Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine
Extract from Leaders of the Mexican American Generation, an anthology of biographies
Introduction
By Anthony Quiroz
The serious, scholarly study of Mexican American history is a relatively recent development. Begun by a handful of researchers in the 1920s, the field grew slowly through the 1950s and expanded rapidly after the 1960s to the present. Through their research, scholars of the Mexican American historical experience have both contributed to our understandings of historical processes and discovered new directions for historical inquiry. Their findings have shed light on the broader sweeps of American history by showing the symbiotic relationship between Mexican Americans and the rest of the country.
Mexican Americans were generally ignored, marginalized, and disrespected in the traditional canon of American history until the late twentieth century. But as their numbers grew, so too did the number of scholars interested in studying them. Mexican Americans have now become more firmly entrenched in scholarly discussions about historical issues such as race and ethnicity, gender relationships, class, politics, education, economics, culture, and in an ongoing negotiation of the meaning of American. This book contributes to that growing body of literature by providing students of Mexican American history with a compilation of biographies of key Mexican Americans active from about 1920 through the 1960s.
The purpose of this work is to offer readers a concise biographical overview of some of the actors who made Mexican American history during this period and to cast them in the context of their times in order to shed light on the historical significance of their contributions.
The folks who became socially active during this period inherited a social climate of hostility based on deeply rooted, pervasive racism. Anti-Mexican sentiments were born in the nineteenth century—first in Texas in the aftermath of the Texas Revolution against the Mexican government in 1835–1836 and across the entire American Southwest after the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848.
Gradually dispossessed of their land, Mexican-descent farmers and ranchers experienced downward mobility throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Poor trabajadores (workers) remained mired in an economic system that disallowed opportunities for upward mobility. Anglo employers saw them as lazy, incompetent, and dishonest, and they relegated these laborers to low-wage, low-skill manual jobs. Those with agricultural skills could find work on farms and ranches. With the loss of land and opportunity came a degraded social and political status. Mexican Americans had been successfully relegated to second-class citizenship by 1900.1
Immigration from Mexico remained slow but increased somewhat during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries due to the increasing resentment of the Porfiriato. The reign of Porfirio Diaz, the powerful president of Mexico from the 1880s through the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, was marked by increased investment in Mexico by Europeans and Americans and an improved economy. But these successes came at a steep cost. Peasant farmers were displaced from their traditional lands and the economic prosperity was not equally distributed. The rich became wealthier while the poor and middling sorts declined financially. The revolution (which ended in 1921) and its aftermath sent over 1 million immigrants to the United States between 1910 and 1930.
These immigrants came from all socioeconomic classes, although most were peasants. Mexicans who crossed over during these decades originally imagined that they would return to Mexico once the social unrest died down. The poor took low-paying jobs in cities and the countryside. Many middle-class émigrés opened their own businesses. Over time, many immigrants decided to stay, thereby boosting the numbers of the Mexican-descent population.
Through subsequent decades, they and their children adhered increasingly to a developing identity as Mexican Americans.2 Both internal and external forces shaped this new self-image. Internally, some Mexican Americans had been promoting an Americanized identity as early as the late 1800s. Ana Martinez-Catsam has shown how Pablo Cruz used the Spanish-language newspaper in San Antonio, El Regidor, to both criticize the Porfiriato and promote a stronger sense of American citizenship around the turn of the century.3The same period saw the small but steady growth of a middle class comprised of shop owners (barbers, shoe repairman, neighborhood shopkeepers, and the like) and educators.
Members of this segment of the population began to see their interests as resting on the northern side of the Rio Grande rather than on the southern side. As such, they gradually developed a sense of belonging in the United States and a desire to gain access to the American dream as full citizens.
The Mexican American worldview was reinforced by the experiences of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. By virtue of the draft and voluntary military service, Mexican Americans were, for the first time in American history, officially included on a large scale in a truly American project: making the world safe for democracy. Once the war ended, these veterans and their friends and family members believed that they had all earned the right to equal access to education, employment, and public places such as restaurants, beaches, and movie theaters.
But the unrelenting pressure of discrimination crushed these hopes. Nothing changed for the mass of Mexican Americans in the post–World War I years. Indeed, the Great Depression witnessed the mass deportation of up to a half million Mexicans and Mexican Americans to Mexico. Seen as a drain on the limited welfare system and as competition for a decreasing number of jobs, Mexicans either voluntarily returned to Mexico or were rounded up in sweeps in several US cities between 1929 and 1939.
Unfortunately, some of the people sent “back” were American citizens. Some were children born here who were legal citizens by birthright, and others were adults who were either born here or who had gained citizenship. But in the zeal to rid the nation of unwanted burdens, such differences went unnoticed. The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought the United States into World War II. A quarter million to a half million Mexican Americans served in World War II.
