| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province. By Daniel D. Arreola. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. xiii + 272 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00, cloth; $22.95, paper.)

Arreola's text lies within a sophisticated theoretical approach. It lies within the crossroads of the Braudel French Annales School of historical cultural geography linked to Clifford Geertz's theory of interpreting culture as "thick description," and using the central trope of "Borderlands" (p. 30). With this theory in hand, Arreola, a cultural geographer, seeks to study the South Texas tip of the "Mexican American Borderlands." For Arreola "Borderlands" is not a metaphor for hybridity, nor is it a postmodern concept of palimpsest. Instead, it is a cultural geographical system of signification represented with the signifiers of "space, place, and landscape" that runs from California to Texas, especially where he focuses his study: South Texas, which extends from the Nueces River to the Rio Grande River and on to the Gulf of Mexico, with San Antonio and Laredo being the principal cities of this region. Arreola argues that this area has always been a "region [that] remains an enigma in the popular imagination," but he will establish that Mexican South Texas "is a unique Mexican American cultural province, similar to but unlike [other] Mexican American regional cultures in [the] other borderland areas" (pp. 2–7). In short, this is a study of memory based on place, culture, and ethnic desires.

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