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.
When a few Mexican Americans associated with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) suggested working with blacks in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), LULAC national president Felix Tijerina sternly reprimanded his colleagues, saying: "Let the Negro fight his own battles. His problems are not mine. I don't want to ally with him."
Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle For Civil Rights in TexasBrian Behnken - University Of North Carolina Press - 2011
As late as 1954 Dr. [Hector] García claimed, “We are not and have never been a civil rights organization. Personally I hate the word.”...
Dr. García, did not wish to alienate whites in Texas–or anywhere else–by appearing to join the struggle of black people for civil rights...
By the early 1950s the American GI Forum, while still denying that it was a civil rights organization, sought to end discrimination in Texas schools, in employment, and in the use of public spaces. The core strategy depended on educating Anglos that “Americans of Spanish-speaking descent” or Latin Americans were Caucasians and that to identify them as anything but white, whether on birth certificates or traffic citations, was illegal. Making any distinction between Latin Americans and whites, he wrote, was a “slur,” an insult to all Latin Americans.
Neil Foley, "Partly Colored or Other White: Mexican Americans and Their Problem with the Color Line," in Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest
