&
Richard
R. Valencia, Chicano Students
and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational
Equality, New York: New York: NYU Press, 2008, pp. 480, $25.00.
Philippa
Strum, Mendez v. Westminster:
School Desegregation and Mexican-American Rights, Lawrence:
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010, pp. 192, Cloth $34.95.
Paper $16.95.
Ignacio
M. Garcia, White But Not
Equal: Mexican Americans, Jury Discrimination, and the Supreme
Court, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008, pp. 248, Cloth
$55.00, Paper $24.95.
Cynthia
E. Orozco, No Mexicans,
Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil
Rights Movement, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009, pp.
330, $24.95.
&
These
are salad days for Mexican American scholarship, both by Mexican
Americans and by other scholars. The small numbers but persistent
growth of Mexican American researchers, combined with improved
access to important archival materials and increased collaborative
projects, and the rich territory yet-to-be-explored have led to
these and other important books about an understudied and
fascinating topic: the litigation for Mexican American educational
and civil rights following WWI and WWII. Indeed, some of the work
has reached back even farther, discovering obscure cases and small
case studies, all of which give lie to the suggestion that
persons of Mexican origin are fatalistic, unambitious, and docile.
As one of many examples, consider the work of the late Harvard
political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who wrote in 2004:
[Author
Jorge] Castaneda cited differences in social and economic equality,
the unpredictability of events, concepts of time epitomized in the
manana syndrome, the ability to achieve results quickly, and
attitudes toward history, expressed in the “cliche that Mexicans
are obsessed with history, Americans with the future.” [Author
Lionel] Sosa identifies several Hispanic traits (very different from
Anglo-Protestant ones) that “hold us Latinos back”: mistrust of
people outside the family; lack of initiative, self-reliance, and
ambition; little use for education; and acceptance of poverty as a
virtue necessary for entrance into heaven. Author Robert Kaplan
quotes Alex Villa, a third-generation Mexican American in Tucson,
Arizona, as saying that he knows almost no one in the Mexican
community of South Tucson who believes in “education and hard
work” as the way to material prosperity and is thus willing to
“buy into America.” Profound cultural differences clearly
separate Mexicans and Americans, and the high level of immigration
from Mexico sustains and reinforces the prevalence of Mexican values
among Mexican Americans.1
In this article in Foreign
Policy, as well as his nativist 2004 book,
Who
Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity,2
Huntington is crudely reductionist
and misinformed about virtually all the negative traits with which
he paints Mexicans, and he is particularly uninformed about the
docility and passiveness of Mexican Americans. Extraordinarily, for
a scholar of his stature, he cited secondhand remarks and a
self-help book by an advertising executive to prove
his thesis. Had he read further and delved deeper into the
history of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, he surely would have
discovered the long history of resistance and struggle against their
lot in life, especially in employing unyielding courts to press
their case against racist oppression. Even when the courts were
hostile and when the state went to great lengths to disenfranchise
them, Mexican American plaintiffs and their lawyers have a
substantial record of aggressively—and successfully—pressing
claims and looking to the legal system for redress. Indeed, even if
it had been true that Mexicans were a passive lot, it is an odd and
cruel turn to accuse persons so substantially marginalized by the
advantaged in U.S. society that they cannot be assimilated or
accommodated because they had somehow failed to resist that very
oppression.
Huntington
died in 2008, apparently not having drunk in the deep water of
Chicano and Chicana scholarship already published. But more recent
works, including these four under review and others, should
definitively put to rest the allegation that persons in Mexico
afuera—Mexican origin persons in the United States—have
simply accepted their fate.3 Although each of these texts
examines different corners of the larger tapestry and uses different
yarn to stitch, they reveal a stunning portrait of resistance and
opposition, particularly in the areas of education, criminal
justice, and civil rights. While the work of Valencia, Garcia,
Orozco, and Strum draw upon different historical sources and examine
different domains, they share an overarching theme: although not
well-known or documented in the larger literatures, Mexican
Americans following WWI and especially after WWII were better
organized and, occasionally, more successful in resisting social
marginalization and racial oppression than is generally appreciated.
In addition, this history is not featured in the general scholarly
discourse of our nation, forming an eerily-evident parallel with the
present, when nativism and restrictionist discourse have reached
dangerous levels and when white Long Island, NY thugs go
“beaner-hunting.”4
Given the clearly-documented and lamentable educational
achievement of Mexican Americans in 2010, and the longstanding roots
of this phenomenon, this long history of resistance will likely come
as a surprise to many readers of educational psychologist Richard R.
Valencia’s Chicano
Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for
Educational Equality.
In a revealing table listing
Mexican American school desegregation cases, he counts thirty five
such cases between 1925 and 1985, beginning with Romo
v. Laird,5 in which a Mexican American family sought
the right for their four children to attend a comprehensive
“white” school in Tempe, Arizona rather than the
“Spanish-Mexican” school these children were assigned, which
served as the laboratory school for the nearby Tempe State
Teachers’ College (later Arizona State University). While the Romo
family won this battle for a single school term, they lost the war,
as the school officials began to assign Mexican-origin children
exclusively to “Mexican Schools,” on the asserted pedagogical
assumption that Spanish-speaking children would only learn when
instructed in Spanish. As
will be seen throughout all these books, the widely-employed means
of segregating Mexican American children—even those who were
English speakers—was to aver that their linguistic needs were best
met by separating them, despite the flawed premise and segregative
effect that this instructional choice had upon the children.
Valencia labeled this tactic a “practice, used over and over,
[that] was, at its core, racialized segregation” (15).
