Latino Americans

by Ray Suarez

  Up in Chicago, the hunger for new housing for returning servicemen saw white veterans turning over cars, swinging bats, and throwing rocks to keep black vets out of newly built public housing. The GI Bill of Rights opened the doors to the middle class for millions of new civilians, but black and brown veterans found their benefits harder to use: There were too few seats in colleges and universities that admitted more than a token number of blacks and Latinos; the GI Bill provision that guaranteed mortgages for veterans also required they be used to purchase new rather than existing houses, but too few new homes were built in the ghetto and the barrio.

  Returning to cities that had built hardly any new housing in the previous fifteen years, they struggled to find a place to live with new brides. Old employers had gotten along without them. Their fellow citizens were sometimes slow to learn how much expectations were raised in young Latinos by all the growing up they did while liberating other countries, and fighting side by side with men from everywhere.

  Eugene Calderon went home to New York City. He earned an undergraduate degree from New York University and a master’s degree from the City University of New York. The onetime gang leader became a policeman. His son said his father went back to el barrio, his old turf. “He literally went back to the police station where they knew him. The day he walked in they recognized who he was and they wanted to arrest him. He had to show them the badge and the whole thing.”

  Calderon did not just serve his time and build a career for himself. Looking around and seeing a department with only a few Latinos, in 1957 he helped found the Hispanic Society, to represent the interests of Latino officers inside the department, and help recruit more Latinos to the nation’s largest police force. After a successful career at the NYPD, Calderon moved on to administrative work at New York’s Board of Education.

  The former gang leader rose to become first the administrator for the school district that included East Harlem, and eventually the deputy superintendent of the city’s board of education. Calderon oversaw New York schools at a tumultuous time, when minority parents confronted a largely white teacher corps and administration to demand more local control and a better-quality education. He played what you might call an insider-outsider role, helping to create some of the premier educational institutions of Puerto Rican New York: Aspira, a group encouraging high school completion and college for young people, and El Museo del Barrio—the Museum of the Barrio—which showcased the work of Latino artists and taught Latino history through art.

  He built a life of achievement: World War II veteran, trailblazing police officer and detective, cofounder of community pillars, a senior leader of the largest school system in the country. When he died in 2007 the New York Times did not run an obituary.

  • • •

  EQUAL RIGHTS FOLLOWING the war were demanded by men like Dr. Hector P. Garcia. He was born to schoolteacher parents in Tamaulipas, Mexico, in 1914. His family, like thousands of others, fled the violence and instability of the Mexican Revolution by coming to the United States. José and Faustina Garcia opened a dry-goods store in Mercedes, Texas.

  The Garcia family grew to include ten children. After education in the University of Texas system, Garcia received his medical doctorate in 1940. Remarkably, he and five of his siblings became physicians. Garcia enlisted in the U.S. Army as soon as his residency was completed in 1942, and volunteered for combat duty. As a trained physician and already in his late twenties, Garcia could have avoided the most dangerous-duty wartime service. Instead, he commanded an infantry company in Europe, eventually won promotion to major, and was awarded the Bronze Star and six battle stars. Those medals weren’t all he got in Europe. He met and married an Italian woman, Wanda Fusillo, and brought her back to Texas, opening his first civilian practice in Corpus Christi on the Texas Gulf Coast.

  Hector Garcia, MD, with his medical school classmates before the outbreak of the Second World War. Dr. Garcia (front row, right) often found his superior officers reluctant to believe he was not only college-educated, but a trained physician. He served as a combat infantryman and in the medical corps; he left the U.S. Army as a major. CREDIT: TEXAS A&MU-CC

  Garcia was familiar with LULAC and its work, but as time went on he heard more and more stories of discrimination touching his fellow veterans. He talked with his friend Vicente Ximenes about an organization specifically for Latino veterans: “Our idea was for our people to have a place where they could come and complain about discrimination,” recalled Ximenes.

  “Many of his patients were veterans. As Hector knew well, under the GI Bill of 1944 they were entitled to medical benefits, low-cost loans to start businesses, and financial help to attend college. But only the Anglo veterans were getting those benefits. I did utilize the bill, but it was a never-ending struggle to be treated the same as Anglo vets.”

  Hector Garcia’s medical diploma from the University of Texas at Galveston. Born in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, Garcia was a naturalized American citizen and the descendant of Spanish land-grant holders. Like thousands of Mexican families, the Garcias fled north to escape the tumult of the Mexican Revolution. CREDIT: TEXAS A&MU-CC

  Rolando Hinojosa-Smith was a teenager when the men came home to Mercedes, the town where Hector Garcia grew up. More than sixty years later he remembers what his neighbors faced when they tried to enroll in college. “You had to report to the county courthouse to submit your discharge papers, so you could enroll in college. And the men in charge of making the referrals were some bad guys.

  “Mexicanos would come over, and they would refer them all to manual trades schools: ‘Hey, there’s a boatbuilding school over in Odessa.’” Hinojosa-Smith encountered the educational steering firsthand when he came home from the Korean War. “When I said I wanted to enroll in the University of Texas in Austin, I told them my brothers had both gone there and had all graduated. I don’t think they believed me.”

