Mexican American civic groups fought to eliminate segregated Mexican Schools on the basis that Mexican-origin pupils were white. They made little mention of the segregation of African Americans in black schools. When the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board decision, Mexican American civic groups barely took notice...
And when the state legislature began passing laws to prolong segregation, the most prominent Mexican American organizations sided with the state government and not African Americans.
For example, some in LULAC debated the idea of joining forces with the NAACP to defeat the flood of racist bills coming from the legislature in 1957. League president Tijerina dismissed this idea. Similarly, LULAC's legal advisor, Phil Montalbo, explained to Tijerina, "[A] stand taken by you on such bills would tend to admit to our Anglo-American (sic) friends that we considered ourselves separate and apart from the majority of American citizens." Montalbo reminds us once again that, as whites, Anglos were the Mexican Americans' allies.
Numerous LULACers, and Mexican Americans more generally, agreed with this stance. For instance, A.G Ramirez stated succinctly, "[M]y district does not want our people and our beloved LULAC to be affiliated with the Negroes. We are white..."
Similarly, Dallas newsman Pedro Ochoa berated anyone wishing black-brown unity, explaining that many Mexican Americans "do not accept the integrationist precept at public schools, and perhaps churches and housing projects." Ochoa also warned Mexican Americans to "preserve your white race, vote against integration, don't look to a black future".
When the movement for birth control began at the turn of the twentieth century, organizers such as Margaret Sanger believed that women's control of their own fertility would lead to upward social mobility for all women, regardless of race...
Under the Influence of eugenics, Sanger changed her approach, moving away from a race-neutral analysis...Sanger believed it was important to "prevent the American people from being replaced by alien or negro stock, whether it be by immigration or by overly high birth rates among others in this country."
Politicians in the southern states were particularly interested in spreading birth control among African-Americans to limit black population growth that threatened their political and economic hegemony. For example, the late Leander Perez of Louisiana, who supported birth control for African-Americans, once said, "The best way to hate a nigger is to hate him before he is born."
Kramarae, Cheris, and Dale Spender. “Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women's Issues and Knowledge.”
Business owners like Felix Tijerina resisted the sit-in movement and did not follow the mandates of the negotiated desegregation, which in most Texas cities remained entirely voluntary. Indeed, Tijerina did not desegregate his restaurants until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, although he did so willingly once the federal government banned segregation.
Tijerina had ridiculed the sitins in 1960, and many other Mexican American leaders publicly opposed black protest activism. In July 1963, for instance, LULACers debated passing a resolution praising Martin Luther King Jr. The measure failed when one member wondered “what the negroes had done to help us?”
Behnken, Brian D. Fighting Their Own Battles Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas. The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
Some black Americans used ethnic Mexicans' legal claims to whiteness to their benefit. Langston Hughes, who emerged as a top figure in the Harlem Renaissance literati in the 1920s, knew that Mexican's white legal status and his own light skin, could allow him to shirk segregation in Texas in the early twentieth century.
Hughes was raised in Kansas, but his father left the family and moved to Mexico to escape racism. As a child, young Langston took the train from the Midwest to Mexico City to visit his father, and the route took him through Texas. During one of his first trips with his mother and grandmother, in around 1906, the black family could not purchase hot food from the dining car when they were hungry because of racial restrictions.
When returning home from a summer in Mexico City as a teenager, however, Hughes found a way to access white accommodations. Hughes recalled "The only way I could purchase sleeping car space after I crossed the border into Texas was by pretending to be Mexican." The young man ignored the Jim Crow signs and asked for a berth by speaking Spanish. He also ate in the diner all the way across Texas by pretending not to speak English."
Tyina L. Steptoe Houston Bound “We Were Too White to be Black and Too Black to Be White.”
In Houston, John Herrera and Alfonso Vázquez, a photographer and political cartoonist, created the Civic Action Committee (CAC) in 1958 to assist the gubernatorial candidacy of Henry B. Gonzalez. The CAC registered thousands of voters to support Gonzalez. After he lost, the CAC continued to mobilize Mexican Americans by funding poll tax and voter registration drives...
