Tension between Anglos and Tejanos has existed in the Lone Star
State since the earliest settlements. Such antagonism has produced
friction between the two peoples, and whites have expressed their
hostility toward Mexican Americans unabashedly and at times
violently.
This seminal work in the historical literature of race relations
in Texas examines the attitudes of whites toward Mexicans in
nineteenth-century Texas. For some, it will be disturbing reading.
But its unpleasant revelations are based on extensive and
thoughtful research into Texas' past. The result is important
reading not merely for historians but for all who are concerned
with the history of ethnic relations in our state.
They Called Them Greasers argues forcefully that many who have
written about Texas's past--including such luminaries as Walter
Prescott Webb, Eugene C. Barker, and Rupert N. Richardson--have
exhibited, in fact and interpretation, both deficiencies of
research and detectable bias when their work has dealt with
Anglo-Mexican relations. De Leon asserts that these historians
overlooled an austere Anglo moral code which saw the morality of
Tejanos as "defective" and that they described without censure a
society that permitted traditional violence to continue because
that violence allowed Anglos to keep ethnic minorities "in their
place."
De Leon's approach is psychohistorical. Many Anglos in
nineteenth-century Texas saw Tejanos as lazy, lewd, un-American,
subhuman. In De Leon's view, these attitudes were the product of a
conviction that dark-skinned people were racially and culturally
inferior, of a desire to see in others qualities that Anglos
preferred not to see in themselves, and of a need to associate
Mexicans with disorder so as to justify their continued
subjugation.
General
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