Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans.

Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans. By Benjamin Heber Johnson. Western Americana Series. (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, c. 2003. Pp. [x], 260. $30.00, ISBN 0-300-09425-6.)

The 1915 Plan de San Diego rebellion in south Texas has remained a footnote to U.S. national history. This book will change that.

The ambitious Plan de San Diego called for the overthrow of U.S. rule in Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, as well as for the creation of an independent republic for blacks, Mexicans, and Indians in the liberated territory and for the killing of all white males over sixteen years of age. Although the plan was discovered before it was launched, rebels attacked south Texas ranches, irrigation pumping stations, and railroads in the subsequent months, killing scores of people. Texas Rangers responded brutally, harassing the local Mexican population and wantonly killing hundreds of Mexicans and Tejanos. Economic and ethnic dislocation, together with the rising nationalist and militant spirit of the Mexican Revolution, all contributed to this rebellion, but Benjamin Heber Johnson also shows how individuals took advantage of the chaos to settle old scores.

The most original and perhaps controversial thesis in this book is that the rebellion was in part a "Tejano civil war" (p. 70). The fact that three Tejano deputies were assassinated, that elite Tejano Florencio Saenz's holdings were repeatedly attacked, and that several other Tejanos were killed by rebels in a period of less than three months indicates that Anglos were not the only targets of this rebellion. Some of the Tejano elite, like prominent Brownsville lawyer J. T. Canales, who served in the Texas legislature both before and after the conflict, vigorously opposed the rebellion and even organized regular patrols along the border to assist the army in capturing raiders. Whether the killing of Mexican collaborators should be labeled a civil war will continue to be debated, but Johnson does a service by turning our attention to divisions within the Tejano community. Although Johnson credits Chicano historians in the 1970s with resurrecting the memory of the Plan de San Diego, he also argues that they had "lost the ambivalence and sense of division within the Tejano community expressed by" earlier Chicano scholars such as Americo Paredes (p. 205).

The final chapters of the book follow the story of what Johnson calls the Tejano Progressives as they sought to pick up the pieces after "the spectacular failure of the Plan de San Diego" (p. 181). With armed insurrection all but discredited, Tejano Progressives organized the Texas Mexican community to claim their rights and equal treatment before the law as U.S. citizens. In 1929 these efforts coalesced into the civil rights defense group known as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), an organization that Johnson compares to the better-known NAACP.

The rebel attacks on troops, the assassination of collaborators, the indiscriminate repression of the local populace, and the United States Army's effort to separate "good" from "'bad" natives that Johnson describes in early-twentieth-century south Texas seem as if they were ripped from yesterday's newspaper dispatches from Baghdad. With Latinos already surpassing African Americans as the largest minority and estimated to reach one quarter of the U.S. population by 2050. this crucial episode in the making of Mexican American identity deserves the attention and careful analysis that Johnson provides. Whether or not "the Colossus of the North will itself [soon] be a Latin American nation," as Johnson declares, the story of the Plan de San Diego and the rise of the Tejano Progressives should become a central part of U.S. history (p. 207).

Lewis and Clark College

ELLIOTT YOUNG