Matt S. Meier
Since Carey McWilliams wrote his “Notes on Sources” in North from Mexico, great strides have been made in the researching, writing, and publishing of historical materials on Mexican-Americans and in the conceptualizing of their history. In the past forty years possibly as many works have been published about the history of this group as in all the years before 1948. In this brief addition to McWilliams’s “Notes” only the most notable authors and works can be listed. Additional important works are cited in the notes to chapters XVII, XVIII, and XIX.
Following McWilliams’s trailblazing work, which has become the point of bibliographic departure, nearly two decades passed before the task of exploring, organizing, and committing to print the experience of Mexican-Americans was resumed in earnest. Early in the 1960s the University of California, Los Angeles, undertook a massive Mexican-American Study Project with a Ford Foundation grant. This resulted in eleven published advance reports and, in 1970, a comprehensive sourcebook, The Mexican American People: The Nation’s Largest Minority, edited by Leo Grebler, Joan Moore, and Ralph Guzmán. Concurrent with this project a growing interest in Mexican-Americans, accelerated by the civil rights movement, helped spawn many useful books of selected readings: Julian Samora, La Raza: Forgotten Americans (1966); in 1970 two collections: Manuel Servín, The Mexican American: An Awakening Minority; and John Burma, Mexican Americans in the United States: A Reader; Wayne Moquin, A Documentary History of the Mexican American (1971); and in 1973, three works: Julian Nava, ¡Viva La Raza!: Readings on Mexican Americans; Livie Durán and H. R. Bernard, Introduction to Chicano Studies: A Reader; and Renato Rosaldo, et al., Chicano: The Evolution of a People.
In the early 1970s, immediately following Joan Moore’s excellent sociological study, Mexican American (1970), there appeared two popular general histories of la raza, the first since McWilliams’s North from Mexico. The Chicanos: A History of Mexican Americans (1972) by Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Rivera, following in the steps of McWilliams, stressed the interrelated themes of immigration, conflict of economic interests, and cultural adjustment. In the same year Rodolfo Acuña published his Occupied America: The Chicano Struggle toward Liberation, which set forth an internal colonialism model. This was followed in the 1980s by a second (1981) and third edition (1988). In his revisions, Acuña abandoned the colonialism theme for a thematic approach, but one which still emphasized victimization.
These two survey accounts were soon followed by a number of similar general works which added little to Chicano historiography. However, in 1979 Mario Barrera’s more theoretical and heavily economic Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality, appeared. In 1985 Alfredo Mirandé stressed Chicanos’ indigenous roots in his highly interpretive The Chicano Experience: An Alternative Perspective.
Meanwhile there had come into existence a number of excellent regional monographic works. In 1966 Leonard Pitt had published his outstanding Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish Speaking Californians. At the end of the sixties The Spanish Americans of New Mexico: A Heritage of Pride (1969), by Nancie González, building on the earlier work of George I. Sánchez, depicted the changes taking place within this subgroup. A dozen years later Robert Rosenbaum’s Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest (1981), while broad in its coverage, devoted over half of its pages to Nuevo Mexicanos’ struggle against Anglo domination.
In the Texas area Lynn Perrigo led the way with his Texas and Our Spanish Southwest (1968), a broad survey of southwestern history stressing Texas and the Mexican contribution. Three years later Félix D. Almaraz’s Tragic Cavalier: Governor Manuel Salcedo of Texas, 1808–1813, focused on the early period of the Tejano revolt for independence from Spain. A full decade later Arnoldo de León published The Tejano Community, 1836–1900 (1982). This study of the interaction of Mexican and United States cultural influence was followed by his They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (1983). More recently David Montejano published his Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (1987), which has continued the stress on regional rather than general Mexican-American topics.
