of the country. LULAC marched, protested, filed lawsuits, and advocated for the rights of Latinos throughout its history. So how does such a defender of human rights become a major tormentor of the undocumented and the chief proselytizer of being white in America?
The Mexican-American obsession with being white probably begins with the bungled negotiation that produced the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Mexicans in the conquered territories were guaranteed the enjoyment of all rights of citizens. The problem of course was that in the United States only white persons could enjoy all of the rights of citizens. The first major test of the whiteness of Mexicans occurred in California twenty years after it became part of the United States. The citizenship of a wealthy Californio and one of the state’s major land barons, Pablo de la Guerra, was challenged in 1870 when he was called to sit on a jury. De la Guerra, whose family arrived in Santa Barbara before the British colonies declared their independence, had served in California’s first Constitutional Convention. Stripped of his citizenship, he became ineligible to own land, vote, hold office, or even sue his accusers. De la Guerra was clearly not white, and possibly even “three-fourths Indian.”4 He was said to be the victim of “caste creep,” wherein Indians and mulattos tarnish the purity of white blood.5 Fortunately, de la Guerra had the resources to hire attorneys and fight back. Ultimately, the court decided that he was “white enough” and restored his citizenship, but it also set a dangerous precedent: the court appropriated for itself the right to determine racial composition and exclude from citizenship any Mexican who was not “white enough.”6
In 1897 a federal district court in San Antonio took an entirely different tack. Ricardo Rodriguez, who was applying for citizenship, was carefully targeted by nativists who were seeking to create a legal precedent stating that all non-white Mexicans were ineligible. Rodriguez was a “copper-colored or red-skinned man with dark eyes, straight black hair and high cheekbones.” He would also testify that he was neither of the “original Aztec race nor the Spanish race,” but was a “pure-blooded Mexican.” Rodriguez was not trifling with the question of race, and neither was the judge. Judge T. S. Maxey found that Rodriguez had a right to citizenship based on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and subsequent international agreements. Period. Judge Maxey did not consider the question of Rodriguez’s red skin, the placement of his cheekbones, or his racial composition as relevant.7
Unfortunately, the Rodriguez case did not settle the matter. The state constitution of California adopted in 1849 gave the right of citizenship only to white Mexicans. Mestizos, Indians, and blacks were excluded.8 The 1836 Constitution of the Republic of Texas gave citizenship to Mexicans who were not Indian or black, and the territorial constitution of Arizona limited citizenship to white males and white Mexican males.9 Courts and state commissions and laws would continue to try to exclude anyone who was discernibly mestizo. The delicate legal status of Mexican Americans augured toward protecting one’s legal whiteness. In 1930 the United States Congress considered a bill imposing quotas on Mexican migration. For the first time in history, Mexican Americans appeared in Congress to testify, mostly in support of the legislation. The testimony in part was that LULAC, then barely a year old, was dedicated to developing “within the members of our race the best and purest and most perfect type of true and loyal citizen of the United States of America.” 10
That same year, as the anti-immigrant campaign was nearing its peak, the US Census announced that it was reclassifying “Mexicans” from the white category to a new “Mexican” category. The census would now enumerate race as: a. White, b. Negro, c. Mexican. Predictably, LULAC mounted a concerted effort to overturn that decision. In 1936 the city of El Paso announced that Mexicans would henceforth be categorized as colored. LULAC organized a successful campaign to reverse El Paso’s decision and, prompted by that victory, filed a court challenge to the US Census classification of Mexicans as, well, Mexicans.11
LULAC took up the objective of being white as a civil rights strategy. Being anything other than white placed the whole community in a legally precarious position. Unfortunately, in time being white became a single-minded strategy for destroying Mexican identity. Since its foundation, the “LULAC Code” had urged: “Be proud of your origin … respect your glorious past and help defend the rights of your people … learn how to master with purity the most essential languages—English and Spanish.” But historian David Gutiérrez tells us that in the early 1950s those provisions were stricken from the code. In fact, in LULAC’s “Aims and Purposes” published in 1954, all references to the Spanish language completely disappeared, replaced by a pledge to “foster the acquisition and facile use of the official language of our country that we may thereby equip ourselves and our families for the fullest enjoyment of our rights and privileges and the efficient discharge of our duties to this, our country.”12
At its ugliest, during the 1950s, LULAC’s obsession with being white was the handmaiden to the practices of humiliating children who spoke Spanish, of punishing anyone appearing too Mexican, and of supporting blatant discrimination against the recently arrived because they replenished the mexicanidad of the community. In time LULAC’s obsession appeared to the students of the Chicano Movement as self-loathing. Eventually, however, the abuses of the Bracero Program, the blatant racism in the execution of Operation Wetback, the troubling casualty rates in Vietnam, and finally the confrontation with the Chicano Movement caused LULAC to reconsider their fifty-year longing to be just like the Anglos … maybe even to be them.
In the 1950s, the American GI Forum was in the news even more than LULAC. I suspect that just about every Mexican American heard the story of Private Felix Longoria. He was killed by a sniper in the Philippines, his body was returned to his family in his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas, and the local Funeral Home owner refused to bury him, because “the whites won’t like it,” he reportedly told Longoria’s widow.13 The American GI Forum, founded only months earlier, immediately launched a protest and also formally asked Senator Lyndon Johnson to intervene. In the midst of the controversy, Mrs. Longoria and her children were refused lunch at the local diner, because they were Mexican. The case of Private Longoria became a national scandal, and the president of the GI Forum, Dr. Hector P. García—a charismatic, brilliant, articulate voice on behalf of Mexican-American veterans—quickly became the most recognizable Mexican-American civil rights leader of the decade. As a result of the Forum’s efforts, Pvt. Longoria became the first Mexican-American soldier buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
García articulated the plight of the Mexican American unlike anyone before him. He commanded media attention like no Mexican-American civil rights leader ever had. Forum members paraded at every opportunity and surrounded Dr. (former Major) García each time he spoke. In the 1950s the guys had yet to grow a paunch, they still wore their uniforms handsomely and executed parade orders crisply. García and the Forum loved the press, and the press loved them back. Unfortunately, García and the Forum suffered from the same schizophrenia as their counterparts at LULAC. García railed against the “wetback tide” and lobbied against illegal immigration. In 1954, the Forum published a propaganda booklet still ballyhooed by nativists: “What Price Wetbacks?” “Illegal immigration represents the fundamental problem facing the Spanish-speaking population of the southwest,” it read. It argued that poverty, sickness, and low educational achievement was a consequence of those Mexicans crossing without papers, but then went further than the other Mexican organizations. The Forum offered policy solutions that read as though they were manufactured in Bush or Obama’s Department of Homeland Security fifty years later: “enforceable penalties for harboring or aiding an alien … confiscation of vehicles used to transport aliens and … enforceable penalties for the employment of illegal aliens.”14 The Forum was composed of veterans of America’s wars; all were required to be citizens, and reeked of patriotism. This made them particularly credible when, in the midst of the Cold War and the Red Scare, they raised without a scintilla of evidence the specter of communist infiltration among their reasons to oppose the “wetback tide.”15 Until now, wetbacks had been merely filthy, disease-ridden, ignorant, and lazy—but after the Forum’s attack they were potentially a terrorist threat as well.