When
used with the other common ascription, that migrant worker children
required separate schools so that their farm labors would not
disrupt the flow of instruction, their fates were sealed,
notwithstanding the failure of school districts to assess the
language capacity of the children or to account for the small number
of children actually involved in migratory labor. This reasoning was
particularly widespread in Texas, such as in Independent
School District v. Salvatierra, 6 a 1931 case set in
Del Rio. As legal scholar George A. Martinez has noted of the case,
which he situates as the first Mexican American desegregation case:
This case is highly significant because it provided two
justifications for
segregating
Mexican-American children. Specifically, the district could
segregate
children because of linguistic difficulties or because they were
migrant
farm workers. This case also presents us with another example
of legal
indeterminacy. The Salvatierra
court acknowledged that no other Texas court had yet addressed the legality of segregating
Mexican- Americans from
other white races. Given this vacuum, the court's decision disallowing race-based segregation for Mexican-Americans was
not compelled. The court could have followed other jurisdictions
that allowed school boards to segregate children on the basis of race,
even without statutory authorization. Similarly, the court's
conclusion that Mexican- Americans could be segregated for "benign reasons"
was not logically compelled.
Because only Mexican-Americans were segregated for linguistic difficulties and migrant farm-working patterns,
the court might have that, in effect, such segregation was race-based and
therefore illegal.
Alternatively, the court might have followed the reasoning of
courts in other jurisdictions
which had held that, in the absence of express legislation,
segregation was illegal. As no legislation expressly authorized the
specific segregation at issue in Salvatierra,
the court could have held that segregation
-- even for linguistic or migrant farm worker reasons -- was
illegal.
Moreover,
the court allowed the segregation to stand despite clear evidence
that the district practiced arbitrary segregation. For example,
white children who started school late were not placed in the
Mexican school. Thus, the school board's assertion that it
segregated children in the Mexican school because they started
school late was a mere pretext. In addition, there were no tests
demonstrating that the Mexican-American children were less
proficient in English, the other alleged justification for the
segregation. In any event, the court did not consider the
possibility that bilingual education might address any language
problems better than segregation.7
During
the early 1930s, when few Mexican American scholars were active,
George I. Sanchez had already taken aim at the misuse of
psychometric instruments and the failure to assess the linguistic
characteristics of Spanish-speaking children.
Similarly, Texas writer Jovita Gonzalez had begun her careful
folklore studies.8 Valencia comprehensively reviews these
efforts at litigation and scholarship, both with an overarching
theoretical section and through single chapters on the various
subjects of educational litigation including, school segregation,
school financing, special education, bilingual education,
undocumented students, higher education financing, and high stakes
testing. His novel contribution is his synthetic treatment of the
elements of Mexican American activism that have historically fed the
struggle for educational opportunity: “advocacy organizations,
individual activists, political demonstrations, legislation, and the
subject of this book—litigation. In order for the Mexican American
people to optimize their campaign for equality in education, they
must draw from all five forms of struggle. Each one in itself is
important, but all five streams flowing simultaneously and
eventually becoming one fast-moving river have the potential to
create a powerful confluence for systemic change in education”
(319).
One
of the important cases Valencia discusses is Delgado
v. Bastrop,9 a federal district court opinion from
June 1948, which struck down the segregative practices in this
central Texas town of Bastrop, a small town near Austin, the state
capital. Because the case was never reported, and not appealed to
the Fifth Circuit, it has not been widely known, even though in
proximity to 1954’s Brown
v. Board of Education10 and following Mendez
v. Westminster,11 the April 1947 Ninth Circuit
decision successfully brought by Mexican American plaintiffs against
California schools, it angered officials who did not want the
decision upheld or widened to other districts. At the time, before
it was split into the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits, the Fifth Circuit
extended all the way from Texas to Florida, and a decision by the
Circuit likely upholding Delgado
would have had bearing upon the Southern judges and the region’s
Jim Crow schools and social practices.
Valencia carefully details the many instances of
“intransigence and subterfuge” (52) by disgruntled school
officials, and brings light to this most obscure steppingstone to Brown.
He also usefully points out the intersections connecting the lawyers
of Mendez, Delgado,
and Brown, who
corresponded and interacted behind the scenes. (Although he does not
make the connection clearly here, he might have added Hernandez
v. Texas12 lawyers to the mix as well, some of whom
participated in Delgado v.
Bastrop and the criminal defense/murder trial that figures in Hernandez.13)
Readers familiar with the fascinating and extensive treatments of Brown
by Kluger, Tushnet, and others who have chronicled this towering
case would do well to re-read the case through the lens of Valencia,
Martinez, and others who have filled in the parallel tracks.14
In
Mendez
v. Westminster: School
Desegregation and Mexican-American Rights,
Philippa Strum has written the first full-length book on this Ninth
Circuit case, as part of the
University Press of Kansas Landmark Law Cases & American Society
series, usually reserved for important cases that reached the U.S.
Supreme Court. Strum earlier wrote an authoritative 2002 treatment
in the same series for United
States v. Virginia,15 the Supreme Court case that
required Virginia Military Institute to admit women. For the same
reasons that Delgado is
important on the road to Brown,
so is Mendez. Strum is a
careful and fluid writer, with a storyteller’s facility for
explaining the many strands that led to the case, including previous
litigation (few California cases on point, but enough to suggest how
to proceed), how the plaintiffs came to their grievance (their
children were not admitted into the better school in the Westminster
system, outside Los Angeles, due to their alleged lack of fluency in
English), how they picked their lawyer (he had litigated a public
accommodations case that led to integration of the San Bernardino
public swimming pools and parks), how he strategized with other
civil rights lawyers and organizations, and what came of the holding
after the State of California lost (in June 1947, the state passed
an anti-segregation statute, signed into law by Gov. Earl Warren).
I
have read this case many times over the years, along with many of
the law reviews and the historical literature about the case.
I thought I knew the details, but I learned much from
Strum’s book. The
texture she reveals is an excellent example of why the backstories
to important cases are so essential to understanding the full
context. Strum is particularly accomplished at the telling detail;
for instance, her
account of how the Mendez family took up the cause, especially with
a Mexican American father and Puerto Rican mother, and at some risk
to their social standing, is particularly compelling. Their daughter
Sylvia, alive in 2010, has become like Linda Brown or Elena Holly,
the active custodian of her family’s tale and private keeper of
the public faith. By recounting many details from the fugitive press
accounts, personal histories, and written records, Strum has
performed a genuine service in drawing such significant attention to
the case.
