The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 99, July 1995 - April, 1996 Page: 275
626 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Book Reviews
individually because of their dissimilar experiences within the United States.
The next group of articles, by Mois6s Sandoval, Marina Herrera, Edmundo
Rodriguez, and Ana Maria Diaz-Stevens, provide excellent historical overviews of
the changes which the Catholic Church has undergone, sometimes willingly,
sometimes grudgingly, in order to encourage the Hispanic presence.
Orlando O. Espin convincingly explains the reasons for the conflicts which
Hispanics have faced within the U.S. Catholic church. He maintains that the
Hispanic popular religion, strongly matriarchal and home-centered, was
brought to the New World before the Council of Trent, while post-Tridentine
Catholicism, with its stronger authoritarian rule and less popular involvement,
arrived with the Irish, German, and Poles and attempted to displace the older
religion. Allan Figueroa Deck, S.J., who deliberates the problem of the flight of
Hispanic Catholics to the Pentecostal church, agrees with Espin that the
resilience and strength of the popular Hispanic church may be an answer to the
problems of the Catholic Church in the culturally cold, self-centered modern
world.
This book is an excellent study of the Catholic Church as it has related to its
Hispanic members, past and present, and one which all Catholics interested in
the growth of their church would do well to study.
Sam Houston State University A. CAROLINE CASTILLO CRIMM
Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County,
z9oo-z950. By Gilbert Gonzalez. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1994. Pp. xiv+252. Preface, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN
0-25206-388-5. $14.95, paper.)
The setting for this fascinating monograph on Mexican American citrus farm
workers is Orange County, California, during the heyday of the citrus industry
(from about the turn of the twentieth century until the immediate post-World
War II era). Its purpose is to analyze Mexican American farm villages and their
development. Consequently, Gonzalez devotes much attention to the rise of the
citrus industry and its demand for exploitable laborers, living conditions in the
county's rural settlements, labor activity therein, the continuation of cultural
norms imported from Mexico, popular forms of entertainment, traditional fami-
ly ties, established religious and folkloric beliefs, and time-tested techniques of
house-building, as well as adjustments and concessions to U.S. schools and
Americanization programs.
In describing citrus farm life, Gonzalez offers several interesting theses. He
feels that immigration accompanying economic change in the U.S. since 1900oo is
"the key to explaining the origins of the Chicano minority" (p. 192). Though
current Chicano historiography holds that most people of Mexican origin since
the 1940os are U.S.-born and owe allegiance primarily to their land of birth,
immigrants still make up a large segment of the U.S. population. Gonzilez
opines that immigrant life, influenced by the modern economic links between
the U.S. and Mexico, is certainly different from that of nineteenth-century1995
275
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 99, July 1995 - April, 1996, periodical, 1996; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101217/m1/323/: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.