Reading, Writing, and Redemption: Literacy Sponsorship and the Mexican-American Settlement Movement in Texas

Abstract

Social settlements established in the United States in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century were important sites of literacy sponsorship for immigrant families. In Texas settlement houses differed from their larger Eastern and Midwestern counterparts in that they were founded against a backdrop of often angry anti-Mexican sentiment and in a region in which the white settlers themselves were often the more recent immigrants. An understanding of these differences contributes to a more complete picture of the varieties of social settlement experiments and their literacy practices in the United States.

Notes

¹I thank RR reviewers Adela Licóna and Deborah Brandt for their careful reading of this article and the helpful comments they provided. The author also gratefully acknowledges the research funding provided by an Organized Research Grant from Tarleton State University.

²While most settlement accounts address Eastern or Midwestern, often university-affiliated houses, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn's Black Neighbors is an exception, concentrating on settlements serving African-Americans in the South.

³A representative account from an editorial in the San Antonio Express suggested that “the [Mexicans'] hogs lived as much as in the houses … and from the similarity it was hard to tell where the hogs left off and inhabitants began” (qtd. in De León 21).

⁴Woods and Kennedy, Handbook 297.

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