However,
she is not as sure in her grasp of the post-Mendez
matters. She mistakenly places the four school districts in the Delgado
v. Bastrop case as being in “south Texas” (149), when any
political and topographical map would locate the three counties and
four school districts in Central Texas, including Travis County,
where the case was tried in Austin federal court. The actual
geography matters less than considerable political cartography
between Anglo Texas and the predominantly-Mexican American South
Texas and border areas. She does not dwell upon Delgado,
although in many respects it was as crucial to the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund’s strategy as was Mendez,
and was tried in the same courts as Sweatt
v. Painter,16 already begun against the University of
Texas. I had not put two and two together to connect the appearance
of A. L. Wirin, Mendez
co-counsel and Delgado
co-counsel; for that matter, I had not known he had been involved in
litigation following the earlier Sleepy Lagoon violence against
Mexican Americans,17 or that afterward, he had gone on to
do the Lord’s work in Arizona ,18 or that he had later
argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.19 (Valencia also
missed this connection in his discussion of Gonzales
v. Sheely, the 1951 Maricopa County, Arizona desegregation case
[53-55].) Through its journey to the Ninth Circuit, Mendez
drew upon white, Jewish, Asian, and African American lawyers,
but not a single Latino or Mexican American attorney.
I
do not think that her rendition of the founding of the Mexican
American Legal Defense & Educational Fund squares with all the
available facts, or that the organization
“contacted Pete Tijerina to use some of … [its Ford
Foundation] money to help Mexican-American lawyers in Texas with
litigation” (154-55). Remarkably, there has never been a
full-length book on MALDEF or its founding, so the accurate version
is still to be told. I also do not believe that it would be correct
to characterize the funds that University of Texas professor George
I. Sanchez had at his disposal as “LULAC” funds, the way she
describes them (149). These may seem quibbles, but her telling of
these details is not nearly as sure-handed as her account of the Mendez
case. One last haunting connection among these books involves
the demise of David Marcus, the lead Mendez
lawyer, for reasons that will be apparent in the review of Ignacio
M. Garcia’s book. These small details aside, I am grateful that
the Kansas series apparently made an exception for this case, which
did not reach the U.S. Supreme Court or achieve the iconic status of
those in its other books, and grateful that Strum decided to write
about it.
Ignacio
M. Garcia’s book on Hernandez
v. Texas is a work long in the making, even drawing an unusual
shout out in a New York Times
editorial years before it appeared in print.20 The
decision, which appears
in the 1954 U.S. Supreme
Court Reporter just before Brown,
involves a Mexican American defendant convicted of murder in a 1951
cantina shooting by an all-white jury in Edna, Texas. That verdict
was subsequently overturned
on the grounds that he was not tried by a jury of his peers; Texas
prosecutors had argued that since state law considered Mexican
Americans to be
“white,” he had indeed been tried by a jury of his peers. 21
However,
in a unanimous opinion by Justice Warren, the Court ordered the
defendant be given a new trial:
The
petitioner's initial burden in substantiating his charge of group
discrimination was to prove that persons of Mexican descent
constitute a separate class in Jackson County, distinct from
"whites." One method by which this may be demonstrated is
by showing the attitude of the community. Here the testimony of
responsible officials and citizens contained the admission that
residents of the community distinguished between "white"
and "Mexican." The participation of persons of Mexican
descent in business and community groups was shown to be slight.
Until very recent times, children of Mexican descent were
required to attend a segregated school for the first four grades. At
least one restaurant in town prominently displayed a sign announcing
"No Mexicans Served." On the courthouse grounds at the
time of the hearing, there were two men's toilets, one unmarked, and
the other marked "Colored Men" and "Hombres Aqui"
("Men Here"). No substantial evidence was offered to rebut
the logical inference to be drawn from these facts, and it must be
concluded that petitioner succeeded in his proof.22
As
the author and editor of the first book on the case to appear in
print, I was pleased to welcome this new work and to have the
perspective of a senior Chicano historian on the case that had come
to mean so much to me.23 Garcia’s use of journalism
sources and his interviews with a number of observers and their
families helps bring to life the alcohol-fuelled bar fight of more
than half a century ago. (Inexplicably, the book cover mistakenly
indicates the shooting was in 1952, when it actually occurred in
1951.) He also has ably explored the social dynamics of the case,
explaining why many community members rallied behind defendant Pedro
Hernandez despite the fact that he had killed another Mexican
American, Joe Espinoza, who was unarmed. He is particularly helpful
in sorting out some of the incongruous aspects of the case, such as
why “outsider” lawyers from Houston and San Antonio took the
Hernandez case in the first place, since the Espinozas were a
relatively well-established family in Edna, Texas, and doing so was
not entirely popular among other Mexican Americans in the small
“Jaime Crow” cotton-culture town.
Gustavo
Garcia, one of the four lawyers on the team, was a tragic figure;
Ignacio Garcia captures his cockiness and bravado in both broad and
small strokes. Nowhere is he better than his depiction of the
Chicano lawyers barred from staying the night in the town’s only
hotel, and of Gus drunkenly singing in the hotel parking lot in
order to irritate the hoteliers (34-35). Indeed, the book is filled
with references to Gus Garcia’s drinking, so much so that the
author strays from his usual care to describe Gus as drunk the night
before his crucial Supreme Court argument, and of the legal team’s
effort to sober him up by pouring coffee down his throat. Gus Garcia
then went on to deliver a brilliant argument, famously extended as
the Justices gave him more time to answer their questions (140-48).
The author explains that he heard this story from an Anglo historian
who was a friend of John Herrera, the lead lawyer in the case.24
Because John Herrera never wrote about the case and his archived
papers do not mention to this incident, and because the U.S. Supreme
Court did not begin to record oral arguments until the following
term, we will never know what actually happened. All the lawyers
have now passed, but the last living lawyer of the four-person team,
James DeAnda, who became a federal judge and a co-founder of MALDEF
in 1967-68, insisted to me that this never happened. It was
plausible that Gus was drunk, as he was an alcoholic and died
ignominiously at the age of forty-eight, having been disbarred,
hounded by creditors, and having been in and out of hospitals and
treatment facilities for his drinking.25 But this story
requires more careful documentation than is evident here.
