Passing for Mexican

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.”