The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture.

The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture. By Neil Foley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xv plus 326pp. $29.95).

In his examination of the complex class and race relationships that existed among Mexicans, African Americans, and Anglo Americans in Texas in the early twentieth century, Neil Foley reveals the inadequacy of the black/white model for understanding the southwestern United States. The area of central Texas that he focuses on differed from other parts of the South both in its multiracial makeup and in the organization of cotton production. Its combination of cultural elements drawn from the South, West, and Mexico presents a unique case study. Foley analyzes the fluidity of racial categories and shows how patterns of resistance to exploitation by white, black, and Mexican farm workers were shaped by the specific set of labor relations that existed in the region. His work uncovers the complicated nature of race and class subordination and their connection to issues of labor control.

Foley begins with a discussion of Anglo American racial ideologies in the nineteenth century that defined Mexicans as lazy, unambitious, shiftless, and inferior. At the founding of the Republic of Texas, Mexicans were classed with Indians and African Americans as "nonwhite" people who were unworthy of full citizenship. After the United States annexed Texas and gained more territory in 1848 through its war with Mexico, many white Americans expressed concern about the incorporation of large numbers of Mexicans into the nation. At that time and during debates over immigration in the twentieth century, however, employers who relied on the steady supply of cheap labor from south of the border argued that the influx of Mexicans was necessary for the economic wellbeing of the region and posed no threat to white civilization. Plantation and ranch owners' need for workers sometimes led them to compromise white racial ideologies by extolling the virtues of Mexican labor. Mexicans, they argued, made better and more rel iable laborers than white or black people.

In reality, employers preferred Mexican workers because they were cheaper and more easily exploited. As noncitizens with few legal rights, often in flight from poverty and political turmoil in their home country, Mexican immigrants were likely to accept whatever wages and conditions they were offered. Between 1900 and 1930, white and black tenants and sharecroppers on Texas cotton plantations faced increasing competition from Mexicans who were hired as sharecroppers and day laborers. At the same time, rising land values, the high cost of credit, and the low price of cotton forced many white landowners into tenancy, with some falling even further down the agricultural ladder into sharecropping. The growth of a class of poor white people who lived in conditions of poverty more commonly associated with "nonwhite" groups challenged Anglo American racial assumptions. To explain the anomaly, wealthier white people developed theories that suggested genetic traits were responsible. Landless white folk were stigmatiz ed as inherently lazy, ignorant, and inefficient in much the same way that Mexicans and African Americans were defined as racially inferior. Suggesting that racism has more to do with economic systems than with skin color or other physical characteristics, Foley states that as white people slipped from property ownership to the "racially marked status of sharecroppers, they came perilously close to becoming racially marked themselves" (p. 39).

The impoverishment of white farm workers drew many of them to the Socialist Party, which gained increasing support in the South between 1900 and 1917. In 1911 Tom Hickey and other Texas Socialists organized the Renters' Union of America (later renamed the Land League), attempting to pull poor white people away from the Democratic Party by emphasizing class differences. Foley notes that despite Hickey's militant rhetoric, the Socialist leader was "not much different" from the Democrats on the issue of race (p. 94). Hickey could see no point in organizing disfranchised African Americans, especially since doing so would make the party vulnerable to charges of seeking racial equality. He viewed Mexicans as inferior, docile "peons" who were unlikely to become involved in efforts to improve their economic condition. The actions of Mexican workers themselves forced Hickey to change his assessment. Many Mexicans in Texas either belonged to or were influenced by the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), the precursor to th e Mexican Revolution, and were more radical than their Anglo American counterparts. They formed their own locals of the Renters' Union and

Land League, risking violence and imprisonment to demand better treatment from their employers. Hickey began to see in Mexican farm workers a degree of militancy and "manliness" that seemed to be lacking among white tenants and sharecroppers, and openly praised them in an effort to shame other union members into asserting their rights more aggressively. Foley states that "Gendered notions of whiteness thus played an important role in whitening Mexicans and in complicating whiteness for Anglos like Hickey ..., who wondered aloud how Anglo-American tenant farmers could claim to be white if they acted like peons" (p. 110). For a brief period, the boundaries of whiteness expanded "to construct Mexican tenant farmers as almost white because of their radical politics" (p. 114).

Political repression during and after World War I crushed the Socialist Party in Texas. Mechanization, the growth of huge commercial farms, and New Deal agricultural policies all exacerbated the problems of landless rural workers. Foley contrasts the success of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU) in organizing sharecroppers in Arkansas in the l930s with its failure in Texas, attributing this to the different class and racial structures that existed in the two states. Tenancy and sharecropping in Arkansas were not as racially stratified and distinguishable as they were in Texas. White and black farm workers in Arkansas shared similar economic interests and both groups viewed themselves as exploited workers, allowing their movement to coalesce around demands for better wages and working conditions. In Texas, most tenants were white, and viewed themselves as having a higher status than sharecroppers and wage laborers, who were largely black and Mexican. Many tenants subrented their farms to sharecroppers or hired others to work for them, so that their economic interests often more closely resembled those of farm owners than farm workers. According to Foley, "In attempting to be a truly interracial union, the STFU mistakenly sought to be interclass as well, and it failed to see the class difference between farm workers and nonplantation farm tenants in Texas" (p. 192).

The White Scourge brings together multiple themes from studies of the South and West, Mexican and African American history, labor history, and more recent work on the social construction of whiteness. Scholars who are interested in one or more of these fields will find it a valuable resource for understanding the class-based nature of racial ideologies and how these may vary between regions or change over time. In addition, Foley suggests new ways of understanding the successes and failures of interracial organizing in the United States, a contribution that is sure to enrich future inquiries into this area.