Claiming Citizenship: Mexican Americans in Victoria, Texas

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Carlos Solís, interview with the author, May 1, 1996. 2. Ignacio García makes a similar point when he writes that Mexican American activists in the early 1960s had become “Americans who happened to be mexicanos.” Ignacio García, Viva Kennedy: Mexican Americans in Search of Camelot, 8. Also see Benjamin Johnson, Revolution in Texas, who traces this process of “Americanization” back to the 1910s. 3. This argument is not completely new. Ignacio García finds an accommodationist tone to post–World War II Mexican American activism in “Backwards from Aztlán: Politics in the Age of Hispanics,” in Roberto M. De Anda, ed. Chicanas and Chicanos in Contemporary Society, 194. This work, however, digs more deeply into such a worldview at the local level and argues that it was less “accommodationist” than current literature allows. 4. I take the phrase from Peter N. Carroll’s book about the United States in the 1970s, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s. In similar ways, we both argue that while on the surface it may appear that Victoria’s Mexican Americans, or Americans in general in the 1970s, were passive, docile, and inactive, a deeper look shows how activists were working in new ways to organize resistance to the status quo. Carroll’s and my arguments both stress the fact that this type of seemingly quiet, almost nonexistent activism was actually quite important with perhaps broader, long-range implications for policy and politics than the visible, overt activism of the 1960s. 5. In my attempts to redirect scholarly lines of inquiry, however, I do not mean to argue that Victoria was devoid of racism. Indeed, the case is made consistently throughout the work that Victoria has historically been a hostile environment for Mexican Americans; a situation they never wished to tolerate. The difference in Victoria was that the conflict that resulted from Mexican American resistance to racism took subtler forms. Mexican American Victorians saw cooperation as a usable alternative for contesting definitions of citizenship and challenging racist norms. 6. Armando Navarro, The Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control. 7. Ibid., 21. 8. Alex Saragoza, “Recent Chicano Historiography.” 129 9. See for example, Mario T. García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930 –1960, and Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880 –1920. 10. See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; Stefano Luconi, From Paesani to White Ethnics. For a discussion of how whiteness became a touchstone of citizenship in various forms in the nineteenth century see Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. See also David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, for an examination of the ways in which the concept of whiteness was embraced and employed by the American working class to define itself and protect its threatened social status. Neil Foley’s The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, examines the ways in which Texans created gradations of whiteness. Greater levels of whiteness allowed increased levels of access to economic success and social acceptance. My work is neither concerned with thoroughly theorizing whiteness nor demonstrating whether or not Mexican Americans sought to be de- fined in such terms. Rather, I focus on the ways in which Mexican Americans sought to negotiate fundamental assumptions about citizenship, which, whether publicly articulated or not, were based on notions of whiteness. 11. Ignacio García, Viva Kennedy, 6. 12. This is a theme echoed in ibid., 17. Here García argues that political participation in the early 1960s became the new avenue for political expression. Chapter 1 1. Robert Shook, Reflections of Old Victoria, ix. 2. Ana Carolina Castillo Crimm, “Success in Adversity: The Mexican Americans of Victoria County, Texas, 1800–1880,” 90. David Urbano, “The Saga of a Revolutionary Family: The Martín de León Family of Texas,” 1–19. 3. Crimm, “Success in Adversity,” 102. Also see Booth Mooney, 75 Years in Victoria , 11. 4. Urbano argues that there were forty-seven families in Guadalupe Victoria. See Urbano, “Saga of a Revolutionary Family,” 19. 5. Urbano, “Saga of a Revolutionary Family,” 33. 6. John J. Linn, Reminiscences of 50 Years in Texas, 22. 7. Urbano, “Saga of a Revolutionary Family,” 45. 8. Linn, Reminiscences, 36–41. Martín de León, founder of Guadalupe Victoria, succumbed in 1833 to...