The White Scourge

Within this volume, the author seeks to unravel the complex history of ethnicity in the cotton culture of central Texas. This narrative, spanning the period from the Civil War through to the collapse of tenant farming in the early 1940s, seeks to bridge the intellectual chasm between African American and Southern history on one hand, and Chicano and Southwestern history on the other. "The White Scourge" describes a borderlands region, where the cultures of the South, West and Mexico overlap, to provide a deeper understanding of the process of identity formation and to challenge the binary oppositions between "black" and "white" that often dominates discussions of American race relations. In Texas, which by 1890 had become the nation's leading cotton-producing state, the presence of Mexican sharecroppers and farm workers complicated the black-white dyad that shaped rural labour relations in the South. With the transformation of agrarian society into corporate agribusiness, white racial identity began to fracture along class lines, further complicating categories of identity. Foley explores the "fringe of whiteness," and ethno-racial borderlands compromising Mexicans, African America