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Southern Historical Association

George I. Sánchez, Ideology, and Whiteness in the Making of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, 1930-1960 Author(s): Carlos K. Blanton Source: The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Aug., 2006), pp. 569-604 Published by: Southern Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27649149 Accessed: 06-03-2018 23:28 UTC

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George I. S?nchez, Ideology, and Whiteness in the Making of the Mexican American Civil Rights

Movement, 1930-1960 By Carlos K. Blanton

Let us keep in mind that the Mexican-American can easily become the front-line of defense of the civil

liberties of ethnic minorities. The racial, cultural, and historical involvements in his case embrace those of all of

the other minority groups. Yet, God bless the law, he is "white"! So, the Mexican-American can be the wedge for the broadening of civil liberties for others (who are not so

fortunate as to be "white" and "Christian"!). George I. S?nchez (1958)

By embracing whiteness, Mexican Americans have reinforced the color line that has denied people of African

descent full participation in American democracy. In pursuing White rights, Mexican Americans combined

Latin American racialism with Anglo racism, and in the process separated themselves and their political agenda

from the Black civil rights struggles of the forties and fifties.

Neil Foley (1998)1

1 HE HISTORY OF RACE AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH IS

complex and exciting. The history of Mexican American civil rights is also promising, particularly so in regard to understanding the role of whiteness. Both selections above, the first from a Mexican American

1 The epigraphs are drawn from George I. S?nchez to Roger N. Baldwin, August 27, 1958, Folder 8, Box 31, George I. S?nchez Papers (Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, Austin); and Neil Foley, "Becoming Hispanic: Mexican Americans and the Faustian Pact with Whiteness," in Foley, ed., Reflexiones 1997: New Directions in

Mexican American Studies (Austin, 1998), 65. The author would like to thank the Journal of Southern History's six anonymous reviewers and Texas A&M University's Glasscock Center for Humanities Research for their very helpful intellectual guidance on this essay.

Mr. Blanton is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University.

The Journal of Southern History Volume LXXII, No. 3, August 2006

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570 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

intellectual of the mid-twentieth century and the last a recently pub lished statement from a historian of race and identity, are nominally about whiteness. But the historical actor and the historian discuss

whiteness differently. The quotation from the 1950s advocates exploit ing legal whiteness to obtain civil rights for both Mexican Americans and other minority groups. The one from the 1990s views such a strategy as inherently racist. The historical figure writes of Mexican Americans and African Americans cooperating in the pursuit of shared civil rights goals; the historian writes of the absence, the impossibility of cooperation due to Mexican American whiteness. This contrast is worth further consideration.

This essay examines the Mexican American civil rights movement by focusing on the work and ideas of George I. S?nchez?a prominent activist and professor of education at the University of Texas?in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. S?nchez is the most significant intellectual of

what is commonly referred to as the "Mexican American Generation" of activists during this period. As a national president of the major Mexican American civil rights organization of the era, however, Sanchez's political influence within the Mexican American community was just as important as his intellectual leadership. S?nchez pondered notions of whiteness and actively employed them, offering an excellent case study of the making of Mexican American civil rights.2 First, this work examines how Sanchez's civil rights efforts were vitally in formed by an ideological perspective that supported gradual, integra tionist, liberal reform, a stance that grew out of his activist research on African Americans in the South, Mexican Americans in the Southwest, and Latin Americans in Mexico and Venezuela. This New Deal ideological inheritance shaped Sanchez's contention that Mexican

Americans were one minority group among many needing governmen tal assistance. Second, this liberal ideology gave rise to a nettlesome citizenship dilemma. During the Great Depression and World War II,

Mexican Americans' strategic emphasis on American citizenship rhe torically placed them shoulder-to-shoulder with other U.S. minority groups. It also marginalized immigrant Mexicans. The significance of

2 For more on S?nchez see Gladys R. Leff, "George I. S?nchez: Don Quixote of the Southwest" (Ph.D. dissertation, North Texas State University, 1976); James Nelson Mowry, "A Study of the Educational Thought and Action of George I. S?nchez" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, 1977); Am?rico Paredes, ed., Humanidad: Essays in Honor of George I. S?nchez (Los Angeles, 1977); Steven Schlossman, "Self-Evident Remedy? George I. Sanchez, Segregation, and Enduring Dilemmas in Bilingual Education," Teachers College Record, 84 (Summer 1983), 871-907; and Mario T. Garcia, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930-1960 (New Haven, 1989), chap. 10.

