The Western History Association
Review The Tejano Diaspora: Mexican Americanism and Ethnic Politics in Texas and Wisconsin . (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. xviii + 238 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.) by Marc Simon Rodriguez Review by: Mary Ann Villarreal The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 3 (AUTUMN 2012), pp. 372-373 Published by: Western Historical Quarterly, Utah State University on behalf of The Western History Association
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autumn 2012
Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America. By John Tutino. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. x + 698 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $99.95, cloth; $29.95, paper.)
Modern-day visitors to the north central Mexican cities of Guanajuato, Querétaro, and San Miguel de Allende come away invariably charmed by the hallmarks of their Spanish colonial past: cobblestone streets lined with crumbling structures, old churches presiding over shady plazas, and monuments commemorating pivotal historic events. As such, the towns are popular destinations for residents of Mexico City—some two hundred miles distant—who flock there on weekends, cheek by jowl with legions of American tourists and expatriates. In his sprawling and fascinating new book, John Tutino argues that this impossibly quaint region—known as the Bajío—played a pivotal role in the development of global capitalism beginning in the mid-sixteenth century. Central to the area’s importance was its vast deposits of silver, which took on added significance around 1550 when China’s Ming Empire required that all taxes be paid in currency derived from the precious metal. If the story of Mexican silver mining is well known and oft told, much less familiar are the contours of the complex society that emerged as a result, which Tutino insists was led by intensely entrepreneurial men who privileged profit over honor or social standing (as most previous accounts would have it). In other words, the Bajío was not simply a resourcerich periphery but itself a crucial incubator of the political economy that remade the globe during the age of European exploration and beyond. While this insight alone marks the book as a critical intervention in the historiographies of Mexico and the larger Atlantic World,
Western Historical Quarterly Tutino carefully demonstrates how capitalism touched and transformed the lives of the region’s many peoples—from Indian laborers and enslaved Africans to peoples of mixed ancestry and the Spanish elite. Along the way, he pauses occasionally to flesh out illustrative examples—like José Sánchez Espinosa, who became a powerful Bajío landowner in the late eighteenth century—which grounds the book’s macro processes in discrete, individual experience. This is no mean feat. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for a book of such monumental scope and ambition (not to mention gestation—Tutino effectively began it in the 1970s), Making a New World is simply enormous: 500 pages of text supplemented by another 115 pages of appendices and tables, all supported by more than 1,000 endnotes. And yet it is only the first half of a larger project; the second volume will consider the Mexican War of Independence— which began in 1810 in Dolores, another Bajío town—and its tumultuous aftermath. Nevertheless, readers of this journal will be handsomely rewarded for engaging with the initial installment of Tutino’s study, particularly those with interests in the histories of colonial North America, the region that became the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the advent of capitalism. Andrew R. Graybill Southern Methodist University
The Tejano Diaspora: Mexican Americanism and Ethnic Politics in Texas and Wisconsin. By Marc Simon Rodriguez. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. xviii + 238 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.)
Marc Simon Rodriguez lays out an ambitious project, identifying a geographically and culturally defined migration pattern he terms the “Tejano diaspora” and laying out
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Book Reviews the impact this transgenerational and transnational population had on the political landscape in Wisconsin and Texas over a twentyyear period. Building on a wealth of primary sources, and weaving together a vast secondary source base from the last four decades, Rodriguez begins with the post–World War II big picture by drawing parallels between the movement of the Tejano diaspora and the African American “southern migration.” For students familiar with the names of leaders in the Mexican American civil rights and Chicano movements, Rodriguez brings together an incredible story of how labor, social activism, and political forces converged in Crystal City, Texas. He connects the early actors of the American G.I. Forum to the bigger story of the often-told “cheerleader” event that excluded Diana Palacios from the cheerleading squad, leading to the student protest and boycott and the eventual creation of the Raza Unida Party. In the first chapter, he places braceros on the landscape to illustrate the complexity they added to a growing sense of participation and patriotism among returning veterans. He argues that braceros also made their place not only as workers but as entrepreneurs who laid a new economic foundation. In the book’s second chapter, Rodriguez highlights the unintended consequences of braceros making Crystal City home, such as overcrowding in schools and a growing demand for inclusion into the city’s political representation. In the last three chapters, Rodriguez pulls the Tejano diaspora argument back into the picture by bringing the economic realizations of migrant workers to the center; we see that the Tejano diaspora built social networks and gained new organizing strategies. Informed by political and accessible communities outside of South Texas, the young leaders of the newly formed Raza Unida Party built upon a sense of Americanism and moved away from the moderate center of early Mexican American civil rights leaders.
The challenge Rodriguez faces is connecting together seemingly disconnected communities and time periods. One clear gap is the way he connects the activity before World War II to the period after the war. He provides only a cursory overview of the cultural and physical landscape and the response of Tejanos to their environment prior to the post–World War II period. That said, the book offers a wider perspective of the events that occurred in Crystal City, and its bigger connection to the preceding Mexican American civil rights activism. Rodriguez is especially deft at depicting the role that the migrant labor community played in the “ideological inspiration” of the Chicano movement. Mary Ann Villarreal The Women’s College of the University of Denver
¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement. Chicana Matters Series. By Maylei Blackwell. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. xi + 300 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00, cloth; $24.95, paper.)
In ¡Chicana Power!, Maylei Blackwell demonstrates that “stories have power” to inspire, heal, transform, and “incite new possibilities” (p. 1). The book tells the intricately woven story of how and why a generation of activists in the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s imagined a new and complex vision of social justice and liberation whose influence is still felt today. The roots of the project go back twenty years, when Blackwell participated in an oral history collective at California State University, Long Beach that investigated and challenged the historiography of second-wave feminism. Blackwell and her colleagues argued that women of color were largely excluded from the written history of second-wave feminism. When they were
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