Historian
Cynthia E. Orozco has published No
Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American
Civil Rights Movement, a
towering work, and a volume of significance that transcends its
actual scope—early 20th century Mexican American
political development in Texas. The book builds on her Ph.D
dissertation, “The Origins of the League of United Latin American
Citizens and the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement in Texas,
1910-1929.” Among the materials she reviewed were the unpublished
papers of Alonso Perales, who graduated from George Washington
University School of Law in 1926, making him the third Mexican
American lawyer to practice in Texas, following
J.T. Canales, a lawyer-politician who graduated from the
University of Michigan Law School in 1899, and Manuel C. Gonzales,
who attended the law school at St. Louis University and graduated
from the University of Texas Law School in 1924.28
Perales not only had a successful practice, but helped found LULAC
and was a prolific writer. The University of Houston acquired his
papers and archives in 2009, and they are ripe pickings for
scholars.
Orozco
has carefully looked at the early Mexican American social and
political organizations, especially LULAC and Order Sons of America
(OSA), and through her careful work, advances the thesis that
Mexican American organizing politics and social consciousness arose
much earlier than has been generally credited in the work of earlier
historians, political scientists, and other scholars. Whereas most
other scholars place these origins in the late 1920s, especially
with the events leading up to the 1929 founding of LULAC, in Corpus
Christi, Texas, she more thoroughly traces its roots to predecessor
groups and to events from the 1910 Mexican Revolution, the end of
the Porfiriato, and the
early 1920s. She also has done rather remarkable archival work with
Perales’s private papers, and with the collection of another early
activist and feminist, Adela Sloss-Vento, also
previously-unavailable. These family-held papers fill out the record
on the structured role
of women in these mutual societies and civic organizations, as well
as the behind-the-scenes role of lawyers—in this instance, not as
litigators, but as civic leaders and elected officials.
Ironically,
the case most often considered to be an early “Mexican American”
case, Mendez, had no
Mexican American lawyers involved in it, and because it was a
California case rather than a Texas case, had no significant
involvement from Mexican American political organizations or the
social-cultural community. However, it did segue into, and through
the connections noted here, did influence Delgado,
Hernandez, and the cases
that flowed eventually into the MALDEF “river” Richard Valencia
has evocatively described.29 In 1982, MALDEF won Plyler
v. Doe, concerning undocumented children, its most important
U.S. Supreme Court victory to that point.30 In 2006,
MALDEF lawyers won in LULAC
v. Perry,31 a voting rights case that, for the first
time, had Latinos and Latinas on both sides of a Supreme Court case,
and because of the majority’s complex decision, allowed Nina
Perales for MALDEF and Teodoro Cruz, the Texas Solicitor General, to
each claim victory. James
DeAnda lived to see that case, and four years later, Sonia Sotomayor
was confirmed to the Court. While these books and others show that
much work has been done, events continue to show how much scholarly
and other work remains.
Many
rich nuggets are still to be mined from this period’s river. As
part of my ongoing research on Hernandez,
I have identified earlier trials where Mexican American defendants
had claimed all-Anglo jury trials were not representative and came
across the famous incident of Gregorio Cortez, among others.32
Literary scholars have begun to look at Lorenzo de Zavala,34
cultural and printing scholars at Padre Antonio Martinez,34
and legal historians at the racialization of juries in the
Southwest.36These projects examine the “first
important mediating figures of U.S.-Mexican democratic cultural
relations and [reveal] much about the early expansionist
ideologies that would affect
U.S.-Mexico relations and Mexican American peoplehood
in the United States for the next century.”37
The literary scholar who wrote this was referring to the “next
century” as the 20th, but he could just as easily have referred to
the future of the 21st century.
I
end as I began this review-essay, as a reposte to Samuel P.
Huntington, who was unaware that Mexican-origin and native peoples
populated what is now the United States long before the Pilgrims
later arrived. If there truly were a
Mexican “obsession” with history, it likely exists because those
who continue to ignore the history of Mexicans in the U.S. or paint
them as inferior are ignorant of these stories, and willfully so.
How could anyone who knew this history assert that we have “little
use for education”? In the movie 1988 Stand
and Deliver,38 math teacher Jaime Escalante,
exasperated at his high school students, shouts at them, “You burros
have math in your blood!” The rise of this developing field of
legal history gives evidence that we burros
also have history—and law—in our blood.
FOOTNOTES
*
Michael A. Olivas is William B. Bates Distinguished Chair in Law,
University of Houston Law Center. He gratefully acknowledges the
assistance of Lauren E. Schroeder and Laura E. Gomez.
1.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Hispanic Challenge, Foreign Pol’y,
Mar.-Apr. 2004, available at
cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/gems/culturalagency1/SamuelHuntingtonTheHispanicC.pdf.
For citations from the books under review, the pagination appears in
parentheses.
2.
Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s
National Identity (2004).