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WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 571

citizenship was controversial within the Mexican American commu nity and coincided with the emergence of an aggressive phase of Mexican Americans' civil rights litigation that implemented a legal strategy based on their whiteness. Third, Sanchez's correspon dence with Thurgood Marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1940s and 1950s reveals early, fragmentary connections between the Mexican American and African American civil rights movements. All these topics address important interpretive debates about the role of whiteness.

This essay fuses two historiographical streams: traditional studies on Mexican American politics and identity and the new whiteness schol arship's interpretation of Mexican American civil rights. In traditional works the Mexican American civil rights experience is often examined with little sustained comparison to other civil rights experiences. Con versely, the whiteness scholarship represents a serious attempt at com parative civil rights history. Taking both approaches into account answers the recent call of one scholar for historians to "muster even

greater historical imagination" in conceiving of new histories of civil rights from different perspectives.3

Traditional research on Mexican Americans in the twentieth century centers on generational lines. From the late nineteenth century to the Great Depression, a large wave of Mexican immigrants, spurred by dislocation in Mexico as well as by economic opportunity in the U.S., provided low-wage agricultural and industrial labor throughout the Southwest. Their political identity was as Mexicans living abroad, the "Mexicanist Generation." They generally paid little heed to American politics and eschewed cultural assimilation, as had earlier Mexicans who forcibly became American citizens as a result of the expansionist wars of the 1830s and 1840s. However, mass violence shortly before World War I, intensifying racial discrimination throughout the early twentieth century, and forced repatriations to Mexico during the Great Depression heralded the rise of a new political ethos. The community had come to believe that its members were endangered by the pre sumption of foreignness and disloyalty.4 By the late 1920s younger

3 Charles W. Eagles, "Toward New Histories of the Civil Rights Era," Journal of Southern History, 66 (November 2000), 848.

4 See Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (College Station, Tex., 1993); George J. S?nchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in

Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York, 1993); Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, 2003); and Amoldo De Le?n, The Tejano Community, 1836-1900 (1982; new ed., Dallas, 1997).

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leaders?the "Mexican American Generation"?urged adoption of a new strategy of emphasizing American citizenship at all times. They strove to speak English in public and in private settings, stressed edu cation, asked for the gradual reform of discriminatory practices, emu lated middle-class life, and exuded patriotism as a loyal, progressive ethnic group. They also desired recognition as ethnic whites, not as racial others. The oldest organization expressing this identity was the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). This ethos of hyphenated Americanism and gradual reform held sway until the late 1960s and early 1970s.5

Studies of whiteness contribute to historians' understanding of the interplay of race, ethnicity, and class by going beyond a black-white binary to seek the subtleties and nuances of race. This new scholar ship examines who is considered white and why, traces how the defi nition of white shifts, unearths how whiteness conditions acts of in clusion and exclusion and how it reinforces and subverts concepts of race, and investigates the psychological and material rewards to be gained by groups that successfully claim whiteness. Class tension, nativism, and racism are connected to a larger whiteness discourse. In other words, this is a new, imaginative way to more broadly interrogate the category of race. Works on whiteness often share a conviction that thoughts or acts capitalizing on whiteness reflect racist power as well as contribute to that insidious power's making. They also generally maintain that notions of race, whether consciously employed or not, divide ethnic and racial minorities from each other and from working class whites, groups that would otherwise share class status and po litical goals.6

In recent reviews of the state of whiteness history, Eric Arnesen,

5 See Mario Garc?a, Mexican Americans; George J. S?nchez, Becoming Mexican American; David G. Guti?rrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley, 1995); Ignacio M. Garc?a, Viva Kennedy: Mexican Americans in Search of Camelot (College Station, Tex., 2000); Carl Allsup, The American G.I. Forum: Origins and Evolution (Austin, 1982); Richard A. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class: San Antonio, 1929-1941 (College Station, Tex., 1991); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin, 1987), chaps. 12 and 13; Julie Leininger Pycior, LBJ and Mexican Americans: The Paradox of Power (Austin, 1997); Juan G?mez-Qui?ones, Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940-1990 (Albuquerque, 1990); and Guadalupe San Miguel Jr., Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston (College Station, Tex., 2001).

6 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991; rev. ed., New York, 1999); Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (New York, 1994); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics (Philadelphia, 1998).

