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.
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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.
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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."
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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.