The White Scourge

Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture

Author: Neil Foley
ISBN: 0520207246

In a book that fundamentally challenges our understanding of race in the United States, Neil Foley unravels the complex history of ethnicity in the cotton culture of central Texas. This engrossing narrative, spanning the period from the Civil War through the collapse of tenant farming in the early 1940s, bridges the intellectual chasm between African American and Southern history on one hand and Chicano and Southwestern history on the other. The White Scourge describes a unique borderlands region, where the cultures of the South, West, and Mexico overlap, to provide a deeper understanding of the process of identity formation and to challenge the binary opposition between "black" and "white" that often dominates discussions of American race relations. In Texas, which by 1890 had become the nation's leading cotton-producing state, the presence of Mexican sharecroppers and farm workers complicated the black-white dyad that shaped rural labor relations in the South. With the transformatio

Publisher: University of California Press
Publish Date: 1997

Subjects: Business & Economics / Economic History, History / United States / General, History / United States / State & Local / General, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies, Social Science / Minority Studies

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Raza Recource Centro (Location: Bookshelf 1)