racism in the united states

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“The days of the pure whites, the victors of today,” proclaimed José Vasconcelos in 1925, “are as numbered as were the days of their predecessors. Having fulfilled their destiny of mechanizing the world, they themselves have set, without knowing it, the basis for a new period: the period of the fusion and mixing of all peoples.” Vasconcelos wrote these words in Mexico as his four-year tenure as the secretary of the nation’s public education system came to a close and as his quest for an elected position (first the governorship of the state of Oaxaca and then the presidency) began. They appeared in La raza cósmica, an enor- mously influential work that circulated across the hemisphere. Whereas the U.S. intel- lectual and civil rights crusader W. E. B. Du Bois had prophesied that the color line would be the problem of the twentieth century, Vasconcelos confidently predicted its erasure. The struggles of a country such as Mexico, which had just emerged from a decade of revolution and civil war, were for Vasconcelos at the center of global dynamics, as they heralded the rise of the cosmic race of his title, first in Latin America and then across the globe.1

Although Vasconcelos was not well known in the United States, where his predictions would have surely struck both the architects and victims of a particularly brutal phase of white supremacy as ludicrous, he did have a profound influence there. His ideas, and the postrevolutionary political and social order of which they were a part, provided Mexican American civil rights leaders in Texas in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly those involved with the League of United Latin American Citizens (lulac), a reflection of their own racial self-conception and a set of arguments with which to critique white supremacy.

This article examines the connections between these Mexican American civil rights circles and postrevolutionary Mexican figures, particularly Vasconcelos. Rather than assessing Vasconcelos’s understandings of race and hybridity and their connections to

The Cosmic Race in Texas: Racial Fusion, White Supremacy, and Civil Rights Politics

Benjamin H. Johnson

Benjamin H. Johnson is associate professor of global studies and history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He would like to thank members of the Dallas Area Social Historians, the organizers and attendees of the 2006 Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History, Gabriela Arredondo, Carlos Blanton, Martina Will de Chaparro, Catherine Cocks, Crista Deluzio, Ariela Gross, Tom Guglielmo, David Gutiérrez, Reiko Hillyer, Rick López, Julie Maiorana, Jolie Olcott, Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, Peggy Pascoe, Andrew Sandoval-Strausz, Mary Kay Vaughn, John Weber, Carmen Whalen, Dan Wickberg, Elliott Young, and (especially) Emilio Zamora for their comments and criticisms on this article and earlier iterations of it.

Readers may contact Johnson at [email protected].

1 José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race/La raza cósmica, trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore, 1997), 16. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, 1903), 41.

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modern Latin American states and society, as others have done, the essay is concerned with the uses to which his ideas were put in the very different legal and cultural context of the segregation-era United States. This approach foregrounds the connections between ethnic Mexican politics in the United States and developments in Mexico, congruent with the transnational turn in borderlands, Mexican American, and Mexican history. It also insists on the importance of national and regional context, a focus often obscured by large-scale transnational frameworks that scholars of borderlands and others employ. Transnational histories, as the approach taken here implies, need not obscure the influ- ence of nation-states nor deny the emancipatory potential of claims to national belong- ing.2

This account sharply contradicts the scholarly consensus that an aspiration for white- ness lay at the heart of lulac’s program and the ideology of its principal leaders—and, by extension, of middle-class Mexican Americans in general. Even as early lulac figures vigorously asserted their rights as U.S. citizens, they deliberately remained part of con- versations about race, racial mixture, education, and modernization unleashed by the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Indeed, prominent aspects of their political program and ideology can be understood as efforts to adapt critical ideologies of postrevolutionary Mexico to the circumstances of life in the United States and to their bid for citizenship rights. The discussion of racial fusion, along with lulac activists’ own racial self- conceptualization, were important ways that many members of these circles were marked by postrevolutionary Mexico. While the consensus view of lulac and the Mexican American middle class in this period offers a cautionary tale about the seduc- tions of whiteness in American culture, this article contributes to an emerging body of work that emphasizes how ethnic Mexican and other Latino racial self-conceptions and ideologies confounded and even undermined U.S. racial hierarchies.3

This article focuses on Texas from the 1920s to the 1940s for a number of reasons. The Lone Star State was home to the United States’ largest Mexican-descent community until the 1950s, when it was surpassed by California. Because they lived in the only state with both a large ethnic Mexican population and a formal Jim Crow system, lulac’s leaders and members faced particularly stark consequences if they fell outside the legal rights accorded to those the state considered white. Finally, scholarship emphasizing the allure of whiteness for Mexican Americans has focused on Texas in this period, so the different

2 On a transnational approach to the study of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, see Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, “Making Transnational History: Nations, Regions, and Borderlands,” in Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History, ed. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young (Durham, N.C., 2004), 1–32. On the rela- tionship between transnational and national histories, see Bryce Traister, “Border Shopping: American Studies and the Anti-nation,” in Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders, ed. Claudia Sad- owski-Smith (New York, 2002), 31–52; and Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill, “Borders and Their Historians in North America,” in Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histo- ries, ed. Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill (Durham, N.C., 2010), 1–29.

3 Neil Foley, “Partly Colored or Other White: Mexican Americans and Their Problem with the Color Line,” in Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest, ed. Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker (Arlington, 2004); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, 1997); Ian Haney López, “White Latinos,” Harvard Latino Law Review, 6 (Spring 2003), http://www.law .harvard.edu/students/orgs/llr/vol6/lopez.pdf; Julie Anne Dowling, “The Lure of Whiteness and the Politics of ‘Otherness’: Mexican American Racial Identity,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2004); Michael Phillips, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841–2001 (Austin, 2006); Daniel A. Rochmes and G. A. Elmer Griffin, “The Cactus That Must Not Be Mistaken for a Pillow: White Racial Formation among Latinos,” Souls, 8 (Spring 2006), 77–91; Neil Foley, Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity (Cam- bridge, Mass., 2010).

