 Hi, this is Dr. Gene Preuss. Today we're going to look at Mexican American history's background, and in this lecture we'll look at the origins and developments of Mexican American history, or its historiography, the study of the history of how history is written. We're going to look at how the field has developed, how it's evolved, and new directions the field is going in, and then some themes that occur throughout the literature. Mexican American history actually can trace its origins back to some of the earliest days of the professionalization of American history. History, although it has been written for thousands and thousands of years, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, American historians began professionalizing. In 1893, in Chicago, at the World Columbian Exposition, this historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, delivered a paper for the American Historical Association that was also meeting at the World's Fair. His paper was called The Significance of the Frontier on American History. This is a unique perspective, because up until then, most of American history had been written as kind of the development of history outside of Europe. It had taken a European perspective, looking west, across the Atlantic. And so what Turner did was kind of turn this on its ear, and he began looking at American history from the west, that it was, American history was influenced by a series of borders, and by borders he meant places where cultures collided, where they came into contact with each other, and where they interacted. This was the idea of the frontier. That's what frontier meant to Turner. And so where the west was, was where Native Americans were in the early colonial period. Then as the United States began expanding, that western frontier kept moving further and further west. And it was what happened at that frontier. It was one of Turner's students, Walter Prescott Webb, who began looking at the west as a place. And one of his colleagues, this man pictured here, Herbert Bolton, who had done a lot of work in the Mexican archives, began looking at American history as an expansion of Spanish history. So the Spanish had come and landed in 1492 in the New World. And by the 1500s they had begun colonizing and exploring what's now the North American West. And Bolton believed that American history really should be looked from west to east instead of east to west as it had previously been done. And so some of Bolton's books reflect this attitude, the Spanish borderlands. The Outposts of Empire, again that frontier ideology. The Rim of Christendom, again that cultural conflict. And Coronado about one of the early explorers for New Spain in what is now the American Southwest. By about the 1930s you had the development of a group of historians that had been raised in the United States were American and were coming out of Texas and the American Southwest and writing about Mexican Americans, the society of Mexican Americans as a people. One of the earliest ones was a woman by the name of Lita Gonzalez who lived in South Texas and she was writing about society and life and culture down in the South Texas region. One of the things that these historians are trying to do is that while Bolton and some of these other historians earlier had opened the door for Mexican American history, they had also had a lot of inaccuracies and stereotypes and misperceptions that were prevalent to that day woven into the stories. And so this next generation of historians began to revise those ideas and revisit them and look at them and reevaluate them. Paul Taylor is another one of these historians. Carlos Castaneda who was at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the librarians who did extensive work with the archives wrote seven volumes of a book series called Our Catholic Heritage in Texas. You also had Los Angeles newspaper writers like Kerry McWilliams and you had George Sanchez who was also a very well respected instructor and later on government official who was writing about the history of Mexican Americans in Texas and the rest of the United States. McWilliams was focusing on Los Angeles, of course. By the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement gets underway, you have a new generation that is coming of a younger generation, better college educated, more college educated and this was sometimes called a Chicano generation after the name that many of those era took for themselves. One of those was a fellow by the name of Juan Gomez Guignones who was looking in the 1970s very early on in the 70s at Chicano history and how Chicano history was being written and new directions that it could go in. The fellow pictured here with Ojo Cunha, his book Occupied America written in 1970, he reflects some of the ideology of the Chicano movement that America was occupied, its indigenous people were taken over and the effect of European, white European society on that indigenous society. Matt Myers wrote a book in 1972, the Chicano is a general history of the people and a lot of these historians are also not only being affected by the Civil Rights Movement and this idea of telling Chicano history but by new social history. Social history, this was a history that was influenced heavily by cultures and disciplines like anthropology, sociology, economics. So they were historians looking more than just at historical documents but they were looking at other factors that led and affected people's lives. Some of these new directions included more women in Mexican American history. On the left here in the center is Cynthia Orozco who writes about, in a recent book, no Mexicans women or dogs allowed looking at the rise of the League of United Latin American Citizens which initially had not allowed women to join in the 1920s when that organization was formed. And so she's looking at Chicano discrimination and how women fared in Lulac and in the Mexican American community at large. Sarah Deusch's book, No Separate Refuge, looking at family life in the Southwest, Vicki Ruiz from Out of the Shadows looking at the development of women in the California area. And then you have