Review: Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights

Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights by Gabriela Gonzalez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an excellent look at the lives and work of transborder activists from 1900 to 1950. While the United States and Mexico modernized in areas like industrialization, urbanization, and technology, Euro-Americans prospered as racial and ethnic groups were marginalized. Mexican-Americans suffered abuse and discrimination across racial, gender, and class lines. Many activists in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico fought for equal rights through many avenues such as print media, non-profit organizations, and community services. Gonzalez spotlights many Mexican-American activists and organizations in detail including the Idar family, the Magonista movement, Emily Tenayuca, Latin American PTA organizations, and LULAC. Drawing on oral histories, diaries, letters, and newspapers of the time, Gonzalez paints a picture of the rebuilding of La Raza and gente decente, the people of the Mexican-American community and the oppressed middle-class of south Texas.

I thought this was a fascinating look at the history of Hispanic and Chicano/a people of the Texas borderlands.

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