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racial ideologies unearthed here speak directly to the literature on the trajectory of whiteness and Latino racial formations.4

The Mexican American Civil Rights Movement in Texas

The origins of the Mexican American civil rights movement lie in Texas in the 1920s, when politically active Texas Mexicans began concertedly organizing themselves on the basis of American citizenship rights. They argued that they were first and foremost American citizens, endowed with certain rights guaranteed by the federal Constitution and entitled to better treatment than they were receiving. They founded political organi- zations to implement that vision, most notably lulac, officially founded in 1929 by a convention in Corpus Christi after a merger of several fraternal and political groups. Those who hosted and led the convention, framed the organization’s constitution, and served as its officers for a decade or more explicitly embraced U.S. citizenship as the group’s organizing principle even as they maintained a sense of themselves as a people distinct from the majority of the national population. As the first principle of lulac’s constitution said, their overarching goal was “To develop within the members of our race the best, purest, and most perfect type of a true and loyal citizen of the United States of America.”5

The preceding two decades of turmoil—the consolidation of the revolution that over- threw Mexico’s old regime, the bloody suppression of an irredentist uprising by ethnic Mexicans in south Texas, and the imposition of Jim Crow–style segregation—convinced the organization’s founders that embracing U.S. citizenship was the only viable alternative to statelessness. Indeed, the specter of being a people without a country hung over the deliberations in Corpus Christi. “Like those who have preceded me in this course of deliberation, I see that we form a conglomerate without a country, without prerogatives,” said José González to heavy applause.6

Within the ethnic Mexican community, the embrace of American citizenship was the most controversial aspect of lulac’s program, generating strife for years. Mexican consuls and immigrants who aspired to return to a redeemed homeland south of the Rio Grande condemned these first Mexican Americans as traitors to their own people and culture. Mexicans in the United States were exiles, refugees, and immigrants; they were not American citizens.7

lulac’s style of political organizing, like any endeavor on behalf of ethnic Mexicans, faced daunting obstacles from Anglo society. People of Mexican descent had faced

4 Thomas Boswell, “The Growth and Proportional Distribution of the Mexican Stock Population in the United States, 1910–1970,” Mississippi Geographer, 7 (Spring 1979), 57–76.

5 Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, 2003), 182–92, esp. 189; David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley, 1995), 75–76; Cynthia Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin, 2009); John Morán González, Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature (Austin, 2009), 95–126.

6 José González, El Paladín, [1929], clipping, Oliver Douglas Weeks Collection (Collection of the League of the United Latin American Citizens [lulac], Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin). See also Castulo Gutiérrez, “Para los que no conocen nuestra inst.” (For those not familiar with our orga- nization), [1929], album 2, Ben Garza Collection, 1926–30, ibid.

7 See San Antonio consul Enrique Santibáñez’s statement, La Prensa, April 24, 1930, clipping, file 74, folder 14, Secretariat of Foreign Relations, Mexico City (Archive of the Mexican Embassy to the United States, Mexico City).

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violence, legal fraud, and employment discrimination in most of Texas since it won its independence from Mexico in 1836 and in the U.S. Southwest as a whole since its cre- ation in 1848. But by the twentieth century, U.S. society had come to racialize Mexican- descent people more thoroughly than before. Ethnic Mexicans were granted a legal standing as citizens in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and were thus grafted onto the U.S. legal system as white. In the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the heavily Mexican-descent enclaves in southern California, northern New Mexico, and south Texas, elite ethnic Mexicans enjoyed legal rights, political power, and social status unreachable for African Americans, U.S. Indian peoples, or Asians in the United States. White Americans who moved into these areas often married Mexican-descent women (usually but not always from wealthy families), learned Spanish, and sometimes even converted to Catholicism. By the 1920s, however, the vast majority of ethnic Mexicans experienced U.S. society as a racially oppressed working class rather than as a distinctive ethnic group. White society denied to all but a very few people of Mexican descent such forms of political expression as office holding, voting, and jury service. Whites were much less willing to marry Mexican-descent women than they had been in the nineteenth century. As the Mexican Revolution prompted hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to flee to the United States, local authorities began to practice a more system- atized residential and educational segregation.8

Texas had implemented a Jim Crow system by the turn of the century aimed at policing its African American population, but ethnic Mexicans faced their own version of Jim Crow. “Society in the Southwest cannot easily adapt itself to the handling of a second racial problem,” wrote the University of Texas professor William Leonard in 1916. Mexicans “are not Negroes,” he observed, but “they are not accepted as white men.” This racial order was never as oppressive or as comprehensive for ethnic Mexi- cans as Jim Crow was for African Americans. Wealthy and light-skinned Mexicans and Mexican Americans could avoid daily humiliations of living on the wrong side of the color line in a way that their black counterparts could not. Nevertheless, the vast majority of people of Mexican descent in Texas and the rest of the Southwest had to endure the racial hatred and contempt of much of the dominant Anglo society. Klans- men paraded through south Texas towns; signs reading “No Mexicans Allowed” were displayed in numerous restaurants and other public accommodations; and municipal- ities established separate schools for “Mexicans” and “whites.” Strict residential segre- gation characterized most of the region’s prosperous new farm towns. Violence in the workplace and at the hands of state agents was an omnipresent threat. The formation of the federal Border Patrol in 1924 and the creation of the category of “illegal alien” further racialized Mexican-descent people, longstanding citizens and newly arrived migrants alike. “It could legitimately be said that . . . Mexicans are considered white,” observed San Antonio’s Mexican consul in 1930. “But it could also be said that this has

8 Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York, 2007), 4; Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); Albert Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque, 1999); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin, 1987); Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame, 1979); Johnson, Revolution in Texas; Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, 1994), 101–4. Eric V. Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin, 2007), 82.

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been nullified . . . [because] a law loses its force if not executed.” “Between the white American and the negro,” he concluded “the bronzed has come to be an intermediate class.”9

When white Americans attempted to place Mexicans in their racial hierarchy, they focused on the theme of “mongrelization” and other demeaning understandings of racial mixture. Elite and popular discourses of white supremacy contrasted a supposed white or Nordic or Teutonic purity with the chaos and conflict brought by mixed ancestry. “They are a mixture, a mule race or cross-breed,” one south Texas farmer informed an inter- viewer in the 1920s. “The Spaniard is a cross between a Moor or a Castilian, and the Indian is a cross with them. I know a case in which the father is a mixture of Indian, white, and Negro. The mother is Mexican. . . . When you cross five races you get mean- ness.” Lothrop Stoddard struck a similar note in his influential 1920 The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy, which largely dismissed the possibility of a Latin American challenge to white supremacy because “the normal state of tropical America is anarchy” due to the “mongrel’s political ascendancy . . . these unhappy beings, every cell of whose bodies is a battle-ground of jarring heredities, express their souls in acts of hectic violence and aimless instability.”10

Both despite and because of this racist animosity, lulac spread quickly across south Texas, the rest of the state, and then the rest of the Southwest. Membership grew through- out the 1930s, even in the face of the Great Depression and the federal government’s deportation campaigns. By World War II, lulac had over eighty councils in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Kansas, though the bulk of its membership and power remained in Texas, particularly in south Texas. lulac used its influence to oppose local segregation ordinances, pursue lawsuits against school segregation, encourage naturaliza- tion by Mexican immigrants, and register many Mexican Americans to vote. The end of World War II bolstered such efforts, as returning veterans revitalized the league and formed other organizations to defend the civil rights of Mexican Americans. The organi- zation is today the oldest surviving and most prominent civil rights organization for Mexican Americans, a sort of counterpart to the National Association for the Advance- ment of Colored People.11

9 On the congruities between the racialization of African-descent people and Latinos, see Mark Sawyer, “Commen- tary: On Black Leadership, Black Politics, and the U.S. Immigration Debate,” Souls, 10 (Jan.–March 2008), 42–49. William Leonard quoted in Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 181. Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 27, 178. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, 2004), 57. Enrique Santibáñez, Ensayo cerca de la inmigración mexicana en los Estados Unidos (Essay on Mexican immigration into the United States) (San Antonio, 1930), 86, 92. I have translated into English quotations from Spanish sources.

