Cynthia Orozco

The essayist Adela Sloss-Vento (1901–1998) was a powerhouse of activism in South Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the Mexican American civil rights movement beginning in 1920 and the subsequent Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. At last presenting the full story of Sloss-Vento’s achievements, Agent of Change revives a forgotten history of a major female Latina leader.

Bringing to light the economic and political transformations that swept through South Texas in the 1920s as ranching declined and agribusiness proliferated, Cynthia E. Orozco situates Sloss-Vento’s early years within the context of the Jim Crow/Juan Crow era. Recounting Sloss-Vento’s rise to prominence as a public intellectual, Orozco highlights a partnership with Alonso S. Perales, the principal founder of the League of United Latin American Citizens. Agent of Change explores such contradictions as Sloss-Vento’s tolerance of LULAC’s gender-segregated chapters, even though the activist was an outspoken critic of male privilege in the home and a decidedly progressive wife and mother. Inspiring and illuminating, this is a complete portrait of a savvy, brazen critic who demanded reform on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

The contributions and influences of Mexican Americans in Texas history have been many and significant. Only in recent decades, however, have historians adequately told this story. The enormous strides made in the study of Mexican-origin people in Texas are reflected in this important new book of essays.In May 1991 the Texas State Historical Association cosponsored a conference, “Mexican Americans in Texas History,” which brought together some six hundred participants, including nearly one hundred leading scholars in the field of Mexican American Studies. In the words of the editors’ introduction, this highly successful conference “confirmed and celebrated the existence of a substantial body of literature in Mexican American history.” It showed that “Mexican American history was on its way to assuming its rightful place of importance.”This groundbreaking volume, which contains eleven essays from that pivotal conference, corrects and amplifies the historical record. Mexican Americans in Texas History will be of great interest to students, scholars, teachers, and general readers, and it is well adapted to classroom use.Selected essays include:; Old Roads, New Horizons: Texas History and the New World Order, by David Montejano; Occupied Texas: Bexar and Goliad, 1835–;1836, by Paul Lack; Mexicanos in Texas During the Civil War, by Miguel González Quiroga; Union, Paz y Trabajo: Laredo’s Mexican Mutual Aid Societies in the 1890s, by Roberto R. Calderón; Mutualist and Mexicanist Expressions of a Mexican Political Culture in Texas, by Emilio Zamora; The Tejano Revolt of 1915, by Rodolfo Rocha; Agents of Americanization: The Houston Settlement Association and the Mexican Community, 1900–;1950, by María Cristina García; Trini Gamez and the Texas Farm Workers: Toil and Trouble on the Texas Plains, by Yolanda García Romero; Carlos E. Castañeda: The Historian and the Critics” by Félix D. Almaráz; The Borderlands of Culture: Americo Paredes’s George Washington Gomez, by Ramón Saldívar; Estudios Tejanos: A List of Historical Literature on Mexican Americans in Texas, by Arnoldo de Leon; Selected Bibliography on Mexican American, Tejana, and Tejano History, by Cynthia Orozco