Using data collected by the Mexican Heritage Project of Tucson, Thomas Sheridan traces the history of Tucson’s Mexican population from the town’s origins as a presidio in 1775 to the eve of World War II in 1940. Chapters 2-7, covering the period from 1854 to World War I, constitute the heart of the book. Despite Anglo-American domination of the economy and politics, a small number of Mexicans, primarily from Sonora, were able to parlay their commercial activity into “elite’’ status until the arrival of the railroad in 1880. This elite was succeeded by a largely immigrant middle-class generation that found its opportunities outside the Mexican community restricted in the period after 1880. Both of the groups participated little in politics. They published newspapers, built churches and schools, and organized mutual aid societies. They fought discrimination, but did not support the economic aspirations of the working class. Residential segregation began as soon as the Anglo-Americans arrived, and Tucson’s modern Mexican barrios crystallized by 1940.
Chapters 8-15 deal primarily with social and cultural topics (family, religion, entertainment, and education), and are weak on economic data for the Mexican community between the two world wars. The latter chapters do demonstrate what Sheridan calls the gradual “institutional subordination” of the Mexican population. However, they do not fully document the internal dynamics of the Mexican community or the “extraordinary sacrifices” of the working class in the barrios, as Sheridan intended (p. 7).
The strengths of the book include the occupational and demographic tables and graphs of the Mexican and Anglo populations, as well as comparisons with other localities. Among other things, we learn that the Mexican work forces of Tucson and El Paso had much larger proportions (over 20 percent) of their members in white-collar occupations than did those of Los Angeles or Santa Barbara. Historians of Mexico will be interested in the Sonoran family and business connections which serve as background.
