The preface and bibliography prove ominously prophetic about this book’s overall quality. Although the title promises a history of Hispanics, the preface’s first paragraph reneges, admitting that “[o]ur book, however, is not a history of the Spanish-speaking peoples” (p. xi). Moreover, that same paragraph asserts that “[o]urs is the first to deal with the Hispanic peoples in the United States as a whole,” suggesting that the authors were unaware of such books as Harold Alford’s The Proud Peoples: The Heritage and Culture of Spanish-Speaking Peoples in the United States (1972).
The “Select Bibliography” confirms that extraordinary oversight. In addition, without leaving the “As,” I discovered that the bibliography also lists Rodolfo Acuña’s 1971 Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle Toward Liberation, but not his thoroughly revised 1981 second edition, while it credits Acuña with authorship of one of my books. Unfortunately, such errors and inconsistencies epitomize this disconcertingly uneven study.
Following a 65-page historical sketch, the book focuses on the contemporary scene. The authors handle some themes well: the bureaucratic artificiality of the term Hispanic; stereotypes such as the distorted American popular vision of Latino machismo and the “political culture” explanation for low Latino voting rates; and the antiminority bias of at-large voting in local elections.
The authors also provide a great deal of data. But how much of it can be trusted, considering the proliferation of glaring factual errors? Names take a battering. Actor Raul Julia becomes Paul Julia, actor-musician Desi Arnaz becomes Desi Arnez, and television newsman Geraldo Rivera becomes Geraldo Riviera. Américo Paredes’s With His Pistol in His Hand is described as “the story of a Mexican sheriff killed in 1901 during a tragic gunfight” (p. 202), when in fact the sheriff was an Anglo who was killed by a Mexican-American. Latino organizations are misnamed, while the chapter on Hispanic politics fails to even mention San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros, arguably the most eminent Latino in U.S. political history!
Ideological advocacy sometimes masquerades as balanced scholarship. In the misleadingly entitled section, “The Case For and Against Bilingual Education,” the authors present an abysmally weak case for bilingual education, ignoring the compelling research of such probilingual education scholars as Stephen Krashen, Ann Willig, Kenji Hakuta, and James Cummins, and then proceed to demolish their own feebly mounted argument. In the following chapter, even this pretense to balance disappears with “The Case Against Affirmative Action,” consisting essentially of the warmed-over, unconvincing arguments of conservative economist Thomas Sowell (like the authors, a fellow of the Hoover Institution).
What can explain this book’s puzzling unevenness? One factor may be the authors’ backgrounds (or lack of them). They are not (or at least were not) specialists on Hispanics. Rather, their previous books deal with Africa and the Middle East. However, that cannot excuse the plethora of factual errors, critical omissions, unsupported assertions, and weakly developed analyses that mar this disappointing book.
