Julie Leininger Pycior – författare

T. R. Fehrenbach Award, 1997As he worked to build his Great Society, Lyndon Johnson often harkened back to his teaching days in the segregated "Mexican" school at Cotulla, Texas. Recalling the poverty and prejudice that blighted his students' lives, Johnson declared, "It never occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance-and I'll let you in on a secret-I mean to use it."This book explores the complex and sometimes contradictory relations between LBJ and Mexican Americans. Julie Pycior shows that Johnson's genuine desire to help Mexican Americans-and reap the political dividends-did not prevent him from allying himself with individuals and groups intent on thwarting Mexican Americans' organizing efforts. Not surprisingly, these actions elicited a wide range of response, from grateful loyalty to, in some cases, outright opposition. Mexican Americans' complicated relationship with LBJ influenced both their political development and his career with consequences that reverberated in society at large.

Over the years millions of Americans have invited Bill Moyers into their homes. His television programs—covering topics ranging from American history, politics, and religion to the role of media and the world of ideas—have made him one of America’s most recognized and honored journalists. In these pages, Moyers presents, for the first time, a powerful statement of his own personal beliefs—political and moral. Combining illuminating forays into American history with candid comments on today’s politics, Moyers delivers perceptive and trenchant insights into the American experience.From his early years as a Texas journalist to his role as one of the organizers of the Peace Corps, top assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent and analyst for CBS News, and producer of many of public television’s groundbreaking series, Moyers has been actively engaged in some of the most volatile episodes of the past fifty years. Drawing from this practical experience, he demonstrates a unique understanding of how American politics works and an enduring faith in the nation’s promises and possibilities. Whether reflecting on today’s climate of megamedia concentration, rampant corporate scandals, or religious and political upheavals, Moyers on America recovers the hopes of the past to establish their relevance for the present.

The legacy of the historic mutual aid organizing by US Mexicans, with its emphasis on self-help and community solidarity, continues to inform Mexican American activism and subtly influence a number of major US social movements. In Democratic Renewal and the Mutual Aid Legacy of US Mexicans, Julie Leininger Pycior traces the early origins of organizing in the decades following the US-Mexican War, when Mexicans in the Southwest established mutualista associations for their protection. Further, she traces the ways in which these efforts have been invoked by contemporary Latino civil rights leaders. Pycior notes that the Mexican immigrant associations instrumental in the landmark 2006 immigration reform marches echo mutualista societies at their peak in the 1920s. Then Mexican immigrants from San Diego to New York engaged in economic, medical, cultural, educational, and legal aid. This path-breaking study culminates with an examination of Southwest community organizing networks as crucial counterweights to the outsize role of large financial contributions in the democratic political process. It also finds ways in which this community organizing echoes the activity of mutualista groups in the very same neighbourhoods a century ago.