Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province (Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture)
For over twenty years Dan Arreola has been writing imaginatively about ethnic landscapes, Mexican-American geography and the character of Borderland cities. In his latest book, Tejano South Texas, Arreola offers a fascinating look at a small but vital vernacular region within this vast state, exploring what makes its rural and urban features geographically distinctive. He portrays a changing region that has had different personalities at different times. In the best traditions of cultural and historical geography, he uses two approaches—impeccable field work and thorough archival research, and all in two languages. The book treats the land occupied, the spaces created by Texas-Mexicans in town and country, their social identities, and the essence of the region as a cultural province. It draws in findings in anthropology, folklore, sociology, urban design, and architecture but makes them serve geographical ends. It employs diverse sources in innovative fashion—local terminology, phone books, menus, even the author's outstanding personal collection of borderlands postcards—to tell an intimate and engaging story of people and landscape. And above all the book is highly readable. Written in an approachable style that will appeal to scholars, business owners, farmers, ranchers and anyone with curiosity, Tejano South Texas represents the very kind of geographical writing that the late J. B. Jackson so encouraged and applauded. (Association of American Geographers)