As such, they met other individuals from other parts of the country where Mexicans faced far less discrimination. They gained new skills, traveled the nation and the world, and returned home after the war as changed men. But, yet again, home had not changed in their absence. Their children could still not attend Anglo schools. Restaurants displayed signs that read “No Mexicans” or worse.
In many places they were disallowed to serve on juries.4 Several civil rights organizations emerged out of these decades of social ferment. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) was created in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1929. Members of LULAC—an amalgam of the League of Latin-American Citizens, the Order of Knights of America, and the Order of Sons of America—were inspired by the Mexican American community’s efforts to defend freedom in the Great War. Originating in and led by the developing middle class, LULAC challenged various types of segregation and employment discrimination.
But the Great Depression severely cut into its abilities to wage war on social injustice. After World War II, however, LULAC regained its pre-Depression momentum and found a new ally in the American GI Forum (AGIF), created by Dr. Héctor P. García in Corpus Christi, in 1948. Originally conceived as a veteran’s rights group, the AGIF was quickly drawn into civil rights activities, a role that came to define them throughout the next several decades. At the same time and after, other groups, such as the Community Service Organization, were forming in California.
These types of organizations filed successful lawsuits against segregated school districts, brought an end to jury discrimination, and promoted education at all levels (elementary through graduate school). They expressed through their publications (such as the AGIF’s monthly organ, The Forumeer) an identity as equal citizens deserving of the same rights and responsibilities as Anglo citizens. Not all activists belonged to organizations such as LULAC or the AGIF. Others were writers, teachers, academicians, and attorneys. All of them struggled to bring about an end to a multi-tiered society comprised of gradations of citizenship based on racial and ethnic definitions.5
The desire to attain citizenship was at the heart of their efforts. Officially, citizenship can be understood from a governmental perspective. One is a citizen of the United States by birthright or through naturalization. Citizenship carries rights and responsibilities such as voting, having to obey the laws, and submitting to selective service and jury duty.
But citizenship’s meaning runs far deeper in the social and cultural layers of society. Natalia Molina shows how citizenship was legally defined in literal black-and-white terms in the 1920s and 1930s; to be allowed citizenship, one had to fit one of those two racial categories. Such thinking denied citizenship to outside groups, including Asians and Asian Indians. Mexicans, however, proved a thorny lot.
Anti-immigration forces argued that they were clearly African or Indian or a mixture and therefore did not qualify to be called Americans. Even though the nation embraced strong anti-immigrant attitudes, their desire to prevent Mexicans from gaining citizenship was trumped in Texas in the 1920s by the larger “need to preserve diplomatic and trade relations with Mexico, as well as the State Department’s commitment to protecting American-owned oil properties there.”
As I argued in Claiming Citizenship: Mexican Americans in Victoria, Texas, citizenship also was defined by the acceptance of specific values (Christianity, family, patriotism), practices (political participation), traits (responsibility, loyalty), and beliefs (superiority of capitalism, dangers of socialism). The acceptance of these sensibilities did not mean a desire to abandon one’s Mexican heritage. Rather, it reflected a desire to create a complicated bicultural identity. This vision of citizenship dominated the Mexican American community throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
Struggles for equality continued through the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the gains made in the previous decades, social unrest, largely driven by the Vietnam War, marked the 1960s and 1970s. Mexican Americans found themselves caught up in a national whirlwind of agitation from African Americans, women, Native Americans, gays, and young people.
While they benefited from passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Mexican-descent Americans still faced social, economic, and political discrimination. Although life had improved by the end of the twentieth century, Mexican Americans had not yet achieved full equality as equal citizens while poverty, crime, and other problems continued to plague portions of the community. This wide swath of Mexican American history, as just described, is long and complex. For it to make sense, it must be dissected.
Historians periodize. We examine wide sweeps of history and identify periods that offer explanatory insight into the human condition. We may speak of decades or centuries, but these are artificial structures imposed on human action. By focusing on the ways in which people think and act, scholars can more substantively discover meaningful patterns of behavior. In the preface to the third edition of Mexican Americans in Texas: A Brief History, Arnoldo De León notes that researchers of Chicano history take different positions on the matter of periodization.
Mainstream writers who researched and published works prior to the appearance of Mexican American history in the early 1970s focused primarily on colonial Spain and early Mexican history. They tended to believe that Spanish-Mexicans had a history only until the Spanish or Mexican eras ended in the borderlands (1821 or 1848, respectively) and then ceased being actors. De León notes further that generally, historians have differed on what specific date denotes the beginning of “Mexican American history.” One school argues that Mexican American history began in 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded the American Southwest to the United States following the Mexican-American War—that event transformed Mexicans into American citizens.
