Book details contributions of Hispanics

      A Mexican boy stumbles upon gold near the Colorado River in 1853; news of the discovery prompts a mass exodus to the West.
      A cattle and sheep ranch owned by two Mexican brothers carves a successful niche in Northern Nevada in the late 1800s.
      Hispanic railroad workers in 1905 pave the foundation for a city which was once a little-used rest stop between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.
      In 1945, a Hispanic becomes the first Nevadan to earn a football scholarship to tradition-rich Notre Dame.
      "A History of Hispanics in Southern Nevada," a new book by Tony Miranda, associate professor and chair of the department of Anthropology and Ethnic Studies at UNLV, taps elder Hispanics, museum archives, folklore and pictures to tell how Hispanics shaped Nevada.
      Miranda, who is Hispanic, wrote an earlier book on successful Nevada Hispanics, but, "this book is more a history of the group."
      He hopes the book boosts pride in the state's biggest ethnic group; Hispanics comprise 10.4 percent of the state's 1.2 million people, giving Nevada the nation's eighth largest Hispanic population, according to the 1990 census.
      "Nothing had ever been written on Hispanics in Nevada," said Miranda, a Green Valley resident who came here in 1976 from his native Santa Maria, Calif. "(In state history books) Hispanics would only be mentioned in passing, as miners or sheep herders but we were so much more."
      They were discoverers. Miranda writes about a young Mexican boy commissioned by Francis X. Aubrey, a Santa Fe, N.M., businessman, to survey the area now known as Boulder City for a railroad. While resting, the boy saw something glistening on the ground. It was gold. The rest is California (history).
      Hispanics, Miranda writes, were adept miners and the first to unearth silver in Nevada.
      They were pioneers. Miranda cites Nevada cities named after Mexican people and places like Guadalajara, in Lander County 18 miles south of Austin and Montezuma, seven miles west of Goldfield in what is now known as Esmeralda County.
      They were ranchers, workers and productive citizens. He mentions famous ranchers like the Altube Brothers who employed Mexican farmhands; the hundreds of thousands or Mexicans recruited here by U.S. contractors by enganchadores to lay railroad tracks which united the Southwest and helped create Las Vegas.
      Also in the book are tidbits on John Mendoza, the former judge who became the first person to receive a football scholarship to play at Notre Dame, and a group of Chicano students at UNLV, who successfully pressured the administration to hire a Chicano professor to begin teaching Chicano studies.
      Some of the 25 black-and-white photos romance the entrepreneurial spirit of Hispanics: a Hispanic-owned saddle shop in 1903, a Mexican-American-owned restaurant in Las Vegas in 1932 and an abode-making company in 1948. Restaurants, specialty shops and grocery and meat markets dotting eastern Las Vegas testify to the community's continuing economic drive, Miranda said.
      Besides spotlighting Nevada's Hispanic roots - the Southwest belonged to Spain before the Spanish-American War in 1848 - Miranda said he wrote the book to give Hispanics an impetus to jump their next hurdle: gaining political clout.
      "We must unify politically so we can exert a political force (on Nevada)," he said. "(To do so), we must come together on all the issues, not just those dealing with English-only laws, immigration or issues regarding the Catholic religion like abortion," since most Hispanics are Catholic.
      He urged Hispanics not to be grouped homogeneously.
      "The term Hispanic was something used by the (Richard) Nixon administration to lump all Spanish-speaking people together," he said. "But we don't all think alike and are not all alike. We are Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, Central and Latin Americans and Spanish and Spanish-speaking peoples.
      "Some people prefer being called Chicano, others Latino. (No matter the name) we all need to come together."