Mexican American Odyssey: Felix Tijerina, Entrepreneur and by Thomas H. Kreneck PDF

In Mexican American Odyssey, Thomas H. Kreneck not just lines the influential lifetime of Houston entrepreneur and civic chief Felix Tijerina as somebody yet illustrates how Tijerina mirrored many traits in Mexican American improvement through the many years he lived, years that have been an important for the Hispanic group this present day. Kreneck outlines a trend of id and assimilation that has been traced in daring, broader phrases via different students, who've referred to as Tijerina’s contemporaries the “Mexican American Generation.”

Felix Tijerina was once born in 1905 in Mexico, even if he publicly claimed to were born in Texas. He labored his method from busboy and waiter to proprietor of a ecocnomic, famous chain of Mexican eating places. the tale of his monetary luck parallels that of different self-made American enterprise leaders. yet his contribution didn't finish there. He used to be an energetic chief of neighborhood, country, and nationwide Mexican American organisations, and in these teams he labored to improve the Hispanic group and advertise social concord. additionally, Kreneck demonstrates how Tijerina’s lifestyles and efforts symbolized the historical past of a those who, by the point Tijerina died within the mid-1960s, have been not numerically inundated and ineffectual.

Emerging as a pace-setter in such mainstream teams and forums as Rotary overseas and the Houston Housing Authority, Tijerina was once a pioneer in Mexican American interplay with Anglos. He was once quite famous for his efforts on behalf of Mexican American schooling. whereas serving an unparalleled 4 phrases as nationwide president of LULAC, from 1956 to 1960, he introduced an the world over acclaimed academic initiative referred to as the Little university of the four hundred, to educate English to preschool Spanish-speaking children.

Through Tijerina’s lifestyles, Kreneck illustrates the complex family among Anglos and Mexican american citizens throughout the early and center years of the century. He identifies either prejudice and chance in Tijerina’s setting and analyzes the characteristics that allowed the fellow to flourish inside of these situations. He additionally indicates how Tijerina and his colleagues answered to the black civil rights circulate that swept the South within the later years of his lifestyles, marking the complicated psycho-cultural stability his new release frequently attempted to strike.

Mexican American Odyssey therefore portrays an important person and areas him inside a bigger context that's purely now being studied via students, and the impression of that is now being felt in society at large.