A subset within this group argues for 1836 as the start of Mexican American history because of the successful Texas Revolution against Mexico. For another set of scholars, Mexican American history has its origins toward the end of the nineteenth or early in the twentieth century, when increased immigration from Mexico gave rise to a large presence of Mexican Americans in the United States.
To this school, immigration, class, and conflict with corporate America now became the most salient identifiers of Mexican American history. De León explains that a third body of researchers posits that Mexican American history is part of a continuum dating back to the colonial Spanish period. These authors stress a connection of events from the time of the Spanish arrival in the borderlands to the present.6By studying this long period of time, historians address the shortcomings of researchers who wrote and published prior to 1970, demonstrating that Mexican Americans had a distinct historical experience, apart from Anglos who were late arrivals in the borderlands. And while we cannot technically discuss Mexican Americans until after 1848, the people, the culture, and the traditions that define Mexican Americans trace back to the mestizaje.
In line with this train of thought, Juan Gómez-Quiñones lays out the following structure: “1600–1800, settlement; 1800–1830 florescence; 1830–1848 conflict; 1848–1875 resistance; 1875–1900, subordination.” The twentieth century falls into the second part and is organized as 1900–1920, a period of emigration and urbanization, and 1920–1941, a time marked by “intense repression, and major labor and political organizing.” He sees the World War II era as an interregnum, but the era from 1945 to 1965 witnessed a Mexican American population that sought inclusion through compromise. The Chicano movement marked the years from 1965 to 1971.7
Regardless of the varying views of the historical origins of a Mexican American people, historians have tended to follow a general periodization somewhat akin to the one laid out by Manuel G. Gonzales and Cynthia M. Gonzales in their book En Aquel Entonces: Readings in Mexican-American History. The authors explain Mexican American history in terms of the creation of a Mexican American people (1598–1846); racial tensions (1846–1900); migration and labor (1900–1940); the emergence of a middle class (1940–1965); and the Chicano movement and after (1965–2000).8 Theirs is an identity-driven model.
This anthology, however, speaks to a generational periodization of twentieth-century Mexican American history. Many scholars have employed this model, which identifies (with some variation) the following basic structure: 1848–1900, conquered generation; 1900–1930, immigrant generation; 1930–1960, Mexican American generation; 1960–1980, Chicano generation; 1980 to the present, Hispanic generation. All the actors in this anthology were active during a period that has been designated as the Mexican American generation.
When studying Mexican American history, the analytical tool called a generational model offers scholars valuable interpretive insights. Rodolfo Alvarez first proposed the idea of applying a generational periodization to organize Mexican American history in 1973 in “The Psycho-Historical and Socioeconomic Development of the Chicano Community in the United States.”
Alvarez defines a generation as “a critical number of persons, in a broad but delimited age group, [that] had more or less the same socialization experiences because they lived at a particular time under more or less the same constraints imposed by a dominant United States society.” Alvarez argues that Mexican Americans’ history could be traced via four generations. First came the creation generation, which began in Texas in 1836 but spread to the rest of the Southwest with the end of the Mexican-American War and lasted until the turn of the century. The migrant generation occurred “after 1900 and before World War II.”
The Mexican American generation was defined largely by the experience of World War II, beginning “somewhere around the time of the Second World War, and increasing in importance up to the war in Vietnam.” Alvarez dates the Chicano generation as occurring from the late 1960s through publication of his essay. For Alvarez, each generation was defined by a shared experience as defined by psycho-historical and socioeconomic factors as well as common responses to those conditions.9
In his 1987 book, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930– 1960, Mario T. García built upon Alvarez’s construct by drawing from a broad array of sources to further argue for the interpretive value of a generational approach to historical study. Although the general outline of the generations is similar to that of Alvarez, García’s formulation is driven not by psycho-historical factors so much as similar political, social, and economic environments that led to the creation of specific self-definitions.
García explains that generational periods are “specific to a certain period which trigger a particular political response or responses by a collection of individuals who come of political age during this time.” He asserts that a political generation is not simply a result of history; it also becomes an active agent shaping the direction of history.10
This work is founded on the premise that García’s concept is still sound, on two fronts in particular. First, each distinct generation existed in a discrete social, cultural, and political environment. Each generation also came to represent a specific identity that expressed its definition of citizenship within the context of that milieu. But García does not imply that these temporal boundaries are concrete. This generation was built on the experiences of those that preceded it, just as it set the stage for events that followed.
As discussed earlier in this introduction, the intellectual roots of the Mexican American generation were planted in the late nineteenth century. The labor activism of this era predated the class consciousness of the Chicano movement.
