Redeeming La Raza
Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights
Gabriela González
Reviews and Awards
Winner of the Tejas Foco Nonfiction Book Award of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies
Winner of the Liz Carpenter Award of the Texas State Historical Association
Winner of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize of the Texas State Historical Association
Winner of the Jim Parish Award for Documentation and Publication of Local and Regional History of the Webb County Heritage Foundation
"Redeeming La Raza is an excellent text" -- Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez, Journal of Southern History
"In Redeeming La Raza ... Gabriela González traces the multifaceted efforts of Mexican and Mexican American activists in the Texas-Mexico border region to confront structural and cultural obstacles to rights and progress for ethnic Mexicans throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing in particular on a handful of individual biographical accounts, González reveals the ambition and the breadth of multiple strands of activism that both sought progress and focused on transformation in a broadly transnational context. These varied activists sought to confront both race- and class-based exploitation using the tools open to them as individuals familiar with the gendered dynamics of their transborder lives ... It is a complicated and rewarding book that covers familiar subjects in interesting new ways." -- John Weber, American Historical Review
"This research significantly expands our knowledge of Mexican American, Texas, southwestern borderlands, and women's and gender history. Comprehensive, grounded on primary documents and essential secondary sources, and written in clear, jargon-free prose, González's work is to be commended for the way in which it explains how gender ideologies shaped and informed locally grown ideas about women's place in society and in its connection to greater American historical processes." -- Sonia Hernández, Southwestern Historical Quarterly
"Redeeming La Raza takes the political and cultural ideas debated by Texas Mexicans along the US borderline seriously as intellectual history. Always attentive to differences shaped by class and gender, Gabriela González weaves a critical story of the impact of respectability politics, transnational modernism, and maternal feminism in the shaping and sustenance of a powerful transborder political culture."-George Sanchez, University of Southern California
"This book is the first to weave numerous biographies and political perspectives of Mexicans/Chicanos across decades using the lens of transnationalism. González offers a most excellent treatment of transborder political culture showing how the Mexican immigrant middle class and Mexican American middle class sought to uplift working class Mexican immigrants from racism."-Cynthia E. Orozco, Eastern New Mexico University-Ruidoso
"Gabriela González's erudite, deeply-researched, and far-reaching study of Mexicans in Texas should be read by students, scholars, activists, and others who care about the U.S.-Mexico border region, women's history, and civil rights. Capturing untold stories of women's leadership, international relations, and racial discrimination, Redeeming La Raza rewrites important chapters in twentieth-century American history."--Stephen Pitti, Yale University