3. There
is a veritable library of recent works on the subject. Some of the
better full-length works include those by Arnoldo De Leon, The
Tejano Community, 1836-1900 (1982); Carl Allsup, The American GI
Forum: Origins and Evolution (1982); Arnoldo De Leon, They Called
Them Greasers (1983); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the
Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (1987); Mario T. Garcia, Mexican
Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity (1989); Gilbert
Gonzalez, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (1990);
Benjamin Marquez, LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American
Political Organization (1993); George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican
American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles,
1900-1945 (1993); Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., Let All of Them Take
Heed: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in
Texas, 1910-1981 (1987); Angela Valenzuela, Subtractive Schooling:
U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring (1999); Guadalupe San
Miguel, Jr., Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano
Movement in Houston (2001); Mexican Americans and World War II
(Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez ed., 2005); Marcos Pizarro, Chicanas and
Chicanos in School: Racial Profiling, Identity Battles, and
Empowerment (2005); Laura E. Gomez, Manifest Destinies: The Making
of the Mexican American Race (2007); World War II and Mexican
American Civil Rights (Richard Griswold del Castillo ed. 2008);
Joseph P. Sánchez, Between Two Rivers: The Atrisco Land Grant in
Albuquerque History, 1692-1968 (2008); Jose A. Ramirez, To the Line
of Fire: Mexican Texans and World War I (2009);
Emilio Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican
Workers and Job Politics during World War II (2009). These
books are specifically about the Mexican-origin experience in the
United States, particularly in the Southwest, and many are more
particularly grounded in Texas. Far less has been written of the
educational history of Puerto Ricans in the fifty states and D.C.
and of other Latino groups in the U.S. For authoritative scholarship
on Puerto Rico itself, see Jose
Cabranes, Citizenship and the American Empire (1979); Ediberto
Roman, The Other American Colonies: An International and
Constitutional Examination of the United States’ Overseas
Conquests (2006).
4.
See, e.g., Michael
A. Olivas, Immigration-Related State Statutes and Local Ordinances:
Preemption, Prejudice, and the Proper Role for Enforcement, U. Chi.
Legal F. 27 (2007).
As
evidence of racial violence aimed at persons perceived to be
undocumented Mexicans, see,
e.g., Manny
Fernandez, L.I. Teenagers Hunted Latinos for “Sport,” Prosecutor
Says, N.Y. Times, Mar. 19, 2010, at A18 (describing the killing of
Ecuadorian permanent resident); Manny Fernandez, Verdict Is
Manslaughter in L.I. Hate Crime Trial, N.Y. Times, Apr. 20, 2010, at
A1.
5.
Romo v. Laird, et al., No. 21617, Maricopa County Superior Court
(1925). This case was unpublished, but all the proceedings are
reprinted in Laura K. Muñoz, Separate But Equal? A Case Study of
Romo v. Laird and Mexican American Education, 15 OAH Magazine of
History 28 (2001), available
at www.oah.org/pubs/magazine/deseg/munoz.html.
While the Valencia list ended in 1985, a number of the cases listed
are still ongoing decades later. For example, United
States v. Texas was reopened in 2006, after many years of
failure to implement. The various documents of this Jarndyce-like
case are available at
http://maldef.org/education/litigation/us_v_texasHYPERLINK
"http://maldef.org/education/litigation/us_v_texas/"/.
6.
33 S.W.2d 790 (Tex. Civ. App. 1930), cert.
denied, 284 U.S. 580 (1931).
7.
George
A. Martinez, Legal Indeterminacy, Judicial Discretion and the
Mexican-American Litigation Experience: 1930-1980, 27 U.C. Davis L.
Rev. 555, 576-77 (1994). Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr. examined all the
original documents and came to the same conclusions in his
authoritative study, “Let All of Them Take Heed”: Mexican
Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas,
1910-1981 74-86 (1987).
8.
George I. Sanchez, Scores of Spanish-Speaking Children on Repeated
Tests, 40 J. Genetic Psychol. 223 (1932); George I. Sanchez, The
Implications of a Basal Vocabulary to the Measurement of the
Abilities of Bilingual Children, 5 J. Soc. Psychol. 395 (1934).
Jovita Gonzalez Mireles served as the president of the Texas
Folklore Society in 1930-1932, and is credited with being the first
Mexican American woman scholar in Texas. See
generally José E. Limón, Dancing with the Devil: Society and
Cultural Poetics in Mexican American South Texas 60-74 (1994);
Mexican Americans in Texas History, Selected Essays (Emilio Zamora,
Cynthia Orozco & Rodolfo Rocha eds., 2000). Her papers and those
of her activist husband Edmundo E. Mireles are archived at the Texas
State University, San Marcos library at http://alkek.library.txstate.edu/swwc/archives/writers/jovita.html.
9.
Civ. No. 388 (W.D. Tex. June 15, 1948) (unpublished opinion).
10.
347 U.S. 483 (1954).
11.
161 F.2d 774 (9th Cir. 1947).
12.
347 U.S. 475 (1954).
13.
“Colored Men” and “Hombres Aqui”: Hernandez
v. Texas and the Emergence of Mexican-American Lawyering
(Michael A. Olivas ed., 2006).
14.
See, e.g., Richard Kluger,
Simple Justice: The History of Brown
v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for
Equality (1976); Bernard Schwartz, Super Chief: Earl Warren and His
Supreme Court—A Judicial Biography (1983); Dennis J. Hutchinson,
Unanimity and Desegregation: Decisionmaking in the Supreme Court,
1948-1958, 68 Geo. L. J. 1 (1986); Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP's
Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 (1987); Mark
V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the
Supreme Court, 1956-1961 (1994); Mark V. Tushnet, Making
Constitutional Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court,
1961-1991 (1997); Mark Tushnet and Katya Lezin, What Really Happened
in Brown v. Board of
Education, 91 Colum. L. Rev. 1867 (1991); Kenneth W. Mack,
Rethinking Civil Rights Lawyering and Politics in the Era Before Brown,
115 Yale L. J. 256 (2005).
15.
Philippa
Strum, Women in the Barracks: The VMI Case and Equal Rights (2002). See
United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996). See
also Rosemary C. Salomone, The Story of Virginia Military
Institution: Negotiating Sameness and Difference, in
Education Law Stories 159 (Michael A. Olivas & Ronna Greff
Schneider eds., 2006).
16.
339 U.S. 629 (1950). See Amilcar
Shabazz, Advancing Democracy: African
Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education
in Texas (2004).
17.
For detailed treatments of the racial violence visited upon Mexican
Americans in Los Angeles in 1943, see
Richard Steele, Violence in Los Angeles: Sleepy Lagoon, the Zoot
Suit Riots, and the Liberal Response, in
Richard Griswold del Castillo, supra
note 3, at 34-48; Maurico Mazon, The
Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (1988).
