Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II (review)

In this important study, social historian Emilio Zamora builds on his excellent first book to examine the Mexican-American labor and civil rights struggle in the era of the Second World War and beyond. A broad synthetic treatment, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas is a strong example of clear thinking, clean writing, and nuanced analysis. As the author himself underscores, given the importance of this period for the history of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the United States, it is remarkable how little research has been done on the period between the end of the Great Depression and the early 1960s. Zamora's exhaustively researched and dense analysis of developments in Texas should help fill this gap.

Zamora pays close attention to the major competing interests in the era and provides a compelling account of how the forces of segregation and white supremacy in Texas continued to mount a fierce defense of the racial status quo in the face of the rising countervailing national and international forces unleashed by the war against fascism. Not content to focus simply or exclusively on Mexican-American workers and activists, Zamora analyses how Texas became a focal point in the national Mexican-American civil rights struggle and demonstrates the ways that struggle sometimes overlapped and sometimes competed with parallel campaigns in the African-American community. Indeed, below the surface of Zamora's able narrative, one can almost hear the grinding of the tectonic plates of social change and resistance as representatives of the extant segregationist regime (including many elements of the Texas state government) attempted to outflank and outmaneuver political actors as diverse as the Mexican consuls and other Mexican officials, members of LULAC and other Mexican-American civil rights groups, and, of course, various workers and their organizations. One could cite any number of examples of the ways Zamora illuminates these complex and constantly evolving wars of maneuver, but his close analysis of the running dispute between the Mexican government and Texas state officials over the Bracero Program and the use of braceros in Texas, the unremitting campaign by Texas employers to continue the use (and abuse) of Mexican workers, the byzantine actions of the so-called Good Neighbor Commission, and the often contradictory activities of the FEPC are particularly effective and enlightening.

All this said, however, some readers may come away from this project wanting to see more systematic engagement with some of the major current disputes and debates in Mexican-American historiography and the regional historiography of greater Latin America. Zamora does a commendable job throughout the monograph engaging the debate over "whiteness studies" in Texas state history—and his arguments on this contentious question are fairly convincing. It is curious, however, that the author apparently chose not to engage some of the critical recent work on the role of the Mexican consuls (and the Mexican government more generally) and the larger historiographical questions raised in recent years by historians such as Gilbert G. González, Raúl A. Fernández, and others. While many find much of Fernández's and González's conclusions and sectarian posturing to be off putting and overwrought, they have raised an number of important challenges to some of the main contours of historical interpretation of this period that deserve to be engaged. It would have been interesting to read Zamora's rejoinder to them and other scholars with dissenting views on these key questions in a period of intellectual flux in the increasingly complex relationship of Chicano history to the historiographies of Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Still, this is an important contribution to the labor and civil rights history of the Southwest.