Below is a detailed book review I had to do for my Latino History (HIST507) course at Adams State University. This was one of five primary text books we had for the course. As an educator I feel that it is important that I also keep up my own education and renew the experience of what it is to be a student. It also helps me review what text books are currently in use for what subjects. 4 stars out of 5 or a B.
Ruiz, icki L. From Out of the Shadows: Mexican
Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York, NY: xford University Press,
USA, 2008.
When studying
history of the common people, many times women have been overlooked. This has
been changing with the rise of feminist historians. These historians have been
researching not only European women immigrants, but also applying this to
Mexican women as they look at their stories of immigration to the U.S. The
study of Mexican women is important in helping people to understand not only
why people immigrant to the U.S., but also why they decide to stay. Some
writers, such as George Sanchez, have looked at the lives of Mexican women
through a patriarchal lens. Then Vicki L. Ruiz tries to change this approach
with her book From Out of the Shadows:
Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. This book takes a dive into the
experiences of Mexican immigrate women and the generations of Mexican-American
woman that came from them.
Ruiz looks at the history of Mexican women
through their experiences, trying to give them a voice as to their place in
history. She does this by looking at the events that impacted specific women
such as border crossings and community activism. She re-empowers these women by
showing how their actions not only improved the lives of their families, but
left lasting impacts on the communities that they lived in. Even though Ruiz
tried to move away from the patriarchal view, she still showed how it impacted
Mexican women. One example she talks about is how immigration agents would be
suspicious of women trying to cross the border without a man to watch over
them. [1] It was not possible for
her to entirely remove how males impacted women and their actions, but she
tried to negate this as much as possible by providing the information directly
from their view points and direct words. This can be hard to do since Mexican
culture has been impacted so much by patriarchy and it takes pilling off the
layers of maleness to get to the heart of the female experience. One of the
ways that patriarchy took shape in the lives of Mexican women was through
chaperonage when they would be interacting with males not from their families.
Instead of just focusing on how chaperonage impacted the women, Ruiz then went
into detail about how women rebelled or found ways around it. Some of her
interviewees would gaily recount “tales of ditching the duena or sneaking down
the stairwell” so that they would not have to deal with these restrictions.[2] These interviewees would
shine light on the female perspective in From
Out of the Shadows.
Vicki L. Ruiz has
made a name for herself in academia with her research. She has received several
large grants, book awards, and even holds the distinguished title of Professor
Emerita from the University of California Irvine.[3] Her
research has spanned many different topics in history, but there has been
emphasis on US women’s history, immigration studies, and gender issues.[4] From out of the Shadows is just one of
her numerous works on similar topics. In the intro for the book she also talks
about her personal experience of being a Latina and growing up hearing two
versions of history, the one taught in school and the one taught to her by her
family.[5] The
family’s version would contain many topics just not covered by standard education
and she would learn from their experiences just how much the history books were
missing. This personal experience can be seen as an influence on her choice of
subjects she has chosen research and write on. This also explains why she wants
to give a voice to Latina women. In this work Ruiz tried to take a feminist
approach to this subject while doing social history. In a way this could also
be her trying to break away from patriarchy of her own culture while showing
the independence of Mexican women. This book could fill her own personal needs
for a voice while helping to get the story of other Latina’s lives out there
for people to be able to learn about.
Ruiz’s feminist
approach can also be seen in her choice of resources. One of the ways that this
can be seen is in her use of works by Cynthia Orozco who is known for her work
on Chicana feminism. Ruiz used Orozco’s knowledge in several ways including her
knowledge of LULAC. Orozco has been trying to get historians to see the
importance of both LULAC and the Mexican American civil rights movement.
Orozco’s views could be seen as being similar to Ruiz’s. Orozco has also
pointed out that key features of Mexican life are missing from how history has
been presented to the public. She mostly clearly states this in one of her
works when she says that even “Chicano scholars had an ideological contempt for
LULAC and those calling themselves Mexican American.”[6] Both of
these women have been working to expand the historical understanding of the
Mexican American experience. Ruiz uses her peers’ work to help her build the
platform for the points she wants to get across of the experience of Mexican
women.
The
rest of Ruiz’s resources are very diverse. She used not only the normal
resources like government documents, books, articles, and newspapers, but other
types of more personal sources. For Ruiz these took the form of correspondences
and interviews. These interviews were took place from 1979 to 1995.[7] Even
though the book’s focus was on women, she also interviewed a few males as well.
