As late as 1954 Dr. [Hector] García claimed, “We are not and have never been a civil rights organization. Personally I hate the word.”...
Dr. García, did not wish to alienate whites in Texas–or anywhere else–by appearing to join the struggle of black people for civil rights...
By the early 1950s the American GI Forum, while still denying that it was a civil rights organization, sought to end discrimination in Texas schools, in employment, and in the use of public spaces. The core strategy depended on educating Anglos that “Americans of Spanish-speaking descent” or Latin Americans were Caucasians and that to identify them as anything but white, whether on birth certificates or traffic citations, was illegal. Making any distinction between Latin Americans and whites, he wrote, was a “slur,” an insult to all Latin Americans.
Neil Foley, "Partly Colored or Other White: Mexican Americans and Their Problem with the Color Line," in Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest
And to think that today we have full-on White Latin American descended people(e.g Cuban-Americans)identifying as "People of color" or worse "brown".So sad
ReplyDeleteTo add some anecdotal reality to this story...My grandfather's birth certificate and on the 1910 Census from Puerto Rico identifies him as "Blanco" (White), which was true because his family was European-born (Corsica, Mallorca, France, Germany, Spain and Ireland) and someone once said to me..."Oh he just 'thought' he was White"...to which I responded..."THAT birth certificate and census was filled out by WHITE American Jesuits and Federal employees who had come to the Island as part of the Council of Churches attempt to carve up the Island into Catholic, Protestant and other Christian denominations and they new "White" when they saw it. Not surprisingly his parents were also "White" and his 12 children were "White" also...even the red-heads, the blue-eyed and freckle-faced grandchildren.
ReplyDeletevery unlikely, purtoricans were never white, in the sense italians, irish and pole were not white eater.
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DeleteAre Italians White?: How Race is Made in America by Jennifer Guglielmo
How Italians Became ‘White’
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html
Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
by David R. Roediger
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
by Matthew Frye Jacobson
How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America
by Karen Brodkin
Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance
by Jacqueline Battalora
How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev
Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers by John Jung
The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White by James W. Loewen
"What if we were not white?"
https://youtu.be/94uDG5iHWnM
India, South Asian Americans, and #ADOS
https://archangelcleo.blogspot.com/2019/10/india-south-asian-americans-and-ados.html
Sad but true.
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