Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights

by Gabriela Gonzalez

The transborder modernization of Mexico and the American Southwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the lives of ethnic Mexicans across the political divide. While industrialization, urbanization, technology, privatization, and wealth concentration benefitted some, many more experienced dislocation, exploitative work relations, and discrimination based on race, gender, and class. The Mexican Revolution brought these issues to the fore within Mexican society, igniting a diaspora to el norte. Within the United States, similar economic and social power dynamics plagued Tejanos and awaited the war refugees. Political activism spearheaded by individuals and organizations such as the Idars, Leonor Villegas' de Magnón's White Cross, the Magonista movement, the Munguias, Emma Tenayuca, and LULAC emerged in the borderlands to address the needs of ethnic Mexicans whose lives were shaped by racism, patriarchy, and poverty.

As Gabriela Gonzalez shows in this book, economic modernization relied on social hierarchies that were used to justify economic inequities. Redeeming la raza was about saving ethnic Mexicans in Texas from a social hierarchy premised on false notions of white supremacy and Mexican inferiority. Activists used privileges of class, education, networks, and organizational skills to confront the many injustices that racism bred, but they used different strategies. Thus, the anarcho-syndicalist approach of Magónistas stands in contrast to the social and cultural redemption politics of the Idars who used the press to challenge a Jaime Crow world. Also, the family promoted the intellectual, material, and cultural uplift of la raza, working to combat negative stereotypes of ethnic Mexicans. Similar contrasts can be drawn between the labor activism of Emma Tenayuca and the Munguias, whose struggle for rights employed a politics of respectability that encouraged ethnic pride and unity. Finally, maternal feminist approaches and the politics of citizenship serve as reminders that gendered and nationalist rhetoric and practices foment hierarchies within civil and human rights organizations.

Redeeming La Raza examines efforts of activists to create a dignified place for ethnic Mexicans in American society by challenging white supremacy and the segregated world it spawned.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

280 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 15, 2018

About the author

Gabriela González is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio where she teaches courses on the US-Mexico borderlands, Latinx history, women’s history and historical methods. She received her Ph.D. in U.S. history from Stanford University in 2005 and is a Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow.

Reviews

[Teri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent look at the lives and work of transborder activists from 1900 to 1950. While the United States and Mexico modernized in areas like industrialization, urbanization, and technology, Euro-Americans prospered as racial and ethnic groups were marginalized. Mexican-Americans suffered abuse and discrimination across racial, gender, and class lines. Many activists in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico fought for equal rights through many avenues such as print media, non-profit organizations, and community services. Gonzalez spotlights many Mexican-American activists and organizations in detail including the Idar family, the Magonista movement, Emily Tenayuca, Latin American PTA organizations, and LULAC. Drawing on oral histories, diaries, letters, and newspapers of the time, Gonzalez paints a picture of the rebuilding of La Raza and gente decente, the people of the Mexican-American community and the oppressed middle-class of south Texas.

I thought this was a fascinating look at the history of Hispanic and Chicano/a people of the Texas borderlands.

[Emily C · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a very limited understanding of this topic but I liked how the author focused on individuals and individual organizations to highlight different methods of activism and how personal backgrounds influenced their actions.

[Synful · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took forever to finish this book, but with the threat of a Lost Book charge from the library, I had the right incentive to finish the last 25 pages or so.

It is really dense and as at least one previous review says, some of it can be dry. Also, some of it seems a bit repetitive. It is a fairly narrow subject, so I personally had already heard of many of the main people covered here. The more academic treatment of them and the subject was what was new for me.

One point it seemed to lean on a lot and repeated so often it became a little tedious was the activism of women within a very narrow definition, as mothers and not just of individual people but of an ethnicity/culture. Not necessarily an idea I'd encounted before, but it makes sense.

Considering my own political leanings, it didn't become more of a page-turner until I got to the section covering Emma Tenayuca. The background on LULAC was new to me and I found it interesting its general conservative leanings and "la gente decente" especially in contrast with Tenayuca et al. It makes sense my own personal disinterest in LULAC when I encountered it as I was graduating from h.s. and entered college.

Considering today's politics and how things have turned out for all of us, not just Mexican Americans, I find it ironic that their view is what we're coming around to now, the problems with capitalism and its divergence with democracy and equity. Tenayuca would be laughing at and joining with today's Gen Z for sure.

Enough food for thought here, albeit very academic and a bit on the dry side. It definitely covers broadly several important persons and movements of the early 20th century all Americans should learn about our history.

[Evan Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very informative

[Patricia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This appears to be a dissertation repurposed as a book. Well-researched, but very very dry.

Food: Cowboy/cowgirl food.