  In March 1948, Hector Garcia brought seven hundred veterans together in Corpus Christi. From that meeting came the American GI Forum, dedicated to fighting for the rights of Latino vets. The organization’s motto, “Education Is Our Freedom and Freedom Should be Everybody’s Business,” reflected that earliest orientation toward making sure Latino vets received their full benefits as equals to other Americans.

  Right around the time of the GI Forum’s founding, a case of discrimination emerged that energized the new organization and began its history of activism.

  After the war was over, Garcia became a civic leader. A steady stream of stories from Mexican-American veterans denied equal housing, employment, and educational opportunity led to the founding of the American GI Forum. CREDIT: TEXAS A&MU-CC

  Until a constitutional amendment swept away poll taxes, they were widely used, especially in Southern states, to exclude minority voters from the polls. Dr. Garcia wanted to turn organized vets into voters, and he urged them to pay their poll tax and increase Latino political power. CREDIT: TEXAS A&MU-CC

  Felix Longoria, a Mexican-American army private from Three Rivers, Texas, had been killed in the Philippines. It took more than three years for the remains to make their way from the Pacific islands to South Texas. The Rice Funeral Home in town refused to handle the burial. Its owner, Tom Kennedy, reportedly told the soldier’s young widow that it did not make any difference that Longoria was a veteran, because “You know how the Latin people get drunk and lay around all the time. The last time we let them use the chapel, they got all drunk and we just can’t control them—so the white people object to it, and we just can’t let them use it.”

  Private Felix Longoria of Three Rivers, Texas, with his wife, Beatrice, and his daughter, Adela. Longoria, killed in the Philippines in the closing days of the Second World War, was denied burial in his local cemetery by a nearby funeral home when his body finally made its way back to Texas from the Pacific. CREDIT: ADELA LONGORIA

  Many Americans may not be
aware of the past segregation of Latinos in daily life that existed in many places in the American Southwest. Schools, movie theaters, retail stores, and other institutions often had different accommodations, inferior ones, for their Mexican and Mexican-American customers. The system was not as deeply entrenched or thoroughly abusive as Jim Crow in the South of the old Confederacy. It varied from place to place, and varied in its severity, but systematic exclusion and second-class treatment were common for Latinos in the Southwest for decades before the civil rights movement.

  Vicente Ximenes remembers not attending a school with Anglo children until he was a teenager, and even then the welcome mat was hardly rolled out at his feet. He was one of only five Mexican-American graduates of the local high school, and he and his friends arrived at the graduation banquet only to find they were seated not with their classmates but “at the corner. There were five seats for those five Mexican Americans that had graduated,” said Ximenes. He and his friends decided to skip graduation and get their diplomas by mail. “We had to give a message to our teachers, that things had to change, that we were hurt, but we had graduated,” he said.

  Hinojosa-Smith said small towns in the Rio Grande Valley, where Anglos and Mexicans lived side by side for generations, were heavily segregated. “In towns like Mercedes, railroad tracks divided Texas Mexicans from Texas Anglos.” Mexican residents of these small towns were always in the majority, Hinojosa-Smith said, but things started to change after World War II. “My father got two veterans to run for seats on the county council, and they won.” He remembers the growing sense that it was possible for Mexicans to begin to push back. “And that never would have happened in the twenties or thirties. We just said to ourselves, ‘We don’t have to be like this all the time.’”

  In earlier decades, in response to mistreatment, exclusion, or discrimination, “There would have been silence. There would have been resentment, naturally. As for action, no.

  “Schools were also segregated for the longest time. I went to hundred percent Mexican schools, as did my brothers and sister.” Rolando Hinojosa-Smith got his place at the University of Texas after the Korean War. He earned a PhD and became a professor and a celebrated writer.

  In the context of 1940s Texas, neither Anglos nor Mexican-Americans would be surprised at a funeral home sending a Mexican family elsewhere for a burial. However, Ximenes and Garcia and the rest of the GI

  The refusal of a local funeral home to handle the Longoria funeral was typical of the indignities large and small suffered by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in small Texas towns. The sensitivities of the public toward the plight of veterans helped the story make local, then national headlines. CREDIT: TEXAS A&MU-CC

  Forum were convinced that Private Longoria, killed in the service of his country, would bring awareness of the daily humiliations of prejudice to a wider world.

  The offense is well detailed in a poster publicizing a rally in support of the Longorias and against the funeral home:

  El American GI Forum de Corpus Christi requiere su presencia para que venga a oir los datos de esta CRUEL HUMILLACIÓN a uno de nuestros HEROES Soldado de la ultima gran GUERRA. Todos los veteranos y sus familias y público en general deben asistir sin FALTA o sin EXCUSAS.

  Cuando una casa Funeraria se Niega a Honrar a los RESTOS de un Ciudadano Americano solamente porque es de origen mejicano entonces es TIEMPO que no unicamente el American GI Forum sino todo el pueblo levante a protestar esta injusticia.

