The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 83, July 1979 - April, 1980 Page: 198

                                
Southwestern Historical Quarterly

icy which occurred. While Coerver has not revised the history of this
period in any dramatic sense, he has clearly established that the Gon-
zMlez presidency was an interregnum between the initial Diaz term and
his return to power in 1884.
The remarkable feature of the recent research on the last third of the
nineteenth century, including the two studies reviewed here, is the con-
tinuity in the political system even while it evolved through the admin-
istrations of Juirez, Lerdo, GonzAlez, and Diaz again until it constituted
the fully authoritarian regime which came to characterize the Porfiriato
leading to that alienation which, together with social and economic dis-
content, provoked the national upheaval in 9g 1o known as the Mexican
Revolution. These studies provide significant links in the evolving and
pivotally important political system.
University of Texas, Austin                       STANLEY R. Ross
The Chicanos as We See Ourselves. Edited by Arnulfo D. Trejo. (Tuc-
son: University of Arizona Press, 1979. Pp. xviii+22o. Editor's
words, index. $12.50.)
This collection of readings, edited by Arnulfo D. Trejo, is yet an-
other attempt to achieve self-image by the Mexican American. Like so
many works in this genre, it falls short of the mark, because it attempts
to create a series of impressions to counter fallacies and myths that the
authors ascribe to the Anglo world. The book suffers from the fact that
it is a series of readings constructed for the one purpose of conveying an
idea of what the Mexican American is or is not. Books of readings or
original essays held together tenuously by one or two single themes are
uneven in quality and difficult to evaluate. Ultimately the reader reacts
to and makes his principal judgment on the basis of a few selected essays
that impressed him as meriting comment.
The first essay, by Guillermo Lux Maurilio E. Vigil, is an attempt to
demonstrate the Indianness of the Chicano. In a broad sense this is in line
with the indigenismo so prevalent in Mexico after the 1910-1920o Revo-
lution. In part it is a manifestation of Mexican American nationalism
just as indigenismo was a manifestation of Mexican nationalism: an at-
tempt to supplant the foreign. Yet, in both cases this essay shows little,
if any, appreciation of the mestizo heritage shared by the Mexican Amer-
ican and by the Mexican. The attempt is to glorify the Indian beyond
what is justified by the cultural values that he has contributed to the hy-
bridization that is the Mexican American.

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