cover image Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity

Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity

Neil Foley, . . Harvard Univ., $24.95 (223pp) ISBN 978-0-674-05023-5

Historian Foley focuses on three aspects of African-American and Mexican-American civil rights activity in Texas and California—the domestic impact of Franklin Roosevelt's WWII “Good Neighbor” policy of mutual obligation toward Latin America; the fight for fair employment practices; and the legal challenges to public school segregation. While Foley ably explores American efforts to end discriminatory practices, he is at his best reviewing the Mexican-American experience, and how “Mexican and African Americans pursued their struggles for equality... in largely parallel universes.” When Mexico's foreign minister banned Texas from receiving Mexican contract workers under the 1943 bracero program due to the state's “extreme and intolerable racial discrimination against Mexicans,” the legislature attempted several times to pass an antidiscrimination bill that could embrace Mexicans as Caucasians. Its failure rested in the fear that “to enact laws to end discrimination against Mexicans might also strike a blow against Jim Crow laws and customs segregating black Texans.” While revealing little common ground except the experience of racial or ethnic discrimination, Foley's accessible history shines fresh light upon the regional issues that make American conceptions of racial and national identity so tangled. (May)