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The Fair Housing Act of 1968 would attempt to end the practices that led to these divisions by prohibiting “discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of dwellings based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” By this point, however, many cities were already entrenched in segregation, and those invisible lines continue making silent divisions to the present day. Places like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Miami have all historically been home to Hispanic neighborhoods (barrios), and studies show that this general trend has continued, with at least nine million Hispanic people in 2000 living in metropolitan areas where they still experience a high degree of segregation.142
The inequalities that Hispanic people faced in finding a home were paired with similar discrepancies in finding schools for their children. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Mexican and Mexican-American children often attended segregated facilities; some 90 percent of schools in Texas and 85 percent of those in California were separate.143 At a time when thousands of people were trying to assimilate to life in the United States, schools and the wider culture were reinforcing the idea that Mexicans were distinct and “inferior.”144 In 1935, some children of Mexican descent were even segregated by laws passed by the California legislature on the grounds that they were “Indian.”145 Overall, school officials often justified segregated schools by pointing to children of migrant workers, saying they had different needs from other children; or these officials argued that local schools simply represented the demographic makeup of neighborhoods which were themselves often segregated. Some school districts used English-language provisions to section off Mexican children; the practice led to majority-Mexican schools. Many of these schools also offered different courses for Mexican children, placing them on more vocational tracks and giving them little access to more academic subjects.146
A 1940 study by the pioneering education researcher George I. Sánchez noted that in the 1937–38 school year, New Mexico spent $51 per pupil annually on average, but the counties with the highest percentage of Spanish-speaking students spent less than $35 per pupil. The effects of this funding shortfall were compounded by a curriculum based on the assumption that the children would come from English-speaking homes “that reflect American cultural standards.” The lack of funding and the cultural presumptions led Sánchez to describe New Mexicans as being the “stepchildren of a nation.”147 He exhorted readers to remember that in recalling the “heroic past” of the “American of Spanish descent … it should not be overlooked that today he faces perplexing problems and issues for which no solution has yet been found.”148
Hispanic civil rights groups began to involve themselves in the school-house struggle, and a number of legal cases forced changes in the 1930s. The ruling in the 1931 case Roberto Alvarez v. Lemon Grove School District found in favor of the Mexican students in this California locality on the basis that they would not Americanize if they did not have access to Anglo institutions.149 After the war, and buoyed by the growth of Mexican-American civil rights groups, legal challenges mounted amid acute awareness that Mexican and Mexican-American children were being forced to accept second-rate services.150
The parents of Sylvia Mendez took their frustrations with this to court in 1945. They wanted to send their daughter to a mostly Anglo school in the Westminster School District in Orange County, California. It was closer to the Mendezes’ home and young Sylvia wanted to go there, too, lured by the beautiful playground—there were no swings at her school, which had a majority of Mexican children.151 Her parents, Gonzalo and Felicitas, along with other families who wanted their children to be allowed to attend majority-white schools, brought a class-action lawsuit against four school districts in a case known as Mendez v. Westminster. They won in 1947 after the case went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. At the core of the argument was the fact that the Mexicans had been segregated on the basis of their appearance, and, because no federal law declared that Mexicans were Indian, the precedents set by earlier rulings or legislation, such as the 1935 law in California, did not apply. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its promise of equal rights was also invoked.152 The ruling was one of several in the 1940s and early 1950s that would lead to a reassessment of what constituted segregation, who was being segregated, and the concept of “separate but equal,” opening the way for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 that would start the process of school desegregation for African-Americans.
In an interview with National Public Radio on the sixtieth anniversary of the Brown ruling, Sylvia Mendez said: “I went to court every single day not knowing what they were fighting for. I just thought my parents wanted us to go to the nice-looking school.” She realized later that they desired something far larger than her access to the better playground. Yet today, some 50 percent of Hispanic children in California attend schools, often in poorer areas, where the student body is less than 10 percent white.153 “We are more segregated in school today than we were in 1947,” Mendez said. “What we have now is de facto segregation.”