10 Paul S. Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Dimmit County, Winter Garden District, South Texas (Berkeley, 1930), 433. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (1920; New York, 1922), 120.

11 Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 78. Benjamin Márquez, lulac: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization (Austin, 1993); Craig A. Kaplowitz, lulac, Mexican Americans, and National Policy (College Station, 2005). For sympathetic accounts of the organization’s early decades, see Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors; and Emilio Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II (College Station, 2009). On the federal government’s deportation campaign, see Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque, 1995).

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lulac and Postrevolutionary Mexico

Despite the league’s embrace of U.S. citizenship and constitutional rights and its early friction with the Mexican government, lulac’s early priorities, its ideology, and many of its internal contradictions were deeply marked by postrevolutionary Mexico. After a decade of civil war in the 1910s, a regime of former revolutionaries in the early 1920s was consolidating itself, forming what would become the Partido Revolucionario Institucio- nalizado (Institutional Revolutionary party, pri). The postrevolutionary Mexican state had as its central goal the transformation of Mexico into a prosperous, strong, and above all, modern nation, free of the dead hand of its past and foreign control. To accomplish this, the state had to maintain a basis of popular support by presenting itself as the fulfill- ment of the promise of the revolution, revitalize an economy largely destroyed by the revolution, help create a modern citizenry loyal to the imagined community of the nation rather than to a region or ethnicity, and create a basic infrastructure for this moderniza- tion. This project was perhaps characterized best by the Mexican social scientist Manuel Gamio as forjando patria, or forging a nation.12

José Vasconcelos played an important role in this process, as scholars of Mexican his- tory have long recognized. Vasconcelos was both a politician and an intellectual. Reared in part in the border community of Piedras Negras (across the river from Eagle Pass, Texas, where he attended school for a time), in 1920 he became head of Mexico’s national university and served as minister of education from 1920 to 1924. Under his guidance, the Secretariat of Public Education designed the national curriculum and education sys- tem that would dramatically increase national literacy rates and serve as a critical institu- tion of the postrevolutionary state. After a split with the Mexican president in 1924, Vasconcelos quit his post to run for governor of Oaxaca. After he lost, he relocated to the United States, where he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and Stan- ford University. In late 1928 he launched his presidential campaign from the United States. He returned to Mexico to push his candidacy, was harassed, intimidated, and defeated by the organization that would become the pri, and fled the country for another decade.13

In La raza cósmica (1925) Vasconcelos split history into a series of eras dominated by particular races, starting with Africans, moving to the great civilizations of the pre- Columbian Americas, the rise of Asia, and finally, the expansion of the white race across the globe. The next great historical era, he insisted, would see not the dominance of one of the races, but rather their fusion into a single race and culture that would embody the virtues of all previous groups. Vasconcelos borrowed from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in much the same way that Karl Marx had, claiming that northern Europeans had fulfilled their historical destiny by creating the productive economies and empires that linked the world as never before, but now that history had entered a new stage. Vasconcelos

12 Manuel Gamio, Forjando patria (pro nacionalismo) (Forging a nation [for nationalism]) (Mexico City, 1916). On Manuel Gamio and José Vasconcelos in a hemispheric context, see David Luis-Brown, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (Durham, N.C., 2008).

13 John Skirius, “Vasconcelos and México de Afuera (1928),” Aztlán, 7 (Fall 1976), 479–97; Luis A. Marentes, José Vasconcelos and the Writing of the Mexican Revolution (New York, 2000), 13–15; Luis Barrón, “José Vasconcelos, Luis Cabrera, y la Revolución Mexicana” (José Vasoncelos, Luis Cabrera, and the Mexican Revolution), Historia y Política, 11 (Jan.–June 2004), 107–30.

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railed against the “Anglo-Saxon limitation of constituting castes of pure races” and contrasted the fetishization of racial purity with the Latin American practice of fusion:

In Latin America, the repulsion of one blood that confronts another strange blood also exists, but infinitely more attenuated. There, a thousand bridges are available for the sincere and cordial fusion of all races. The ethnic barricading of those to the north in contrast to the much more open sympathy of those to the south is the most important factor . . . because it will be seen immediately that we belong to tomorrow, while the Anglo-Saxons are gradually becoming more a part of yesterday.

Anglo-Saxon mechanistic coldness would give way to the fifth race, “made up of the genius and the blood of all peoples, and, for that reason, more capable of true brother- hood and of a truly universal vision.” And Latin America was leading the way to this new historical epoch: “we in America shall arrive, before any other part of the world, at the creation of a new race fashioned out of the treasures of all the previous ones.”14

That historical schema was well suited for the needs of the Mexican state because it pro- vided an ideological basis for the unification of its extremely heterogeneous population and the validation of such a society on the world stage. It also provided a potent critique of the United States, which had in the 1910s twice invaded Mexican territory and was in the 1920s rapidly extending its economic and political domination over much of Latin America. Unlike most nineteenth-century Mexican intellectuals, who saw the United States and Mexico as engaged in similar projects of creating liberal republics in the New World, Vasconcelos saw Anglo America and Latin America as very different civilizations. By presenting mestizaje (the fusion of previously distinct groups) as a benign practice that grew out of racial tolerance, the scholar Rubén Medina has argued, Vasconcelos “offered a compensatory narrative of the lack of social and economic progress in Mexico and the rest of Latin America.” He also advanced the con- cept to critique U.S. racism, with which, like the founders of lulac, he had firsthand experi- ence in the turn-of-the-century Texas-Mexico borderlands. This flattering contrast with the United States and the continuation of U.S. imperialism during the twentieth century perhaps helps account for Vasconcelos’s enduring influence in Latin American intellectual circles. It also helps explain why his writings, particularly his valorization of racial fusion, were attractive to Chicano thinkers and their critique of U.S. racism, as well as to a diverse group of intellectu- als who in recent decades have found the concept of mestizaje to offer both understanding and valorization of contemporary hybridity and fusion.15

In his own time, there were plenty of people in Mexican society who had reason to fear Vasconcelos’s ideology and political program. As a large work of scholarship has suggested,

14 Vasconcelos, Cosmic Race, 21, 20, 40, 30, 31. For Vasconcelos’s later embrace of a more racist Hispanophilia, see Augustín F. Basave Benítez, México Mestizo: Análisis del nacionalism mexicano en torno a la mestizofilia de Andrés Molina Enríquez (Mestizo Mexico: An analysis of Mexican nationalism centered on the mestizophilia of Andrés Molina Enríquez) (Mexico City, 1992), 134.

