Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, Carlos Kevin Blanton has produced the first detailed and comprehensive account of language education policies for Mexican Americans in Texas—or, for that matter, in any Southwestern state. The nineteenth-century portion of this story, in particular, has gone largely untold by professional historians. Yet it is crucial in appreciating the turn toward coercive assimilation that assumed full force in the World War I era, when a majority of states adopted English-only school laws. Texas was especially harsh, enacting criminal penalties in 1918 for teachers caught using any other language for instruction—a ban that lasted until 1969.
In early Texas history, in contrast, Blanton documents “a vibrant bilingual tradition,” beginning with the Spanish missionaries who were directed in 1724 to learn Native American languages as “the first step in the great work of evangelization and conversion” (p. 11). A century later, under Mexican rule, an...
