risk spoiling the ceremony with political grandstanding.” (189) That doesn’t sound like the Lyndon Johnson most of us know. As Robert Caro so ably demonstrates in last year’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, by the time of Longoria’s funeral Johnson had caught plenty of heat from conservative Texas Anglos and he was doing his damnedest to downplay any involvement in the episode. In fact, Caro does a far better job of illuminating LBJ’s role in just a few pages than Patrick Carroll does in the entirety of Felix Longoria’s Wake.
Carroll’s largely abstract view of the Longoria episode plods along relatively harmlessly for much of the book. It only takes an ominous turn near the end, when it becomes evident that Carroll’s real interest is to use the Longoria case as a model to test the efficacy of several analytical methodologies popular among sociologists. This allows Carroll to argue that:
The accommodative, culturally pluralistic model of integrative ideology that emerged out of the hybrid structuralist and antistructuralist process explaining how the Longoria incident took place provided activists like Dr. Héctor Pérez García with a blueprint for building a climate of constructive cooperation and coexistence between Anglos and Tejanos in spite of periodic strains in the two subcommunities’ relationships with one another. (212)
Despite the truly impressive command of jargon, Carroll’s hyper-analysis does not always succeed. In some instances, such as his assessment of public reactions to the event, Carroll’s own evidence contradicts his conclusions.
He argues that those in regions without a substantial Hispanic presence (i.e., the northern states) tended to condemn the funeral director’s “unpatriotism” rather than his racism. That argument might be more compelling if Carroll hadn’t reprinted an editorial cartoon from the Detroit Free Press depicting the funeral director in a KKK hood with the word “bigotry” emblazoned on it.
Conversely, Carroll argues that people within Hispanic regions tended to emphasize the funeral director’s racism, rather than his lack of patriotism. Again, the evidence contradicts this assertion. Hector García’s initial telegram to LBJ, for example, pointedly referred to Longoria’s status as a war hero and it decried the funeral director’s “un-American action.” By Carroll’s reckoning, then, Hector García must qualify as a Yankee.
Carroll’s eagerness to plug the events of the Longoria episode into pre-conceived methodologies is not only intellectually suspect, it also craters whatever reading audience might exist for the book. By making the dramatic, important story of Felix Longoria’s burial inaccessible to all but a narrow coterie of theory-devoted academics, Carroll loses a unique opportunity to share the story with succeeding generations. Regrettably, for a book that so forcefully decries institutionalized segregation, Carroll’s seemingly willful obfuscation contributes to a very real intellectual segregation.
Felix Longoria’s Wake is an academic parlor game, not a book intended for reading. Scholarship doesn’t have to be this way. One need look no further than the founder of CMAS, the late Américo Paredes, to find a model for a first-class scholar who communicated abstract concepts with clarity and grace—while never losing sight of the story itself.
June 1, 2020
I read this for TX history class. I was dreading it at first because I knew it would be a sad book. It was, however, I am glad I read it. The storytelling of the incident was done well. I appreciate the story and history behind how Felix was buried and also the courage of a woman.
February 7, 2025
I do highly recommend this book because it does highlight how the Mexican-American Civil Rights movement started. This is also one of the books I read for my history classes, specifically my Texas History class when I took it in my fall 2022 semester of college.
August 4, 2020
I had to read this for school and learned a lot about the latino Civil Rights movement.
November 4, 2010
Pretty dry historical recount of a turning point in the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, when a the family of a WWII veteran was turned away from the funeral home in their home town. A young LBJ features prominently in this book.
August 21, 2007
Conveys the significance of Felix Longoria's life as well as the efforts of the GI Forum.
June 7, 2012
First half was good, but became VERY repetitive.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews