Recovering the Hispanic History of Texas (review)

Recovering the Hispanic History of Texas, one of the first scholarly collections produced under the auspices of the Hispanic History of Texas Project, is comprised of eight essays that engage alternative conceptions of Texas history with the goal of creating a space for dialogue across and within the field of Chicana/o studies. In the spirit of interdisciplinarity, and in seeking to broaden the ways in which knowledge is produced, disseminated, and ultimately archived, the collection works to transform the archival enterprise to include folklore, multilanguage writings, photography, and oral histories, among other personal and communal materials. The result is an engagement of alternate voices and wider debates about power and knowledge that not only revisits historical events from multiple contexts but also broadens the evidentiary base to reimagine and reshape the dominant narrative of Texas history.

The essays were originally presented as part of the first Hispanic History of Texas Project’s conference held in conjunction with the Texas State Historical Association’s annual conference in 2008. The book’s three sections establish a record of Mexicans and Chicana/os who, although often absent from the archive, have served as the makers and keepers of history.

The first section, “Creating Social Landscapes,” moves from the Texas-Louisiana borderland of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, where Native Americans, tejanos, and Euro-Americans shaped peaceful relationships based on complex networks of trade and cultural brokerage, to the intersections between Mexican and Native healing cultures along military frontiers to Mexico’s centennial celebration of 1921. The essays reveal how personal correspondence, census lists, medical topographies, and the pages of the San Antonio daily La Prensa expose lines of authority and shape conflict and consensus among the diverse peoples of the Texas borderlands during periods of changing social, economic, and political landscapes.

Section 2, “Racialized Identities,” engages a compendium of oral histories, letters, legal cases, and the documentary film The Schools of Crystal City (1975) to expand ideas of race, civil rights mobilization, and racial justice in the state’s public schools. Personal narratives and struggles emerge from these essays to reveal collective efforts and legitimize the contributions of individual players. The result is a historical trajectory that emphasizes authenticity, subaltern agency, and lived experience in the context of identity politics. “Unearthing Voices,” the collection’s final section, considers the key question of recovery and the need to explore new methodologies to expose archival strategies of silencing by providing new knowledge of hidden feminine spaces in borderlands literature and shedding fresh insight into the cultural and religious diversity of Mexicans in Texas.

The authors of Recovering the Hispanic History of Texas approach the field of Chicana/o studies from related perspectives on the history of the American West and borderlands history and offer compelling narratives from a myriad of voices and multiple landscapes by established and emerging scholars. As such, the collection will be useful to students and scholars of Texas history, Chicana/o studies, and borderlands studies.