Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston.

By Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. University of Houston Series in Mexican American Studies, No. 3. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xiv], 283. $34.00, ISBN 1-58544-115-5.)

In 1970 the Houston Independent School District (HISD) decided to classify Mexican American students as white in order to integrate them--rather than Anglo students--with African Americans. In response, Houston's Mexican American community stridently resisted such cynical manipulation, eventually engaging in a huelga (strike) against the public schools. Guadalupe San Miguel Jr.'s new book examines the story of the Chicano attempt to avoid being classified as whites. The story of the strike itself is not new to Chicano scholars and has been dealt with in several other works by other authors. But San Miguel provides the first book-length account of the episode, thereby providing a more subtle and complicated understanding of this important event in Chicano history.

Locating the Houston school protest within the Chicano movement, San Miguel shows how Mexican Americans united to resist continued discrimination and defiantly proclaimed a new nonwhite identity; hence the book's title. In this way San Miguel draws on a recent line of interpretation that sees Chicano activism as more than unfocused anger, a product of the turbulent 1960s, or an identity crisis. San Miguel, much as did Ignacio Garcia in Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos among Mexican Americans (Tucson, 1997), argues instead that the new direction in self-identification from white to brown was not part of a quest for identity but was instead a conscious reaction to discrimination.

By examining events in Houston, San Miguel is also able to explore the relationship and intersections between the African American and Mexican American civil rights struggles, as well as black-brown relations. And while the author briefly addresses the unfortunate strain of antiblack bigotry that existed in portions of the Chicano community, the book would have benefited from a deeper exploration of the nature, depth, and significance of those racial tensions. Additionally, the book could have been enriched by a deeper theoretical exploration of the nature of "brownness" and "blackness" and the ways that these identities intersected and competed for fair treatment within Anglo society.

Such issues aside, San Miguel has written a fascinating and important account of the Chicano huelga in Houston, one that illustrates Chicano activism in parts of Texas other than the Rio Grande Valley, Austin, San Antonio, Crystal City, or Robstown. In the process, he has also contributed to contemporary discussions about the meaning of the Chicano movement. Accessible yet sophisticated, this book reads well and functions at numerous levels, which will make it valuable to a wide range of audiences.

ANTHONY QUIROZ
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi