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All Rise Reynaldo G. Garza, the First Mexican American Federal Judge by Louise Ann Fisch |
At the urging of Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy nominated Reynaldo G. Garza to the U.S. District Court bench in South Texas. For more than three and half decades after that 1961 appointment, Judge Garza's service marked many more firsts. And as author Louise Ann Fisch demonstrates, Garza did not surrender his Mexican ethnicity as he achieved success in the dominant culture of American society.
Born in Brownsville, Texas, in 1915, Reynaldo Garza was the fourth child of immigrants. As a student at the University of Texas, he showed ease in gaining the trust of Anglos in an environment that was still strongly divided by racism. He also got involved in campus politics, managing John B. Connally's campaign for student body president and thus forging a tie that later brought him into contact with important Democratic party figures such as Lloyd Bentsen and LBJ.
As an increasingly renowned attorney in Brownsville and an emerging power broker in the predominantly Anglo establishment of the state, Garza personified the new elite in the Mexican American community and in the Democratic party. In 1979, Garza became the first Mexican American appointed to the United States Court of Appeals. President Carter invited him to become U.S. attorney general, which would have made him the first Mexican American member of a presidential cabinet had he accepted the appointment.
Louise Ann Fisch argues that Garza's long list of successes comprises a story of American achievement that had much to do with one man's ability to retain his heritage while forging ahead in an Anglo-dominated society. A product of the cross-border culture of Brownsville, where class and ethnic lines formed their own unique pattern along the Rio Grande, Garza integrated himself into the mainstream of American life, successfully balancing the Mexican and American parts of his dual identity. Fisch keenly analyzes the impact of ethnic identity on how he conducted his professional and personal life and looks specifically at the judicial issues he faced which confronted cultural dichotomy.
Relying on interviews with Garza, his family, and associates, and verified through extensive archival and documentary work including unrestricted access to the judge's papers, Fisch has written a book that is as much a careful examination of the rise of the Mexican American middle class in the twentieth century as it is a portrait of one pioneering man. Students and scholars of Mexican American culture, Borderlands studies, American politics, and judicial history should find much to value in Fisch's probing look into the mythos that underlies tales of political power and the American Dream.
LOUISE ANN FISCH, a native of Brownsville, Texas, received a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in history from Tulane University. She currently works as a writer in Washington, D.C., and lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
Number Sixty-two: The Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University
All Rise
ISBN 0-89096-713-X
$32.95
LC 96-5453. 6x9. 240 pp. 10 b&w photos. Bib. Index.
Legal History. Mexican American Studies. American History.
Publication Date: September 1996.
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