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

Hijacking Affirmative Action

Just what is a Hispanic?

It is a nouveau term cultivated from the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Prior to that Mexican Americans demanded to be listed as Caucasian on government applications, etc.  When affirmative action started to kick in and “protected classes” began to formulate, their leadership abandoned the claim as Caucasian and demanded distinction as a protected class also.  Thus, the broad term “minority” started to include Mexican Americans and others who no longer saw the advantage in being separated from Blacks. Eventually, the term Hispanic began to be included among minority ethnicities... 

During the Jim Crow days of the South and various northern venues like Indiana, Ohio, downstate Illinois, etc. separate facilities were for “whites” and “colored” aka Blacks or Negroes.  People such as Mexican Americans and other Latino ethnicities walked through the “whites” door.  They were not reduced to the inferior facilities we Blacks had.  General Colin Powell describes it brilliantly in his first autobiography “Soldier” when he goes into a restaurant in Columbus, GA and orders a take out.  The waitress says, “Say you are a Puerto Rican and I can serve you.  If you don’t; I can’t serve Blacks.”  He left.

“BEYOND THE RHETORIC”, Harry C. Alford

"Vote against integration. Don't look to a black future"

Mexican American civic groups fought to eliminate segregated Mexican Schools on the basis that Mexican-origin pupils were white. They made little mention of the segregation of African Americans in black schools. When the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board decision, Mexican American civic groups barely took notice...

And when the state legislature began passing laws to prolong segregation, the most prominent Mexican American organizations sided with the state government and not African Americans.

For example, some in LULAC debated the idea of joining forces with the NAACP to defeat the flood of racist bills coming from the legislature in 1957. League president Tijerina dismissed this idea. Similarly, LULAC's legal advisor, Phil Montalbo, explained to Tijerina, "[A] stand taken by you on such bills would tend to admit to our Anglo-American (sic) friends that we considered ourselves separate and apart from the majority of American citizens." Montalbo reminds us once again that, as whites, Anglos were the Mexican Americans' allies.

Numerous LULACers, and Mexican Americans more generally, agreed with this stance. For instance, A.G Ramirez stated succinctly, "[M]y district does not want our people and our beloved LULAC to be affiliated with the Negroes. We are white..."

Similarly, Dallas newsman Pedro Ochoa berated anyone wishing black-brown unity, explaining that many Mexican Americans "do not accept the integrationist precept at public schools, and perhaps churches and housing projects." Ochoa also warned Mexican Americans to "preserve your white race, vote against integration, don't look to a black future".

Behnken, Brian D. The Struggle in Black and Brown: African American and Mexican American Relations during the Civil Rights Era. University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

"...more different to us than a Spanish person might be"