By the mid-1970s there was, in addition, a new generation of young Chicano historians completing doctoral dissertations and beginning to write and publish monographic studies in their various areas of expertise in social history and particularly pioneering in urban history. In 1976, for example, Louise Año Nuevo Kerr completed her University of Chicago dissertation, “The Chicano Experience in Chicago,” one of the first and frequently cited studies of Mexican-Americans in the Midwest. A year earlier Oscar Martínez had published Border Boom Town: Ciudad Juarez Since 1848, followed by Richard Griswold del Castillo’s The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850–1890: A Social History, and Albert Camarillo’s Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930, both in 1979. Two years later Mario T. García published his well-documented Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880–1920, a detailed study of urban life; and in 1982 Francisco Balderama’s In Defense of La Raza: The Los Angeles Mexican Consulate and the Mexican Community, 1929 to 1936 was published followed in the next year by East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (1983), by Ricardo Romo, who emphasized immigration to Los Angeles up to the Great Depression.
In one of the newest and therefore least-developed fields, the history of the Chicana, Marta Cotera published Profile of the Mexican-American Woman (1977); two years later La Chicana: The Mexican-American Woman, by Evangelina Enriquez and Alfredo Mirandé, appeared. In 1984 Vicki Ruiz and Susan Tiano published Woman on the U.S.-Mexico Border: Responses to Change; and Richard Griswold del Castillo came out with La Familia: Chicano Families in the Urban Southwest, 1848 to the Present. Three years later came Patricia Zavella’s Women’s Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley. In 1986 the National Association for Chicano Studies (NACS) issued Chicana Voices: Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender. This collection of essays, a majority written by Chicanas, was the first NACS publication devoted exclusively to the Chicana experience.
Besides these monographs in the newer social historical fields, we have the more traditional labor history works of Ernesto Galarza, Juan Gómez Quiñones, Mark Reisler, Vernon Briggs, David Macías, Luis Arroyo, and others. In political history there are also the valuable works of Ralph Guzmán, F. Chris García, Rodolfo O. de la Garza, Tony Castro, and John Shockley; and in the vast area of immigration and borderland studies are the publications of people like Jorge A. Bustamante, Wayne Cornelius, Julian Samora, María Herrera-Sobek, Gilbert Cárdenas, Alejandro Portes, Arthur Corwin, Ellwyn Stoddard, Abraham Hoffman, Lawrence Cardoso, and Stanley Ross. In the field of demography Los chicanos: geografía histórica regional (1976), by geographer Richard Nostrand, is unique in presenting geographic and demographic details of Mexicanos in the Southwest in historical perspective.
Also of continuing great importance are two major reprint series, the twenty-one-volume The Mexican American (1974) and the fifty-five-volume The Chicano Heritage (1976), both edited by Carlos Cortés. Likewise, of exceptional value to understanding the historical background to the Mexican-American experience are the works of David J. Weber and Oakah Jones dealing with the Spanish colonial and Mexican national periods on the northern Mexican frontier. Not strictly historical in organization but extremely useful to the student reader are the works of Octavio Romano V. in cultural anthropology and Clark Knowlton in sociology.
In addition to the important publications already cited, there are a number of bibliographic works which can lead the inquiring student and scholar to many more books describing, analyzing, and interpreting the Mexican-American experience. Among the more extensive and useful are, in chronological order, Mexican American Bibliographies (1974), a reprint of five earlier bibliographies, edited by Carlos Cortés; Frank Pino’s two-volume multidisciplinary Mexican Americans: A Research Bibliography (1974); Arnulfo Trejo’s broad work, Bibliografía Chicana: A Guide to Information Sources (1975); The Mexican American: A Critical Guide to Research Aids, by Barbara J. and J. Cordell Robinson (1980), a well-annotated guide to bibliographies; and Bibliography of Mexican American History, with over 4,000 entries, partially annotated, by Matt S. Meier (1984).
Besides full-length books, there have been numerous important journal articles published in leading social science periodicals such as Aztlán: International Journal of Chicano Studies Research, International Migration Review, Journal of Borderlands Studies, Journal of Ethnic American History, Journal of the West, New Scholar, Social Science Quarterly, and regional journals like the New Mexico Historical Review. All of this is not to mention the large number of works in sociology, cultural anthropology, literature, theater, and the arts which serve to complement the more strictly historical publications. Obviously in a short overview of such a large field as this some important works may get overlooked.