18.
He tried the Gonzales v. Sheely case, 96 F. Supp. 1004 (D. Ariz.
1951). Professor Martinez mistakenly lists the case throughout as
Gonzalez. See Martinez,
supra note 7, at 555, 578.
19.
Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165 (1952). Rochin
was a case about search and seizure, and at the trial court and
state appellate levels, it was argued by David Marcus, who handed it
off to Wirin and another lawyer for the U.S. Supreme Court argument.
Wirin argued the case with co-counsel Dolly Lee Butler, who is
listed in a website of early successful women lawyers from
Tennessee: 50 Years of Pioneers: Early Women in the Law, http://www.tba.org/pioneers.html
(last visited July 16, 2010).
Although the petitioner Rochin was Latino, the case was not about
race and ethnicity, but drugs seized by a coerced stomach-pumping.
Rochin prevailed in the Supreme Court. Marcus also represented
Mexican American homeowners sued by white homeowners to invoke
racial housing covenants in 1943 Fullerton, California in Doss
v. Bernal. See Gustavo
Arrellano, Mi Casa Es Mi Casa, Orange County Weekly, May 6, 2010, available
at
http://www.ocweekly.com/2010-05-06/news/alex-bernal-housing-discrimination.
20.
A Quiet Victory for Civil Rights,
N.Y. Times, May 15, 2004, at A16.
(“Ignacio Garcia, a history
professor at Brigham Young University who is writing a book about
the Hernandez case, said that it marked the first time Hispanic
lawyers had argued before the Supreme Court.”)
21.
Hernandez v. Texas,252 S.W.2d 531 (1952).
22.
Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U.S. 475, 479-80 (1954) (quotation marks and
citations omitted). See also
Ian Haney Lopez & Michael A. Olivas, Hernandez
v. Texas: Jim Crow, Mexican Americans, and the
Anti-Subordination Constitution, in
Rachel Moran and Devon Carbado, Race Law Stories 269 (2008). This
“whiteness thesis” is, as could be expected, a quite contested
issue. See, e.g., Neil
Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas
Cotton Culture (1997); Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal
Construction of Race (1996); John Tehranian, Performing Whiteness:
Naturalization Litigation and the Construction of Racial Identity in
America, 109 Yale L.J. 817 (2000);
Ian Haney Lopez, Racism on Trial, The Chicano Fight for Justice
(2003); Ariela Gross, Texas Mexicans and the Politics of Whiteness,
21 L. & Hist. Rev. 195 (2003); Steven H. Wilson, Brown Over
“Other White”: Mexican Americans’ Legal Arguments and
Litigation Strategy in School Desegregation, 21 L. & Hist. Rev.
145 (2003); Multiple Origins, Uncertain Destinies: Hispanics and the
American Future (Marta Tienda & Faith Mitchell eds., 2006).
Many
scholars and observers have speculated upon the “bonus of
whiteness,” ranging from Toni Morrison to Derrick Bell, not always
with much historical nuance or knowledge. See,
e.g., Toni Morrison, On the Backs of Blacks, TIME, Dec. 2, 1993,
at 57 (noting what she characterizes as newcomers’ antipathy
towards African Americans); Derrick Bell, The Permanence of Racism,
22 Sw. U. L. Rev. 1103, 1109 (1993) (“If immigrants from Europe
who are, after all, white, have seen the need to bolster their
self-esteem by denigrating blacks, then what of the immigrants who
are not European: those from Asia and those from Spanish-speaking
nations? Can blacks expect those groups to reject the blandishments
of quasi-white status and join in coalitions with blacks to fight
the economic and social rejection suffered by both?”) Among the
more thoughtful writers on this complex subject are Tanya Katerí
Hernández, Latino Inter-Ethnic Employment Discrimination and the
“Diversity” Defense, 42 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 259 (2007);
Gomez, supra note 3 at
149-61; Anna Williams
Shavers, The Invisible Others and Immigrant Rights: A Commentary, 45
Hous. L. Rev. 99 (2008). The Hernandez
v. Texas case, if anything, revealed the extensive similarities
between these two marginalized communities in cotton country,
“Jaime-Crow” Texas in the 1950s. The putative “whiteness
bonus” penalized Mexicans by keeping them off petit and grand
juries, even in jurisdictions such as Jackson County, where their
share of the population would have suggested at least one Mexican on
each seven-person jury.
23.
Olivas, supra note 13.
24.
Ignacio M. Garcia, White but not Equal:
Mexican Americans, Jury Discrimination, and the Supreme Court 220,
n.47 (2008).
25.
The John J. Herrera papers at the Houston Metropolitan Research
Center contain many heartbreaking exchanges among the various
parties, with considerable evidence of Gus Garcia’s drinking,
including letters from his former wife. Olivas, supra
note 13, at 220, n.64. His obituary appears in Paul Thompson, San
Antonio Evening News, June 14, 1964, at 2A. A San Antonio reporter
filed what I believe to be the only news story filed by a reporter
who was actually present at the Supreme Court when the case was
argued by Cadena and Garcia, and she gives no hint of his demeanor,
except in a more positive light: “Garcia termed [Sam] Houston
‘that wetback from Tennessee.’ . . . observers here think the
court will rule in favor of the Latin-Americans. [sic] Anyway, to
have reached this far on a typewritten petition and small
contributions from many Texas Latin-Americans, the little group of
San Antonio, Del Rio and Houston Latin-Americans could hold their
heads high as they emerged from the court.”
Sarah
McClendon, Jury Bias Put to High Court, San Antonio Light, Jan. 12,
1954, at 1, available at: www.law.uh.edu/hernandez50/mcclendon.pdf.
26.
He published a short pamphlet, A Cotton Picker Finds Justice! The
Saga of the Hernandez
Case, which is included in its entirety in Olivas, supra
note 13, at 356-72. He suggests that he was the original lawyer
(“I could not resist the tearful pleadings of the defendant’s
mother.”), who brought in Herrera and DeAnda (“I decided to
contact the only man I knew who could possibly help me.”). Id.
at 361.
