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
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
[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.
~Observer
