"Huelga! I don't want to go to school with those black people"

SR: What did you think about the huelga school movement that emerged in response to HISD’s so called integration plan? And what role did U of H MAYO play in this huelga movement? 

MJ: Well I think we were ambivalent about the huelga movement. Some people became teachers; I never did. I was always ambivalent about it because I think the leadership was saying this was an injustice but I think the community was saying, “I don’t want to go with those black people.” And so that’s what always there was a lot of that within the community. So it wasn’t like clearly…it wasn’t a clear movement of fighting for equality. The leadership may have been different in its conception but the grassroots had a different. There was a lot of racism. So I think we had ambivalent roles. Individually I think a lot of the Houston MAYO get those teachers out of the schools. 

SR: And did the… was the huelga school movement and CMAS connected in terms of leader faculty members or those who support CMAS? 

MJ: I don’t remember that being there. Because I think that the leadership of the huelga schools was entirely based in the neighborhoods. I mean if you looked at the leadership they were neighborhood leaders or political leaders or even religious leaders who were leading it. And again for the leadership, the question was one of fighting the bad plan of integration but the reason I think of the community response was there was a lot of racism.

 Jimenez, Maria. Oral history from the Houston History Project

Race relations in Texas

 

Growing up White in Texas

 

I am white, and grew up outside of Houston in the 1950s and 1960s. Jim Crow was still strong, but my parents taught me that racism and segregation were wrong, so I learned at an early age that the accepted way of doing things is not always the right way to do it.

I went to segregated schools until my senior year in high school, in 1966. Every morning, while I waited for the school bus (we lived in the country), I watched our neighbor Mr. Mitchell drive by in one of our school buses. It took me several years to figure out that the reason Mr. Mitchell didn't pick us up (he kept the bus at home) was because he was driving into Alvin to pick up all the black children to take them to the "colored" schools down the road in Dickinson. The Alvin schools only integrated in 1966 because Dickinson closed its separate and unequal high school.

I remember the little things, like the first time I realized that the gas station where we did business had three restrooms: women, men and "colored." I recall being particularly appalled (I was about 11) that the "colored" restrooms weren't separated by gender. It seemed very rude to make women and men use the same restroom.

Because our school had no black students, a lot of racist attitudes were directed at Mexican-Americans. Some of the teenagers would always say, when two Mexican-American girls got on the bus toward the end of the route, when seats were few, "Don't let those Mexicans sit down." I did, though, when I could.

Nancy Jane Moore
Washington, DC

Whites Remember Jim Crow 

"Don't allow nigger integration in schools"

The patriotic Spanish-speaking Tejano organizations have their eye on you; they want to find out if you're a Tejano patriot or a simple traitor. My "Ochoa" newspapers have been instilling more patriotic American faithfulness to each resident in Texas. You will have noticed in your town, those persons that hated Texas and called themselves citizens of latin, hispanic or Mexican origin, etc., now they are informed by way of the press; and with pride they say "I'm an AMERICAN." No, no, it wasn't hunger that won them over. Help us make Texas better. You, your neighbor and I, of AMERICAN origin, are the example to be followed; this is our country. Don't allow nigger integration in schools or homes. Look for improvement and not retardation for your family. It's better to be alone than in the bad company of negroids. Equality means not permitting improvement. Millions of people of the black race hope that their candidates win the elections, and that way the niggers will be able to equalize and place themselves in high society and compete with your business. Your electoral vote is for you to improve your job and standard of living, and not to destroy social morality. 

Ochoa, Pedro. "Texas Necesita Mas Lealtad de Usted" The Dallas Americano May 28, 1958. Vol. 5 No. 58  Retrieved From The Dallas Public Library. 

The Priest and the Hispanic Politician

 

Expelled for being white

 

Maria Varela and Luis Zapata joined SNCC in 1963, pre-dating the 1964 “Freedom Summer” and Elizabeth Mártinez came to Mississippi in 1964. Having each come to SNCC for different reasons, the three activists were joining what was, at the time, the vanguard of the Civil Rights Movement. The group was driven by students and young people and engaged in the direct action techniques that other civil rights groups hesitated to use. Founded in 1960 at Shaw University, with the guiding principles of nonviolence rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, SNCC was originally envisioned as a “channel of communication for the student movement.” Historians have remembered SNCC as being young, black and white activists from the Northeast and Southeast. However, the experience of Varela, Mártinez, and Zapata suggests that, in the early years, SNCC’s organizing model appealed to people from diverse backgrounds including activists from the labor movement, older people, people from the West and Southwest United States, and Latino/as. SNCC, which embraced inclusiveness in its early years, grew increasingly closed off and unable incorporate racially liminal subjects. When SNCC forced categorization of white or black, Mártinez and Varela were deemed white and were expelled from SNCC.

