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
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.
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".
When the movement for birth control began at the turn of the twentieth century, organizers such as Margaret Sanger believed that women's control of their own fertility would lead to upward social mobility for all women, regardless of race...
Under the Influence of eugenics, Sanger changed her approach, moving away from a race-neutral analysis...Sanger believed it was important to "prevent the American people from being replaced by alien or negro stock, whether it be by immigration or by overly high birth rates among others in this country."
Politicians in the southern states were particularly interested in spreading birth control among African-Americans to limit black population growth that threatened their political and economic hegemony. For example, the late Leander Perez of Louisiana, who supported birth control for African-Americans, once said, "The best way to hate a nigger is to hate him before he is born."
Kramarae, Cheris, and Dale Spender. “Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women's Issues and Knowledge.”
Business owners like Felix Tijerina resisted the sit-in movement and did not follow the mandates of the negotiated desegregation, which in most Texas cities remained entirely voluntary. Indeed, Tijerina did not desegregate his restaurants until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, although he did so willingly once the federal government banned segregation.
Tijerina had ridiculed the sitins in 1960, and many other Mexican American leaders publicly opposed black protest activism. In July 1963, for instance, LULACers debated passing a resolution praising Martin Luther King Jr. The measure failed when one member wondered “what the negroes had done to help us?”
Behnken, Brian D. Fighting Their Own Battles Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas. The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
