The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (review)

In his examination of the complex class and race relationships that existed among Mexicans, African Americans, and Anglo Americans in Texas in the early twentieth century, Neil Foley reveals the inadequacy of the black/white model for understanding the southwestern United States. The area of central Texas that he focuses on differed from other parts of the South both in its multiracial makeup and in the organization of cotton production. Its combination of cultural elements drawn from the South, West, and Mexico presents a unique case study. Foley analyzes the fluidity of racial categories and shows how patterns of resistance to exploitation by white, black, and Mexican farm workers were shaped by the specific set of labor relations that existed in the region. His work uncovers the complicated nature of race and class subordination and their connection to issues of labor control.

Foley begins with a discussion of Anglo American racial ideologies in the nineteenth century that defined Mexicans as lazy, unambitious, shiftless, and inferior. At the founding of the Republic of Texas, Mexicans were classed with Indians and African Americans as “nonwhite” people who were unworthy of full citizenship. After the United States annexed Texas and gained more territory in 1848 through its war with Mexico, many white Americans expressed concern about the incorporation of large numbers of Mexicans into the nation. At that time and during debates over immigration in the twentieth century, however, employers who relied on the steady supply of cheap labor from south of the border argued that the influx of Mexicans was necessary for the economic wellbeing of the region and posed no threat to white civilization. Plantation and ranch owners’ need for workers sometimes led them to compromise white racial ideologies by extolling the virtues of Mexican labor. Mexicans, they argued, made better and more reliable laborers than white or black people.

In reality, employers preferred Mexican workers because they were cheaper and more easily exploited. As noncitizens with few legal rights, often in flight from poverty and political turmoil in their home country, Mexican immigrants were likely to accept whatever wages and conditions they were offered. Between 1900 and 1930, white and black tenants and sharecroppers on Texas cotton plantations faced increasing competition from Mexicans who were hired as sharecroppers and day laborers. At the same time, rising land values, the high cost of credit, and the low price of cotton forced many white landowners into tenancy, with some falling even further down the agricultural ladder into sharecropping. The growth of a class of poor white people who lived in conditions of poverty more commonly associated with “nonwhite” groups challenged Anglo American racial assumptions. To explain the anomaly, wealthier white people developed theories that suggested genetic traits were responsible. Landless white folk were stigmatized as inherently lazy, ignorant, and inefficient in much the same way that Mexicans and African Americans were defined as racially inferior. Suggesting that racism has more to do with economic systems than with skin color or other physical characteristics, Foley states that as white people slipped from property ownership to the “racially marked status of sharecroppers, they came perilously close to becoming racially marked themselves” (p. 39).

The impoverishment of white farm workers drew many of them to the Socialist Party, which gained increasing support in the South between 1900 and 1917. In 1911 Tom Hickey and other Texas Socialists organized the Renters’ Union of America (later renamed the Land League), attempting to pull poor white people away from the Democratic Party by emphasizing class differences. Foley notes that despite Hickey’s militant rhetoric, the Socialist leader was “not much different” from the Democrats on the issue of race (p. 94). Hickey could see no point in organizing disfranchised African Americans, especially since doing so would make the party vulnerable to charges of seeking racial equality. He viewed Mexicans as inferior, docile “peons” who were unlikely to become involved in efforts to...