Interviews as oral history have gained in importance to help fill in the
shortfalls that other forms of research can leave. It is also important in
communities and cultures that are overlooked by standard forms of documentation
or where it may be hard to find personal accounts such as journals. These oral
histories allow historians to capture personal stories that can help them
better understand history before that information is last to time. These oral
histories fit in perfectly with Ruiz’s goals of presenting the female
perspective of life being both Mexican and Mexican American. She can use their
voices to help expand how history views them and the times they lived in.
Ruiz’s attempt to give a voice to Mexican
and Mexican American women has been noticed in historical circles and beyond.
For the most part it has been positively received. Maria Raquel Casas could
only find minor flaws when she reviewed it. These included not building enough of
a background on the settlement of the Southwest and focusing mostly on
1910-1940 while saying the book was to cover the full twentieth-century and not
just a part of it.[8]
Even with these minor issues Casas even directly said that the book was “a
major contribution to Chicana historiography.”[9] Camille Guerin-Gonzales in
her review pointed out that this was not just on Mexican women, but also
provided “a blueprint for social justice and human dignity.”[10] Since this was a social
history topic I wanted to also see what another reviewer in a different field
thought of the book. Victoria Carpenter, writing for The Journal of Gender Studies, actually had some issue with it having
such a strong feminist approach.[11] I was actually surprised
by this since the historical reviewers seemed to see that has a positive. I
personally felt that the book did a great job of meeting the goals it had set
out to do, primarily give a voice to an under represented group of women that
were active in history in so many different ways. The only issue I had with it
goes with Casas’s view of it focusing too much on a limited part of the
twentieth-century. I think it would have been better if she would have broken
the book into the different decades and then she could have seen on what timeframes
she was short on information.
This book is not only significant to the
time when it was written, but still is today. This is because even with the
Black Lives Matter Movement, many other groups are being overlooked because
they are not being as vocal. This really has impact because President Trump is
still for building the border wall, changing what immigration looks like, and
other social government policies that can impact these groups and they are
happening without those people having a voice. Ruiz not only helps to get the
story of Mexicans and Mexican American out there, but by her focusing on it
from the women’s perspective she is expanding how different that voice can be.
This is another book that should be read by politicians right to help them
understand more about the experience of immigrants and their children. Also as
a woman I think it has significance in that it helps me see how other women
have lived and how they have worked to achieve their own type of independence within
cultural constraints like patriarchy.
Bibliography
Carpenter, Victoria. “From Out of the Shadows.” Journal of Gender Studies 8, no. 3 (1999): 374-375. Accessed September 19, 2020.
Casas, Maria R. “From Out of the Shadows Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America.” Western Historical Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Winter, 1998): 523-524. Accessed September 19, 2020.
Guerin-Gonzales, Camille. “From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America.” The Journal of American History 85, no. 3 (Dec., 1998): 1158-1159. Accessed September 19, 2020.
Matsumoto,
Valerie J. “Vicki L. Ruiz Biography.” https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-
membership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential-addresses/vicki-l-ruiz/vicki-l-ruiz-biography. Accessed: 9/19/20.
Orozco, Cynthia E. No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The
Rise of the Mexican American
Ruiz, Vicki L. From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008.
University of California. “Faculty Profile
System: Vicky L. Ruiz.” https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5302.
Accessed:
09/19/2020.
[1] Vicki L. Ruiz . From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008) 12.
[2] Ruiz, 63.
[3] “Faculty Profile System: Vicki L.
Ruiz,” https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5302. Accessed: 09/19/2020.
[4] Valerie J. Matsumoto. “Vicki L.
Ruiz Biography,” https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential-addresses/vicki-l-ruiz/vicki-l-ruiz-biography. Accessed 09/19/20.
[5] Ruiz, xi.
[6] Cynthia E. Orozco. No Mexicans,
Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement
(Austin: University of Texas Press, USA, 2009) 186.
[7] Ruiz, 246-247.
[8]
Maria Casas.
“From Out of the Shadows Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America.” Western
Historical Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Winter, 1998): 524, accessed September 19,
2020.
[9] Casas, 524.
[10] Camille Guerin-Gonzales.
“From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America.” The
Journal of American History 85, no. 3 (Dec., 1998): 1159, accessed September
19, 2020.
[11] Victoria Carpenter.
“From Out of the Shadows.” Journal of
Gender Studies 8, no. 3 (1999): 375, accessed September 19, 2020.
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