15 Francisco Valdés-Ugalde, “Janus and the Northern Colossus: Perceptions of the United States in the Building of the Mexican Nation,” Journal of American History, 86 (Sept. 1999), 594, 596; Gabriella de Beer, “José Vasconcelos vis-à-vis the United States,” Revista Interamericana de bibliografía, 17 (Oct.–Dec. 1967), 417–18. Rubén Medina, “El mestizaje a través de la frontera: Vasconcelos y Anzaldúa” (Mestizaje across the border: Vasconcelos and Anzaldúa), Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 25 (Winter 2009), 111. Nicandro F. Juárez, “Jose Vasconcelos and La Raza Cosmica,” Aztlán, 3 (Spring 1972), 53–57. On Vasconcelos’s wide influence in Mexico and the rest of Latin America, see Valdés-Ugalde, “Janus and the Northern Colossus,” 594; Marentes, José Vasconcelos and the Writing of the Mexican Revolution, 80; and Barrón, “José Vasconcelos, Luis Cabrera, y la Revolución Mexicana,” 111. Medina, “El mestizaje a través de la frontera,” 112; Rafael Pérez-Torres, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture (Minneapolis, 1996); John Francis Burke, Mestizo Democracy: The Politics of Crossing Borders (College Station, 2002); Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (New York, 2002).

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his view of mestizaje could justify and create domination as much as critique it. The celebration of the superiority of a mixed Latin America over a North America hell-bent on maintaining a vicious racial purity made it easy for elites to deny the racism of Mexican society. San Antonio consul Enrique Santibáñez, for example, asserted in 1930 that unlike in the United States, “in Mexico we do not draw distinctions amongst our- selves based on skin color.” Ironically, the insistence that the future had to be mestizo could be just as compelling a rationale for the coercive acculturation of Mexico’s indige- nous communities as Anglo-American racism was north of the border. And the terms with which Vasconcelos described the process of racial fusion often revealed a deep con- tempt for Africans and Indians, a contempt articulated in eugenicist terms.16

In the context of the Jim Crow United States, with its fetishization of white racial purity and denigration of ethnic Mexicans as mongrels, however, Vasconcelos’s writings provided a powerful critique of U.S. racism and a validation of racial hybridity. “How the North American sociologists of the school of Mr. Lothrop [Stoddard] will suffer when they read this work,” wrote Francisco García Calderon of La raza cósmica in the pages of San Antonio’s La Prensa a few months before lulac’s founding. La Prensa, the most widely read Spanish-language periodical in the United States at the time, ran a weekly column by Vasconcelos in the late 1920s and for a decade at least advertised La raza cós- mica, priced at $1.50, in its series of affordable paperbacks.17

The first generation of lulac leaders and members had deep ties to Vasconcelos and the larger ferment of postrevolutionary Mexico. Despite the public rebukes from the Mexican government after the organization’s founding, lulac worked closely with the Mexican state in defending the rights of Mexican-descent people. They also had extensive contact with Vascon- celos. In 1928, a year before the organization’s founding, a key set of its future leaders hosted Vasconcelos during his presidential campaign in Corpus Christi. (During the campaign Vas- concelos spent eleven months in the United States, drumming up support in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Fe, and Chicago, and even more extensively in Texas—El Paso, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Laredo, Brownsville, and numerous small towns in south Texas.) Ben Garza, who would become lulac’s first president the following year, managed Vasconce- los’s Corpus Christi campaign, and at one banquet the Mexican intellectual was introduced by Clemente Idar, soon to be one of the principal authors of the league’s constitution.18

16 Gary Gerstle, “Race and Nation in the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, 1880–1940,” in Nationalism in the New World, ed. Don H. Doyle and Marco Antonio Pamplona (Athens, Ga., 2006), 272–303. Santibáñez, Ensayo cerca de la inmigración mexicana en los Estados Unidos, 47. Anne Doremus, “Indigenism, Mestizaje, and National Identity in Mexico during the 1940s and the 1950s,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 17 (Summer 2001), 379; Agustín Jacinto Zavala, “Las etnias y la cultura mexicana en José Vasconcelos” (Ethnic groups and Mexican culture in José Vasconcelos), Relaciones, 23 (no. 91, 2002), 163; Luis-Brown, Waves of Decolonization, 19, 185. Marentes, José Vasconcelos and the Writing of the Mexican Revolution, 96; Medina, “El mestizaje a través de la frontera,” 107, 109; Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, 1991), 148–51.

17 Francisco García Calderon, “Vasconcelos en Mexico” (Vasconcelos in Mexico), La Prensa, Jan. 10, 1929, p. 3. Marentes, José Vasconcelos and the Writing of the Mexican Revolution, 148. For an example of these advertisements in La Prensa, see La Prensa, Oct. 5, 1935, p. 4.

18 María Eva Flores, “The Good Life the Hard Way: The Mexican American Community of Fort Stockton, Texas, 1930–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 2000), 92; Emilio Zamora, “Mexico’s Wartime Interven- tion on Behalf of Mexicans in the United States,” in Mexican Americans and World War II, ed. Maggie Rivas-Rodrí- guez (Austin, 2005), 221–43; Thomas A. Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas,” Journal of American History, 92 (March 2006), 1212–37; Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas. Skirius, “Vasconcelos and México de Afuera (1928),” 487. For the timing of Vasconcelos’s 1928 campaign and return to Mexico, see undated newspaper announcement, album 1, Garza Collection. Marentes, José Vasconcelos and the Writing of the Mexican Revolution, 148. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed, 117.

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The connections between lulac circles and Vasconcelos and the education system he cre- ated continued through the 1930s. The University of Texas professor George I. Sánchez, who served as an influential adviser to early lulac leaders and as the organization’s president in 1941–1942, extensively studied Mexico’s public education system in the 1930s, publishing Mexico: A Revolution by Education in 1936. “Nothing has affected my thinking and my feel- ings more than Mexico’s experience—redemption by armed Revolution, then Peace by Revo- lution,” he acknowledged late in his life. “The latter revolution still goes on, and I associate myself with it vicariously.” Less prominent figures were also well aware of developments across the river, as when the Del Rio, Texas, schoolteacher E. E. Mireles (future husband of the scholar and novelist Jovita Gonzáles) spoke in 1935 of crossing into Mexico to teach if his run- ins with the Del Rio school board continued. A 1932 issue of lulac News published two stu- dent essays on Mexico’s education system, under the heading “Progreso en México,” in which one of the authors lauded the work of specific Mexican educators. Continued migration from Mexico and the persistence of San Antonio as a favored residence of Mexican political figures disaffected with (or in fear of their lives from) the Mexican state ensured that Mexican Americans remained part of the intellectual world of Mexico.19

