Manifest Destinies, Second Edition

by Laura E. Gómez

  [Sergeant Garcia] came back from serving in the war and went to a restaurant there in . . . [the Houston area] and they wouldn’t serve him because he was Hispanic even though he was wearing his Congressional Medal at the time. And somebody said, “You’re going to have to leave.” And as he did, he tipped a glass of water over the on the table and there were two county [sheriff’s deputies] sitting in the restaurant at the time, and they took him outside and beat the hell out of him and filed on him for assaulting an officer.25

  In the early 1950s, an unlikely team of four Mexican American lawyers—Gus Garcia (who would become the first Mexican American to argue before the Supreme Court), Carlos Cadena, John Herrera, and James De Anda, quoted above, who was the most junior team member—made it known that they were searching for a “good” case that would allow them to challenge the state’s exclusion of Mexican Americans from juries.26 They considered jury service a fundamental civil right, both for the reason that a criminal defendant had a constitutional right to be tried by a jury of peers and for the reason that U.S. citizens had the right to serve as jurors, alongside the right to vote. The attorneys eventually found a case they thought could work to get the issue squarely in front of appellate judges, though, as legal scholar Michael Olivas has noted, “Norman Rockwell would not be painting pictures” of their new client, Pete Hernandez, who at the time worked at a filling station in a town where most Mexicans and Mexican Americans picked cotton. Hernandez was accused of murdering Joe Espinoza after a verbal altercation at Chinco Sanchez’s Tavern in Edna, Texas. In 1951 Hernandez was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to life in prison for intentional murder. Despite the fact that Mexican Americans were 15 percent of citizens in Jackson County, not a single one had ever been listed as an eligible juror, much less served as one.

  Hernandez’s attorneys eventually made it to the Supreme Court, but, to get there, they had to sell a lot of tamales. Local LULAC chapters largely funded the litigation with tamale sales, spurred to action, one Texas town at a time, by the lawyers’ rousing calls to action on Spanish-language radio stations. In these media pitches (and, indeed, in their legal briefs), the attorneys argued that discrimination against Mexican American jurors violated the Equal Protection Clause. But they also held on to the valuable fiction that Mexican Americans, unlike African Americans, were white. Hernandez’s legal team presented statistical and other social data to show that Mexican Americans in Jackson County were discriminated against as “a separate class,” but they did not argue Mexican Americans were not white. This almost cost them the case because the state of Texas argued that, precisely because Mexican Americans were white, there could be no finding of discrimination in the case since white citizens of Jackson Country were included in the jury pool. The legal team presented an especially dramatic piece of evidence at trial, when they opted to put one of the lawyers on the witness stand. Sworn in to testify, he was asked by his colleague whether he had gone to the restroom in the courthouse, and it was thus revealed that the courthouse had segregated men’s restrooms, one reserved for white men and one specifically designated for blacks and “Mexicans.”

  In an opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Supreme Court decided the case in favor of Hernandez, finding that “it taxes our credulity to say that mere chance resulted in there being no members of this class among the over six thousand jurors called in the past 25 years.”27 The unanimous Court had no difficulty reaching the conclusion that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (enacted in the midst of Reconstruction) applied to Mexican Americans:

  Throughout our history differences in race and color have defined easily identifiable groups which have at times required the aid of the courts in securing equal treatment under the laws. But community prejudices are not static, and from time to time other differences from the community norm may define other groups which need the same protection. Whether such a group exists within a community is a question of fact. . . . The Fourteenth Amendment is not directed solely against discrimination due to a “two-class theory”—that is, based upon differences between “white” and Negro.28

  This passage from the opinion—which appeared in 1954, alongside the landmark school desegregation opinion in Brown v. Board of Education29—reveals how the Supreme Court wrestled with the question of where Mexican Americans fit racially. The Court was prescient in nodding to a social constructionist view of race: “community prejudices” change over time and may vary from place to place. It also embraced a notion of racism as process, not simply as outcome, one that could be seen as far more radical than that designated in Brown. At the same time, Warren gestured to the sensibilities (and maybe sensitivities) of Mexican Americans, who claimed both that they were unconstitutionally discriminated against and that they were “white” (as the opinion stated, placing the word in quotation marks). Finally, and unlike African Americans, the Hernandez case offered piecemeal constitutional protection to Mexican Americans, noting that whether or not such protection was deserved was a “question of fact” to be determined on a local or regional basis.

