Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province.

By Daniel D. Arreola. Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Pp. [xvi], 272. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-292-70511-5; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-292-70510-7.)

In Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province Daniel D. Arreola studies the dynamic subregion where southern culture in the United States ends and southwestern culture begins. Using seventy-five maps and pictures, fifteen tables, and a variety of interdisciplinary methods, Arreola, a cultural geographer at Arizona State University, argues that South Texas is more culturally Mexican than any other region of the nation.

Much of Tejano South Texas defines a region once described in an 1894 Scribner's Magazine article as "The American Congo" (p. 236) and "terra incognita to the rest of the United States" (p. 2). Chapter 2 eruditely summarizes early knowledge and exploration of South Texas by Spanish conquistadors and United States naturalists. Arreola notes in chapter 3 that the Spanish created six permanent settlements in South Texas during the eighteenth century, and Mexican and Mexican American peoples founded fourteen more between 1824 and 1880. The fourth chapter concludes of the subregion's present boundaries, "The South Texas Mexican homeland is a thirty-two county area larger than the state of Pennsylvania where Texas Mexicans hold sheer demographic dominance" (p. 62). The rest of Tejano South Texas goes beyond the political, economic, and geographic to get at the region's cultural distinctiveness. Chapter 5 examines the spatial structures of South Texas, including uniquely Mexican public spaces like plazas. The sixth and seventh chapters focus on three small towns--San Ygnacio, San Diego, and Cotulla--and two cities--San Antonio and Laredo--that are culturally representative of the region. Though the author discovers varying degrees of segregation, the topic is expressed as a function of separate spatial development and not so much as a social issue through time. In chapter 8 Arreola anthropologically offers a thick description of South Texas culture through a fascinating examination of foodways and folk Catholicism. One map delightfully identifies a "Taco-Burrito" line that separates South Texas from other Mexican American, subregional cultures as well as a "Taco-Barbecue" line that tentatively suggests a cultural division "between 'Southwestern' and 'Southern' cuisine regions in the United States" (p. 175).

Tejano South Texas succeeds in large part because it is well informed by history. However, a few dynamic historical moments are underexamined. For example, a more substantial consideration of the monumental ideological possibilities of the 1915 "irredentist movement" (which proclaimed an intention to take back for Mexico land that had been lost in 1836 and 1848) and the limited but enduring Tejano-Anglo cooperation inherent to the patron system would not necessarily have discredited Arreola's thesis and might have enriched it with more nuance (pp. 190-91). Moreover, the concept of race is static. Not addressed are how Anglo conceptions of race influenced Mexican Americans and what racial or citizenship distinctions were maintained within the Tejano community. Also, though perhaps beyond the book's scope, Anglo cultural contributions to the region's distinctiveness are only incidentally mentioned.

These minor imperfections, however, are ultimately not detrimental. Daniel Arreola's Tejano South Texas makes a convincing case for South Texas as a unique cultural homeland for Mexican Americans in the United States and should be studied by scholars interested in the place where South and West meet.

CARLOS KEVIN BLANTON

Texas A&M University