1590
Reviews of Books and Films
1915-1917 and was repressed in the historical memory
of both countries. Largely justified by the Plan de San
Diego (PSD), named for a small Texas town where it
had allegedly originated, a group of Tejanos had
launched an uprising against the newly emerging Anglo economic and social order that was displacing them
in South Texas. Initially calling for a liberation of races
and peoples by waging a war of extermination against
all male Anglos over the age of sixteen, the purpose of
the rising was to create a new republic from the
territory of the Mexican Cession that might later align
itself with Mexico. A separate republic for Negroes
would be created adjacent to the new republic, and
Indians would have their tribal lands restored. Within
two months of its proclamation, the PSD was revised
on February 20, 1915, making it unmistakably an
anarchist document. Accepting the earlier iteration, it
now proclaimed the social war of the downtrodden
proletariat against the forces of capitalism with the
"Liberating Army of Races and Peoples," promising to
deliver cultivated land to the disinherited confiscated
from their exploiters.
There was far more to the PSD than local protest,
for Mexican revolutionaries under the banner of the
Constitutionalist faction led by Venustiano Carranza
supported the movement, and pressure from the administration of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson for
Carranza to suppress the raiders did not bring results
quickly enough for American authorities. Persistent
rumors maintained that Germany and Japan also
supported the PSD. Benjamin Heber Johnson's book
seeks to show the local conditions in which the PSD
emerged and the local consequences that eventually
produced Mexican American political action in forming the League of United Latin American Citizens
(LULAC) in 1929. He downplays the importance of
anarchism and its international ideas to the detriment
of understanding the central leaders of the PSD, Luis
de la Rosa and Aniceto Pizana. These men led attacks
on symbols of Anglo oppression in the valley such as
the King Ranch, railroads and irrigation pumping
stations, and vigilante leaders. Their treatment of
Germans raised an ongoing specter of foreign sabotage that transcended Anglo fears of Mexican revolutionary involvement. Johnson describes the kidnapping
and murder of vigilantes Alfred and Charles Austin
but fails to observe that de la Rosa led the raid and
ordered their execution. When de la Rosa and his band
derailed the Brownsville train and attacked the passengers, an incident Johnson describes, Johnson omits
that two of the Anglos claimed (falsely) to be Germans
and were left unharmed. When Pizana attacked Fresno's Pump Canal and kidnapped some of its employees, Johnson does not report that two Anglos, when
asked if they were German, shook their heads and
were summarily executed. Anarchism's internationalism makes it messy for those who concentrate on local
history.
Johnson regards the PSD as foolish, costing the
survivors much more than it was worth. Yet the plight
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
of some Tejanos had become so desperate, even before
the great repression that followed it, that anarchism
provided an explanation and a plan of action to redress
their grievances. Johnson reflects a general bias in the
U.S. against serious study of anarchism by historians
writing on the Latin American and Chicano experience. For at least a generation, Europeanists and many
Latin Americanists have tried to present historical
studies of anarchism on its own terms, without letting
its historical failure prevent the author from taking
anarchism seriously as, under certain circumstances, a
meaningful option. That the consequences of that
option made conditions worse is irrelevant to the
desperation that drove women and men to seek it.
Johnson does a good job describing the dire results
of the PSD locally. Calculating that the number of
Tejano deaths in the "low thousands is probable," he
writes that "a Tejano in South Texas was more likely to
'disappear' than a citizen of Argentina during that
country's infamous 'Dirty War' of the 1970s" (p. 120).
This episode in U.S. history of what today is called
"ethnic cleansing" needs to be confronted. Yet historical memory has been repressed, as Tejanos and ethnic
Mexicans in South Texas were repressed and converted into a pliable labor force by the Texas Rangers
and vigilantes, not only in the wake of the PSD but
during World War I and throughout the 1920s. Johnson makes a strong case for Anglo solidarity in bringing Jim Crow discrimination effectively into the valley
in the 1920s, but this decade deserves deeper treatment than he can give it. He mentions Ku Klux Klan
(KKK) activity briefly (p. 178), but its far-ranging
power of intimidation needs more coverage. A photograph in the Carlos Larralde Collection from the
mid-1920s shows a frightening image of a night ride by
the KKK through the streets of San Benito, the home
of de la Rosa, a decade after the PSD. Anglos still
feared what might come again.
Johnson persuasively argues that the community of
Mexican ancestry in the valley struggled for selfidentity and found it partially in LULAC, membership
in which was restricted to American citizens. Such
membership requirements thus excluded many in the
community but solidified the political base to fight
segregation. I would argue that the anarchism of the
PSD eventually forced the conservative elements that
founded LULAC to become more engaged and committed to national citizenship. Despite my reservations, Johnson has written an important book, one that
deserves the attention of those interested in the history
of the United States, Chicanos, and the Texas-Mexico
borderlands.
