This text covers over 2,000 years, tracing the roots of the contemporary Mexican-American. It utilizes the fields of history, political science, cultural anthropology, folklore, literature, sociolinguistics, Latin American studies and ethnic studies. Thus, it is unique for its multidisciplinary approach which probes into the past of the underclass--the exploited Native-American, Campesino and Mexican-American. It presents, therefore, an insider's view of the history, culture and politics of the Mestizo/Mestiza as an underclass. Most important, it presents a new perspective that invalidates...

This work probes into the socio-political and cultural setting in South Texas (1915-1992) via data found in the private archival collection of Adela Sloss-Vento; it focuses on her role as an activist, writer and civil/human rights pioneer. It is only through this archive that documentation becomes available of her participation in this unknown and unpublicized civil rights movement. It is a realistic portrayal of an exclusionist semi-colonial society that the reader discovers; a Jim Crow type of political and racial existence against all people of Mexican descent. It represents Sloss-Vento's...