Connecting to Community: San Antonio's West Side

In Mexican Americans with Moxie Frank P. Barajas argues that Chicanas and Chicanos of the 1960s and 1970s expressed politics distinct from the Mexican American generation that came of age in the decades prior. Barajas focuses on the citrus communities of Fillmore and Santa Paula and the more economically diversified and populated rurban municipalities of Oxnard, Simi Valley, and Ventura, illustrating Ventura County's relationship to Los Angeles and El Movimiento's ties to suburbanization, freeway construction, and the rise of a high-tech and defense-industry corridor. Mexican Americans with Moxie devotes particular attention to cross-cultural dynamics that transcended space and generation. The residents of Ventura County became involved with national issues such as the Vietnam War, school desegregation, labor, and electoral politics. The actions of Black students at the community colleges of Moorpark and Ventura and other area universities inspired Mexican American youth of Ventura County to assess their own activism. Mexican Americans with Moxie situates the Chicana-Chicano movement within the nation's struggle to achieve social justice. From this history, readers will gain a new appreciation for how leadership development spans generations and contributes to the identity formation of communities.

The contributions and influences of Mexican Americans in Texas history have been many and significant. Only in recent decades, however, have historians adequately told this story. The enormous strides made in the study of Mexican-origin people in Texas are reflected in this important new book of essays. In May 1991 the Texas State Historical Association cosponsored a conference, "Mexican Americans in Texas History," which brought together some six hundred participants, including nearly one hundred leading scholars in the field of Mexican American Studies. In the words of the editors' introduction, this highly successful conference "confirmed and celebrated the existence of a substantial body of literature in Mexican American history." It showed that "Mexican American history was on its way to assuming its rightful place of importance." This groundbreaking volume, which contains eleven essays from that pivotal conference, corrects and amplifies the historical record. Mexican Americans in Texas History will be of great interest to students, scholars, teachers, and general readers, and it is well adapted to classroom use. Selected essays include: * Old Roads, New Horizons: Texas History and the New World Order, by David Montejano * Occupied Texas: Bexar and Goliad, 1835-1836, by Paul Lack * Mexicanos in Texas During the Civil War, by Miguel González Quiroga * Union, Paz y Trabajo: Laredo's Mexican Mutual Aid Societies in the 1890s, by Roberto R. Calderón * Mutualist and Mexicanist Expressions of a Mexican Political Culture in Texas, by Emilio Zamora * The Tejano Revolt of 1915, by Rodolfo Rocha * Agents of Americanization: The Houston Settlement Association and the Mexican Community, 1900-1950, by María Cristina García * Trini Gamez and the Texas Farm Workers: Toil and Trouble on the Texas Plains, by Yolanda García Romero * Carlos E. Castañeda: The Historian and the Critics" by Félix D. Almaráz * The Borderlands of Culture: Americo Paredes's George Washington Gomez, by Ramón Saldívar * Estudios Tejanos: A List of Historical Literature on Mexican Americans in Texas, by Arnoldo de Leon * Selected Bibliography on Mexican American, Tejana, and Tejano History, by Cynthia Orozco

Inspired by a 1968 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights six-day hearing in San Antonio that introduced the Mexican American people to the rest of the nation, this book is an examination of the social change of Mexican Americans of Texas over the past half century. The San Antonio hearing included 1,502 pages of testimony, given by more than seventy witnesses, which became the baseline twenty experts used to launch their research on Mexican American civil rights issues during the following fifty years. These experts explored the changes in demographics and policies with regard to immigration, voting rights, education, employment, economic security, housing, health, and criminal justice. While there are a number of anecdotal historical accounts of Mexican Americans in Texas, this book adds an evidence-based examination of racial and ethnic inequalities and changes over the past half century. The contributors trace the litigation on behalf of Latinos and other minorities in state and federal courts and the legislative changes that followed, offering public policy recommendations for the future. The fact that this study is grounded in Texas is significant, as it was the birthplace of a majority of Chicano civil rights efforts and is at the heart of Mexican American growth and talent, producing the first Mexican American in Congress, the first Mexican American federal judge, and the first Mexican American candidate for president. As the largest ethnic group in the state, Latinos will continue to play a major role in the future of Texas.

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers' Day, when migrant laborers-Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth-united in resistance on the first "Day Without Immigrants." As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of "America First" rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights. 2018 Winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award

Founded by Mexican American men in 1929, the League of United Latin-American Citizens (LULAC) has usually been judged according to Chicano nationalist standards of the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including the personal papers of Alonso S. Perales and Adela Sloss-Vento, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed presents the history of LULAC in a new light, restoring its early twentieth-century context. Cynthia Orozco also provides evidence that perceptions of LULAC as a petite bourgeoisie, assimilationist, conservative, anti-Mexican, anti-working class organization belie the realities of 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.

Like its ground-breaking predecessor, the first general survey of Tejanos, this completely up-to-date revision is a concise political, cultural, and social history of Mexican Americans in Texas from the Spanish colonial era to the present. Professor De Len is careful to portray Tejanos as active subjects, not merely objects in the ongoing Texas story. Complemented by a stunning photographic essay, a helpful glossary, and meticulously annotated, this work continues to be ideal reading for anyone wanting to learn about the most influential ethnic group in Texas.

A historical overview of Mexican Americans' social and economic experiences in Texas For hundreds of years, Mexican Americans in Texas have fought against political oppression and exclusion--in courtrooms, in schools, at the ballot box, and beyond. Through a detailed exploration of this long battle for equality, this book illuminates critical moments of both struggle and triumph in the Mexican American experience. Martha Menchaca begins with the Spanish settlement of Texas, exploring how Mexican Americans' racial heritage limited their incorporation into society after the territory's annexation. She then illustrates their political struggles in the nineteenth century as they tried to assert their legal rights of citizenship and retain possession of their land, and goes on to explore their fight, in the twentieth century, against educational segregation, jury exclusion, and housing covenants. It was only in 1967, she shows, that the collective pressure placed on the state government by Mexican American and African American activists led to the beginning of desegregation. Menchaca concludes with a look at the crucial roles that Mexican Americans have played in national politics, education, philanthropy, and culture, while acknowledging the important work remaining to be done in the struggle for equality.

After World War II, Mexican American veterans returned home to lead the civil rights struggles of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Many of their stories have been recorded by the Voces Oral History Project (formerly the U.S. Latino & Latina World War II Oral History Project), founded and directed by Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism. In this volume, she draws upon the vast resources of the Voces Project, as well as archives in other parts of the country, to tell the stories of three little-known advancements in Mexican American civil rights. The first two stories recount local civil rights efforts that typified the grassroots activism of Mexican Americans across the Southwest. One records the successful effort led by parents to integrate the Alpine, Texas, public schools in 1969--fifteen years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate schools were inherently unconstitutional. The second describes how El Paso's first Mexican American mayor, Raymond Telles, quietly challenged institutionalized racism to integrate the city's police and fire departments, thus opening civil service employment to Mexican Americans. The final account provides the first history of the early days of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and its founder Pete Tijerina Jr. from MALDEF's incorporation in San Antonio in 1968 until its move to San Francisco in 1972.

Beginning with the early 1800s and extending to the modern era, Rosales collects illuminating documents that shed light on the Mexican-American quest for life, liberty, and justice. Documents include petitions, correspondence, government reports, political proclamations, newspaper items, congressional testimony, memoirs, and even international treaties.