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Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments Much like the activists in this book, I grew up traveling by automobile between Wisconsin and Texas. My parents were witnesses to the activism of this era and participants in some of the main strands of social activism of the late 1960s. As the family of a former migrant worker, each December we would pack up my father’s pickup truck and head down to Texas, moving south from Milwaukee, through Chicago, and joining an annual migration of cars south. If you are from a Tejano or Mexican family in the Midwest, this drive is a familiar one, resembling a mass exodus. When I was very young, we could identify the Tejanos and Mexicans by the many things they hauled south in their trucks or the celebratory Tejano or Mexicano bumper stickers or gothic lettering on the rear windows, and, as time passed, a creative array of vanity plates. Some brought washers, dryers, and other mysterious gifts under tarps. At rest stops, we talked to people from Texas and Mexico making the same annual trek. These migrants defined life by the industries that recruited them to the Midwest and the variety of agricultural products they helped plant, tend, harvest, and process across lives defined by migration and rooted in community. With so much in common, however, Tejano-origin and Mexican-origin families were different and considered each other distinct, and there was meaning for both in the different boundaries and borders they crossed. This book is an outgrowth of the very Tejano diaspora that it details. My greatest debt is to the former migrant farmworkers, activists, and everyday people in Crystal City, Texas, and Wisconsin who talked to me about their lives across the diaspora. To the people from both the Tejano and Anglo communities in both states who took the time to meet acknowledgments XII with me, suggest others to talk to, and to all who shared memories, personal artifacts, and their own impressions of history in their homes and o∞ces I will always be grateful. This is an archival study, yet the many oral histories I conducted and the vast number of conversations I had in Wisconsin and Texas shape and color its metaphorical and historical structure. Activists and migrants including Jesus Salas, Miguel Delgado , Salvador Sanchez, José Angel Gutiérrez, Arturo Gonzalez, Carlos Reyes, Mario Compean, Ezequiel Guzman, Juan Alvarez, Ernesto Chacon , David Giffey, Mark Erenburg, Bill Smith, Genevieve Medina, Lupe Martinez, and many others read parts of the book, offered suggestions and criticisms, or supported this project from the start by taking time to share their personal histories, scrapbooks, and family albums with me. Sadly, Amalia Aguillar, publisher of the Zavala County Sentinel, and Francisco Rodriguez, an important activist in Wisconsin and Texas, did not live to see the publication of this book. Many people have helped me make this a better project. Michael Gordon and Joseph Rodriguez at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee encouraged me to consider historical research and graduate education . At Northwestern University, Henry Binford, Ed Muir, Josef Barton, James Oakes, James Campbell, T. H. Breen, Harold Perkin, and Nancy MacLean challenged my assumptions about history and supported me in my endeavors. Josef Barton spent hours talking to me about migration , ethnicity, and the variety of comparative movements of peoples across the globe and made me a better historian. His constant attention to the similarities between migrant streams and his vast knowledge of polyglot historical literatures made him the perfect mentor for a migration project. Aldon Morris and Jane Mansbridge, two leading social movement scholars, provided me with the first venue for sharing my work across disciplines, and Jane in particular, even after her move to Harvard, read and reread my materials and helped me refine my thinking on the nature and origins of social movement ideology among Tejano migrants. My graduate school classmates and friends in Chicago—Wallace Best, Michael Bailey, Patrick Gri∞n, and Christine Bradley—filled my days with fruitful discussion and more. Christine Bradley helped me prepare the first draft of this book, completed the bibliography, and transcribed hours of oral interviews, and I am grateful to her for making the process of researching and writing this book a less painful task. At the University of Wisconsin Law School, Arthur McEvoy and Carin [3.93.59.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:00 GMT) acknowledgments xiii Clauss helped me to explore the subtle connections between law and society in my work and made...