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Book Review
| LULAC, Mexican Americans, and National Policy. By Craig A. Kaplowitz. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. x + 254 pp. Notes, index. $35.00.)
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Craig A. Kaplowitz's incisive study of LULAC during the modern Civil Rights era captures a significant moment in the organization's history when they made claims for Mexican Americans derived from their disadvantaged position in American society. This position was based on long standing and continuing cultural, particularly language-based discrimination. This moment in history, the author further argues, served as a watershed period for the American political system, which at the time was fully immersed in the Rights Revolution. LULAC made considerable demands of the federal government such as calling for the expansion of the white/black binary to encompass the particular needs of Mexican Americans as an ethnic minority group. Various presidents on both sides of the aisle proved receptive to the organization's anti-racialization civil rights agenda. The government was more willing to deal with a group able to work within the established political system than with Chicano movement activists who, like advocates of black power, challenged mainstream society and its institutions using a militant tone perceived as threatening by defenders of the status quo. |
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