It is little wonder, then, that authors and intellectuals associated with lulac used con- cepts, language, and imagery from Vasconcelos and other key Mexican intellectuals to describe Anglo and Hispanic cultures. lulac intellectuals bitterly resented the racism of Anglo-American culture, but could not help but admire the United States’ modernity and economic productivity. An anonymous article entitled “Our attitude toward history” published in Corpus Christi’s El Paladín just a few months after lulac’s founding typified this conflicted stance. Over the previous year, the newspaper had helped spread the call for the formation of the group, and the author of this article sought to locate lulac within a larger historical context. Lamenting the fact that Anglo racism made even fourth-generation Tejanos face “the sorrowful dilemma of searching for a country, because they have none,” the author briefly mentions the divisions in Mexico that had made pos- sible the nation’s dismemberment by the United States in the preceding century. U.S. conquest brought “a foreign flag, leaders, and laws. The blonde invasion with its fount of wealth, spewing torrent of gold, importing machinery and creating cities, all with shock- ing rapidity, lead us to recognize a false superiority in those [Anglo] arrivals.” Having lost almost all of their land and economic independence, Mexican Americans should now seek political rights in the U.S. system, but not at the expense of fully embracing the cold Anglo culture. Hence, for the author, the key phrase in lulac’s constitution was the one that declared “emphatically that we accept the ideas and customs of this country ‘only to the extent that there is good in them.’”20

The role of Hispanic culture in the United States was a more explicit theme a decade later in F. Valencia’s manifesto “March Onward Lulac Soldiers.” Valencia, a regular con- tributor to lulac News, seemed to draw heavily from the periodization of Vasconcelos and other prominent Latin American critics of U.S. culture. Valencia presented lulac as the bearer of Latin culture marginalized by hard-driving Anglo-Saxons, a movement with the

19 George I. Sánchez, Mexico: A Revolution by Education (New York, 1936). Ruben Flores, “States of Culture: Relativism and National Consolidation in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2006), 216. E. Mireles to Carlos Castañeda, Aug. 21, 1935, box 24, Carlos E. Castañeda Papers (Benson Latin American Collection); Dora Hinojosa, “Educación” (Education), lulac News, 2 (Nov. 1932), 21.

20 “Nuestra actitud ante la historia” (Our attitude toward history), El Paladín, [May 14, 1929], clipping, album 2, Garza Collection.

413Racial Fusion, White Supremacy, and Civil Rights Politics

potential to inaugurate a fourth era in the history of the Americas. First came the hemisphere’s Indian civilizations, then the “Spanish cavalcade” bringing haciendas, towns, and Christianity to the New World. The Anglos swept down from the North, and with “clock-like precision they changed the wilderness, with its few settlements and missions into a vast progressive country, with a multitude of cities, factories, plantations, grazing herds, and all the new things of science and industry as time went on.” The tragedy in that triumph was the loss of Latin virtues. “Where are the dons, the domesticated Indians, the friars, the music, the romance,” he lamented, “the culture and civilization that was Spain’s and the Aztec hinterland?” The answer was grim: “Then I saw them and I wept, for they were swept off and lost in the whirl and buzz of the incoming new civilization. I saw them working in the fields, in the factories, digging ditches, serving the tables, and everywhere with brawn and muscle they toiled, and they were the underdogs of the new conquistadores.” But now there was a way out: lulac.21

Despite Valencia’s nostalgic language, lulac leaders, like their counterparts in Mexico, were relentless modernizers. If there were continuities with Hispanic “tradition” to be pre- served, there were also numerous primitive traits in their own people that desperately needed to be broken. Another writer offered a view of this process in a lulac News article about medicine and public health, in which he heralded “scientific methods” destroying “anti- quated and erroneous ideas.” This modernizing vision had many ramifications for lulac’s program. English had to be learned in addition to Spanish, even though this was difficult for many lulac leaders, many of whom spoke mostly Spanish. English was the language of their country, and anyone who wanted to succeed in business or education could not do without it. Just as Vasconcelos and the other architects of Mexico’s postrevolutionary educational state had emphasized, language was one of the key elements that bound a people together.22

Most importantly, lulac’s relentless focus on modernization led it to prioritize education. Unequal and discriminatory education seemed proof that white society was intent on keeping ethnic Mexicans and others in subordinate social positions. The high priority that lulac placed on educational equality reveals the influence of the Mexican postrevolutionary educa- tion system. Some made this link explicitly. Manuel C. González, a civil rights activist, praised the egalitarianism of Mexico, embodied in “the educational system . . . administered without resort to ridiculous pedagogical theories in order to favor the members of one race to the exclu- sion of another.” Mexican American civil rights activists had enormous confidence in the social changes that education could bring. “The rise and fall of power in a nation is through its citi- zenry,” wrote Ruben Lozano, the chair of lulac’s education committee, and “history has clearly shown that internal evils, regardless of nature and size, may be cured by education.” The justification for placing such an emphasis on education had as much to do with addressing the supposed “backwardness” of Mexican Americans as it did with confronting Anglo racism.23

21 F. Valencia, “March Onward Lulac Soldiers,” lulac News, 5 (Feb. 1938), 7–8. For a similar perspective, invok- ing “Spanish” culture “as a solid wall against the evils of modern civilization,” see the anonymous Día de la Raza work “Editorial,” ibid., 2 (Oct. 1932), 10. Rodolfo A. de la Garza, a lulac activist, used similar language in his description of “a Nordic cloud” coming to south Texas and the difficulty experienced by Tejanos and their “pleasure- loving ways” in coping “with the energetic, wealth-seeking characteristics of the Nordics.” Rodolfo A. de la Garza, “Who Are You,” ibid. (Sept. 1932), 3.

22 Daniel Saenz, “El médico en el hogar” (The doctor in the house), ibid., 1 (Feb. 1932), 8. 23 Guadalupe San Miguel Jr., “Let All of Them Take Heed”: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational

Equality in Texas, 1910–1981 (Austin, 1987), xviii; Carolyn Hernandez, “lulac: The History of a Grassroots Orga- nization and Its Influence on Education Policies, 1929–1983” (Ph.D. diss., Loyola University of Chicago, 1995). M. C. González, “Cual es nuestro deber” (What is our duty), lulac News, 1 (Oct. 1931), 7; Ruben R. Lozano, “An Appeal,” ibid., 2 (Nov. 1932), 5; M. C. González, “The Aim of lulac,” ibid., 1 (March 1932), 1.

