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  • Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature
  • Teresa Acosta
Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature. By John Morán González. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Pp. 276. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780292719781, $50.00 Cloth.)

In his very fine book, John Morán González presents an analysis of the Texas Mexican writers who created a literature in the 1930s that cast their people as genuine actors in the state's history. He likewise asserts that in doing so they exposed the narrow vision of Texas created by such Anglo-Texan writers as folklorist J. Frank Dobie and historian Walter Prescott Webb. The author employs unique illustrations and epigraphs to complement his account.

González examines the work of María Elena Zamora O'Shea, Américo Paredes, Jovita González, and numerous LULAC News writers within the context of the 1936 Texas Centennial. He points out that Zamora O'Shea turned to the vast storehouse of her grandfather's records, her maternal grandmother's oral histories, and her own research to write El Mesquite, an account of Texas history that had been long silenced in numerous Anglo-Texan versions of the early days of the land that became Texas. Indeed, the mesquite tree of her novella serves as an "organic marker" for the continuous presence of Tejanos in the formation of the state.

González devotes a chapter to the work of Américo Paredes, primariy focusing on his early writing, including the novel George Washington Gómez, the play Tres facesdel pocho, and the poem "Alma Pocha." In dissecting these works, González examines their cultural and political strengths in the formation of Tejano identity and resilience. However, he also discusses the limits of Paredes's anti-colonial patriarchal vision as the means to forge a modern Tejano community.

The author pays much needed attention to LULAC News commentators of the era. He cites Adolph A. Garza's two-part article "Citizenship" as an example of how LULAC deployed journalism to uphold the basic rights of Texas Mexicans. He offers George Cisneros's editorial "LULAC and Education" and the poems of LULAC Poet Laureate Margil López to illustrate the range of LULAC voices actively engaging the Tejano community amid the racism inherent in the "Texanizing Texans" discourse of the one-hundredth anniversary of Texas independence.

In "Mujeres Fronterizas," González examines how LULAC News writers Alice Dickerson Montemayor and Adela Sloss used the pages of LULAC News to denounce gender discrimination within LULAC and the Mexican community in Texas. Turning to Jovita González, the author recounts her singular contributions to Tejano folklore, history, and narrative. He emphasizes the importance of Caballero, the novel she and Margaret Eimer wrote in the late 1930s. The authors, González states, fashioned a book that sought to transform the violent nature of Tejano-Anglo history, using the relationships that developed between the leading characters as a harbinger of the brown-white collaboration that might still create a better Texas.

Border Renaissance is a meticulous investigation of the Mexican-American literature that arose at the moment when the state, firmly in the hands of an Anglo-Texan power base, prepared to begin its second century of independence on the premise that Texas Mexicans would never be Texan enough to warrant equality. [End Page 107]

One of the most important lessons to take from González's book is that Tejano folklorists, journalists, novelists, and poets led in the effort to forge a more genuine version of Texas history during the Centennial and served as precursors to the Chicano movement writers who arose three decades later.

Teresa Acosta
University of Texas at Austin
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