Mexican Americans who reject white identification in favor of “some other race” may be doing so as a reaction to the high and persistent levels of discrimination they perceive.68 But this oppositional racial identification is by no means limited to native-born Hispanics. In fact, among Latinos overall, those born outside the United States were more likely to select “some other race” than native-born Latinos (46 compared to 40 percent).69 Other surveys have shown that the children of immigrants are more likely to identify as white than their immigrant parents.70 This has implications for Latinos, the majority of whom today are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. There are significant class differences among Latino immigrants, with most immigrants from Cuba (pre-1980) and South American countries having a middle-class profile when they emigrate, in contrast to Mexican, Central American, and most Caribbean immigrants, who come to the United States without substantial capital, whether monetary or human (education and skills).
The data suggest that this class bifurcation among immigrants may correspond to the degree to which they identify as white versus “some other race.” Salvadorans and Guatemalans were two of the national-origin subgroups who selected “some other race” at levels above 50 percent. Most of them came to the United States in the 1980s in the midst of civil wars in their countries, arriving with low levels of education, and they may have substantially more indigenous ancestry than other Latino immigrants. Moreover, Central Americans initially settled in California during a period of intense anti-immigrant and anti-minority political mobilization. In the 1990s, Californians passed the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, the anti–affirmative action Proposition 209, and the anti–bilingual education Proposition 227. It was not a climate in which these new immigrants felt welcomed as “white” Americans.
In Los Angeles, Central American immigrants settled in majority-black south Los Angeles County, and during the riots of 1992 they were arrested at higher rates than blacks.71 In the long-questionnaire sample of the 2000 Census, 49 percent of Central Americans selected “some other race,” 39 percent white, and 5 percent black.72 The latter may well reflect their material and symbolic affinity with blacks. Finally, Latinos who are immigrants are considerably more likely than native-born Latinos to report discrimination as a major problem.73 These data suggest that the infusion of immigrants into the Mexican American population is not likely to temper the effects of their historic racial discrimination and colonial experience in the United States. If anything, the current anti-immigrant climate and the mass mobilizations by immigrants in 2006 and 2007 may fuel greater political participation.74
My son’s question at the beginning of the epilogue speaks to the power and flexibility of racial identity and racial categories in the United States. It reveals at once a ten-year-old’s sense of the burden of race for African Americans, but also his awareness that Mexican Americans too have freighted interactions with whites. It reflects his desire, conscious or not, to make a place for himself in the national racial fabric. In that sense, it parallels Mexican Americans’ collective struggle, over more than a century and a half, to find their place in the nation.
Postscript
In the epilogue to the first edition of Manifest Destinies, I claimed that Latinos were increasingly seeing themselves as a racial group, on par with the groups typically designated as such: whites, African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans (not that these are necessarily separate groups, given that 2.4 to 7 percent of people identify with more than one of those racial groups). Indeed, the ubiquity of the media’s references to “non-Hispanic whites” and “non-Hispanic blacks” suggests as much. Ten years later, the Census Bureau is considering, for the 2020 census, folding the Hispanic/Latino ethnicity question into the racial self-identification question. This outcome—and, in fact, even the consideration of this outcome—suggests that many observers agree with my claim.
In order to appreciate the implications of such a change in national data collection, we must first better understand the creation of the Hispanic/Latino ethnicity question in 1980. As I have noted, the Hispanic ethnicity question was first asked in the 1980 census at the behest of an advisory committee of Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American representatives of civil rights organizations. The committee members and Mexican American politicians viewed the new census category as essential if Latinos were to “get their share” of federal resources (often apportioned to states and local governments on the basis of census data), be able to pursue claims of discrimination before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other agencies, and marshal data to enforce voting rights.1 In a new book, sociologist Cristina Mora has mined internal government reports and conducted interviews, concluding that a variety of additional forces influenced the establishment of the Hispanic ethnicity question.2
For one thing, the Census Bureau received widespread criticism that it had undercounted Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in the 1970 census—using the regional samples and the questions about country of birth, language, and surname—culminating in a 1971 lawsuit filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, then a new civil rights organization.3 In response to the lawsuit, census officials already had been testing ways of incorporating data gathering about Hispanic identity as early as the mid-1970s, before the creation of the advisory committee.4 Moreover, Mora found that advisory committee members themselves advocated for a categorization that would be on par with other racial groups. These Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American leaders were not, by and large, making an argument that Hispanics were “white” and, as a result, should be designated an ethnic, rather than a racial, group; instead, they urged Hispanics to be counted within the existing framework of racial categories.5
UCLA professor Leo Estrada, who worked for the Census Bureau in the mid-seventies, recalls being directed to inform the Latino advisory committee that the 1980 census form was going to use two questions—one for race (without a Hispanic category) and one for ethnicity (asking only whether someone was Hispanic or not).6 In light of the debate about whether the 2020 census should collapse the race and Hispanic ethnicity questions or keep them distinct, I spoke with Estrada about why census officials took this route in 1980. He recalled that the greatest opposition to adding a Hispanic racial category came from bureau employees whose primary focus was obtaining accurate counts of African American, American Indian, and Asian American populations, given the civil rights and war on poverty emphases on the distribution of federal resources based on population counts. According to Estrada, census officials relied on preliminary, internal studies to argue against adding a Hispanic category to the race question for fears it would cause the African American count to decline (because some Puerto Ricans in New York might switch their designation from African American to Hispanic), the American Indian count to decline (because some Mexican Americans in Arizona might switch their designation from Indian to Hispanic), and the Asian American count to decline (because some Filipinos in the San Francisco Bay Area might switch their designation from Asian American to Hispanic).7 Rather than exclusively from the advisory committee composed of Latino civil rights activists, the impetus for a separate Hispanic ethnicity question came as much or more from advocates for other minority groups—African Americans, Asian Americans and American Indians.