Like other civic groups, the CAC drew on the whiteness strategy. For example, when the Houston Police Department (HPD) redesigned traffic tickets, it listed three racial designations: “W” for white, “M” for Mexican, and “N” for Negro.
The CAC, LULAC, and G.I. Forum demanded the city change the tickets. “There are only three races,” the CAC stated, “the Mongoloid the Negroid and the Caucasian.” Listing “M” for Mexican was discriminatory, it asserted, because “when race is designated we belong to the Caucasian Race.” The civic groups continued to vie for whiteness to win rights and to show a remarkable amount of touchiness when they perceived their whiteness threatened.
Behnken, Brian D. Fighting Their Own Battles Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas. The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
Many Mexican Americans opposed black protests at both the state and the national level. They did not participate in demonstrations with African Americans, and they generally detested the fact that blacks throughout America engaged in these protests. As labor leader Pancho Medrano remembered, LULAC, the G.I. Forum, PASO, and other groups always rejected protesting.
“Even at their state conventions,” Medrano stated, “when you tried to say, ‘Start demanding or picketing or marching,’ they say, ‘No. We are above that.’ Especially the LULACs; they say, ‘We have more pride or education than that. You leave this to the Negroes.’”...
Some leaders rejected demonstrations, others denigrated protests, and some went so far as to criticize the most momentous protest of the 1960s: the March on Washington. LULAC, for example, drew up a resolution denouncing the march...
Once again the league’s leaders firmly communicated to African Americans that they could not look to LULAC for aid or support. Like Felix Tijerina before them, Paul Andow and William Bonilla made sure that association with groups like the NAACP would not besmirch LULAC’s image.
Behnken, Brian D. Fighting Their Own Battles Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas. The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
In 1948, Andrea Perez, a white woman, and Sylvester Davis, an African American man, were denied a marriage license under California’s anti-miscegenation statute. The California Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Perez couple by a narrow margin, 4-3, deeming anti-miscegenation legislation unreasonable and unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. With the Perez v. Sharp case, California became the first state to repeal its anti-miscegenation laws following the Pace decision.
LULAC and G.I Forum leaders found widespread support for their racial ideas. One vocal supporter, who engaged in his own form of racism and white supremacy, was Pedro Ochoa of Dallas. Ochoa, an auto parts salesman who wrote under the pseudonym Pedro el Gringo, published the widely read Dallas Americano...
His viewpoint provides insight into the working-class Mexican American political and racial thought. Like some other Mexican leaders, he vehemently opposed any form of unity with blacks and actively promoted whiteness.
Pedro Ochoa vocalized a racism that reflected the dominant views of southern society. He frequently peppered his columns with racial slurs: "niggerianos", "niggerifos," "niggerote," or simply "nigger." He also called those wishing black/Mexican unity "pro-negreras" and claimed that "integration is solely for the aggrandizement of the black race."
Similarly, Ochoa believed that integration would lead to the loss of Mexican American business. "The integrationist is our worst enemy," he wrote, "and they intend to implant integration by force." He referred to integrationists as "brota la paga" or a plague and reminded his readers that "all people who speak Spanish are classified as white people."
Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle For Civil Rights in TexasBrian Behnken - University Of North Carolina Press - 2011
Not so long ago, Hispanics, particularly Mexicans and Cubans, resisted the label of "minority". In a black-and-white America, Hispanics tended toward white, or at least tended to keep their distance from black. I remember my young Mexican mother saying to her children, in Spanish, "We are not minorities,"...
One day, in the 1960s, the success of the Negro Civil Rights movement encouraged Hispanics to insist on the coveted black analogy, and thus claim the spoils of affirmative action.
Rodriguez, Richard. Brown: the Last Discovery of America. Penguin Books, 2003.