27.
DeAnda’s version, supported by the original case filing documents,
was that Herrera and he took the case and elaborated upon their
earlier involvement in a similar case, Sanchez v.
Texas, 243 S.W.2d 700 (1951). James DeAnda, Hernandez
at Fifty: A Personal History, in
Olivas, supra note 13, at
202. The filmmaker Carlos Sandoval, who directed the 2009 PBS film
(“A Class Apart”) based upon the Hernandez case, also paints Gus
as the architect and primary lawyer. He cites the Cotton Picker
pamphlet published by Garcia, and interviews John Herrera’s son on
camera, who avers the version of the hungover Garcia arguing the
case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
28.
Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of
the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement 94-96 (Canales), 104-107
(Gonzales), 111-14 (Perales). See
also Lisa Lizette Barrera, Minorities and The University of
Texas Law School (1950-1980), 4 Tex. Hisp. J.L. & Pol’y 99
(1998).
29.
Richard R. Valencia, Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican
American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality 319 (2008). These
connections are also examined in Jorge C. Rangel & Carlos M.
Alcala, De Jure Segregation of Chicanos in Texas Schools, 7 Harv.
C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 307 (1972); Guadalupe Salinas, Mexican-Americans
and the Desegregation of Schools in the Southwest, 8 Hous. L. Rev.
929 (1971); Richard Delgado & Victoria Palacios,
Mexican-Americans as a Legally Cognizable Class Under Rule 23 and
the Equal Protection Clause, 50 Notre Dame L. Rev. 393 (1975); Gary
A. Greenfield & Don B. Kates, Jr., Mexican Americans, Racial
Discrimination, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, 63 Cal. L. Rev.
662 (1975); Lupe S. Salinas, Gus Garcia and Thurgood Marshall: Two
Legal Giants Fighting for Justice, 28 T. Marshall. L. Rev. 145
(2002-2003); Haney López & Olivas, supra
note 22, at 273.
30.
Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982). See
Michael
A. Olivas, Plyler v. Doe,
the Education of Undocumented Children, and the Polity, in
Immigration Stories 197 (David A. Martin & Peter H. Schuck eds.,
2005).
31.
League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, 548 U.S. 399
(2006).
32.
For the authoritative history and
folklore concerning this case and the early 1900s trial, which I
calculate to be the first challenge by a Mexican American to jury
composition, see Américo
Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero
(1958). See also Richard
J. Mertz, “No One Can Arrest Me,” The Story of Gregorio Cortez,
1 J. of South Tex. 1 (1974). The Dallas news story notes: “There
is perfect quiet here and everybody seems to be of the opinion that
he can have a fair trial in this county.” Olivas, supra
note 13, at Appendix IX, 373.
33.
Id.
34.
Lorenzo de Zavala, Journey to The United
States of America/Viaje a Los Estados Unidos del Norte de America
(John-Michael Rivera ed., Wallace Woolsey trans., 2004);
John-Michael Rivera, The Emergence of Mexican America: Recovering
Stories of Mexican Peoplehood in U.S. Culture 24-50 (2006)
[hereinafter, The Emergence of Mexican America].
35.
A. Gabriel Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in
Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834-1958 (1997); A. Gabriel Meléndez,
Spanish-Language Newspapers in New Mexico, 1834-1958 (2005). See
also Michael A. Olivas, Reflections Upon Old Books, Reading
Rooms, and Making History, 76 UMKC L. Rev. 811 (2008).
36.
See, e.g., Laura E.
Gomez, Race, Colonialism and Criminal Law: Mexicans and the American
Justice System in Territorial New Mexico, 34 L. & Soc. Rev. 1129
(2000); Laura E. Gomez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the
Mexican American Race 88-89 (2007) (NM juries); Raul A. Ramos,
Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821-1861 192-94 (2008)
(San Antonio, TX juries).
37.
Rivera, The Emeregence of Mexican America, supra
note 34, at 21.
38.
Warner Bros., Stand and Deliver (1988).
Sent
by Roberto Calderon, Ph.D. beto@unt.edu
HISPANIC
LINK
I
invite you to join me in a historic effort to memorialize the role of
Latinos in the U.S. by supporting the work of the National
Museum of the American Latino Commission.
I
first learned about Lucia
(Chita) Rede Madrid’s accomplishments when my mother handed me
a couple of National Geographic magazines. The first, a May
1980 issue, featured an article entitled “The Mexican Americans
– A People On The Move”. The article made reference to
Lucia’s grandfather, “Secundino Lujan” (brother of my
mother’s grandfather) and the land grant that he received in El
Polvo, Texas in 1870.
The
most interesting or memorable experience that happened during his journey
On
July 13, 2010, Machado arrived at the gates of the White House. His goal
was to raise $500,000 to be donated to children with illness. So far, he’s
raised $15,000 to be donated toward treating ill children, including those
with congenital illnesses, like spinal bifida.
"Mimi, Everyone was very attentive and really enjoyed themselves. Several people came from Corpus Christi including Alicia Gallegos Gomez. Angel Zuniga came from Robstown to talk about Dr. Hector's involvement in the
American GI Forum. Santiago Hernandez brought his books of letters and research about the Felix Longoria incident. He pointed out that all these writing protesting the renaming of the post office were descendants of the original people involved in the incident. Santiago says he will work on helping to obtain for Dr.
Hector P. Garcia, the Congressional Medal of Honor. 
His
accomplishments in law, advocacy and civil rights were recognized
in 
AP/Amnesty International: This undated image is made available by Amnesty International in London shows Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a mother of two who had faced stoning to death in Iran on charges of adultery. 
