Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness through Racial Violence by Cynthia Skove Nevels (review)

did not receive the same kind of assistance as national lines and because it was foreign owned, it was taxed at a higher rate. Meanwhile, the railroad and government engaged in constant legal wrangling over taxes and claims for reparations following the Mexican Revolution (1910–1919) and the Cristero Rebellion (1926–1929). Labor relations presented another major point of contention. Hoping to avoid the tax on foreign corporations, the company moved its headquarters to Empalme, near Guaymas, and set up a segregated company town. It had an American section with tennis courts and other amenities, and a Mexican part with inferior services. The ploy never worked. Variously plagued by revolutionary nationalism, other civil unrest, the Great Depression, and probably fearing nationalization after 1937, the management of the SP de Mex allowed their rolling stock and other physical assets to go into decline. The Mexican government finally bought the run-down line in 1951. Cutting through rugged mountains and spanning plunging gorges, Lewis demonstrates that the SP de Mex was a feat of engineering but a failure as a business because of a culture clash between U.S. executives who viewed it as an extension of empire, and Mexican governments which hoped it would help modernize and develop their country but still saw it as symbolic of U.S. power penetrating into Mexico. Texas State University–San Marcos Paul Hart Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness through Racial Violence. By Cynthia Skove Nevels. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. Pp. 204. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-1-58544-589-9. $24.95, cloth.) In Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness through Racial Violence, Cynthia Skove Nevels has produced a careful study of the political, racial, and ethnic dynamics of Brazos County, Texas, during the decades of the late nineteenth century. Although the focus of the book is on three lynching episodes that occurred in the county around the turn of the century, Nevels gives a significant amount of attention to the development of Brazos County in the decades following the Civil War. Much of the book’s value rests in the well-researched description Nevels provides of a society rising on the southern frontier during the tumultuous decades between the Civil War and the turn of the century. Nevels adeptly describes the growing complexities of the Brazos County social order, beginning with the first white settlers who established plantation slavery in the region before the Civil War. From there she traces the upheaval in the county’s political, economic, and racial relations during the decades following emancipation and war, and she describes new conflicts that arose in the 1890s with the rise of Populism, the arrival of new European immigrant groups, and the intensifying racial discord that characterized much of the South during the decades surrounding the turn of the century. For a portrait of late-nineteenth-century Brazos County, a society characterized by instability and violence, this book delivers. More problematic is Nevels’s treatment of three lynching episodes in the county as an illustration of the way in which new European immigrants went 2009 Book Reviews 337 *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 337 about “claiming whiteness” in American society. The title of the book, Lynching to Belong, hints at immigrant agency in the lynchings. One imagines immigrants actively participating in racial violence in order to ally themselves with white Americans and overcome their status as outsiders in their adopted home. Indeed, Nevels emphasizes in her introduction that “one of the fastest ways to establish whiteness was through violent racial oppression, a method that a number of immigrants did not shun” (p. 8). While immigrant involvement is characteristic of each episode that Nevels recounts in the book, however, her narrative reveals that immigrant involvement in the Brazos County lynchings was generally passive rather than active. In two of the cases the immigrants that were involved, an Italian woman and two Bohemian men, were alleged victims of black violence. She also briefly considers an incident in which Irish railway workers were murdered by a disgruntled white coworker. In another case, an Irish immigrant was a witness who gave testimony against a black defendant. Nevels also gives attention to...