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WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 573

Barbara J. Fields, Peter Kolchin, and Daniel Wickberg offer much criticism. These historians argue that scholars using whiteness as an analytical tool are shoddy in their definitions, read too finely and semantically into documents and literary texts, and privilege discursive

moments that have little or nothing to do with actual people or expe riences. More specifically, Kolchin and Arnesen argue that many stud ies of whiteness incautiously caricature race as an unchanging, omnipresent, and overly deterministic category. In such works white ness is portrayed as acting concretely and abstractly with or without historical actors and events. Ironically, studies of whiteness can ob scure the exercise of power. Fields explains that studying "race" and "racial identity" is more attractive than studying "racism" because "racism exposes the hollowness of agency and identity . . . [and] it violates the two-sides-to-every-story expectation of symmetry that Americans are peculiarly attached to."7

Research that applies the idea of whiteness to Mexican American history is sparse and even more recent. Several of these studies focus upon the use of whiteness as a legal strategy while others take a broader approach.8 Historian Neil Foley offers the most significant and ambitious arguments by moving beyond an analysis of how white people viewed Mexican Americans to look instead at the construction of whiteness in the Mexican American mind. He shifts the perspective from external whiteness to internal whiteness and argues that Mexican Americans entered into a "Faustian Pact" by embracing racism toward African Americans in the course of trying to avoid de jure discrimi nation. Foley claims that Mexican Americans consciously curried the favor of racist whites: "In pursuing White rights, Mexican Americans

7 Peter Kolchin, "Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America," Journal of American History, 89 (June 2002), 154-73; Eric Arnesen, "Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination," International Labor and Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001), 3-32; Barbara J. Fields, "Whiteness, Racism, and Identity," International Labor and Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001), 48-56 (quotations on p. 48); Daniel Wickberg, "Heterosexual White Male; Some Recent Inversions in American Cultural History," Journal of American History, 92 (June 2005), 136-57.

8 Ian F. Haney L?pez, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York, 1996); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, 1997); Steven Harmon Wilson, The Rise of Judicial Management in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, 1955-2000 (Athens, Ga., 2002); Wilson, "Brown over 'Other White': Mexican Americans' Legal Arguments and Litigation Strategy in School Desegregation Lawsuits," Law and History Review, 21 (Spring 2003), 145-94; Clare Sheridan, '"Another White Race': Mexican Americans and the Paradox of Whiteness in Jury Selection,"

Law and History Review, 21 (Spring 2003), 109-44; Ariela J. Gross, "Texas Mexicans and the Politics of Whiteness," Law and History Review, 21 (Spring 2003), 195-205; Carlos Kevin Blanton, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836-1981 (College Station, Tex., 2004); Patrick J. Carroll, Felix Longoria's Wake: Bereavement, Racism, and the Rise of Mexican American Activism (Austin, 2003).

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combined Latin American racialism with Anglo racism, and in the process separated themselves and their political agenda from the Black civil rights struggles of the forties and fifties."9 Missing from such interpretations of whiteness's meaning to Mexican Americans is George I. Sanchez's making of Mexican American civil rights. Ana lyzing Sanchez's views is an excellent test of Foley's interpretation because Sanchez's use of the category of whiteness was sophisticated, deliberate, reflective, and connected to issues and events.

An internationalist, multiculturalist, and integrationist ideology shaped by New Deal experiences in the American Southwest, the American South, and Latin America informed George I. Sanchez's civil rights activism and scholarship. S?nchez regarded Mexican Americans as one of many American minority groups suffering racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry. Though S?nchez regarded Mexican Americans' racial status as white, he also held that they were a mi nority group that experienced systematic and racialized oppression. Sanchez's articulation of whiteness was qualified by an anti-racist ideological worldview and supports Eric Arnesen's criticism of "over reaching" by whiteness scholars who "appreciate neither ambiguity nor counter-discourses of race, the recognition of which would cast doubt on their bold claims."10

S?nchez was very much a New Deal "service intellectual" who utilized academic research in an attempt to progressively transform society. The term service intellectual is an appropriate description of S?nchez, who propagated his civil rights activism through academic research with governmental agencies (the Texas State Department of Education, the New Mexico State Department of Education, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs) and national philanthropic organizations (the General Education Board, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Marshall Civil Liberties Trust). The pinnacle of Sanchez's scholarly contribution as a service intellectual was his evocative 1940 portrayal of rural New Mexican poverty and segrega tion in The Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans.H

9 Foley, "Becoming Hispanic," 53-70 (quotation on p. 65); Foley, "Partly Colored or Other White: Mexican Americans and Their Problem with the Color Line," in Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker, eds., Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest (College Station, Tex., 2004), 123-44. For an older whiteness study that discusses the external imposition of racial concepts on Mexican Americans and other groups, see Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, chap. 10.

10 Arnesen, "Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination," 24. 1 ' Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt

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WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 575

S?nchez particularly sought to transform society through the field of education. In the early 1930s he published blistering critiques of the shoddiness of IQ tests conducted on Mexican American children.