...the organization, led by a group working out of the “Atlanta Project,” agreed that “white activists needed to organize in the white community” and that black activists would organize in the black community. They maintained that whites organizing in their communities could still work under the banner of SNCC. However, months later, in December 1966, the SNCC staff met again at the New York estate of black entertainer Peg Leg Bates, where the decision was made, as Mártinez described it, to “expel white staff members.”

...While Zapata left SNCC before the battle over the role of whites in the movement took place, both Mártinez and Varela were deeply affected by the changing nature of SNCC. Writing many years later, Mártinez’s memory was increasingly focused on her identification as Chicana and the improper classification of her and Maria Varela as white during the expulsion. She wrote “as far as anyone seems to remember, we [Varela and herself] were classified as white, even though I did not consider myself either white or black.”

Writing after the Kingston Springs decision to expel whites, Mártinez defended whites put in a seemingly impossible position. “How could they defend themselves,” she asked, “when attacked for their whiteness.” Like Varela’s earlier discussion of white womanhood, Mártinez use of “they” and “them” in reference to whites suggests she saw herself as racially nonwhite, even if those in SNCC disagreed. She wrote: “From time to time, the question of whether I was to be classified as white or Mexican (i.e., non-white) has come up in SNCC. People talked about me but never asked me what I considered myself.” She goes on to make clear that she has always identified as Mexican, and therefore nonwhite. However, in SNCC she found her self reclassified. “One day,” she went on, “I found myself unable to vote in SNCC because I was ‘white.’”

 Cecilia Márquez, “The Strange Career of Juan Crow: Latino/as and the Making of the US South, 1940–2000,” PhD thesis, University of Virginia (2016) 

The Mexican Slave Catcher

The most explosive incident involving runaway slaves in Laredo came ... on November 5, 1860. In a letter written to Henry and William Maltby's secessionist pro-slavery Corpus Christi Daily Ranchero, a forty-one-year-old Irish-born clerk named Michael Lidwell, a political ally of Santos [Benavides] who was living in Laredo at the time, said that a black man claiming to be a "free Negro" had arrived at Laredo with two dun horses and persuaded the ferryman to allow him passage to Nuevo Laredo. After the news was quickly passed along to Santos that the man was probably a runaway slave, he gathered ten vigilantes armed with rifles and pistols and at eight that evening crossed to Nuevo Laredo. "In the face of the entire population of the place," Santos was said to have "seized the negro" and succeeded in "making good his retreat [with] his men to the boat." ... Reaching the north bank of the river, the men dragged the wounded Mussett along with the runaway slave up the steep bank and scurried off to the safety of the town, where their captive was lodged in the city jail.

The Ranchero went out of its way to praise Santos for being "foremost in confronting danger in support of the laws and institutions of Texas." It was not the first time Santos had "distinguished himself in restoring runaway slaves to their owners," the Ranchero went on to say. The newspaper also praised him for his refusal to "receive any recompense for his exertions." The writers hoped that Santos, through his actions, had gone a long way toward alleviating the widely held idea in Texas that people of "Mexican origin" were not loyal to the state. His daring actions had proven that citizens on the Rio Grande frontier were as committed as the most "rabid orator." In a few comments on November 17, 1860, the Ranchero again praised Santos for daringly crossing into Mexico to retrieve the runaway slave."

Jerry D. Thompson. Tejano Tiger: José de los Santos Benavides and the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1823-1891. The Texas Biography Series. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2017.

Singled out.

At a young age, the South was the place where Cortez learned what it meant to be Jim Crowed, while for nonblack Latinos it was where they learned what it could mean to be free from that violence.  

Growing up, Cortez’s family was upper middle class. She attended a French Catholic private school where she was the only “colored” girl in her class. While she was the only “colored” girl, there were also two light-skinned Dominican girls in her class, the goddaughters of a member of the Trujillo family, a Korean girl and a Filipina. To the Dominican girls, Cortez was “just an American colored girl.”

During her senior year of high school, Cortez’s school decided to take the graduating class on a trip to Washington DC. Cortez, however, was excluded from the trip after the school decided to have the group stay in an all white hotel. Even in her racially diverse group, with a “Korean [girl] who was darker...the Filipina who was about [her] complexion...and the two girls from the Dominican Republic,” it was Cortez’s status as an African American that prevented her from staying in the hotel. Alienated by her classmates who she “lunch with everyday for four years,” Cortez was destroyed. When she spoke to her mother about the incident, Cortez’s mother lamented, “that’s just how white people are.” But “they’re not white,” Cortez responded. “Well,” her mother said, “that’s how they’re considered.” 