Second, García emphasizes the need to understand the complexity of this generation. Contrary to later scholarly critics of this period’s activists, García shows that leaders came from multiple backgrounds and had varying agendas. David G. Gutiérrez, in his 1993 essay “Significant to Whom? Mexican Americans and the History of the American West,” demonstrates that the oppression of previous generations informed and inspired writers of the Mexican American generation. Gutiérrez notes that the American story of westward movement was couched in terms of Mexican weakness and inferiority, which justified American expansion and subsequent discrimination.
Further justification for the marginalization of Mexicans was the prevalence of stereotypes that homogenized Mexicans in negative terms—and Anglo-Americans in positive ones. But through their scholarship, individuals such as Ernesto Galarza, Jovita González, George I. Sánchez, and Arthur Campa, among others, proved that people of Mexican descent were no more homogeneous than any other group of people. This was a significant discovery on the road to combating racism based on commonly accepted stereotypes.11
Informed by that argument, this collection applies a similarly malleable definition of generation. Yes, this cohort involved members of organizations such as LULAC, which was generally led by the middle class, or the AGIF, whose members hailed mostly from the working class. Yet both organizations made claims to equality based on patriotism and fealty to the nation’s history as well as to its political and economic systems.
At the same time, the efforts of labor activists such as Ernesto Galarza and Luisa Moreno targeted workers’ immediate material needs rather than ideological struggles over definitions of citizenship. What unites this diverse array of people is a commitment to securing improved living and working conditions for Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Their ideas and actions marked the onset of a civil rights struggle that continues to the present.
As such, the Mexican American generation provides the first key to understanding the intellectual and civic transformation of a people who initially considered themselves primarily Mexican to those who now created a bicultural identity and saw themselves increasingly as Americans of Mexican descent. The emergence of this new vision shaped the course of Mexican American actions to the present day.
Throughout subsequent decades, the Chicano movement and now the Hispanic generation have remained true in some measure to the basic ideals laid out by this group. To be sure, the Chicano movement fueled an increase in production of new forms of art, music, scholarship, and activism. But throughout the decades, Mexican Americans have continued to act through labor organizations and political activism, much as was done during the period under study in this work.
Actions of the Hispanic generation have further contributed to our political empowerment and led to the increased presence of Mexican Americans (and Latinos in general) in the popular culture through an increased presence in sports, film, music, business, education, and politics. And although the Mexican American community has become more diverse over time, many of the values, practices, traits, and beliefs that defined citizenship for this generation remain relevant. One useful way to learn about the importance of this generation is through studying biographies of its leaders.
Editor’s Note: Complete footnotes are found in the book.
THE LIST OF BIOGRAPHIES
Intellectuals and Ethnic Consciousness
1. José de la Luz Sáenz: Experiences and Autobiographical Consciousness
Emilio Zamora 25
2. Alice Dickerson Montemayor: Feminism and Mexican American Politics in the 1930s
Cynthia E. Orozco 57
3. Alonso S. Perales: The Voice and Visions of a Citizen Intellectual
Richard A. Garcia 85
4. Jovita González Mireles: Texas Folklorist, Historian, Educator
María Eugenia Cotera 119
5. Of Poetics and Politics: The Border Journeys of Luisa Moreno
Vicki L. Ruiz 141
6. Separate Tejano/Texan Worlds: The Félix Longoria Controversy, Racism, and Patriotism in Post-WWII South Texas
Patrick J. Carroll 163
Legal, Political, and Labor Activists
7. Dr. Héctor Pérez García: Giant of the Twentieth Century
Carl Allsup 191
8. “I Can See No Alternative Except to Battle it out in Court”: Gus García and the Spirit of the Mexican American Generation
Anthony Quiroz 209
9. Mr. LULAC: The Fabulous Life of John J. Herrera
Thomas H. Kreneck 229
10. Vicente Ximenes and LBJ’s Great Society: The Rhetorical Imagination of the American GI Forum
Michelle Hall Kells 253
11. Ralph Estrada and the War against Racial Prejudice in Arizona
Laura K. Muñoz 277
12. “Vale más la revolución que viene”: Ernesto Galarza and Transnational Scholar Activism Julie Leininger Pycior 301
13. Edward R. Roybal: Latino Political Pioneer and Coalition Builder
Kenneth C. Burt
Anthony Quiroz is a professor of history at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi and past chair of its Department of Humanities. He has published Claiming Citizenship: Mexican Americans in Victoria, Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005) and the author of several book chapters and journal articles. Copies of Leaders of the Mexican American Generation, published by University Press of Colorado, may be purchased at www.upcolorado.com, any online book retailer, or from local bookstores.