Southwestern Historical Quarterly

The scope of the coverage accorded in this book on the history of Mexican Americans in Texas is wide; the timeline extends from the Spanish colonial era to the present. In it, author Martha Menchaca explains how political and social currents within the Lone Star State determined the development of Mexican American citizenship. She elaborates: “Specifically, I wanted to understand how Mexican Americans challenged segregation and how their political rights as citizens evolved over time” (p. 5).

The Mexican American Experience in Texas begins by chronicling how the Anglo American government after the Texas Revolution limited opportunities for ethnic Mexicans, considering them unworthy of full citizenship because of their racial makeup. But the monograph also emphasizes the many initiatives and campaigns that Mexican Americans undertook to achieve economic, political, and social success, and ultimately equality.

The study is an exhaustive work focusing on almost every aspect of political life affecting Mexican Americans in Texas. It broadens the vast scholarship that defines the field of Tejano history while expanding upon topics yet to be fully researched. Menchaca brings to light the many laws enacted by the U.S. Congress and the Texas legislature, as well as court decisions intended to control Tejanos. Much is added to such subjects as segregation and desegregation. Her discussion of the 1930 Salvatierra case, for instance, augments what the published literature already says about that pivotal Del Rio lawsuit. The author uncovers the aims of the Catholic Church to institutionalize its own version of school segregation. The chapters on the post-1945 era, which include much about the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, unearth key facts and details heretofore unstudied or not known at all. Closing the book is an assessment of the current state of the Mexican American population, showing its important successes in employment, education, and politics. But, the author cautions, continued upward mobility remains obstructed by racist beliefs about Latinos.

The Mexican American Experience in Texas completes its look at the Texas-Mexican narrative by focusing directly on the subject of politics and how the dominant society used legal mechanisms and approaches to obstruct Mexican American progress. To buttress her argument, Menchaca relies upon the most recent secondary sources, on archival documents, and, more impressively, on an array of official government records. [End Page 471]

The studies on just about every aspect of Tejano history have become numerous, but the author’s success in achieving her purpose—recording institutional obstacles to Tejano upward mobility and the efforts launched by Tejanos to overcome those barriers—serves to advance the extant scholarship. Masterfully organized and artfully written, the book sets a standard for all students of the Mexican American experience in Texas to read.