Cecilia Márquez, “The Strange Career of Juan Crow: Latino/as and the Making of the US South, 1940–2000,” PhD thesis, University of Virginia (2016) 

White Allies

 

Other Latinos native to the South seem to have taken a different approach than Enriquez. Mary Gonzalez, for example, joined an organization called “The Concerned White Citizens of Alabama.” This group worked in support of the Civil Rights Movement and Gonzalez, along with several other white identified women marched with Dr. King at the now-iconic Selma march. 

In the face of a march that felt like a “battle,” Gonzalez and her peers struggled to maintain “order and dignity.” “We wanted people to know that we were not just a band of, I don’t know how to describe it,” Gonzalez paused, “but you know people who didn’t have anything better to do than go around getting into trouble and stirring up trouble.” “We wanted them to know,” she continued “we were serious citizens who really cared about what was happening.” Returning from the march Gonzalez recalled an icy welcome at the local YWCA from those who knew she had marched. While Enriquez never seemed hostile to the Civil Rights Movement, she maintained her distance from any activism. Gonzalez, on the other hand, still firmly claimed her whiteness but instead deployed it in service of the movement.

Cecilia Márquez, “The Strange Career of Juan Crow: Latino/as and the Making of the US South, 1940–2000,” PhD thesis, University of Virginia (2016) 

Race not at issue in Mendez

Méndez, along with four other parents, decided to hire David Marcus to represent them in their suit on behalf of “some 5,000 other persons of Mexican and Latin descent and extraction”against four Orange County school districts. In California, Section 8003 of the Education read, “the governing board of any school district may establish separate schools for Indian children…and for children of Chinese, Japanese, or Mongolian parentage.” Because Mexicans were not one of the groups that the law permitted to be segregated, the school district’s attorney argued that the segregation was not based on race.

Mexicans, after all, were legally Anglo. Instead, the segregation was a result of Mexican children’s lack of English-proficiency. David Marcus, attorney for the Méndezes, also argued, “race discrimination” was not the issue at hand “since persons of Latin and Mexican extraction are members of the ‘white’ race.” If Mexican children were white, it was illegal to segregate them from other white children. Marcus had to prove, then, that language proficiency was not being tested equally and that many of the Mexican students unfairly segregated were actually fluent English speakers. Judge McCormick agreed, and on February 18, 1946 he ruled in favor of the Méndezes because the school district had failed to prove they were testing for English proficiency in ways that did not specifically target Mexican students.

The school district appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Marcus again emphasized the whiteness of Mexicans so the court did not have to confront Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal doctrine.” Because, as Marcus argued, the case was not about racial segregation, the court could uphold that the segregation of Mexican children was unconstitutional because they were Anglo, while preserving the legality of racial segregation.

 

 Cecilia Márquez, “The Strange Career of Juan Crow: Latino/as and the Making of the US South, 1940–2000,” PhD thesis, University of Virginia (2016) 

Mexican girl barred from black school

                                    

The Galarza family returned to Washington, D.C. so that Ernesto could continue his work for the Pan-American Union. In his capacity as an organizer for the Pan American Union, he was developing a booklet that “told the story of America” which would aid new immigrants in becoming “better acquainted with one another’s customs, habits and modes of dress.” While meeting with people he hoped would assist him in this project, he was introduced to Mrs. Cordelia Wharton who taught dressmaking at the Margaret Murray Washington Vocational School. Galarza and Wharton developed a friendship, and when his daughter expressed a desire to take a course in dressmaking, Galarza enrolled her in Wharton’s class at the M.M. Washington Vocational School. In addition to their growing friendship, Wharton’s particular skill-set made the M.M. Washington school an appealing place for Karla to learn dressmaking.

...

On February 3, 1947 Karla enrolled at the Margaret Murray Washington Vocational High School to take Wharton’s course on dress design and costume making. However, one month into her attendance at the M.M. Washington school, Assistant Superintendent Dr. Garnet C. Wilkinson, requested that Karla voluntarily withdraw and enroll instead at the white vocational school, Burdick Vocational High School. During their March 10, 1947 meeting, Dr. Wilkinson informed Karla that, in his assessment, she was white and as a result not “entitled to attend” the M.M. Washington Vocational school.

...