414 September 2011The Journal of American History

Mexican Americans and the Question of Race

The failure to recognize the deep connections between Mexican American civil rights activists and postrevolutionary Mexico is one reason that some scholars have offered a distorted portrayal of Mexican American racial politics and self-conception in the 1930s and 1940s. The rise of whiteness theory—insightfully premised on the idea that white- ness is a racial identity, one that like all others must be historicized and one that now encompasses groups such as Irish and Italians that may have once lived outside its bound- aries—has given historians a powerful tool with which to interpret the behavior and politics of Mexican Americans. A consensus in the scholarship holds that lulac and most Mexican Americans of the mid-twentieth century who advocated for U.S. citizenship rights sought to claim the status of whiteness and that this racial claim was at the heart of their political project. As the historian Neil Foley writes of what he calls the “Faustian pact” with whiteness,

The period roughly from the 1930s to 1970 represented a particular strategy of civil rights activism among middle-class Mexican Americans who stressed the importance of assimilation and Americanization. But they also sought to construct identities as Caucasians by asserting their Spanish and “Latin American” descent . . . Mexican Americans, beginning around 1930 . . . sought to overcome the stigma of being Mexican by asserting their Americanness. In the process, they equated Americanness with white- ness and therefore embarked on a strategy of dissociating themselves from African Americans as potential coalition partners in their early civil rights struggles. They came to the realization that being a U.S. citizen did not count nearly as much as being white.

This argument is consistent with historians’ depictions of earlier Mexican American racial self-conceptions, including the embrace of a Spanish” past or identity to avoid anti-Mexican racism even while claiming a distinctive culture and historical experience. So generally accepted is this thesis that even Gregory Rodriguez, who argues that in the contempo- rary United States Mexican Americans are “breaking down the barriers that have tradi- tionally served to separate whites and nonwhites,” assumes that “before 1970, [Mexican Americans] sought to be recognized as whites, while afterward they insisted on being ‘people of color.’”24

There is no doubt that whiteness held a deep allure for some Mexican Americans. The demeaning and brutal treatment of African Americans in Texas, with its consequent deprivation, vulnerability to savage violence, and political disfranchisement provided a clear example of the costs of being on the wrong side of a color line. lulac was vigorous in challenging efforts to classify Mexican-descent people legally as a separate race, whether by the Census Bureau or in court cases dealing with jury selection, due process, or educa- tional discrimination. As long as Mexican-descent people were legally white, they could avoid the legal structure that kept African Americans as a separate and inferior social group deprived of many benefits of citizenship, such as voting and equal education, that lulac sought. The very existence of Mexican American citizenship in the United States might be at stake—lulac’s legal advisers were well aware of past and ongoing efforts to

24 Foley, “Partly Colored or Other White,” 125; Charles Montgomery, The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power, and Loss on New Mexico’s Upper Rio Grande (Berkeley, 2002); John M. Nieto-Phillips, The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1930s (Albuquerque, 2004). Gregory Rodriguez, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America (New York, 2007), xiv, 175.

415Racial Fusion, White Supremacy, and Civil Rights Politics

preclude Mexican-descent people from claiming citizenship, efforts based on the argu- ment that they were not white and therefore ineligible for naturalization.25

In some cases the use of whiteness went well beyond the instrumental. “As a matter of absolute record,” an anonymous author informed readers of lulac News shortly after the organization’s founding, “it was the Latin-American (Mexicans) who first braved and tamed the Texas wilderness. They are the first white race to inhabit this vast empire of ours.” When fired for insisting on drinking from the “white” rather than the “Mexican” water pail in 1942, the laborer Jesús Valdez retorted, “I considered myself as white as [my boss] or any other white person.” As it had been historically in both Mexico and the United States, the demeaning of blackness was a counterpart to claims to an exalted racial status. lulac’s magazine printed a demeaning joke making fun of a black character named Rastus who spoke in dialect and was accused of stealing a Ford; in 1936, a lulac member railed against a group of Mexican girls for dating black boys whose band had been invited to play at a Mexican social gathering.26

Nevertheless, as scholarship is starting to observe, there are large problems in the whiteness interpretation of Mexican American politics in this period. It falls into many of the traps pointed out by critics of whiteness histories in general. Eric Arnesen, for exam- ple, asserts that whiteness scholars “put words in their subjects’ mouths to compensate for the absence of first-hand perspectives by the historical actors themselves.” Such is the case when Foley and others suggest that the very term “Latin American” reflects a self-conception as white, even though the lulac constitution’s casual mention of “our race” in its first article offers a notion of peoplehood distinct from Anglo-Americans. Hasia Diner’s observation that “few whiteness studies engage with the primary sources written in the immigrants’ own languages, and few take any cognizance of the vast inner divisions within each of the immigrant groups” applies particularly well to the literature on Mexican Americans, which generally elides the considerable differences—even within lulac—on the subject of race and ignores the competing notions of race regularly artic- ulated in the Spanish-language press. Interpretations by whiteness scholars end up mar- ginalizing the more racially progressive aspects of lulac and help perpetuate the mistaken notion that the organization and its members had cut themselves off from Mexican cul- ture and politics, including discourses of race that did not revolve around whiteness.27

25 Rodriguez, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds, 164, 169; Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights”; Clare Sheridan, “‘Another White Race’: Mexican Americans and the Paradox of Whiteness in Jury Selec- tion,” Law and History Review, 21 (Spring 2003), 109–44; Steven H. Wilson, “Brown over ‘Other White’: Mexican Americans’ Legal Arguments and Litigation Strategy in School Desegregation Lawsuits,” ibid., 145–94; Ariela Gross, “Texas Mexicans and the Politics of Whiteness,” ibid., 195–204.

26 “Are Texas-Mexicans ‘Americans?,’” lulac News, 1 (April 1932), 7. Jesús Valdez quoted in Guglielmo, “Fight- ing for Caucasian Rights,” 1235. lulac News, 5 (March 1938), 32; Márquez, lulac, 33.

27 Carlos K. Blanton, “George I. Sánchez, Ideology, and Whiteness in the Making of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, 1930–1960,” Journal of Southern History, 72 (Aug. 2006), 569–604; Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas, esp. 9–11, 81, 121; Lisa Ramos, “A Class Apart: Mexican Americans, Race, and Civil Rights in Texas” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2008); María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, “‘How Many Mexicans [Is] a Horse Worth?’ The League of United Latin American Citizens, Desegregation Cases, and Chicano Historiography,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 107 (Fall 2008), 809–31. Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001), 5, 25. See also the less caustic treat- ment of whiteness scholarship in Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History, 89 (June 2002), 154–73. Hasia R. Diner, “The World of Whiteness,” Historically Speaking (Sept.–Oct. 2007), 22. For more cautious claims about whiteness that recognize different racial ideologies within Mexican American communities and organizations, see Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights,” 1235; and Meeks, Border Citizens, 115–16.