  As the civil rights movement took on steam, and as Mexican Americans began to self-consciously embrace a non-white racial identity in the 1960s and 1970s, tensions emerged between Mexican Americans who still clung to claims of whiteness (coupled with opposition to coalition with blacks) and those who saw themselves as “Chicano.”30 The former strived for respectability and inclusion in white institutions, whereas the latter took a more militant approach and proclaimed a mestizo identity that emphasized Mexicans’ indigenous roots (see Chapter 2). In Los Angeles, both cooperation and conflict between Mexican Americans and other non-white groups coexisted. The intensive residential segregation of post–World War II Los Angeles County meant that Mexican Americans, blacks, and Asian Americans lived in the same, less desirable neighborhoods and districts, and this sometimes meant cultural mixing of all sorts.31 But it also meant that Mexican American and African American community leaders competed for limited resources.32 In an important study that shows the centrality of police brutality to the formation of Chicano militancy, legal scholar Ian Haney López examines the roles of two prominent criminal trials of Mexican American youths in the 1970s, showing that the racism of the Sleepy Lagoon era lasted into the 1970s.33

  Similar dynamics played out in Chicago, with Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, and in New York, with Puerto Ricans, where Latinos’ identity as non-white became cemented by violent encounters with police, school segregation, and other forms of discrimination. For example, historian Sonia Lee finds a comparable level of competition between Puerto Ricans and African Americans for war on poverty resources targeted at New York City.34 In that context, even as late as the 1960s, some Puerto Ricans argued that they were white and resisted political alliances with African Americans. Like the Texas officials who argued they could not possibly discriminate against Mexican Americans because they were white and there were white jurors, New York City public school officials argued a decade after Brown that a school in Spanish Harlem was racially integrated because Puerto Ricans were white and attended the school—despite the fact that only black and Puerto Rican students attended. Both groups rejected the school district’s claim, insisting that a school that was half Puerto Rican and half African American was not racially integrated.35 In the end, Lee concludes that “Puerto Ricans . . . were as vital as African Americans in shaping New Yorkers’ notions of ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘minority’ in the civil rights and Black Power eras.”36

  In Chicago, an even more complicated racial order developed, as the numbers of Puerto Rican and Mexican American residents mushroomed. By 1980, after two decades of white flight to the suburbs, Chicago was 40 percent African American and as much as 20 percent Latino, almost evenly divided between Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans.37 Historian Lilia Fernandez situates Latinos as a “buffer group” between whites above and blacks below, finding dynamics in many ways similar t
o those Manifest Destinies charts a century earlier in New Mexico.38 On the one hand this was quite literally true in Chicago, where there was a rigid white-black color line that governed where one lived (and the many resources and opportunities that flowed from neighborhood residence):

  Mexicans’ and Puerto Ricans’ racial ambiguity spared most [of them] from the more sustained racial exclusion or immediate racial turnover [of neighborhoods] that African Americans experienced. As some scholars have suggested and as real estate brokers openly admitted in the 1960s and 1970s, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans often served as a “buffer” between blacks and whites, a liminal group that constituted the traditional zone between rigid racial borders. . . . Latinos/as in Chicago’s neighborhoods tested the limits of residential integration.”39

  But Fernandez also uses the racial buffer concept more generally: “in the racial taxonomy of the United States, brown stands in as a placeholder that captures the malleable meaning assigned to the social difference most Mexicans and Puerto Ricans are believed to embody. The term locates them between African Americans and whites.”40

  Theorizing the Racialization of Latinos

  Manifest Destinies followed Omi and Winant in foregrounding racial formation as a process allowing for the excavation of “racial projects” undertaken by state actors, by racial groups (including non-white groups), and by civil society entities. Since publication of Manifest Destinies, social scientists have produced a number of studies about Mexican Americans and Latinos that have sharpened our understanding of racial formation. In particular, the social and political process of racialization (which applies to everyone, not only people of color) has been further conceptualized and empirically explored. Racialization refers to “the way persons are absorbed into a racial system by racial assignment and categorization and taught the commonsense and sanctions accorded to the hierarchy of humans in the races in that system.”41 Political scientist Ray Rocco offers this approach:

  I will use racialization as constituting a configuration of social, cultural, and political processes by which specific perceived visible differences are imbued with racial significance and meaning that then are incorporated in a racial hierarchy. . . . [M]acro- and micro-level racialized codes and practices function as sedimented forms of socially, politically, and culturally produced “knowledge,” or more accurately, “common sense,” that are then naturalized.42

  For a similar approach, see the concept of “racial scripts” offered by Natalia Molina and Ian Haney López.43

  How then should we understand Latino racialization today? As Rocco notes, a key element is the framing of Latinos as “perpetual foreigners” rather than as full members of society with all the attendant rights and privileges.

  Each Latino group has a different history of articulation with U.S. society, and this heterogeneous nature of Latinos is reflected in the very different patterns characterizing each group’s incorporation into U.S. institutions. . . . [D]espite these differential modes of articulation and incorporation, the staging of the cultural identity of each group has converged around a particular mode of racialization . . . on the basis of the notion of Latinos as racialized perpetual foreigners—a framing that has its roots in the nineteenth century and still resonates with the tensions between Latinos and the broader society, particularly but certainly not limited to immigrants.44

  In order to chart Latinos’ racialization, then, the key inquiries are twofold. First, how are Latinos racialized compared to other groups (a question this book has answered for Mexican Americans in the nineteenth century)? Second, how does the “common sense” of Latino racial inferiority come to be known and accepted by individuals within and outside the Latino category (the micro level) and via institutions such as schools and civic organizations (the meso level)? For it is by way of these micro- and meso-level social processes that racial categorization and racism come to be systematically reproduced at the level of social structure (the macro level).