As a result of Karla’s refusal to leave the school voluntarily, the school board met on April 2nd, 1947 to make a decision regarding her attendance. The Superintendent, Hobart M. Corning, submitted a report to the board that outlined his case for removing Karla from M.M. Washington. He opened the report by writing: “Since the admission of Karla Rosel Galarza to the Margaret Murray Washington Vocational High School question has arisen to her racial status and as to whether she is entitled to the privilege of attending the Margaret Murray Washington Vocational High School.”... Corning argued that Karla, because of her prior attendance at white schools in the area, was “not entitled” to attend M.M. Washington. The schools she attended “do not admit Negroes as students,” and her attendance, Corning went on, “indicates that she is not a Negro.”

...

The white newspapers reported the case as a white girl being barred from a black school. The Toledo Blade referred to Karla as a “pretty, 22-year-old white girl,” The Times-Picayune chronicled “a white girl ousted from a Negro public school,” and The Sunday Oregonian introduced Karla as a “white girl” and the “daughter of former educational adviser to the PanAmerican union.” For the white media this was an interesting story of a reversal of the traditional

 

 Cecilia Márquez, “The Strange Career of Juan Crow: Latino/as and the Making of the US South, 1940–2000,” PhD thesis, University of Virginia (2016) 

Latin Americans are not to eat with the Negros.

 

Passing for "Latin white"

 

Early in Lena Horne’s career there were complaints that she did not fit the desired image of a black entertainer for white audiences, either physically or in her style…Noting her brunette-white beauty, one white agent tried to get her to take a Spanish name, learn some Spanish songs, and pass as a Latin white, but she had learned to have a horror of passing and never considered it…

Davis, F. James. Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition. N.p., Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.

While touring with Barnet, Horne was noticed by an MGM talent scout during a stop in Los Angeles. She landed a contract with the studio but initially was cast only as "window dressing," appearing in the background. With her light skin tone, the studio had pressed her into trying to "pass as a Latin," which she refused.

Byrge, Duane. “Lena Horne Dies at 92.” The Hollywood Reporter, 9 May 2010, 

The light-complexioned Horne refused to go along with studio plans to promote her as a Latin American. She later said she did not want to be "an imitation of a white woman."'

Duke, Alan. “Legendary Singer, Actress Lena Horne Dead at 92.” CNN Entertainment, 11 May 2010.

She made "Hispanic" official

While success has many fathers and failure is an orphan, bureaucrat-ese, it turns out, sometimes has one proud author. During her long career in government, Grace Flores-Hughes spent some time working as an assistant in what was then called the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It was there, in the early 1970s, that she helped establish "Hispanic" as the government's word of choice for people of Spanish origin -- a term that made it onto the official U.S. census form in 1980.
... 

How did the federal government come to use the term "Hispanic"?

There are many Hispanic activists who think that Richard Nixon did it. Well, no, Richard Nixon was very busy -- he didn't have time to be doing this. When I explain it, they get relieved. They were holding this anger that some nasty Anglo named them. Well, no, it wasn't. It was this little Hispanic bureaucrat.
...

So you and others in your office joined a committee to come up with the best name?

It was very contentious. Others were pulling for the word "Latino." I wanted "Hispanic." And I was the youngest one in the group. They said: " 'Latino' and 'Latina' is what we all are, that's why we should be called that." But to me the only way to accurately count us is by using the term "Hispanic."
...

It was an affirmative action decision?

Essentially it was guiding any affirmative action that was going to evolve.

Who is Hispanic in your mind? Who were you thinking of when you fought for the term?

All the people in South Texas I grew up with. So many of them were poor, so many were disenfranchised. I thought: How can we argue for more federal funds or more federal help if we don't know how many they are?

Washington Post, 2009. She Made 'Hispanic' Official.

"There is no connection!"

 

A year after Sweatt v. Painter, the U.S District Court for the District of Kansas heard Oliver Brown's suit against the Topeka School District for refusing to allow his third-grade daughter, Linda, to attend the white elementary school, which was nearer to her house than the segregated grade school on the other side of a railroad switchyard.

When Wirin suggested in 1953 that the Mendez and Delgado segregation cases in California and Texas would likely influence the outcome of the Brown cases, [George] Sanchez exclaimed: "There is no connection!" Our cases really were on the "due process' clause[that segregation was] ('arbitrary, capricious') much more than on the equality...clause - whereas the present [Brown] cases attack the right of the states to legislate segregation (something which has never been done for Mexicans). "Does one of the present cases attack Negro segregation where there is no law decreeing such segregation? Only in such a case would we be concerned."

For Sanchez the overriding issue was not the constitutional right of states to legislate segregation, but rather the illegality of segregating Mexicans from other whites in the absence of state law. While Thurgood Marshall sought to overturn a half-century-old Supreme Court decision, Sanchez challenged local school districts that arbitrarily segregated Mexicans for their alleged language handicap.

