At Loose Ends: Twentieth-Century Latinos in Current United States History Textbooks

Joseph A. Rodríguez and Vicki L. Ruiz

The setting: a graduate seminar in United States history where two students are debating the Eisenhower years. One student, citing rising income and consumer spending, argues that the Eisenhower era was a period of peace and prosperity, fullemployment, and suburban growth. The opposing student notes the continuation of racial and gender discrimination, ongoing poverty, and the perils ofMcCarthyism. At one point the professor mentions that in 1954 the Immigration and Naturalization Service had deported over a million Mexicans. This fact stuns the students, provoking them to ask all sorts of questions about Operation Wetback.	1
Faced with repeated experiences such as this, we found ourselves wondering what undergraduates are being told (or not told) in their textbooks about modern United States Latino history. So we have revisited eight national surveys, a sample drawn from the most popular and well-regarded recent texts. In doing so, our intent is not to heap praise upon the conscientious and shame upon the negligent, but to highlight certain conceptual categories useful for a comparative analysis of twentieth-century Latinos, an increasingly diverse and important segment of the American population.	2
While one can readily bemoan the coverage of Latinos in current survey texts, it is important to remember that these overviews represent substantial improvements over the textbooks on the market just fifteen years ago. In 1985, for example, the sixth edition of the widely used volume The National Experience covered all recent Latino history in only a few paragraphs. The authors asserted baldly that Mexican Americans did not "act as a conscious minority" until after World War II and observed of Puerto Ricans, "Unlike other Hispanics, they were American citizens." In a comment that now seems quaint at best, they continued, "The brilliant musical show West Side Story (1957), adapting the Romeo and Juliet theme to 'rumbles' between Puerto Rican and white street gangs, won a sympathetic hearing for problems in the larger community." Such tokenism was typical for surveys before 1985, as was the brevity. The best-selling text America: A Narrative History (1984) contained only three paragraphs on Latinos out of 1,343 pages.1	3
From such a low starting point, some improvement was almost inevitable, and it is not hard to explain some of the recent halting advancements in both the quality and the quantity of coverage. Since 1985, earlier specialized literature has been rediscovered and granted more respect, and challenging new monographs have appeared at an accelerating rate, touching every era of North American history for half a millennium. Nevertheless, one observation struck us forcibly almost from the start. While United States survey writers have infused their narratives with stories and actors from African American and women's history, Latinos are still too frequently reduced to numbers, faceless statistics who wander in and out of the text—nameless lost souls, seemingly at loose ends. Individual stories remain untold in these baseline narratives, especially with regard to women's aspirations and attainments.2	4
The legacy of these voiceless and nameless Spanish-speaking peoples is a long one, and their experiences in North America before 1900 are important and worthy of separate discussion. So rather than offering a smattering of ideas across five hundred years, we have chosen to write from our vantage point as twentieth-century United States historians. We recognize that writers of survey texts have glanced over the expanding secondary literature, but they cannot always be expected to tease out (or squeeze in) the nuances in argument and context that absorb scholars in Latino history. As specialists who also write and teach about American history more generally, our job here is to offer a set of conceptual threads for understanding the historical experiences of Latinos within a United States history survey course. The four threads examined briefly below, chosen from many, involve racial/ethnic identification, immigration/migration issues, labor/class matters, and cultural concerns.	. . .