Mexican American Odyssey:
Felix Tijerina, Entrepreneur
and Civic Leader, 1905-1965
By Thomas H. Kreneck.
College Station:
Texas A&M University Press.
2001. 440 pages.

Felix Tijerina was born in 1905 in Mexico, although he publicly claimed to have been born in Texas. He worked his way from busboy and waiter to owner of a profitable, well-known chain of Mexican restaurants. The story of his economic success parallels that of other self-made American business leaders. But his contribution did not end there. He was an active leader of local, state, and national Mexican American organizations, and in those groups he worked to advance the Hispanic community and promote social harmony.

In Mexican American Odyssey: Felix Tijerina, Entrepreneur and Civic Leader, 1905-1965, Thomas H. Kreneck not only traces the influential life of Tijerina but shows how Tijerina's enterprise influenced and reflected the trends in Mexican American development during years that were crucial for the Hispanic community.

"When Felix Tijerina died in 1965 at age sixty, he was widely viewed as the most esteemed and influential Mexican American resident of Houston, Texas," Kreneck writes. "[This book] is an account of an accomplished, yet representative person in all his complexity, resourcefulness, resiliency, and adaptiveness who over a lifetime maintained a personal balance as a Mexican American."

Emerging as a leader in such mainstream groups and boards as Rotary International and the Houston Housing Authority, Tijerina was a pioneer in Mexican American interaction with Anglos. He was particularly noted for his efforts on behalf of Mexican American education.

While serving an unprecedented four terms as national president of LULAC from 1956 to 1960, he launched an internationally acclaimed educational initiative called the Little School of the 400, to teach English to pre-school Spanish-speaking children.

Moreover, Kreneck demonstrates how Tijerina's life and efforts symbolized the history of a people who, by the time Tijerina died in the mid-1960s, were no longer lost in a sea of voices and ineffectual. He also shows how Tijerina and his colleagues responded to the black civil rights movement that swept the South in the later years of his life.

Arnoldo De Leon, author of Ethnicity in the Sunbelt: A History of Mexican Americans in Houston, says that Kreneck's writing "is crisp, meticulous, and emotionally touching . . . we learn much about the diversity of the ‘Mexican American Generation’ from the discussion of philosophical stands that competed with Tijerina's own conservative brand."

Emilio Zamora, author of The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas, says Kreneck's work "is very impressive and will be recognized as an important contribution, especially in the field of Mexican American biography."

Kreneck is head of Special Collections and Archives at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi. A specialist in developing local research resources, Kreneck founded the Mexican American archival component at the Houston Metropolitan Research Center.

Mexican American Odyssey is available at stores or direct from Texas A&M University Press (800-826-8911; secure online ordering at www.tamu.edu/upress).