Foley, N., 2010. Quest for equality. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.  

The danger of becoming an "utterly bastardized race"

 

Mexico was not the only Latin American country that did not welcome black soldiers during World War II. When the U.S Navy assigned 250 African American enlisted personnel to the Panama Canal Zone, the U.S ambassador to Panama urged the secretary of state to cancel the assignment because of the risk of protest from the Panamanian government, which denied entry to "persons of the colored race." In 1941 the Panamanian president, Arnulfo Arias, an admirer of Hitler and Mussolini while ambassador to Italy in the 1930s, amended the constitution to deny entry of all immigrants of the "black race whose native language is not Spanish, of the yellow race, and the races originating in India, Asia Minor, and North Africa." Article 23 of the new constitution also revoked the citizenship, retroactively, of children of Panamanians whose parents were of African or Asian descent.

President Arias spoke of the necessity of "improving the biological conditions" of Panamanians and was especially critical of the U.S policy of having imported thousands of "colored aliens" from the West Indies and Asia to construct the Panama Canal. The foreign minister defended Article 23, declaring that Panamanians were "anxious to guard against the danger that Panama, situated at the crossroads of the world, should degenerate from a Spanish-speaking, white nation into...a Babel of tongues, and an utterly bastardized race."

  Foley, N., 2010. Quest for equality. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 

Ending discrimination against Caucasians.

 

LULAC leader Alfonso Perales ... believed that Mexicans ought to be entitled to rights and privileges routinely denied to African Americans. He proposed that Anglo-Americans conduct a "vigorous campaign" in Texas "to end all racial prejudices in so far as members of the Caucasian race are concerned." The Mexican foreign minister and Mexican consuls continued to insist that Texas and California end all discrimination against Mexicans with little concern for discrimination against African Americans or Asian Americans.

  Foley, N., 2010. Quest for equality. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 

Not a Puerto Rican? I can't serve you.

[Colin] Powell felt the sting of southern racism firsthand after he received orders to leave Birmingham and report once again to Fort Benning. One day, when he was trying to find a house in the area so his wife and son could join him in Georgia, he stopped at a restaurant for a hamburger. The waitress asked if Powell was a student from Africa. When Powell told her no, the woman asked him, "A Puerto Rican?"  

"No," Powell answered.  

"You're a Negro?" she asked.

"That's right."
"Well," the waitress responded, "I can't bring out a hamburger. You'll have to go to the back door."

Schraff, Anne. Colin Powell: Soldier and Patriot (African-American Biographies). Enslow Pub Inc, 1997.

Runaways not welcome

 

Examples abound in Mexican history of laws and circulars designed to prevent the immigration or settlement of Africans in Mexico. In 1833 the Mexican consul Francisco Pizarro Martinez refused to grant immigration rights to free-blacks from Texas because in his view "'people of color' were immoral and lazy."  

In the 1920s, the Mexican ministry of the interior (gobernacion) issued a circular prohibiting African Americans in the United States from crossing the international border for even a brief visit to Mexico: "The measure prohibiting persons of the black race from immigrating to Mexico applies to the entire border in such a way that no American citizens of this race can spend even a few hours of recreation in any of the Mexican border towns."

The Mexican consul in San Antonio, perhaps in response to pressure from the NAACP, recommended to the foreign minister that citizens of la raza negra, the black race, be allowed to visit Mexico within a zone of thirteen miles along the border for a period of three days. The Foreign Ministry relented and agreed to allow black Americans to visit Mexican border cities, but reduced the time of their cross-border visits from the proposed three days to fourteen hours and stressed that they be allowed only "occasional visits."

 Foley, N., 2010. Quest for equality. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

"Hispanic" was not a word.

Ms. [Linda] Chavez's ancestors emigrated to what is now New Mexico from Spain in the 17th century, and have been primarily English speakers since the 1870's, her mother said. In fact, after Ms. Chavez became active in politics, she served as president of U.S. English, a national lobbying group that has led campaigns to make English the official language of various states...

Before entering college, Ms. Chavez had been oblivious to racial differences, her mother said.

''Nobody thought to ask anybody what they were,'' Mrs. Chavez said. ''There was no such thing as Hispanic. That was not a word. Linda started noticing that when she went away to school. Race became important, and I think that is when the 'Hispanic' word was coined.''

 

Times, The New York. “Conservative and Hispanic, Linda Chavez Carves Out Leadership Niche.” The New York Times, 19 Aug. 1998