Today we are left with a conundrum. I argue that Latinos increasingly see themselves as a distinct racial group, on par with non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, non-Hispanic Asian Americans, and non-Hispanic Native Americans. This suggests moving forward with a combined race question in 2020. On the other hand, as sociologist Nancy López has cogently argued, this change puts social scientists and policy makers in the position of not having continuous data if the census changes course after four decades. In particular, she argues that continuing to have data that allow us to see how race and Hispanic national origin intersect is essential; for example, the kind of data that allow us to see that Dominican
Americans are much less likely than those with origins in Argentina to self-identify as “white” on the racial question.8 In this postscript, I consider what new scholarly evidence tells us about how Mexican Americans and other Latinos were racialized in the twentieth century and how they have been positioned racially in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This examination leads me to conclude that it is problematic to continue to speak in terms of Hispanic “ethnicity” rather than consider Latinos qua Latinos alongside the nation’s other major racial groupings. Important reasons, however, remain for continuing to seek data on Latino subgroups given both the value in making comparisons over time and significant differences among Latino subgroups.
Still Off-White? Mexican Americans in the Twentieth Century
Manifest Destinies ends by suggesting that late nineteenth-century social and legal dynamics positioned Mexican Americans as an in-between, “off-white” buffer group between whites above them and African Americans and American Indians below them. Drawing on research published in the past decade, this section of the book explores what happened to Mexican Americans in the subsequent century. Let us begin with the turn of the twentieth century. One lesson from the experience of the original Mexican Americans was that their political and civil rights varied depending on where they lived. For the two-thirds who lived in what was the federal territory of New Mexico there were ways in which their rights were both more limited and more expansive compared to those in California or Texas. Because Mexican Americans in New Mexico did not possess rights as state citizens until 1912, when both New Mexico and Arizona were admitted as states, there were important ways in which they were second-class citizens compared to European Americans.
At the same time, there was a rather substantial silver lining for New Mexico’s Mexican Americans, as Manifest Destinies has shown. The relatively slow pace of European American migration to New Mexico (compared to the rest of the Southwest) meant that Mexican Americans there were the majority of voters and, at times, officeholders—something unheard of in Arizona, California, and Texas. Consider that of the first seventeen elections in New Mexico for the nonvoting “delegate to Congress” (1851–82), Mexican Americans were elected thirteen times, compared to a mere four times for European Americans.9 Data painstakingly collected by sociologist Phillip Gonzáles show a similar pattern for county-level elections in the seven counties he calls the core “homeland” for Mexican Americans (Bernalillo, San Miguel, Taos, Socorro, Santa Fe, Mora, and Guadalupe): between 64 and 89 percent of elected county officers in the 1848 to 1906 period had Spanish surnames.10 These outcomes had everything to do with the fact that the vast majority of eligible voters were Mexican American men.