Around the same time as the Mendez case, LULAC and AGIF were supporting a similar one in Texas, Delgado et al. v. Bastrop Independent School District. Lawyers for this 1948 case argued that the principle “separate but equal” in the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson did not apply to Hispanic children because they were “Caucasian,” and the plaintiffs won. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Hernández v. Texas that Mexicans were not considered another race but were “other white.”154
Schools in Arizona faced similar legal challenges. One high-profile case occurred in the farming town of Tolleson, where the Alianza Hispano-Americana demanded better educational services. The Anglo children had modern facilities, and Mexicans dilapidated ones. The suit attempting to correct this came to trial in 1951 as Gonzales v. Sheely, in which it was argued that Mexican-American children were being denied their constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment. The school district claimed that children who could not speak English were holding everyone else back, although the courts had earlier dismissed language as a basis for segregation. The ruling went against the school district, and the case became another that paved the way for Brown.155
Despite the many legal challenges to school systems in the Southwest, problems related to segregation and inequality continued after the Brown ruling. In New York, Puerto Rican students were crammed into schools with limited resources, and by the 1960s, the students in El Barrio were going to school in shifts and had few bilingual teachers.156 In Texas, similar grievances culminated in Cisneros v. Corpus Christi Independent School District, which was filed in 1968. This case originated when José Cisneros, a steelworker in Corpus Christi, heard his children complain about the poor facilities at their school. He met with school officials to discuss having parts of the building repaired but realized the problems were more than just superficial, for the students did not have the same curriculum options as those at Anglo schools. He contacted Hector García, and Cisneros’s union, the United Steelworkers of America, also became involved, offering to pay the legal fees.157
The case focused on the long-term and systematic discrimination that Mexican-Americans faced in Texas. The numbers told their own story. Total high school enrollment was 56 percent Anglo and 39 percent Mexican-American, yet the pool of thirteen hundred Mexican-American and two hundred African-American students attended schools that were less than 10 percent Anglo, while Anglo students attended high school with 90 percent white classmates.158 The composition of the schools reflected the social geography of the town, with Anglos and Mexicans clustered in different parts of the city. The federal judge Woodrow Seals found there was a de jure segregated system in the town, but that was not the end of the matter. The question of how to desegregate the schools turned into a legal battle of its own, stretching well into the 1970s. By 1973, the Supreme Court upheld a 1971 district court decision that Mexican-Americans were a definable minority and that the schools were to be desegregated.
Another area of concern for activists was access to voting. To prevent Mexican-Americans from casting ballots, some places had long had Jim Crow–type barriers such as the poll tax in Texas, which was not ruled unconstitutional until 1966.161 Correspondingly, Hispanic representation across the Southwest was minimal, although John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 mobilized Hispanic voters. Excited about the prospect of Kennedy’s presidency, Hector García became involved in the Viva Kennedy clubs set up by Mexican-Americans for the 1960 campaign to bolster national support among Hispanic voters. A membership card from the campaign features a blue-and-white illustration of JFK wearing a sombrero with “Viva” written on the front, while sitting on a Democratic donkey. García was instrumental in organizing the Hispanic community; Kennedy won 91 percent of the Mexican-American vote in Texas and 70 percent in New Mexico.162 Afterward, President Kennedy appointed García as a representative for the signing of a trade deal with the Federation of the West Indies in 1961.163 Soon after that, Hispanic politicians such as Texas’s Henry B. González started winning seats in Congress. Kennedy also appointed a Mexican-American, Reynaldo Garza, to a federal judgeship in the Southern District of Texas.164
When Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency after Kennedy’s assassination, he already had a relationship with the Mexican-American community in Texas, but it had been a tricky balance to maintain. As a senator, he helped constituents but then would play down any involvement with the Hispanic community if attacked for his sympathies. This on-off relationship would continue into the White House, though over time he became more supportive. He told a press conference in 1966, in answer to a question about whether Mexican-Americas should receive more national attention: “I think they should have more attention … I think that they are entitled to more consideration in government employment than they have received. I think they have been discriminated against in housing, in education, in jobs. I don’t think we can be very proud of our record in that field.”165
While García and many other activists in Mexican-American communities made great gains in the 1950s and early 1960s, by the end of the latter decade a new generation was on the rise, and moving in a very different direction. Perhaps the best-known figure of this period was César Chávez, who brought the appalling conditions of migrant farmworkers to national attention. He knew their struggle well. Chávez grew up poor in Arizona; though his family had land, they lost it after suffering financial difficulties and not being able to pay their taxes.166 The family headed west in the 1930s during the depths of the Great Depression to look for work. Chávez was twelve when he became a migrant worker, in insecure employment, on poor wages, and living in tents and shacks.167 He enlisted in the navy in 1946 and was honorably discharged a couple of years later, returning to work in the fields around Delano, California. He married and began a family in 1949 and soon became involved with the Community Service Organization, a civil rights group focused on helping Mexican-Americans.
By the 1960s, the large-scale strikes of the 1930s had dwindled, but the work remained difficult and underpaid. Chávez saw the need to organize unions in the fields. He, along with Dolores Huerta, founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962; it merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to become the United Farm Workers in 1966. He fought for fair wages and better working conditions in an industry where the lives of the workers were often as harsh as they had been in the 1930s.
