Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature by John Morán González (review)

It has been argued that the United States' efforts to deal with the topic of immigration have long been stymied, in part, by a persistent, predictable tendency towards historical amnesia. Literary scholar Ali Behdad, for example, in his book A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States, argues that our efforts to understand ourselves and represent ourselves as a nation of immigrants has been marked by long periods of relative apathy towards immigration punctuated by inflammatory moments of paranoia and anti-immigrant xenophobia. For Behdad, our collective amnesia is historical in the sense that we ignore and forget our overt hostility towards the reality of immigration while simultaneously constructing the rhetorical flights of fancy that allow us to see ourselves as a flourishing patchwork of nations and cultures. By contrast Jon Stewart, in a brilliant March 17, 2010 sketch on the Texas Board of Curriculum's review process, would likely suggest that our historical amnesia runs much, much deeper. Stewart highlights the undercurrent of historical ignorance presiding over the Board's committee members by paring down their argument against the inclusion of Oscar Romero in history textbooks to its essence: "We shouldn't teach people this because no one knows it." Although Romero remains an important figure in Latin America and beyond for his efforts to resist right-wing oppression, he is summarily dismissed by the Texas Board of Curriculum for not being well known enough. What Behdad and Stewart ultimately reveal is that our categorical resistance to acknowledging certain historical events and figures is decidedly ahistorical. So much so, that works of counter or revisionist history remain crucial texts in the project of reshaping our national consciousness along more egalitarian and less Euro-centric lines.

It is in this vein that I would like to acknowledge the importance and impact of John Morán González's book Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature. González's book takes as its point of departure, the 1936 Texas Centennial celebration, an event that he suggests, led to an unexpected but fervent burst of literary activity by Texas-Mexicans who saw themselves as summarily ignored from the imagined Texas community constructed around the centenary. González goes further to argue that the Centennial, in fact, offered Texas-Mexicans an opportunity to highlight the profound racism of 19th and early 20th century Texas and, in offering their flurry of literary critiques and contestations, gave birth to the social identity we have come to recognize as Mexican-American. González charts the shift from Texas-born Mexican self-designations as puros mexicanos to "Mexican Americans" and suggests that it is a development intimately tied to the literary activities of writers wholly engaged in the task of claiming and reclaiming a space of belonging in a Texas that had made clear its hostility towards all people of Mexican descent. González offers the term "Centennial discourses" to characterize Texas' aggressive construction of Mexican difference and suggests that literary production by Texas-Mexicans become a key site of struggle and contestation in the face of persistent racist and xenophobic Centennial discourses.

González develops his argument over the course of five chapters and an introduction. The introduction, which focuses on the active, conscientious construction of the Centenary discourse is a crucial piece of historical revisionism, one that clearly lays out the long history of denigration of Mexicans as other and, more importantly perhaps, charts in concrete ways the roots of present-day social iniquities. In the five principle chapters, González surveys the varied terrain of literary and rhetorical strategies that Texas-Mexicans employed to contest their persistent racialization by Anglo-Texan society. Part of the strength and usefulness of González's book is that it ranges eloquently from discussions of important well known organizations like LULAC and canonical authors like Américo Paredes...