Redeeming La Raza : transborder modernity, race, respectability, and rights /

Redeeming La Raza : transborder modernity, race, respectability, and rights /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	González, Gabriela, author.
Imprint:	New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018]
Description:	xvi, 261 pages ; 24 cm
Language:	English
Subject:	Mexican Americans -- Texas -- Politics and government -- 20th century. Mexican Americans -- Political activity -- Texas. Mexican Americans -- Texas -- Biography. Mexicans -- Texas -- History -- 20th century. Transnationalism -- Political aspects -- Texas -- History -- 20th century. Mexican Americans. Mexican Americans -- Political activity. Mexican Americans -- Politics and government. Mexicans. Politics and government. Texas, South -- Politics and government -- 20th century. Mexican-American Border Region -- Politics and government -- 20th century. North America -- Mexican-American Border Region. Texas. Texas, South. Biography. History.
Format:	E-Resource Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11682764

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780199914142 0199914141 9780190909628 0190909625
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:	"Redeeming La Raza examines the gendered and class-conscious political activism of Mexican-origin people in Texas from 1900 to 1950. In particular, it questions the inter-generational agency of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who subscribed to particular race-ethnic, class, and gender ideologies as they encountered barriers and obstacles in a society that often treated Mexicans as a nonwhite minority. Middle-class transborder activists sought to redeem the Mexican masses from body politic exclusions in part by encouraging them to become identified with the nation-state. Redeeming La Raza was as much about saving them from traditional modes of thought and practices that were perceived as hindrances to progress as it was about saving them from race and class-based forms of discrimination that were part and parcel of modernity. At the center of this link between modernity and discriminatory practices based on social constructions lay the economic imperative for the abundant and inexpensive labor power that the modernization process required. Labeling groups of people as inferior helped to rationalize their economic exploitation in a developing modern nation-state that also professed to be a democratic society founded upon principles of political egalitarianism. This book presents cases of transborder activism that demonstrate how the politics of respectability and the politics of radicalism operated, often at odds but sometimes in complementary ways."--Provided by publisher.
Other form:	Online version: González, Gabriela. Redeeming La Raza. New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] 9780199914159

Description
Summary:	The transborder modernization of Mexico and the American Southwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the lives of ethnic Mexicans across the political divide. While industrialization, urbanization, technology, privatization, and wealth concentration benefitted some, many more experienced dislocation, exploitative work relations, and discrimination based on race, gender, and class. The Mexican Revolution brought these issues to the fore within Mexican society, igniting a diaspora to el norte. Within the United States, similar economic and social power dynamics plagued Tejanos and awaited the war refugees. Political activism spearheaded by individuals and organizations such as the Idars, Leonor Villegas' de Magnón's White Cross, the Magonista movement, the Munguias, Emma Tenayuca, and LULAC emerged in the borderlands to address the needs of ethnic Mexicans whose lives were shaped by racism, patriarchy, and poverty.<br> <br> As Gabriela Gonzalez shows in this book, economic modernization relied on social hierarchies that were used to justify economic inequities. Redeeming la raza was about saving ethnic Mexicans in Texas from a social hierarchy premised on false notions of white supremacy and Mexican inferiority. Activists used privileges of class, education, networks, and organizational skills to confront the many injustices that racism bred, but they used different strategies. Thus, the anarcho-syndicalist approach of Magónistas stands in contrast to the social and cultural redemption politics of the Idars who used the press to challenge a Jaime Crow world. Also, the family promoted the intellectual, material, and cultural uplift of la raza, working to combat negative stereotypes of ethnic Mexicans. Similar contrasts can be drawn between the labor activism of Emma Tenayuca and the Munguias, whose struggle for rights employed a politics of respectability that encouraged ethnic pride and unity. Finally, maternal feminist approaches and the politics of citizenship serve as reminders that gendered and nationalist rhetoric and practices foment hierarchies within civil and human rights organizations.<br> <br> Redeeming La Raza examines efforts of activists to create a dignified place for ethnic Mexicans in American society by challenging white supremacy and the segregated world it spawned.
Physical Description:	xvi, 261 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:	9780199914142 0199914141 9780190909628 0190909625