The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 83, July 1979 - April, 1980 Page: 424
464 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
society rather than ethnic strife and cleavage. He mentions but does not
stress, for instance, the exploitation of Mexican Americans in California
and, in fact, generally seems to feel that the "Californios" came out
of their initial contacts with Anglo conquest in fairly good fashion.
Machado regards such Chicano heroes of the California past as Joaquin
Murietta as simple bandits, rather than as Robin Hood-like avengers of
wrongs perpetrated on the Mexican people by Anglo-Saxon invaders.
Discussing more recent events in California, the author has little good
to say about Cesar Chavez, whom he views as an opportunistic trouble-
maker whose quest for the fulfillment of his personal ego-needs has done
more harm than good for the Mexican Americans he presumes to
represent.
In this informal-at times almost chatty-book, Machado surveys in a
somewhat revisionist manner the Mexican Revolution and the impact of
this monumental event on Mexican Americans. Although he certainly
pulls no punches in his ascerbic account of bumbling efforts on the part
of the United States to come to grips with the reality of the Revolution,
Machado also has little good to say about the so-called heroes of the
self-assertion of the Mexican people. He levies heavy criticism on all of
them, from Benito P. Juirez through Porfirio Diaz, Victoriano Huerta,
Venustiano Carranza, Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, and Lizaro CAr-
denas. Machado also casts a jaundiced eye at the "cult of the Indian"
(p. 78) arising out of revolutionary fervor; a cult which he feels commits
a grave historical error in refusing to recognize the blending of cultural
attributes that the present-day Mexican American embodies.
Despite Machado's generally nonabrasive treatment of relations be-
tween Mexicans and the Anglo population, he does at times direct cen-
sure towards groups and situations that, in his mind, exemplify intol-
erable victimization of the Mexican American. Thus Anglo-Texans
come in for their share of criticism, with the author feeling that in their
actions over the generations the Texans have embodied the nadir of
relations with their ethnically different neighbors. Machado also, sur-
prisingly enough, treats Reies L6pez Tijerina with considerable sym-
pathy in his account of the fight to regain lost New Mexican lands for
the "Hispanics" in that state.
In its historical analysis, Machado's work is both incisive and casual,
sorrowful and humorous, and, withal, well worth reading. It is unfor-
tunate that his volume is saddled with a wholly inadequate index as
well as with crudely penned sketches (presumably by the author) which
give the book a misleadingly childish tone.424
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 83, July 1979 - April, 1980, periodical, 1979/1980; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101207/m1/482/: accessed April 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.