  The American GI Forum of Corpus Christi requires your presence to come hear the details of this CRUEL HUMILIATION of one of our HERO soldiers of the last great WAR. All veterans and their families and the general public must assist without FAIL or without EXCUSES.

  When a funeral home neglects to honor the remains of an American Citizen only because he is of Mexican origin, it is therefore TIME not only for the American GI Forum but the entire community to rise to protest this injustice.

  Garcia sent telegrams to people of influence, hoping to bring attention to the Longoria family. The response to almost every note he sent was silence. Almost every note. One sent to an ambitious new U.S. senator from Texas, Lyndon Johnson, got a reply. Garcia’s telegram read in part:

  In our estimation, this action in Three Rivers is in direct contradiction of those same principles for which this American soldier made the supreme sacrifice in giving his life for his country, and for the same people who now deny him the last funeral rites deserving of any American hero regardless of origin.

  Senator Johnson sent a return telegram to Hector Garcia:

  I deeply regret to learn that the prejudice of some individuals extend even beyond this life. I have no authority over civilian funeral homes, nor does the federal government. I have today made arrangements to have Felix Longoria buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. . . . This Texas hero [will be] laid to rest with the honor and dignity his service deserves.

  Felix Longoria was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on February 16, 1949, with all the pomp and fanfare a U.S. senator could provide. There is no picture of the Texan standing at the graveside with the grieving family.

  In Master of the Senate, part three of his biography of LBJ, Robert Caro details that once the language in the Johnson telegram was made public, Johnson launched a blizzard of denials and obfuscations to the Anglo press. After all, the Texas establishment was pretty happy with things in the state as they were and was not sympathetic to the mission of the GI Forum.

  Early in his working life, Lyndon B. Johnson taught Mexican students in the small South Texas town of Cotulla, about halfway between San Antonio and the Mexican border. His early experience as a schoolteacher shaped his views toward civil rights in his later political career. He took up the cause of the Longoria family and helped them arrange Felix’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery. CREDIT: LBJ LIBRARY

  For the young civil rights organization, the Longoria affair had been an instructive and useful victory. In the years to come, the American GI Forum’s concerns moved far beyond those of returning servicemen. It became a modern civil rights organization, working to end school segregation, the injustices of local court systems, and the poll taxes that served to keep minorities from voting. Hector Garcia, the south Texas doctor at the helm of the GI Forum, was enraged by all the injustices he saw in the daily lives of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, especially in the counties bordering Mexico, some of the poorest places in America.

  Long after they first crossed paths over the Longoria affair, Dr. Hector Garcia of the American GI Forum and LBJ remained allies. Here Garcia meets the Senate majority leader and his wife, Lady Bird, during a visit to Texas. CREDIT: TEXAS A&MU-CC

  He investigated the living conditions of migrant workers in Texas, which led first to a booklet from the GI Forum, “What Price Wetbacks?” then to testimony to the National Advisory Committee on Farm Labor. The GI Forum took aim at the Bracero Program, still delivering low-cost farm labor from Mexico long after the war was over. Garcia told the committee, “The migrant problem is not only a national emergency; it has become a national shame on the American conscience.”

  Vital cogs in the machine that brought fresh produce to markets and kitchen tables, migrant workers who crossed the border under the Bracero Program were extremely useful to the food business. Farmers supported continued congressional authorization for the program. Garcia saw the migrant workers, especially the children, as they were: exploited, sick, and poor.

  “If he lives to be of school age, he will never average more than three years of schooling in his lifetime. His parents may be completely illiterate. If he lives to be an adult, he may average as high as $60 a month. He will live, if he is lucky, in a substandard home and die an early death from tuberculosis.

  “The only piece of property he owns in this world, however, will be his grave. I feel it is our moral obligation to recognize that the migrant’
s world is really part of our own world. To me, it is more than that since these people are my brothers and sisters.”

  Once again, we are face-to-face with the duality of Latino life in America. Hector Garcia, born in Mexico to educated parents, moved to the United States during the Mexican Revolution. Through education he was able to become a prominent and respected man, an officer in the U.S. Army, and, moving in ever more powerful circles, sought after by prominent political men in the pro–civil rights wing of the Democratic Party: Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, and Arthur Goldberg.

  Garcia’s “brothers and sisters” were now coming in the tens of thousands, and were a major source of Mexican immigration to the United States. Like him, these immigrants were born in Mexico, but he saw the Bracero Program built to keep them as something like American serfs. Poorly paid, poorly housed, and poor in health, they were unlikely to prosper the way the Garcia family had.

  Boy Scout Troop and Cub Scout Pack 104, sponsored by the American GI Forum’s Lubbock Chapter. Dr. Garcia saw his organization as a developer of future civic leaders and a spur to assimilation and acceptance in the wider community. CREDIT: TEXAS A&MU-CC

  While the American GI Forum may have deplored the Bracero Program, there were no shortage of Mexican farmworkers willing to take a chance and make the crossing. A surging American economy in the postwar years raised the wage differential on the two sides of the border even higher; there was no place in the world where an international border separated workers making such vastly different wages. By the time the Bracero Program was ended in 1964, it oversaw five million crossings (many by the same workers, who returned year after year).