  Manifest Destinies offers one answer, but several recent studies shed light as well. Anthropologist Jennifer Nájera excavates racism in a south Texas town where a select number of Mexican Americans married whites or passed for white, but where the large majority lived racially segregated lives, from cradle to grave.45 The town was formally established by Anglos in 1915 and excluded a prior settlement known as “Mexican town,” with its crowded shotgun houses without indoor plumbing. Using archives and interviews, Nájera unpacks white versus Mexican American segregation as it shape-shifted over the course of a hundred years. For example, as late as the 1940s the town’s Catholic parish enforced the practice of Anglos sitting in the left pews and Mexican Americans sitting in the right pews. Inspired by Chicano civil rights activism in the 1970s, Mexican Americans challenged the practice, eventually coming to dominate the church’s lay leadership.46

  Sociologist Julie Dowling’s life history interviews with Mexican Americans in Texas yield powerful evidence that Mexican Americans all are racialized, but in particular ways. Research subjects who lived near the border were much more likely than those living farther from the border to self-identify as “white” on the census racial question. Yet she finds considerable dissonance via interview questions designed to get at the respondents’ lived experience of race: “If you were walking down the street here in [city name], and someone were to see you, how do you think the person would label you in terms of your racial or ethnic background?” and “Has anyone ever commented on your racial or ethnic background, or asked you what your racial or ethnic background is?”47 Consider the heartbreaking story told by Mari Bredahl (née Ramirez), who self-identifies as white on a census-type question and who is married to a white man. At the time of the interview, she was a teacher in her fifties, who is second generation on her mother’s side and third generation (or more) on her father’s side. When she arrived at an overwhelmingly white college in central Texas in the 1970s, she described being “horrified” to encounter frequent signs in the windows of local restaurants: “We refuse to serve Mexicans.” Although she told Dowling she had not experienced discrimination, Ramirez described meeting her college roommate, who was white, for the first time:

  When she saw me, that I was her roommate, she nearly died. . . . She just took one look at me and walked out of the room. . . . I mean it didn’t bother me that much. I have a lot of self-confidence. Maybe for someone who did not have a lot of self-confidence it would bother them.48

  Dowling concludes that Mexican Americans “who identify as ‘white’ cling to whiteness not in spite of but because of their position as [members of] a stigmatized group. However, these ‘white’ Mexican Americans are not generally recognized as white by others. Hence, it becomes quite clear that they do not truly ‘own’ whiteness as it is not a validated social identification for them.”49

  Sociologist Nicholas Vargas utilizes statistics to explore similar questions regarding Latino racial identity beyond what census results reveal. In a 2015 study called “Latina/o Whitening?” Vargas considered several different aspects of racial identity and racial identification by others. Two questions mirrored the two census race and Hispanic ethnicity questions, but he also asked a question that asked, essentially, how others see the respondent: “Earlier you told us that you are Hispanic. Do you think other Americans would say that you are Hispanic or something else?” Finally, Vargas’s survey includes indicators of phenotype—something rarely assessed in studies, especially with large sample sizes. First, he asked the respondent to self-report eye color and hair texture, and second, he obtained the interviewer’s assessment of the respondent’s hair color, hair texture, and skin color. The findings mirror the census results in that 42 percent of Latinos selected “white,” while 50 percent of them selected “some other race” (not white, black, Native American, Asian American, or multiracial). In a telling finding, however, only 6 percent of Latinos reported that others would see them as white, with only 2 percent of those reporting both that they identify as white an
d that others perceive them as white.50 He concludes that the Hispanic/Latino category “is emerging as a salient racial category” and that there is “little evidence” that the white category will expand to include most Latinas/os.51 In this regard, Vargas’s study directly challenges the theory put forward by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva that substantial numbers of Latinos will become “honorary whites.”52

  Two recent studies show how useful it is to analyze Latino racialization in comparison to the racialization of other non-white groups. Claudia Sandoval’s research in Chicago considers how the anti-immigrant narrative plays a role in incentivizing African Americans to distance themselves from Latinos, to the advantage of whites. Sandoval explains that “the negative framing of citizenship” works to perpetuate, simultaneously, both African American and Latino racial subordination, by reproducing

  a racial order that keeps whites on top and both groups marginalized, with no real gains for either blacks or Latinos. Within this discourse, black individuals, regardless of their citizenship status, are viewed as African Americans and therefore, U.S. citizens, Latinos across all ethnic groups can be perceived as illegal immigrants and therefore non-Americans. Through this frame, African Americans have the advantage of symbolically belonging to (white) U.S. society—“symbolically” because any actions that African Americans take on the immigration debate do not change the existing racial structure of white dominance, much less translate into substantive change for their own life chances.53