Southwestern Historical Quarterly

The history of Mexican-descent people in Texas reaches back some three centuries; yet, not until the last quarter of the twentieth century did the scholarly community acknowledge Tejanos as being active agents in the Texas narrative.¹ Slowly during the 1970s, a trickle of essays centering on Tejanos found their way into U.S. academic journals.² None were present in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly until [End Page 429] the early 1980s. Although the Quarterly had published essays on aspects of the ethnic Mexican population in Texas earlier, these articles only tangentially fell within the scope of "Tejano history," at least as historians today distinguish the field. From its rise to prominence during the early 1970s as part of what developed in the profession as a component of "Chicano history,"³ which considered the history of Mexican-origin people in Texas and elsewhere in the United States as worthy of attention on its own terms; it was more than just a kind of offshoot of Mexican history. (It is impossible, of course, to disconnect the history of Mexico from that of Tejanos, as historians who use a transnational or transregional approach to writing about Texas Mexicans consistently attest.)

The field then supposed that Mexican American history started in the year 1836, when Mexicans in Texas no longer belonged to the sovereign country of Mexico but became part of Republic of Texas (and then in 1845 the United States). Obviously, no one would deny that Mexican-descent people had founded settlements in Texas since the early eighteenth century, nor that Spain and Mexico had left a mark on the state's history. But scholars recognized 1836 as a demarcation point between Mexican American history and what until recent times was known as borderlands history.⁴ Over the years, the history of Mexican Americans in Texas has come to be generally denoted as "Tejano history," and it is within such an application that the scholarship on the subject is considered in this essay.

Writers abided by an understanding that in the study of Chicano history, Mexican Americans were an integral part of the narrative, and in some cases, at its center. As humans, as groups, as members of communities, Chicanos asserted themselves into episodes of a bygone past. No longer were they limited, as in the older histories, to a secondary or supporting role in the epic of Anglo exceptionalism or to defenseless figures unable to cope with political and economic events. Chicanos now were bona fide actors in history, afforded as much space and attention in the record as historians had previously given to political leaders or to men of great power. As did those of White Americans, their actions affected, as well as directly reflected, historical currents, watershed eras, and tipping points. [End Page 430]

Under this conceptualization of Tejano history, then, those who placed their essays in the Quarterly before the 1980s on Spaniards, Spanish-Mexicans, and even on post-1836 Mexicans were not writing Tejano history, per se. These early authors did not heed today's definition of the field. Their periodization was wrong, and they often lumped Mexicans from Mexico together with Mexicans from Texas. Mirroring the larger scholarship of monographs and academic pieces, essays in the Quarterly tended to look at Texas Mexicans as voiceless human figures overpowered by larger economic and political forces, as quixotic followers of idealistic revolutionaries causing border trouble, and, at best, as secondary (if not stereotypical) participants in the unrelenting advancement of progress in the Lone Star State.⁵

But even aside from the relative newness of the definition of Tejano history as it emerged after the Chicano movement, why was Mexican American history in so many particulars neglected...