professors and teachers who have passed away who did a lot of work and were very influential in Mexican American history. Irene Ledesma from South Texas and Yolanda Romero on West Texas Mexican American community. Irene had written on South Texas's Mexican American community and looking at women in those areas. As far as culture is concerned, you have authors who are now writing and historians who are now writing about sexuality, acculturation and the other issues. So Ramon Gutierrez is his very famous book in 1991, very influential book in 1991 when Jesus came, The Cornmothers on a Way, looking at colonization of the Southwest in places like Arizona and New Mexico. Native American women who had influential roles, how their roles are stripped from them when the Spanish came and entered the New World. George J. Sanchez about acculturation in becoming Mexican American and this is about Los Angeles community. And then you have more recent books like Defiant Braceros which is a new take on the manual laborers that came into the United States that Mireya Loza is writing about who kind of seen as all immigrant workers from Mexico but she says you know it was much more diverse than that and she's not trying to romanticize the workers. So those are new ways that these topics are being addressed. One of the things that we see in the historiography of Mexican American history is that a lot of studies focus either on Los Angeles or on Texas and especially on Los Angeles and you do have some new writers who are writing about communities in Chicago and now in the American South like Atlanta and North Carolina are starting to emerge. But Texas although it accounted for about half of the Mexican Americans up until the 1970s and 80s was kind of underwritten. You start seeing the development of Texas Mexican American history with writers like America Parvedes. Now Parvedes from UT Austin was an English professor and not a historian but his analysis of a border ballad the ballad of Gregorio Cortez who was a fugitive in 1910 was chased by Texas Rangers and eventually arrested and finally pardoned by a later Texas governor. It was a very famous border ballad. And his analysis looks at the development of that looks at the variations on this type of folk music and what place Gregorio Cortez had in Mexican American identity and history. Arnoldo de Leon is another writer he's from San Angelo and his history in one of his first books was looking at Anglo attitudes towards Mexicans in the early period of 1820s when Stephen F. Austin brought his Angles and how that developed throughout the 19th century. Emilio Zamora teaches at University of Texas has written a lot on labor history. One of his most famous books is the world of the Mexican worker in Texas from University of Houston. Guadalupe San Miguel has written quite a bit on educational history Mexican Americans in the educational process and his 1987 book let all of them take heed Mexican Americans the campaign for educational equality in Texas was a very good well received book. Similarly Carlos Blanton who is now at Texas A&M has written about education from a different aspect of the strange career of bilingual education in Texas. And then you have some more recent scholars some younger scholars who reflect the diversity of the field now and how it's grown looking at more women Sonia Hernandez at Texas A&M on women in the borderlands and Gabriela Gonzalez at UT San Antonio looking at how the trans border issues have changed over time and the ideas of middle class and respectability and rights in redeeming la rasa. So those are some of the new ways the field has changed but you still see even at that some very similar themes that keep recurring. One of those is the issue of the land and Mexican Americans and their identity with the land and this may take on this rural heritage that I mentioned here. But it's also about the land being dispossessed of the land there is strong focus on racism and rightly so. Economic issues is another problem and Mexican Americans often time are economically disadvantaged and so it's no surprise that that has become an important issue that historians have addressed. The rural agricultural heritage which has been criticized as a focal point because it ignores many of the urban dwelling. For example we get the idea that San Antonio when the battle of San Antonio in the 1830s was fought that San Antonio was a rural area in Mexico and in fact it was the major city in Texas at the time. But it's this idea of ruralism and most Mexican Americans working in farm areas. And there's a lot of talk on culture and by culture and I kind of pointed to this earlier. It's not just about how they live their lifestyles but about how people acculturate how they adapt to new societies and new environments, how they respond to the geography of place and how they also sexuality is very important and a new and emerging issue, LBGTQ issues have largely been ignored in Mexican American historiography. And so this is a new area that's starting to develop. And education and I mentioned a couple of books on that. So if we wrap things up, the origins of the development of Mexican American history it started off as a subfield of Western American history and then as people wanted to correct misrepresentations in correct history it began expanding and it was also expanding because more Mexican Americans were entering the field after college of becoming professional historians and teaching and writing. The field is moving in new directions it's expanding and new generations continue to bring in new ideas and some of the common themes and despite the changes as I've said earlier that many of these core themes remain but there are new opportunities. The field is slowly evolving and maturing and there's always new ways and new areas and new ways of looking at things that hopefully will capture the next generation of stories. Thank you very much and I hope that gives you a good overview of where we're going to be going in this class and the types of themes we see in Mexican American history and some of the prolific writers and the other historiographical ideas about this class.