Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature (review)

John Morán González crisscrosses the borders of history and literary criticism in his groundbreaking study Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature (2009). González refocuses the trajectory of Texas history and the Chicana/o literary canon by examining Texas history and literature around the time of the Texas Centennial, the anniversary of the end of the Texas Revolution. González finds that the events and initiatives orchestrated to commemorate the Centennial used an oversimplified history of the Texas Revolution that sparked Anglo-Texan racist zeal. Using Homi Bhabha's concept of nation writing and supplementarity, Border Renaissance finds that this "Centennial discourse" represented Mexicans as the obstacle that stood between Texans and freedom during the nineteenth-century war. By contrast, an oppositional cultural production, an artistic renaissance, aesthetically established a united Texas-Mexican community based on pluralist nationalist rhetoric. This Border Renaissance of the 1930s revised Texas history by reimagining Mexican Texans as citizens who participated in forming not only the Texas Republic but also Texas culture. González thus suggests a paradigm shift from viewing the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s as the first literary renaissance to remap the social, political, and literary path of Mexican American history. Border Renaissance inserts itself into Texas historiography that includes David Montejano's Anglos and Mexicans and the Making of Texas (1987) and David G. Gutiérrez's Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (1995); the study views this revisionist historiography reflexively as the beneficiary of the border renaissance.

Organized into five chapters and an epilogue, Border Renaissance walks the reader through the historical, political, and social climate of 1930s Texas and examines the Texas Mexican literary response. The first chapter outlines the preparations and execution of the Centennial celebrations and shows how Texas history as it was told in the Centennial celebrations formed a Centennial rhetoric. The chapter begins with a Nazi visit to the Alamo in 1935, making a connection between Nazi racial pedagogy and an Anglo-Texas triumphalism spurred by the idea that the Texas Revolution was a struggle for Anglo independence from Mexican oppression. González examines historical records of the literature, educational campaigns, exhibits, poetry, newspaper articles, and pamphlets that were funded by public Centennial funds and suggests that the Texas Centennial was planned as a concerted commercial exposition to usher Texas into modernity by showing Texans' pride of political ancestry to the rest of the US. González demonstrates that the Centennial was centered on an Anglo point of view that represented Mexicans as racially and morally inferior.

The titular border renaissance is introduced in Chapters Two and Three with examinations of a novella published by a Texas Mexican and the aesthetic output in the LULAC News, the newsletter for the League of United Latin American Citizens. González first pits vernacular historian and teacher María Elena Zamora O'Shea against eminent Texas folklorist and university professor J. Frank Dobie. González contrasts Dobie's article "Mesquite" (1938) with Zamora O'Shea's novella El Mesquite (1935), comparing their uses of the mesquite tree as a symbol for the Mexican Texan population that epitomizes the representation of Texas Mexicans in the Centennial public imagination. Whereas Dobie's article, written as an ethnographic account of South Texas history, presents the mesquite tree as an anti- or premodern representation of Texas Mexicans, Zamora O'Shea's novella uses the tree as a living, persisting symbol of Mexican Texan resiliency and history. Border Renaissance then reclaims the glory of the establishment of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). González shows how revolutionary LULAC was by examining its aesthetic output in the LULAC News in the years of its inception during the time of the Texas Centennial. Although he concedes that LULAC emphasized the whiteness of Mexican Americans for...