Book Review

The racial status and group position of Latinos in the racial hierarchy of the United States has increasingly become a vexing issue for historians and social scientists alike. Historically, the racial status of the largest Latino group—Mexican Americans—has been subject to the vagaries and vicissitudes of the racial formation process in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century.	1
It is the historically contingent nature of the racialization of the Mexicans—as both a white and a nonwhite population—that is the central issue explored by Neil Foley in his important book The White Scourge. In so doing, Foley has turned the historical lens to central Texas, a place where Mexicans, blacks, and poor whites struggled for group position within the shifting racial hierarchy and evolving class structure. Focusing attention on the period spanning the Civil War to the collapse of the tenant-farming system in the early 1940s, Foley argues that "The cotton culture of central Texas represents a special case for the study of class formation and white racial ideology precisely because it brings together two sets of race and class relations—blacks and whites in the South, and Anglos in the Southwest."	2
While Foley does not deny the cultural or discursive aspects of this racialization process, he charts the fracturing and realignment of racial divisions in central Texas by carefully attending to the changing nature of the political economy of the region. Like David Montejano in Anglos and Mexicans in the Making ofTexas, 1836-1986 (1987) before him, Foley explores the racialization of Mexicans through a meticulous analysis of the complex land-tenure arrangements and class relations in Texas cotton culture and their impact on the way that racial lines were drawn and redrawn. As in all questions of identity formation, time, place, and context are crucial, and Foley has done an impressive job of excavating the historical record to survey the geography of race and class relations in "the triracial borderlands of central Texas." Much to his credit, Foley's ambitious narrative also addresses other important historical questions, such as the demise of agrarian whiteness, the racialized nature of proletarianization, labor relations and interracial unionism, and Mexican immigration, as well as the role of gender in central Texas's transformation from an agrarian society into one dominated by corporate agribusiness.	3
But it is the way in which "Mexicans walked the color line" in central Texas that is the main focus of The White Scourge and the central issue that scholars concerned with race making and the racialization process will welcome. According to Foley, the "ethnoracial" identity of Mexicans was a contested matter "shaped as much by region as by class, skin color, language, religion, and culture." In exploring the "fringes of whiteness"—where Germans, Irish, and, later, "Okies" jostled with Mexicans in central Texas for group position within an evolving racial and class system—it is the shifting locations and fortunes within the agrarian tenant-farming system that provide the structural context for the construction of whiteness. Central to that process was the way in which poor whites lost their claims to whiteness. That same process, Foley argues, ushered in a reversal of fortunes for some Mexicans who momentarily climbed up the "agricultural ladder"—taking the place of white tenants on farms—and experienced a renewed claim and investment in whiteness.	. . .