| Summary: | In the Mid-1960s, San Antonio, Texas, was a segregated city governed by an entrenched Anglo social and business elite. The Mexican American barrios of the west and south sides were characterized by substandard housing and experienced seasonal flooding. Gang warfare broke out regularly. Then the striking farmworkers of South Texas marched through the city and set off a social movement that transformed the barrios and ultimately brought down the old Anglo oligarchy. In Quixote's Soldiers, David Montejano uses a wealth of previously untapped sources, including the congressional papers of Henry B. Gonzalez, to present an intriguing and highly readable account of this turbulent period.
Montejano divides the narrative into three parts. In the first part, he recounts how college student activists and politicized social workers mobilized barrio youth and mounted an aggressive challenge to both Anglo and Mexican American political elites. In the second part, Montejano looks at the dynamic evolution of the Chicano movement and the emergence of clear gender and class distinctions as women and ex-gang youth struggled to gain recognition as serious political actors. In the final part, Montejano analyzes the failures and successes of movement politics. He describes the work of second-generation movement organizations that made possible a new and more representative political order, symbolized by the election of Mayor Henry Cisneros in 1981.
Through the history of the Chicano movement in San Antonio, Montejano tells a story of social and political change that played out across the Southwest in cities such as Albuquerque, Denver, and Los Angeles. This local history was part of the national political transformation that ended the last legal-political vestiges of Jim Crow segregation and made the United States a more inclusive society.
"David Montejano has written a well-researched and clearly argued study of the interaction among members of different social backgrounds in San Antonio's Chicano community during the turbulent and politically creative years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He has augmented extensive archival research (especially in the papers of Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez) with effective use of secondary works by other sociologists and historians and his own fieldwork. This book will be of interest not only to historians of Mexican American urban life and Chicano struggles for civil rights, but also to anyone interested in the politics of the Vietnam War era." Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century Edited by David Montejano.
The various protest movements that together constituted the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s urged a "politics of inclusion" to bring Mexican Americans into the mainstream of United States political and social life This volume of ten specially commissioned essays assesses the post-movement years, asking, "What went wrong?," "What went right?," and "Where are we now?" Collectively, the essays offer a wide-ranging portrayal of the complex situation of Mexican Americans at the start of the twenty-first century. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986.
"Because Montejano so astutely understands the historical forces that formed Texas as a whole, his book is indispensable to any serious student of Texas history."--Texas Observer --Book Jacket.
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