No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed
No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed

Author: Cynthia E. Orozco

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0292774133

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“A refreshing and pathbreaking [study] of the roots of Mexican American social movement organizing in Texas with new insights on the struggles of women” (Devon Peña, Professor of American Ethnic Studies, University of Washington). Historian Cynthia E. Orozco presents a comprehensive study of the League of United Lantin-American Citizens, with an in-depth analysis of its origins. Founded by Mexican American men in 1929, LULAC is often judged harshly according to Chicano nationalist standards of the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed presents LULAC in light of its early twentieth-century context. Orozco argues that perceptions of LULAC as an assimilationist, anti-Mexican, anti-working class organization belie the group's early activism. Supplemented by oral history, this sweeping study probes LULAC's predecessors, such as the Order Sons of America, blending historiography and cultural studies. Against a backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, World War I, gender discrimination, and racial segregation, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed recasts LULAC at the forefront of civil rights movements in America.

The Mexican and Mexican-American Laborers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, 1870-1930
The Mexican and Mexican-American Laborers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, 1870-1930

Author: Camilo Amado Martínez

Publisher:

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

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The primary purpose of this study was to present the little-discussed Mexican and Mexican-American labor contribution to the economic development of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas between 1870 and 1930. Special attention was given to their efforts in the citrus industry which became a major enterprise. Immigration laws, local and national Anglo attitudes and their effects on this numerous and apparently submissive people were discussed in length. Due credit has been given to the Burgos, Tamaulipas, residents who came to the Valley before, during, and after the Mexican Revolution in search of stability and better wages. In spite of the abuses they suffered some of them decided to stay. Their children (now Mexican-Americans), are still contributing to the citrus industry today, although not in the strenuous way their parents did. The various attempts which were made to develop the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas prior to the coming of the railroad in 1904 were all but futile. This situation, however, did not restrain Anglo businessmen from coming to the region in search of prosperity. They saw its potential if the available resources were properly tapped. The combination of inexpensive Valley land and cheap Mexican and Mexican-American labor attracted entrepreneurs to the area. They bought brushlands, had them cleared, and started irrigation projects in preparation for the crops they experimented with. Although not all Anglos prospered it was not because of the labor force they employed, but rather, to some extent, because of the poor transportation system available. They employed Mexicans and Mexican-Americans for all types of work. With the coming of modern transportation the Valley broke its economic isolation and in the process everyone benefited: Anglos from the use of cheap labor and Mexicans and Mexican-Americans from jobs which had previously been non-existent. The Valley owes a tremendous debt to those businessmen with foresight who encouraged the construction of a railroad line through the Valley and built irrigation systems, but the greatest debt for its success, as presented in this work, is owed to the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.

Farm Workers and the Churches
Farm Workers and the Churches

Author: Alan J. Watt

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2010-02-23

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 160344193X

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In the mid-1960s, the charismatic César Chávez led members of California's La Causa movement in boycotting the grape harvest, and melon pickers in South Texas called a strike against growers, contesting unfair labor and wage practices in both states. In Farm Workers and the Churches, Alan J. Watt shows how the religious and social contexts of the farm workers, their leaders, and the larger society helped or hindered these two pivotal actions. Watt explores the ways in which liberal expressions of Northern Protestantism, transplanted to California and combined with the pro-labor wing of the Catholic Church and the heritage of Mexican popular piety, provided a fertile field for the growth of broad support for Chávez and his organizing efforts. Eventually, La Causa was able to achieve collective bargaining victories, including a historic labor contract between California agribusiness and farm workers. The movement did not fare as well in Texas, where the combination of a locally weak union leadership, a more conservative Southern Protestant ethos, and the strikebreaking measures of the Texas Rangers all boded ill. However, a general Chicano/a movement ultimately took permanent root in the state, because of the workers' struggle. Watt offers a careful examination of the complex interactions among religious traditions, social heritage, and ethnicity as these factors affected the course and outcomes of these two pioneering campaigns undertaken by La Causa.

Decade of Betrayal
Decade of Betrayal

Author: Francisco E. Balderrama

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 2006-05-31

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 9780826339737

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Examines the social and economic effects on the migrant Mexican families subjected to forced relocation by the United States during the 1930s.

Mexicanos, Second Edition
Mexicanos, Second Edition

Author: Manuel G. Gonzales

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2009-08-20

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 0253007771

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Newly revised and updated, Mexicanos tells the rich and vibrant story of Mexicans in the United States. Emerging from the ruins of Aztec civilization and from centuries of Spanish contact with indigenous people, Mexican culture followed the Spanish colonial frontier northward and put its distinctive mark on what became the southwestern United States. Shaped by their Indian and Spanish ancestors, deeply influenced by Catholicism, and tempered by an often difficult existence, Mexicans continue to play an important role in U.S. society, even as the dominant Anglo culture strives to assimilate them. Thorough and balanced, Mexicanos makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of the Mexican population of the United States—a growing minority who are a vital presence in 21st-century America.

Farming across Borders
Farming across Borders

Author: Timothy P. Bowman

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2017-12-01

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 1623495695

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Farming across Borders uses agricultural history to connect the regional experiences of the American West, northern Mexico, western Canada, and the North American side of the Pacific Rim, now writ large into a broad history of the North American West. Case studies of commodity production and distribution, trans-border agricultural labor, and environmental change unite to reveal new perspectives on a historiography traditionally limited to a regional approach. Sterling Evans has curated nineteen essays to explore the contours of “big” agricultural history. Crops and commodities discussed include wheat, cattle, citrus, pecans, chiles, tomatoes, sugar beets, hops, henequen, and more. Toiling over such crops, of course, were the people of the North American West, and as such, the contributing authors investigate the role of agricultural labor, from braceros and Hutterites to women working in the sorghum fields and countless other groups in between. As Evans concludes, “society as a whole (no matter in what country) often ignores the role of agriculture in the past and the present.” Farming across Borders takes an important step toward cultivating awareness and understanding of the agricultural, economic, and environmental connections that loom over the North American West regardless of lines on a map. In the words of one essay, “we are tied together . . . in a hundred different ways.”

Mexicanos
Mexicanos

Author: Manuel G. Gonzales

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 9780253214003

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A lively, original interpretive history of Mexicans in the United States.

Blood Oranges
Blood Oranges

Author: Timothy P. Bowman

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2016-05-15

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 162349415X

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Blood Oranges traces the origins and legacy of racial differences between Anglo Americans and ethnic Mexicans (Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans) in the South Texas borderlands in the twentieth century. Author Tim Bowman uncovers a complex web of historical circumstances that caused ethnic Mexicans in the region to rank among the poorest, least educated, and unhealthiest demographic in the country. The key to this development, Bowman finds, was a “modern colonization movement,” a process that had its roots in the Mexican-American war of the nineteenth century but reached its culmination in the twentieth century. South Texas, in Bowman’s words, became an “internal economy just inside of the US-Mexico border.” Beginning in the twentieth century, Anglo Americans consciously transformed the region from that of a culturally “Mexican” space, with an economy based on cattle, into one dominated by commercial agriculture focused on citrus and winter vegetables. As Anglos gained political and economic control in the region, they also consolidated their power along racial lines with laws and customs not unlike the “Jim Crow” system of southern segregation. Bowman argues that the Mexican labor class was thus transformed into a marginalized racial caste, the legacy of which remained in place even as large-scale agribusiness cemented its hold on the regional economy later in the century. Blood Oranges stands to be a major contribution to the history of South Texas and borderland studies alike.