Claiming Citizenship

Claiming Citizenship spotlights a community where Mexican Americans regardless of social class embraced a common ideology and worked for access to the full rights of citizenship without confrontation or radicalization. Victoria Texas is a small city with a sizable Mexican-descent population dating to the period before the U.S. annexation of the state. There a complex and nuanced story of ethnic politics unfolded in the middle of the twentieth century.Focusing on grassroots author Anthony Quiroz shows how the experience of the Mexican American citizens of Victoria who worked within the system challenges common assumptions about the power of class to inform ideology and demonstrates that embracing ethnic identity does not always mean rejecting Americanism. Quiroz identifies Victoria as a community in which Mexican Americans did not engage in overt resistance labor organization demonstrations or the rejection of capitalism democracy or Anglo culture and society. Victoria's Mexican Americans struggled for equal citizenship as the loyal opposition opposing exclusionary practices while embracing many of the values and practices of the dominant society.Various individuals and groups worked beginning in the 1940s to bring about integrated schools better political representation and a professional class of Mexican Americans whose respectability would help advance the cause of Mexican equality. Their quest for public legitimacy was undertaken within a framework of a bicultural identity that was adaptable to the private Mexican world of home church neighborhood and family as well as to the public world of school work and politics. Coexistence with Anglo American society and sharing the American dream constituted the desired ideal.Quiroz's study makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Mexican American experience by focusing on groups who chose a more subtle less confrontational path toward equality. Perhaps indeed he describes the more common experience of this ethnic population in twentieth-century America.ANTHONY QUIROZ an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. A former resident of Victoria Texas he has written several articles about the role of Mexican Americans in that city's history. This is his first book.