416 September 2011The Journal of American History

A wide range of members and leaders of lulac offered clear statements about their own racial identities and political programs that contradict the prevailing whiteness interpretation. Some members of these civil rights circles, for example, offhandedly but matter-of-factly included African people in their descriptions of the fusion that gave rise to the Mexican people. In “March Onward Lulac Soldiers,” for example, F. Valencia included “the negro Estevanico” (a member of an early Spanish expedition into what became the U.S. Southwest) in his description of the founding of Mexico and its people. Moreover, the lulac leaders most likely to claim indigenous heritage explicitly, such as José de la Luz Saenz, a south Texas schoolteacher, longtime civil rights activist, and coauthor of lulac’s constitution, were also the most unequivocal in their denunciation of racial dis- crimination and segregation per se. Luz Saenz, himself quite dark skinned, frequently drew parallels between the treatment of Mexican Americans, African Americans, and American Indians.28

Furthermore, Mexican American civil rights activists offered frequent valorizations of racial hybridity. Manuel González was one such person. Although he was involved in efforts to change the policy that categorized Mexicans as a separate race by census takers in 1930 and apparently authored a 1943 Texas resolution declaring ethnic Mexicans to be members of the Caucasian race in the hopes that it would protect Mexican contract labor- ers from segregation and wage discrimination, there is no evidence that he thought of himself as white or put a premium on racial purity. “The existence of a people known to be members of a vigorous and masterful race commingling with other races of a strong force of character and high civilization, the fusion of such people,” he flatly declared in 1932, “in the end tends to bring out the force and character and the fertility of intellect that create and perpetuate a leading nation.” José Tomás Canales went a step further in an article published the same year, attributing much of the success of Americans to the fact that, like the Romans, they “were the result of a composite race, the Romans from the Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans, and the Americans from the Anglo-Saxons with a mixture from Dutch, German, French, Scandinavian, and other races.” Vasconcelos may have damned the United States for ruthlessly seeking racial purity, but lulac members had a different reading of American history. “This country is composed of the descendents of many lineages, families of many races,” stated Cástulo Gutiérrez.29

Other activists actually went out of their way to claim indigenous roots amid this racial hybridity, a major feature of the Mexican state’s official discourse. J. Luz Saenz was par- ticularly emphatic in this regard. He described himself as “an Aztec” in writings as early as World War I in his dispatches from Europe, claiming special fellowship with a unit of

28 Valencia, “March Onward Lulac Soldiers,” 7. For glimpses into the ethnic Mexican conversation about race, including discussions of mestizaje and acknowledgements of African ancestry, see “Como se formaron las razas Americanas” (How the American races were formed), La Prensa, July 12, 1929, p. 3; and Enrique Valay, “Indianism y Latinismo” (Indianism and Latinism), ibid., May 26, 1932, p. 3. José de la Luz Saenz, “La discriminación racial” (Racial discrimination), manuscript, [1944?], folder 2, box 3, José de la Luz Saenz Papers (Benson Latin American Collection); Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 194. Neil Foley recognizes multiple instances of prominent League of United Latin American Citizens (lulac) leaders and anonymous lulac members alike explicitly condemning Jim Crow and expressing support for African American civil rights initiatives, though he does not incorporate these views into his overall characterization of lulac or middle-class Mexican Americans more broadly. Foley, Quest for Equality, 95, 125, 129, 134, 135.

29 On the Caucasian race resolution, see Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights.” M. C. González, “The Aim of lulac,” lulac News, 1 (March 1932), 1; J. T. Canales, “The Romans of Today,” ibid. (Feb. 1932), 5; Gutiérrez, “Para los que no conocen nuestra inst.”

417Racial Fusion, White Supremacy, and Civil Rights Politics

Indians from Oklahoma and referring to Tejanos as “the Indians of Texas.” In an undated manuscript entitled “Mi linaje Azteca,” J. Luz Saenz described an excursion of some thirty Texas teachers to Mexico, organized by the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education. Here a Tamaulipas historian told him of the journeys of a branch of the Aztecs in the wake of their defeat by Hernando Cortés, which brought them north to what eventually became south Texas. J. Luz Saenz saw this as academic corroboration of the history he had learned from his father and of his own sense of himself as an Aztec. Others in lulac seemed to share this indigenist point of view.30

For Saenz and for others, Mexican-descent people were a composite people formed of diverse ancestors. Indeed, to the extent that there was one dominant racial self- conceptualization on the part of Mexican American civil rights activists in Texas in this period, it was of a separate “Mexican” (or sometimes Latin American or “Hispanic”) race that was neither black nor white, nor identified in terms of those two poles. In 1936 the lulac founder Alonso Perales published a collection of his speeches and articles from the previ- ous twenty years, entitled En defensa de mi raza. In a public address in San Antonio on Día de la Raza (the Latin American version of Columbus Day) in 1935, he criticized U.S. writers for excluding “la raza hispana” from their accounts of national history and urged his listeners to celebrate “the Spanish and Indian-Hispanic race . . . a race as dignified as any.” The same year, he wrote a letter to the Texas director of the National Youth Admin- istration, Lyndon Baines Johnson, protesting the establishment of two separate youth camps in San Antonio, one for Anglos and one for Mexican Americans. It was a perfect opportunity to claim that those of Mexican descent, too, were white, but instead he referred to the unfair and anti-American practice of separating “the members of our two great races.” Even many of those who asserted their whiteness in legal venues seem not to have actually thought of themselves as white in their private lives, as the legal scholar Ariela Gross shows. This fluidity may account for the fact that for most of the twentieth century when Mexican-descent people in the United States were asked to state their race by the military or Census Bureau about half chose “white” and half “other.”31

At times lulac leaders in these decades decisively rejected white racism in a thorough- going way that contradicts the whiteness interpretation. At the organization’s founding convention in 1929, for example, J. Luz Saenz condemned Anglo-Americans for their rac- ism, including that directed at African Americans. “As long as they wish to raise up on high the standard of SUPREMACY OF RACES ON ACCOUNT OF COLOR; as long as they wish to point out to us a DETERMINED METHOD OF LIFE as to the negro,” he told his fellow delegates, “as long as they continue to stir up the fire of historical preju- dices, past or racial, so much more they will put off our conversion and the total carrying out of our obligations as full citizens.” In a writing that same year, Saenz approvingly cited

30 J. Luz Saenz, “Mi linaje Azteca” (My Aztec lineage), manuscript, n.d., folder 5, box 3, Luz Saenz Papers. On the indigenist point of view, see the poem Margil López, “lulac,” lulac News, 1 (Oct. 1931), 5. Emilio Zamora, “Fighting on Two Fronts: José de la Luz Saenz and the Language of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement,” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage: Volume IV, ed. José Aranda Jr. and Silvio Torres-Saillant (Houston, 2002), 214–39; Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 161.

31 Alonso Perales, En defensa de mi raza (In defense of my race) (San Antonio, 1936), 61, 62, 63. For another unselfconscious reference to the mixed ancestry of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, see Rodolfo A. de la Garza, “Who Are You,” lulac News, 2 (Nov. 1932), 3. Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), 285. For evidence from south Texas military recruitment during World War II, see Benjamin Heber Johnson, Bordertown: The Odyssey of an American Place (New Haven, 2008), 125. On the 1990 and 2000 censuses, see Dowling, “Lure of Whiteness and the Politics of ‘Otherness,’” 1.