Mexican Americans had just challenged separate schools in Texas and California and were told by the courts that because they were techni cally "white," racial segregation was illegal; however, the courts then claimed that pedagogical segregation based upon intellectual or lin guistic "deficiency" was permissible. In challenging racist IQ science, S?nchez essentially advocated integration.12 A decade of service in tellectual work came together for S?nchez in Forgotten People. He called for a comprehensive federal and state program to uplift down trodden Hispanic New Mexicans: "Remedial measures will not solve the problem piecemeal. Poverty, illiteracy, and ill-health are merely symptoms. If education is to get at the root of the problem schools must go beyond subject-matter instruction. . . . The curriculum of the edu cational agencies becomes, then, the magna carta of social and eco nomic rehabilitation; the teacher, the advance agent of a new social order."13

S?nchez regarded Mexican Americans as similar to Japanese Americans, Jewish Americans, and African Americans. To S?nchez these were all minority groups that endured varying levels of discrimi nation by white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America. S?nchez was un interested in divining a hierarchy of racial victimization; instead, he spent considerable energy on pondering ways for these groups to get the federal government, in New Deal fashion, to help alleviate their plight. Even in the mid-1960s when many Mexican Americans had come to favor a separate racial identity over an ethnic one, S?nchez still conceived of Mexican Americans as a cultural group, ignoring concepts of race altogether unless discussing racial discrimination.14 S?nchez engaged the struggles of other minority groups and linked them to Mexican American activism. In 1948, for example, S?nchez

(Columbia, Mo., 1966), 1-6; George I. S?nchez, Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans (1940; reprint, Albuquerque, 1996), xvi-xvii. Befitting the service intellectual ideal of freely diffusing knowledge, the Carnegie Foundation gave the book away. Carnegie provided four thousand dollars for Sanchez's research at the same time it supported work on a much larger study on African Americans?Gunnar Myrdal's classic An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1944).

12 Carlos Kevin Blanton, "From Intellectual Deficiency to Cultural Deficiency: Mexican Americans, Testing, and Public School Policy in the American Southwest, 1920-1940," Pacific Historical Review, 72 (February 2003), 56-61 (quotations on p. 60).

13 S?nchez, Forgotten People, 86. 14 George I. S?nchez, "History, Culture, and Education," in Julian Samora, ed., La Raza:

Forgotten Americans (Notre Dame, 1966), 1-26; Mario Garcia, Mexican Americans, 267-68.

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published through the United States Indian Service a government study on Navajo problems called The People: A Study of the Navajos}5

In 1937-1938 S?nchez transferred his New Deal, reformist ideology across borders as a Latin American education expert with a prestigious administrative post in Venezuela's national government. Writing to Edwin R. Embree, director of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, S?nchez described his work as the chief coordinator of the country's teacher training program in familiar New Deal terms: "the hardest task is breaking down social prejudices, traditional apathy, obstructive habits (political and personal) and in-bred aimlessness." His first program report was appropriately titled "Release from Tyranny."16 During

World War II S?nchez was appointed to the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs under Nelson A. Rockefeller, where he con tinued work on Latin American teacher-training programs as part of the war effort. S?nchez was deeply committed to progressive reform in Latin America that would lift educational and living standards.17

S?nchez also took on African American issues. From 1935 to 1937 he worked as a staff member with the Chicago-based Julius Rosenwald Fund. This philanthropic organization was concerned with African American rural education in the South, and in this capacity S?nchez collaborated with Fisk University's future president, the eminent so ciologist Charles S. Johnson, on preparing the massive Compendium on Southern Rural Life. S?nchez was listed in the study's budget as the highest-paid researcher for the 1936-1937 academic year with a $4,500 salary and a $2,000 travel budget. Sanchez's work with the Rosenwald Fund also involved numerous activities beyond his role as the group's pedagogical expert. In November and December 1936 he lobbied the Louisiana State Department of Education on behalf of a

15 "Dr. Sanchez Seeks Fulfillment of U.S. Promise to Navajos," Austin Daily Texan, November 16, 1946, in George I. S?nchez Vertical File (Center for American History, Austin, Texas; hereinafter this collection will be cited as S?nchez Vertical File and this repository as Center for American History); George I. S?nchez, The People: A Study of the Navajos ([Washington, D.C.], 1948).

16 G. I. S?nchez to Edwin R. Embree, October 17, 1937, Folder 4, Box 127, Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives (Special Collections, John Hope and Aurelia Franklin Library, Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee; hereinafter this collection will be cited as Rosenwald Fund Archives and this repository as Franklin Library) (quotation); Embree to S?nchez, October 29, 1937, ibid. Sanchez's work for the "Instituto Pedag?gico" occurred just after its creation in 1936 during a brief liberal phase of Venezuelan politics. For more on its creation, see Judith Ewell, Venezuela: A Century of Change (Stanford, 1984), 75.

