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Book Review
| Claiming Citizenship: Mexican Americans in Victoria, Texas. Number Three: Fronteras Series. By Anthony Quiroz. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. xxv + 166 pp. Illustrations, map, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $32.95.)
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Claiming Citizenship is a solid community study. But it is more than a local history. Quiroz uses the example of the history of Mexican Americans in Victoria, Texas, in the southern portion of the state to grapple with much more significant issues. Central to his investigation is what the history of Mexican Americans in this one community suggests about the politics of this ethnic group. Utilizing the concept of citizenship, much in vogue among some historians today, Quiroz proposes that Mexican Americans since World War II (the focus of his study) have primarily stressed the acquisition of full citizenship rights. Through their leadership and organizations, they have not questioned the integrity of the American capitalist system, but have challenged how that system has not been an inclusive one, particularly for racialized minorities such as Mexican Americans. Hence, their struggles have been oriented to reforming the system rather than rejecting it. I agree with Quiroz's interpretation. This is where most Mexican Americans have been historically and not where some Chicano historians might have them be. |
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But Quiroz's interpretation, which is substantiated by well-researched chapters on Mexican American involvement in Catholic community programs, educational issues, community self-help efforts, and electoral campaigns, is not a conservative one. Victoria's Mexican Americans are not apologists for the system. Quite the contrary, they challenge and oppose all forms of discrimination, segregation, and exclusion aimed at Mexican Americans and, on occasion, do so in coalition with African Americans. Here, Quiroz introduces the concept of "consensual opposition." By this he means that Mexican Americans in Victoria accept the parameters of the American system, but understand that they must struggle to achieve full citizenship. But in their challenge, they, in fact, are changing the system and revising the meaning of who is an American. Liberal reform politics has been the mainstay of Mexican Americans and, despite the skepticism of some Chicano historians who privilege a more radical but less consensual political tradition, it has allowed a significant degree of Mexican American agency and empowerment. |
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Claiming Citizenship is revisionist history in that it challenges the older but still influential Chicano historiography out of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which interprets Chicano history as one of radical oppositional movements and discounts the more dominant liberal reform ones. Yet such radicalism was not evident in Victoria, and elsewhere has only been part of the Mexican American story. Chicano history has to be presented in a more balanced way and Quiroz's important study adds to this dialogue. |
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| Mario T. García
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| University of California, Santa Barbara |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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