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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