JAMES A. SANDOS
University of Redlands
RANDY B. McBEE. Dance Hall Days: Intimacy and
Leisure among Working-Class Immigrants in the United
States. New York: New York University Press. 2000.
Pp. ix, 293. $40.00.
DECEMBER 2004
Canada and the United States
Tattered memories of dances enjoyed long ago show
up occasionally in on-line auction listings. There are
dance cards, song books, band advertisements, and
advertising posters, but it is the pictures that are
especially evocative. To the urban historian, these
snapshots and posed portraits are not only mementoes
of pleasure-filled evenings but also documents of the
way that public dancing in twentieth-century America
long suffered from the contradictory images of innocence and evil. Settlement house workers and antidelinquency reformers cast the cheap dance halls that
appeared after the turn of the century as icons of evil.
The dark interiors and reinforcing atmosphere of loose
morality in makeshift venues created opportunities for
sinful experimentation, while the sensuous music hastened the loss of inhibition. By contrast, the polished
floors, escapist architecture, and veneer of respectability that was available for the price of admission to the
large commercial ballrooms built during the 1920s
created the terpsichorean equivalent of the popcorn
palace movie theater. Only a few of the latter, including Chicago's Aragon Ballroom, still survive. Somewhere in between those extremes was the real world of
amusement that was inhabited by working-class young
people.
Like all books, this one by Randy B. McBee is
shaped by its sources. Earlier studies of dance halls
and their habitues had been based largely on picking
through reformers' jeremiads to glean facts enough to
reconstruct social patterns. This book draws heavily on
the 1970s oral recollections of those who were young
half a century earlier. Because of its sources, it is much
more about social relationships than physical dancing
venues, although it nicely frames the story in the
vigorous national debate over the commercialization
of leisure.
The book begins with a good accounting of the
different kinds of places where young people could
meet to form relationships with those of the opposite
sex. They were forced to find mates while operating
within the context of tight social constraints created by
a limited discretionary income, exhausting work hours,
family restrictions, and customs that were part of the
immigrant baggage. With the ultimate goal of marriage
and a space of their own, young people were forced to
create collective strategies for amusement and courtship.
McBee's book does a masterful job of getting inside
those relationships. It is a solid contribution to both
women's and men's studies; readers are made to feel as
if they are eavesdropping on conversations taking
place on opposite sides of the dance floor. Young men
discuss their "prospects," form social clubs complete
with clubhouses, and then gradually make the individual decisions to settle down and marry. McBee's
discussion of how they learned etiquette is a masterpiece. Across the dance floor, the women talk about
seeking independence from parents, to whom most of
those who work surrender their paychecks. Dance
venues often became places where working-class
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1591
women struggled to shape their own identities without
generating conflict with their parents. Often, they
found themselves rushing into a hasty marriage with
someone they did not know well in an effort to forge
an escape route to independence.
This is a very important book that draws together
astute analyses of youth, gender, morals, amusements,
and ethnic history. But one strength of this book, its
depth, may also be a weakness. That is, the author's
remarkable analysis of oral interviews takes us inside
the thoughts of a relatively small number of participants, whom we get to know very well. Every nuance of
their comments is analyzed from every possible perspective. But, the reader may wonder how accurately
one can generalize from their experience. Most of the
narrative is based on Italian and Polish youth in
Chicago and New York City. Did Swedish young
people in Minneapolis or St. Louis Germans have the
same conversations? There are a few other minor
flaws. There is not enough about the dissemination of
dance fads, and the narrative is generally time compressed, allowing the reader to lose a sense of progressive historical change. But these problems are minor
compared with the book's achievement. And after you
read it, you will never look into faces on the old dance
photos in the same way.
PERRY R. Durs
University of Illinois,
Chicago
JOEL DENKER. The World on a Plate: A Tour Through
the History ofAmerica's Ethnic Cuisine. Boulder, Colo.:
Westview. 2003. Pp. ix, 196. $24.00.
This book by Joel Denker offers readers a breezy read
on the topic of immigrant foodways and their wide
diffusion onto the plates, and into the consciousness,
of Americans who otherwise had no real contact with
or knowledge of ethnic practices. For example, most
American consumers of yogurt probably have little
idea of the historic process by which this foodstuff of
the Middle East ended up on their grocery shelves.
Denker traces the journeys of a wide array of foods,
making clear by means of a range of individual food
stories that Americans of many backgrounds owe a
debt to the immigrants who brought these foods to
their new home.
Organized along a group by group structure, the
book treats with delight how various ethnic cuisines
have made their way into America and American life.
For each group-and the author includes Italians,
Arabs, Greeks, Jews, Chinese, South Asians (Indians
and Pakistanis) and, finally, Latin Americans-Denker
shows how foods, once the ordinary stuff of immigrant
communities and known only to insiders, entered into
the larger consciousness and palates of Americans.
Each chapter tells the story of a particular set of foods
authentic to an immigrant group and highlights the
activities of ambitious entrepreneurs who figured out a
DECEMBER 2004