Chávez was a proponent of nonviolent means, though confrontation had long been the hallmark of suppression of agricultural unions in California and Texas.168 One of his best-known campaigns involved the Delano grape strike and boycott, a series of protests and strikes starting in 1965 and involving Hispanic and Filipino grape-pickers. As part of this, Chávez led farmworkers on a march for more than 250 miles from Delano to the California state capital, Sacramento, under a banner with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, imploring consumers to boycott any grapes that did not have a union sticker on them. By 1970, the boycott had paid off and grape-growers allowed union contracts for their workers. Chávez said in a 1984 speech, “The union’s survival, its very existence, sent out a signal to all Hispanics that we were fighting for our dignity.”169
As the 1960s progressed, some Mexican activists began to reject earlier ideas about assimilation or claims to “whiteness,” pushing instead for a different vision. In 1969, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, who ran the group Crusade for Justice, gave a name to this spirit of activism, addressing the young Mexican-Americans at a conference he organized as “Chicanos.”170 At the time, that word had a negative connotation associated with poorer Mexicans, dating back decades. Gonzales reclaimed it and turned it into a linguistic symbol of not only the treatment of Mexican-Americans but also their unwillingness to accept Anglo norms.171 The Chicano movement—also known as El Movimiento or, for some, La Reconquista—pushed for rights and equality in work, politics, and social services, with a corresponding aim to raise awareness and the status of Chicanos.172
At Gonzales’s landmark Chicano National Liberation Youth Conference, he and the participants adopted El plan espiritual de Aztlán (The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán), based on the mythical starting point of Mexica cosmology. Indeed, the Disturnell map of 1847 actually showed Aztlán, described as “Antigua Residencia de los Aztecas”—the ancient home of the Aztecs—in modern southeast Utah, near the Colorado River.173
Gonazales’s vision involved the creation of a Chicano homeland in the Southwest, on the lands lost to the United States in 1848 and to the Europeans before that. He wanted Chicanos to pursue “social, economic, cultural, and political independence,” which should be the “only road to total liberation from oppression, exploitation, and racism.”174 Aztlán was to be a place for “bronze people” and their Chicano nation.175 The Chicana activist Enriqueta Vasquez wrote in the New Mexican newspaper El Grito del Norte, around this time, that with Aztlán “we have the answer to the call of the spirit. We know that we will not let our culture die. … The Plan de Aztlán is very clear and very strong. You are either for your brothers or you are not. You either live in the spirit of Aztlán or you do not.”176
Chicano activism also challenged prevailing ideas about “Spanish” culture. The historian John Nieto-Phillips has written about his own experiences of being bound in that particular cultural knot. As a child he would be taken to his mother’s village near Bernalillo, New Mexico, to participate in the Matachines dance on the Day of San Lorenzo, commemorating the moment in 1693 when the Spaniards made peace with the Pueblos. Nieto-Phillips recalled how this story was enshrined in family lore and how “for years to come I wanted to erase such stories from my memory … they also caused me a great deal of anguish.” Part of this distress came from his mother’s insistence that her New Mexican family was “Spanish.” To the young Nieto-Phillips, “most of our neighbors [in Pomona, California] were from Mexico and I couldn’t possibly go around our neighborhoods proclaiming we are Spanish and not Mexican—as if we were somehow better than them.”177 He was further confused by the fact that part of his family tree included Pueblo Indians, which made him wonder “how could we be Spanish and Indian at the same time, but not Mexican?”178 These contradictions left him feeling “trapped by our supposed ‘Spanish’ heritage.”179
The Chicano generation rejected the “Spanish myth” and instead looked to indigenous culture in the Southwest and Mexico, often criticizing Mexican-Americans who claimed whiteness at the expe
nse of their Indian roots.180 The question of identity, however, would not be easily resolved, in part because of the diversity of backgrounds and experiences that coexisted under the umbrella of Latino and Mexican. Chicano activists were not a static group, and there were differing aims and rifts within activist circles. For the author Gregory Rodriguez, “the Chicano portrayal of Mexican-Americans as a unified, downtrodden people preternaturally loyal to their ancestral culture was astonishingly similar to the way Anglo racists had been characterizing Mexican Americans for more than a hundred years.”181
In Texas, activism entered politics, as Raza Unida was established as an alternative to the traditional parties.182 By 1971 it had been established in New Mexico. The party there focused on issues such as police brutality, labor, and education. It did not have much success putting its members into elected office, though it was able to push its concerns onto the agendas of the main parties.183
Also in New Mexico, another activist group formed in 1963, focusing on land issues. Called La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants), and known as La Alianza, the group was led by Reies López Tijerina, a charismatic Pentecostal minister later known as “King Tiger,” who was born in Texas but whose work took him to Arizona and New Mexico. His obsession was land: he wanted the group to “organize and acquaint the heirs of all the Spanish Land Grants covered by the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty.”184 In effect, he wanted his followers to demand back the land lost to Anglos in the years that followed the Mexican-American War.
López Tijerina had been living in a community with a dozen or so families in a place he called the Valley of Peace, in Arizona, but fled to New Mexico in 1957 after being accused of attempting a jailbreak to free his brother. There he learned about the land grants and developed a passion to have them returned to New Mexicans. López Tijerina had many run-ins with state authorities and, as with other activist leaders of the time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation maintained a large file on him. He was aware of the surveillance, at one point sending his brother to the Albuquerque FBI office to invite agents to the Alianza convention in 1964. The FBI noted: “Mr. Tijerina … was thanked for his courtesy in coming to the FBI and he was told that an Agent of the FBI could not attend the convention.”185