Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880–1950 by Sterling Evans (review)

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 a Jewish jury foreman who deliberated in the case against the murder of the Bohemian men, which led, despite the jury’s recommendation, to what she describes as a “legal lynching”— an execution that is performed in order to avoid an extralegal lynch mob. With the exception of the Irish witness, who was present at the lynching of the man against whom he gave testimony, none of these immigrants actively participated in racial violence in order to claim whiteness. Nevels argues, however, that their involvement benefited the various European groups represented in these episodes. When a black defendant was punished for doing violence to one of these immigrants, or when an immigrant helped to prosecute and punish the black defendant, she claims, this affirmed the group’s alliance with white society and chiseled away at their status as outsiders. Little is offered in the way of proof, however, that the lynchings themselves were a catalyst to change. Despite these problems, Nevels’s case studies do contribute to an understanding of the complexity of race relations during the 1890s in Texas. They bolster the complex portrait that she paints of Brazos County, and in her examination she opens up questions about the place of European immigrants in the racial hierarchy of Texas during a tumultuous era of racial conflict, an arena few have considered. Texas State University–San Marcos Angela F. Murphy Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880–1950. By Sterling Evans. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. Pp. 340. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-1-58544-596-7. $42.00, cloth.) Before the advent of the wheat combine, the American and Canadian Great Plains—breadbaskets to the world—depended on binder twine from Mexico to make commercial harvests possible. Binders cut the wheat stalks and then mechanically tied the bundled stalks with binder twine. Workers then followed behind the binders gathering the bound shocks. On the Great Plains from Texas 338 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 338 to Canada farmers needed twine for their binders, and two species of agave plants from Mexico, henequen (Agave fourcroydes) and sisal (Agave sisalana), produced raw fibers of long, tough leaves, perfect materials for cordage products, such as rope and binder twine. Many recent works focus on one commodity, such as Mark Kulansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (Penguin, 1998) and Salt: A World History (Penguin, 2003). Such studies detail a product’s global nature. Sterling Evans’s Bound in Twine fits within these other transnational and environmental histories. Specifically, Evans focuses on twine made from henequen plants grown on the Yucatán Peninsula of southern Mexico, illustrating how that commodity related to the world wheat market. The dense, well-researched work is somewhat heavily weighted with quotes, yet the overwhelming wealth of resources paints a convincing thesis. The author unearthed documents in archives from across the North American continent—from the Saskatchewan Archives to the Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán, and everywhere in between including the...