Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City by Tyina L. Steptoe (review)

The experiences of ancestors often influence the work of professional historians, providing them with the intellectual tools necessary to understand self, family, community, and the world. Following this tradition, University of Arizona scholar and Houston native Tyina L. Steptoe's masterful work, Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City, honors, among others, her ancestors—Creoles of color—whose determination, work ethic, cultural ingenuity, and activism made her success possible. A culturalpolitical history, Houston Bound examines four ethnic communities: African Americans from East Texas; African-descent Creoles from Southwest Louisiana; Tejanos from Central and South Texas; and Mexican nationals fleeing Revolutionary Mexico. Ultimately, the newcomers' cultural tenets helped ferment varied civil rights movements at a time when whites were imposing systems of segregation based on a black/white dichotomy.

With the use of an impressive array of records and sources, including manuscript collections, War Department materials, oral histories, music, newspapers, government documents such as census data and vital statistics, and secondary sources, written in English, Spanish, and French, the author reconstructs the complex, interwoven histories of these four groups of Houstonians whose appearance during the Great Migrations (the mass, overlapping movements of an estimated two hundred thousand culturally varied people within and into the United States between 1900 and 1950) helped shape the historical contours of what would ultimately become the nation's fourth largest city.

Not surprisingly, the history of these groups in Houston correlates with their experiences as both the displaced poor and as people perceived as inferior by the white majority culture. Racialized segregation, job inequality, inadequate public schooling, disfranchisement, and violence all fostered discrimination and caused irreparable harm in rural communities and small towns in East Texas and Southwest Louisiana. So too did natural disasters inflict misery. The devastating Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 precipitated the migrations of tens of thousands of African-descent Louisianans into Texas. Descendants of multiracial parentage, they defined themselves as Creoles or Creoles of color, believing the cultural and phenotypical differences that separated them from most black people also distinguished them as proudly and historically special.

Racism and poverty also affected Tejanos—Texans of Spanish and Amerindian origin—whose lives intersected with black newcomers. Tejanos were oppressed even in South and West Texas, where they outnumbered whites. In Mexico, socioeconomic instability caused by the 1910 Revolution caused mass exoduses to the north, with 1.5 million people relocating permanently to the United States, including several thousand to Houston.

The Great Migrations brought into the city tens of thousands of Latinos, ushering in a fascinating cultural renaissance: a social admixture of folk music, the arts, and political satire that took place from the 1900s to the 1960s. In the early decades, Creole music and East Texas blues helped usher in jazz, a sound influenced by urbanization and industrial growth. Two Latino sounds also emerged in the 1900s and 1910s: corridos and conjunto among Tejanos and boleros and ranchera among Mexican nationals.

The city's growing economy stimulated new migration streams in the 1920s. Politically, "New Negro" and Mexican American generations emerged with divergent voices, creating their own respective protest initiatives to dismantle segregation and racial bigotry. These groups, their children, and other early twentieth-century newcomers, however, eventually precipitated pathways for inclusivity.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, the growth of swing music and the plethora of jazz clubs that opened throughout Houston confirmed the successful collaborations of New Negroes and their ability to earn decent livings. For Latinos, Mexican-oriented big bands called orquestas attracted New Negroes, especially from elite families. In the 1950s and 1960s, Latinos, Creoles, and African Americans crossed musical lines of demarcation through the rise of rhythm and blues and soul music. At the same time, younger Hispanics of Mexican ancestry now embraced their indigenous roots, calling themselves Chicanos. Rejecting the older civil-rights strategy of LULAC president Felix Tijerina, they built on the Black...