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an article entitled “King Cotton, the Black, and the Mexican,” arguing that cotton had caused slavery and led to the continued oppression of blacks, for whom ethnic Mexicans substituted as an oppressed laboring class in much of Texas. In its early years lulac sup- ported a rider to a school funding bill that would have withheld state aid to “any school district which fails to provide equal educational facilities to all children of school age resid- ing therein”—a measure that would have forced equal educational expenditures for black, Hispanic, and white schools. As Andrés de Luna, the secretary of the founding conven- tion, explained, “if that school in question is good for some it is good for all and if it is not good for a few it is not good for any.” “In the public schools like in any other public prop- erty of the people,” he concluded, “there should be shown no partiality, group consider- ation or special privileges to a few.”32

Conclusion

In the mid-1980s Virgilio Elizondo, the rector of San Fernando Cathedral in downtown San Antonio and a champion of liberation theology, wrote an ambitious book called The Future Is Mestizo, in which he passionately advocated for mestizaje suffused with a mysti- cal Catholic sensibility. Claiming that “culturally and linguistically speaking, Jesus was a mestizo,” Elizondo boasted that in the contemporary American Southwest, “differences are not destroyed, hidden, or ignored; they are absorbed to become the active ingredients of a new human group.” Elizondo was born in San Antonio and had grown up there in the 1930s and 1940s, and he saw the city as a critical site for the making of a “nueva raza.” “It is the history alive today in the people of San Antonio that creates the collective soul for this new group on planet earth. This soul is the foundation and guiding force of the new expression of the cosmic race made up of Nordic and Latins, Europeans and Native, Africans and Asiatics.” There is, of course, nothing novel about people from different so- called races meeting, falling in love, marrying—or just having sexual relations, consensual or otherwise. It is a story as old as humanity, and such relationships can easily go hand in hand with severe and brutal race lines. British colonial North America, for example, saw not only some of the highest rates of race mixture in American history—surely higher than now—but also the hardening of race lines and the creation of the pernicious one- drop rule. The fact that Strom Thurmond had a child considered “black” by U.S. racial etiquette does not make him anything other than an unrepentant segregationist—it just makes the human tragedy of white supremacy all the more poignant.33

The open advocacy or even acknowledgement of fusion across the constructed lines of race, however, is fatal to the kind of racial order that the ruling white citizens of Texas sought to maintain in the first half of the twentieth century. At its heart, the story of race and the early Mexican American civil rights movement in Texas is not one of being

32 Oliver Douglas Weeks, report, May 24, 1929, folder 10, box 1, Weeks Collection. J. Luz Sáenz, “Nuestra niñez, su educación” (The education of our youth), clipping, [1929], album 2, Garza Collection. “El que no llora no mama” (He who doesn’t cry isn’t suckled), lulac News, 3 (Feb. 1937), 4; Andrés de Luna to McCracken, n.d., folder 8, box 1, Andrés de Luna Collection (Benson Latin American Collection).

33 Virgilio P. Elizondo, The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet (1988; Boulder, 2000), 79, xv. Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” Journal of American History, 82 (Dec. 1995), 941–64; David A. Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States,” American Historical Review, 108 (Dec. 2003), 1363–90. Jeffrey Gettleman, “Strom Thurmond’s Child: Old Times There Are Not Forgotten,” New York Times, Dec. 21, 2003, sec. 4, p. 3.

419Racial Fusion, White Supremacy, and Civil Rights Politics

captured by the pull of a racial formation of whiteness forged during African slavery and tempered by the U.S. encounter with and subordination of Asians, Indians, and Latin Americans. Rather it is a story more about how ethnic Mexican ideas and practices sub- verted U.S. racial practices. lulac and its leaders consistently advocated and agitated on behalf of a vision of U.S. civic nationalism that denied the legitimacy of racial discrimina- tion and hierarchy. Moreover, their ideologies and practices undermined the very notions of racial purity that were foundational to the U.S. racial system. In this sense, David Hollinger’s argument that we ought to make “amalgamation” a major axis of our under- standing of U.S. history is right on the mark. To do so in this case, though, historians must broaden their visions to incorporate the connections between the United States and Latin America.34

In their own way, white supremacists of the time understood this. They had no trouble acknowledging that open mixture was anathema to the fictitious purity of race that undergirded whiteness: hence miscegenation statutes, which police what Lothrop Stod- dard called the “true frontiers” of the white world—“marked, not by boundary-stones, but by flesh and blood.” Some Latinos who came of age under Jim Crow had their own understanding of the threat that they could pose to the American racial order. It is not coincidental that the first non-black-owned restaurant in Austin to serve blacks was owned by a Mexican American, Josefina Galindo Nieto; or that the California case that set the stage for the Supreme Court’s destruction of miscegenation statutes involved a black man and a woman named Andrea Pérez; or that 97 percent of Americans who marked “some other race” in the 2000 census were Latino; or that Latino intellectuals such as Elizondo, painfully aware of their own legacy of antiblack racism and of the ways that mestizaje has been a brief for social violence in Latin America, nevertheless embrace the term.35

Moreover, it is no surprise that the collapse of segregation brought a marked increase in interracial marriage, particularly on the part of Hispanics. By the early 1970s, the His- panic outmarriage rate in New Mexico and California was three times the level of the 1920s, and today almost one-third of U.S.-born Hispanic women and men who are mar- ried chose to marry out. The celebration and practice of racial fusion so powerfully if problematically articulated by a key intellectual of the Mexican Revolution and advanced by many early leaders of lulac is, for all its ironies, alive and well in an increasingly poly- glot United States.36

34 Lauren L. Basson, White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation (Chapel Hill, 2008). Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent.”

35 Stoddard, Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy, 236. For Lothrop Stoddard’s warning of the proclivities of Latin Americans in the United States to “impair the purity of [their] blood,” including with “negroes,” see ibid., 128. Daryl Bell, “Nieto Was Forthright in Austin Integration,” San Antonio Express-News, March 25, 2002, p. 4E; Perez v. Sharp, 32 Cal.2d 711, 1948; Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent,” 1377; Mireya Navarro, “Going beyond Black and White, Hispanics Choose ‘Other,’” New York Times, Nov. 9, 2003, p. A1; Elizondo, Future Is Mestizo, 18, 119, 127.

36 Robert Schoen, Verne E. Nelson, and Marion Collins, “Intermarriage among Spanish Surnamed Califor- nians, 1962–1974,” International Migration Review, 12 (Autumn 1978), 360; Sharon M. Lee and Barry Edmonston, “New Marriages, New Families: U.S. Racial and Hispanic Intermarriage,” Population Bulletin, 60 (June 2005), 29.

© 2011 Organisation of American Historians