| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans. By Martha Menchaca. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. xiv, 375 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-292-75253-9. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-292-75254-7.)
In Recovering History, Constructing Race, the historical anthropologist Martha Menchaca offers a metahistory for Mexican Americans. This fine study seeks to understand how, and why, ethnic Mexicans in the United States were racialized. In so doing Menchaca sheds light on the place of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in the nation's racial order.	1
In order to show the process of racialization, Menchaca probes the construction of race in Spain, Mexico, and the United States from 1570 to 1898. In addition, an epilogue examines the place of ethnic Mexicans in present-day America. Throughout the study Menchaca uses the first-person voice "because," as she argues, "this is my history. A positioned history" (p. 10). Thus Menchaca begins with the premise that Mexican Americans must understand their indigenous, white, and African background, a notion that derives from her own family's black roots—a past that was recently discovered after years of denial. This disclosure, however, does not mean that the book is solely anecdotal; rather, it is deeply rooted in primary sources from a multitude of archives and in secondary literature from a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, and history.	. . .

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