The new South in the Southwest: Anglos, Blacks, and Mexicans in Central Texas, 1880-1930.

This study explores the complex, triangular relationship among Mexicans, Blacks and Anglos in rural Central Texas between 1880 and 1930. As such, it links concerns of Chicano and African American history with those of labor history and postemancipation studies. Specifically, the study examines the interactions of predominantly Anglo owners and tenants, Black and Mexican sharecroppers, and Mexican migrant workers in central Texas, a region comprising over fifty counties stretching roughly from Dallas in the north to San Antonio and Corpus Christi in the south. The study also examines the processes of rural proletarianization that accompanied the growth and development of large-scale agriculture, which reduced tenants from the status of semi-independent farmers to that of wage laborers, and relied heavily on the labor of sharecroppers and seasonal workers, mostly Mexicans, from South Texas and Mexico. Finally, the study undertakes a critical assessment of Anglo Socialists in Texas, who preached class unity among all classes of farmers, but resisted efforts of Black farmers to organize their own locals of renters' unions. The contribution of this study will thus be to explore and analyze the ways in which the choices of, and constraints imposed upon, different groups of rural Texans operated to shape their physical and social world, within the context of larger processes of agrarian transformation.PhDAmerican CultureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/105181/1/9116179.pdfDescription of 9116179.pdf : Restricted to UM users only