The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 92, July 1988 - April, 1989 Page: 633

Book Reviews

Nevertheless, scholars and all those interested in New Spain's north-
ern frontier will find Hispanic Arizona, 1536-1856 extremely valuable.
It complements very well two other excellent works by the same press
on related topics: Henry F. Dobyn's Spanish Colonial Tucson: A Demo-
graphic History (1976) and Thomas E. Sheridan's Los Tucsonenses: The
Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941 (1986). On its own, Officer's
book will undoubtedly become a landmark in Arizona's history. The
author's use of previously untapped archival resources provides new
leads for important issues in Arizona's Hispanic past. Furthermore, the
work's time scope and regional perspective are a welcome contribution
to the new Borderlands historiography. The concluding Epilogue and
Appendices, which provide the information that links the Spanish and
Mexican past with the American era, may well serve as a model for all
who share the viewpoint that Hispanic roots in the Southwest were not
severed by events in the mid-18oos.
University of Texas at San Antonio GILBERTO HINOJOSA
Invisible Houston: The Black Experience in Boom and Bust. By Robert D.
Bullard. (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press,
1987. Pp. xiv+16o. Preface, introduction, illustrations, tables,
maps, notes, index. $28.50, cloth; $11.50, paper.)
It seems like only yesterday that the Houston economy was soaring,
temporarily earning the city the nickname "Boomtown USA." While
teaching at Texas Southern University during those halcyon years, soci-
ologist Robert D. Bullard was disturbed that Houston's image-builders
and boosters habitually ignored the local black community. In order to
correct that omission, Bullard has written a modest volume that exam-
ines the social conditions confronting black Houstonians during "the
'boom-and-bust' era of the 197os and 198os" (p. 12). Chapter topics in-
clude housing, environmental concerns, employment, income levels,
law enforcement, and civil-rights struggles.
Bullard's main goal is to determine the extent to which blacks partici-
pated in Houston's growing prosperity. Despite a substantial decline in
overt racial discrimination during the period, he believes that continu-
ing "institutional racism" clearly limited black benefits from the eco-
nomic boom. The author shows that in the mid-197os, when the area's
unemployment was remarkably low, the black unemployment rate was
double that of whites. When the Houston economy crashed in the
198os and unemployment soared, the black rate still remained at twice
the white rate. Bullard also produces some interesting figures on black
family income that showed Houston's blacks as the most affluent of

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