She was born in what is now Camargo, Tamaulipas, Mexico as the sixth of nine
children of Capt. Juan Jose Hinojosa de la Garza and his wife Maria Antonia Ines
Balli de Benavides (elsewhere Antonia Baez Benevides). They were Spanish
aristocrats, though not wealthy, and, like many who chose New Spain (later
Mexico) as their home, were given rights to land grants and public offices. The
family was to move to the frontier town of Reynosa in 1767 where Hinojosa was
appointed alcade (mayor). As such he was among the relatively well-off of the
area who controlled the jurisdiction. It is likely that Maria was educated there
by the parish priest, and well too, as indicated by the literate records that
she later produced. She grew up to marry Jose Maria Balli Guerra, who was a
captain of the militia in the area and chief justice of Reynosa. He had already
been granted a double porcion of land south of the river that added to his grant
east of Camargo. All were used for cattle raising. Oldest of their three sons
was Jose Nicolas Balli, a missionary priest and developer of the island which
would take its name from his title of "Padre" (father).
In addition to maintaining a family chapel she endowed churches in Reynosa,
Camargo, and Matamoros. The latter was the first chapel for the town. Her will
bequeathed silver plates, a silver service, and jewelry to Padre Balli for use
at the La Feria Chapel. She de-servedly earned the sobriquet "La Patrona" and
was godmother to a good many who were christened in Our Lady of Guadalupe Church
in Reynosa Viejo. 
This
is the dilapidated monument that has been dedicated to the memory of
fallen Tejano heroes that died for the same reasons as the heroes of
the Alamo. 180 valiant warriors sacrificed their lives for liberty and
freedom at the Alamo, yet, as tragic as it was, sends the wrong
message to the Hispanic community, when over 1000 of their ancestors
were killed fighting for the same reasons, at the Battle of Medina.
Few people know that this monument exists, or its location yet it's
only 10 miles from the Alamo and it's what the State of Texas says
they are entitled to. The State has no markers directing you to its
site, as in other historical places. Not only is it a disgrace to the
memory of these fallen heroes but it is an insult to the majority
Hispanic community. 
"Colonel
Menchaca has been repulsed time and time again, suffering heavy
casualties amongst the Tejano cavalry, yet they continue the attack.
Reporting to Toledo at the rear of the line it is reported that
Toledo had instructed him to withdraw his men. Whereas Menchaca
responds that, "Tejanos do not withdraw," and plunged back
into the foray. 
My grandfather, Pablo
Armenta, who the family affectionately called “Papa Grande”, was born in Higuera de
Zaragoza, Sinaloa, Mexico in 1875.
My grandfather, Pablo
Armenta, faced many challenges during his life, but he possessed a keen business
sense which resulted in his ability to succeed.
And The Annex Presents:
Free Form, a new series of paintings from Pat Gomez. Pat Gomez has created a new series of light and lyrical free form abstract paintings that are playful and unfettered. Please join us as we imaginatively explore Pat's poetic ruminations. 
Ulises' father died,
while working in the fields near Bakersfield, when Ulises was just
seven. Ulises was one of eight children. Unluckily, the oldest were
girls. At ten years old Ulises left for Mexico City, to work with an
Uncle in a mercado, or flea market. Though times were hard,
Ulises still remembers with a smile selling women's lingerie as just a
boy. After a few years here, Ulises went to the northern state of
Sinaloa to work cutting sugar cane.
was
able to get Ulises a job with a friend and neighbor, Bob Polson of
Lake Sonoma Winery. Ulises moved from a run down trailer park in
Cloverdale, to a small shack in Dry Creek Valley, and eventually to
what amounted to a camper shell where he lived with his brother
Nicolas for a year or two.
In
1900, prior to the great hurricane, Galveston, with a population of
37,000, was the 4th largest and most sophisticated city in Texas. On
September 8th, the hurricane made landfall, bringing 130-mph winds and a
tidal wave that killed more than 6,000 people and destroyed one-third of
the city. In 1902 measures were begun to prevent such as catastrophe
from occurring again. The 10.4 mile Galveston seawall was constructed,
the level of the island was raised, and structures on the island were
jacked up. Construction of the seawall was completed in 1910, and the
raising of the elevation was completed in 1928. The construction of the
causeway linking the island with the mainland took place 1909-1912. The
elegant Hotel Galvez opened in 1911.
Saliva samples taken from 39 relatives of the Nazi leader show he
may have had biological links to the “subhuman” races that he
tried to exterminate during the Holocaust.
NEW YORK, NY (September 20, 2010) An exhibition entitled: "Looking Back: Jewish Life in Morocco," will have its Opening Program and Reception on October 14, 2010 at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. Produced by the American Sephardi Federation, the exhibition will focus on the history of the Jewish people and Jewish life, as it once was in Morocco
Mexico
abounds with significant historic sites - some celebrated and elaborately
preserved, others neglected and virtually forgotten. In Guanajuato, the
"Cradle of Independence", both kinds are to be found. While the
former attract many visitors,*
few encounter the latter. We visited one of these out-of-the-way,
neglected sites recently, still a place of authentic character and
nostalgic melancholy.
The
chapel played a historic part in the saga of Mexican Independence: In
September 1810, following the Grito de Dolores at nearby Dolores
Hidalgo, Father Miguel Hidalgo led his ragtag army towards
the key city of Guanajuato. Before the final assault, his troops were
quartered at the hacienda, from where he sent an ultimatum (see below) to
his former friend and liberal sympathizer, the Spanish intendente, Juan
Antonio Riaño, who had withdrawn to the city stronghold of Alhóndiga
de Granaditas* with 500 troops and many Spanish residents of the city.
Before leaving the hacienda, Father Hidalgo celebrated an open air mass in
the chapel patio. After a costly and bloody battle, the 20,000 strong
insurgent force, coincidentally aided by a Rayas miner now famous as El
Pípila, stormed the redoubt and killed all the defenders including
Riaño.
Today,
what is left of the main hacienda building is being used as a school,
conserving some of the handsome original arcading and now happily, serving
a worthy social purpose. Despite its historic role in Mexican history, the
abandoned chapel has fared less well. The roof and tower have gone and
only the much altered lateral facade and part of the atrial wall remain -
in a poor state of preservation despite heavy-handed stabilization
measures carried out some years ago.
