Content area
Full Text
The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Cultures
NEIL FOLEY, 1997
Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press
pp. xii + 326; $29.95
The White Scourge, recent recipient of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, examines a very important and largely unexamined history involving the interaction of Mexicans, Anglos and blacks in the cotton culture of central Texas. Written in the tradition of American cultural studies, its central focus is the evolution of dominant white ideology toward racial identities in the late-l9th and early-20th centuries. The setting offers critical insights as it straddles two distinct rural formations, the southern plantation characterized by a black-white dichotomy, and the southwestern ranch where Mexican and Anglo met. The interaction informed the "White Scourge," simultaneously a metaphor for cotton and cotton culture, the color line, and whiteness itself.
In Central Texas the plantation South and the ranching Southwest intermingled, resulting in sharp rifts separating tenants, sharecroppers and wage laborers, exacerbated by racial differences. Tenants were more akin to small farmers, as they owned their own tools, did not work under supervision, and they often hired sharecroppers and wage laborers. Among tenants, whites were dominant...