Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II (review)
World War II was a watershed for the Mexican Americans who fought in the U.S. armed services and worked on the home front to defeat the enemies of democracy. In the past five years scholars have increasingly turned their attention to how the war years affected Latino civil rights. The Latinos and Latinas in the World War II Project at the University of Texas, Austin produced three anthologies: Mexican Americans in World War II (2005) and A Legacy Greater than Words (2006), both edited by Maggie Rivas Rodriguez, and Beyond the Latino World War II Hero (2009), which Rivas Rodriguez edited with Emilio Zamora. In addition, Zaragosa Vargas studied labor unions' influence in Labor Rights are Civil Rights (2005), while Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard Steele looked at how the war affected civil rights of Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest in World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights (2008). This most recent study by Emilio Zamora is the most in-depth scholarly study thus far of the complex forces at work among the Mexican Americans in Texas during the war.