Book Review

Ignacio M. García's Viva Kennedy offers a vivid glimpse into one of the most interesting, and yet least understood, periods of Mexican American political history. The third volume of a series of books focusing on ethnic politics in the Southwest, Viva Kennedy explores Mexican American activism in electoral politics in the crucial period between the first large-scale Mexican American political mobilizations after World War II and the emergence of the Chicano movement in the mid-1960s.

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The main contours of this story have been told before, but García breaks new ground by analyzing the establishment and political significance of hundreds of "Viva Kennedy" clubs that emerged among Mexican American and other Latino Democrats during the 1960 presidential campaign. The author is particularly effective in detailing the issues politically engaged Mexican Americans believed to be at stake in the 1960 campaign. As a result of both their participation in the war effort and the slowly changing civil rights atmosphere of the 1950s, Mexican Americans had tasted some limited successes in access to employment, education (particularly through the benefits of the G.I. Bill), and the election of a few government officials at the state and local levels. Moreover, with the establishment of new, aggressive Mexican American advocacy organizations in the Southwest between 1947 and 1959, community activists symbolically announced that Mexican Americans would henceforth be a political force with which to reckon.

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