Redeeming La Raza in the world of two flags entwined -- Modernizing Mexico, 1900-1929 -- Social change, cultural redemption, and social stability: the political strategies of gente decente reform -- Masons, magonistas, and maternalists: liberal, anarchist, and maternalist thought within a local/global nexus -- Crossing borders to rebirth the nation: Leonor Villegas de Magnón and the Mexican Revolution -- Borderlands Mexican Americans in modern Texas, 1930-1950 -- All for country and home: the transnational lives and work of Romúlo Munguía and Carolina Malpica de Munguía -- La pasionaria (the passionate one): Emma Tenayuca and the politics of radical reform -- Struggling against Jaime Crow: LULAC, gente decente heir to a transborder political strategy.
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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.