The Cigar City

 

 Although Latinos in Ybor were working-class and union-conscious, their dedication to interracial coalitions and civil rights was nominal at best. When the city’s black women and men began to move into the neighborhood, La Gaceta started a campaign to raise awareness about plans for removal:

Gentlemen: The undersigned citizens, residents, and taxpayers of that portion of the city, which bounds on 14th Street between 9th Avenue and Columbus Drive do most sincerely petition your honorable body that some act or Resolution be adopted eliminating Negros living in this boundary. We respectfully solicit the aid of the authorities to stop the intermingling of Negros with the white population avoiding thus that our children, wives and immediate families be embarrassed with such a condition.329

This petition was sent to the board of city representatives and published by the Anglo press in the Tampa Morning Tribune. Both white Latinas and Latinos signed the petition in support of segregation within the Ybor City community, and they insisted on making this request publicly known…One of the most significant aspects of the letter is its use of racialized language by immigrant Latinos. This was the first time Ybor City residents described themselves as “white” in print. 

 

Mc Namara, Sarah. From Picket Lines to Picket Fences: Latinas and the Remaking of the Jim Crow South, 1930-1964. 2016.

The Jim Crow Accomplices

 

By 1948 a nine-square-mile community of 25,000 blacks, Mexican Americans, and poor whites lived on a low flood plain in West Dallas...

Desperation forced relatively prosperous blacks again to venture in the early 1950s in the Exline Park neighborhood, scene of the 1940-41 bombings. Twelve bombings in the next year and a half targeted homes sold to blacks in formerly all-white neighborhoods in a two-square-mile area of South Dallas. Not expecting white protection, African Americans armed themselves...

Dallas police arrested a series of suspects beginning in September 1951. The accused shared a decidedly working-class background and included parts pressers, machinists, and garage mechanics...

Yet only one of the suspects was ever put on trial- Pete Garcia, a member os Moore's South Dallas Adjustment League. Garcia was one of two Hispanics indicted in the bombings...

Garcia claimed Caucasian status, painting "For Whites Only"signs and placing them in the yards of families agreeing to not sell their South Dallas homes to black families. Garcia threatened other families at knifepoint to maintain the ban. Dallas newspapers, which had a policy of identifying black and Mexican American crime suspects by race, acknowledged Garcia's whiteness by frequently not mentioning his ethnicity. A chief witness at Garcia's trial testified that she had seen Garcia enter a vacant house moments before an explosion. She recanted her testimony, however. A jury deliberated for twelve hours before acquitting Garcia. 

Phillips, Michael. White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001. United States, University of Texas Press, 2010.

University of Texas

 

 

In May 1945, an Anglo private in the U.S Army and graduate of the University of Texas, PFC Robert Jones, wrote to Governor Stevenson that he attended high school with many Mexicans, some of whom "obviously had traces of Negro ancestry," and that at the University of Texas he saw "boys and girls with kinky hair and Negroid features from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Panama, Nicaragua, Venezuela and other countries... I know from almost a whole lifetime in contact with Mexicans that they deserve more. I think the same can be said for the Negros." 

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

"They was all white."

Creoles understood the benefits of exploiting whiteness for material gain. Sometimes, even having a person of color who looked white with his hand on one's shoulder was enough to reap benefits. Earl A. Barthé recalled that, when traveling through the South as a young man while looking for work,

there were these little highway diners. But if you were black, you might be able to stop and get gas but you couldn't go in to eat. You couldn't use the rest room. Not unless you were white. So, me and Harold [Earl A. Barthé's brother], we were travelling with a dark-skinned fella, we would sit in the back seat of the car and pretend he was the driver when we pulled in. We would get out and say "boy, fill up the tank while we get some sandwiches," and we would walk right in and order the food "to go."... They thought we was white. They didn't know... A white man might look at you twice but he wouldn't ask you if you was white if you carried yourself like you were white...we could be Mexican or we could be Indians or Italians and they was all white...we just wanted to get our food and get on to the next job, man! We were looking for work! We weren't on vacation!

Barthé, Darryl. Becoming American in Creole New Orleans, 1896–1949. United States, LSU Press, 2021.