The Mexican American Experience in Texas

Martha Menchaca has done what no one else has to date. In concise, cogent prose and analysis, she seamlessly synthesizes the vast historical literatures spanning the Spanish colonial period, Mexican era, and US conquest and incorporation, up through the present. Focusing on Texas Mexicans’ contributions to creating a more just world, The Mexican American Experience in Texas provides a fresh, foundational narrative that places Texas Mexicans at the center of Texas’s future.

— Raúl Coronado, University of California, Berkeley, author of A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture

The Mexican American Experience in Texas is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Texas history. With impeccable research and fluid, accessible, and powerful writing, Martha Menchaca weaves together the experiences of African, Indian, and European people as they meet, fight, and settle together. Laws regarding enslavement form a crucial thread in her exploration of colonization and the making of Texas as we know it today. Indeed, legislating color was as essential to the formation of Texas’s boundaries across the centuries as it is today in relation to creating congressional districts and controlling the movement of US citizens. This book demonstrates that Latinx and Afro-Latinx citizens never stopped fighting for the rights of all Texans.

— Margaret E. Dorsey, University of Richmond, coauthor of Fencing in Democracy: Border Walls, Necrocitizenship, and the Security State

[The Mexican American Experience in Texas] serves as a thorough retelling of critical events that have shaped the cultural identity [of Mexican Americans]  in Texas all the way back to the state’s earliest days.

— Texas Observer

A sweeping historical narrative of Mexican American history in the Lone Star State...This lucid, ambitious work pays off for scholars interested in not just the history of Mexican Americans, but of southwestern border politics, civil rights, and of American conceptions of race.

— Journal of Arizona History

Today’s generation is lucky to have books like this to help them imagine and work for a better future. This book is a must read for anyone serious about understanding the Mexican American fight for inclusion, citizenship,and justice.

— Pacific Historical Review