As we have seen, Mexican Americans in Texas were a minority by the 1930s and in California by the late 1840s (see Chapter 1). New research on Arizona shows that, by the late 1900s, a small Mexican American population was outnumbered by white migrants (some born in the United States and others European immigrants). Not surprisingly, given these demographics, whereas the state constitutional convention in New Mexico enacted a provision to declare both Spanish and English the official languages and to protect the rights of those who spoke only one language, Arizona’s territorial legislature in 1909 enacted an English-only law that made speaking English a requirement for voting and seeking elected office.11 Historian Eric Meeks traces the rise of “the white citizen-worker” to promote and protect white supremacy from Mexican Americans’ claims for inclusion. The Arizona Rangers—modeled on the Texas Rangers—were created to enforce the law and also the racial hierarchy.12 The Arizona and Texas examples contrast sharply with New Mexico, where Mexican Americans frequently were elected county sheriff in many counties.13
Mexican Americans experienced racial categorization and discrimination in every sphere of life. For example, many school districts in the Southwest informally (more often) or formally (less often) segregated Mexican American children.14 Often, such separation within schools or exclusion from school altogether was justified on the basis of children’s reputed inability to speak English, even when this was not the case. In New Mexico, in some counties more than others, discrimination against Mexican American school children occurred routinely in the first three decades of the twentieth century. However, the state constitution’s protections for Spanish speakers and the state’s demographic makeup tempered discrimination. In contrast, segregation of Mexican American children was widespread in other southwestern states. The first lawsuit challenging the school segregation of Mexican American children in the United States was filed in Tempe, Arizona, in 1925. The second such lawsuit in the nation was in Del Rio, Texas, in 1930, with the third in 1931 in Orange County, California. There are no comparable suits in New Mexico during these decades.15
It was discrimination against Mexican Americans in the early decades of the twentieth century that gave rise to racist stereotypes about Mexicans that continue today. Historian Natalia Molina has examined how white public health officials policed Mexican Americans who were perceived as dirty and disease-infected because they were Mexican in early twentieth-century Los Angeles.16 In this way, the stereotype of “the dirty Mexican” was born and propagated, to the exclusion of practical efforts to fight poor sanitation due to poverty and institutional neglect of predominantly Mexican American neighborhoods. Cybelle Fox has similarly explored how social welfare benefits were differentially distributed to Mexican immigrants, European immigrants, and African Americans. In the first three decades of the twentieth century and in multiple regions of the country, she finds that public benefits were provided to European immigrants without question and largely denied to blacks, but that Mexicans (and sometimes even Mexican Americans) sometimes were deported simply for requesting such assistance.17
With the economic recovery hastened by World War II, along with Mexican Americans’ disproportionately high rates of service in the war, they became increasingly dissatisfied with the racism they experienced on a daily basis. As historian George Sánchez has noted, these youth were the large “second generation”—the U.S.-born children of the huge number of Mexicans who migrated to the United States between 1900 and 1920.18 Like their parents, this generation faced daily discrimination—from de facto school segregation to restrictions on when they could swim at public pools (one day a week for Mexican Americans and blacks).19 Unlike their immigrant parents, however, these second-generation Mexican Americans adopted a more confrontational attitude to white institutions. Ongoing police mistreatment and brutality was an important site for this conflict, and the 1942–43 Sleepy Lagoon case illustrates how white authorities attempted to keep Mexican Americans in their racial place and how they, in turn, resisted racial oppression. In early 1943, seventeen Mexican American young men were found guilty of serious crimes including assault and first-degree murder, “the largest mass conviction in California history.”20 The police told the grand jury that indicted the youths that Mexican American men were “biologically prone to violence,” and, as if to confirm the claim, the judge who presided over the trial refused to let the defendants cut their hair or change their clothes, despite the fact they had spent several months in county jail.21 Around the same time, the Los Angeles Times wrote a number of articles about the “zoot suiter menace,” and tensions culminated in June 1943 in days of Zoot Suit Riots, when young Mexican American men were attacked by uniformed white servicemen and the police.22 The stereotype of the Mexican American criminal was born and would come to thrive in the national press and imagination.
In Texas, second-generation (and sometimes third) Mexican Americans formed a number of civil rights organizations in the early twentieth century, including the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the American G.I. Forum, an organization of Mexican American veterans. Mexican Americans and African Americans in Texas both faced “both de jure and de facto segregation” in where they could live and go to school, as well as in public accommodations including streetcars, schools, ho
spitals, libraries, and swimming pools.23 But instead of aligning with blacks, some Mexican Americans sought to replicate the distancing strategies discussed in Chapter 3 of Manifest Destinies. Historian Brian Behnken uncovered a 1956 letter from G.I. Forum leader Manuel Avila, chiming in on whether or not the organization should take a stand on how the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling would be enforced in Texas: “I can already hear the Anglos saying, ‘those nigger lovers.’ . . . To go to bat for the Negro as Mexican Americans is suicide.”24
This racist statement powerfully illustrates the way that white supremacy structures the racial hierarchy among multiple racial groups precisely in order to sow division between them and complicity in enforcing the color line (see Chapters 3 and 4). As the twentieth century civil rights movement progressed, Mexican Americans walked a fine line between distancing themselves from African Americans and wanting to redress the racial discrimination they experienced at the hands of whites. One case, involving Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Macario Garcia, illustrates. Texas federal judge James De Anda, himself a Marine Corps veteran of World War II and one of a dozen Mexican American attorneys in the 1950s, tells this story about how Garcia learned his racial place in postwar Houston:
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