17 Dave Cheavens, "Soft-Spoken UT Professor Loaned to Coordinator of Latin-American Affairs," Austin Statesman, December 3, 1943, in S?nchez Vertical File; "Texan Will Direct Training of Teachers," Dallas Morning News, November 3, 1943, ibid.; George I. S?nchez, "Mexican Education As It Looks Today," Nation's Schools, 32 (September 1943), 23, ibid.; George I. S?nchez, Mexico: A Revolution by Education (New York, 1936).

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WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 577

Rosenwald teacher-training program and the broader issue of school equalization. Equalization had been the primary avenue of African American activism that culminated with the Gaines v. Canada decision

of 1938, which mandated that the University of Missouri either admit a black law student or create a separate, equal law school for African Americans. S?nchez also lobbied in Washington, D.C., in February 1937, consulting with the Progressive Education Association and vari ous government agencies on Rosenwald projects.18

As one of his duties on the compendium project, S?nchez studied rote learning for rural African American children who lived in homes lacking in formal education. This study was inspired by Charles Johnson's mentor at the University of Chicago, Robert E. Park. Johnson, S?nchez, and other young researchers such as famed historian Horace Mann Bond were to look at ways to educate populations "handicapped by the lack of books and a tradition of formal education in the home." This venture was affiliated with the Tennessee Valley

Authority and chiefly concerned with "raising the cultural level" of poor, rural African Americans more effectively than standard text books and pedagogies developed for privileged students in other parts of the country. The project aimed to equip teachers to "integrate the knowledge which the school seeks to inculcate with the experiences of its pupils and with the tradition of the local community." Sanchez's comparable work with bilingual education in New Mexico and Latin America fit well within the scope of the new undertaking.19

Sanchez's biggest project with the Rosenwald Fund was creating a well-recognized teacher-training program at the Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute at Grambling. Charles S. Johnson later described this Grambling teacher-training program as "among the most progressive of the community-centered programs for the edu cation of teachers in the country." He praised the Grambling endeavor for offering African American teachers "opportunities for the devel opment of creativeness and inventiveness in recognizing and solving

18 Charles S. Johnson to Edwin R. Embree, October 16, 1936, Folder 1, Box 333, Rosenwald Fund Archives; Embree to Johnson, October 23, 1936, and enclosed budget manuscripts "Supplementary Budget on Rural Education Compendium" and "Rural School Exploration, Tentative Budget 1936-37," ibid.; undated project time sheet [October 7, 1936 to April 27, 1937], Folder 3, Box 127, ibid.; Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945-1980 (Baton Rouge, 1995), 15; Compendium on Southern Rural Life with Reference to the Problems of the Common School (9 vols.; [Chicago?], 1936).

19 Charles S. Johnson to Edwin R. Embree, January 21, February 25, 1937, Folder 5, Box 335, Rosenwald Fund Archives; Johnson to Dorothy Elvidge, June 23, 1937, and study proposal by Robert E. Park, "Memorandum on Rote Learning Studies," March 3, 1937, pp. 2 (first and second quotations), 3 (third quotation), ibid. S?nchez left shortly after the project began.

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the problems to be found in rural communities, homes, and schools . . . ."20 S?nchez oversaw this project from its inception in September 1936 until he left for Venezuela in the middle of 1937. He set up the curriculum, the budgets, the specialized staff (nurses, agri cultural instructors, home economists, and rural school supervisors), and equipment (the laboratory school and a bus for inspections). These duties involved close coordination with Grambling administrators, Louisiana health officials, and state education and agriculture bureau crats. Difficulties arose due to Sanchez's departure. One Rosenwald employee summarized the program's problems, "As long as George [S?nchez] was here he was the individual who translated that philoso phy to the people at Grambling, and I am sure that you agree with me that he could do it far more effectively than the rest of us. But now that Sanchez [sic] is not here it is the job of the president of the institution to do both this interpretation and this stimulation. ... I do not believe [President] Jones knows them."21

Fisk's Charles S. Johnson was elite company for S?nchez. Johnson's devastating attacks on southern sharecropping influenced public policy and garnered praise from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He and others spurred the creation of Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet."22 S?nchez practiced a similar combination of academic research and social activ ism. When he began his work at Grambling he had recently lost his position in the New Mexico State Department of Education due to his pointed advocacy of reform as well as his penchant for hard-hitting, publicly funded academic research on controversial topics such as the segregation of Mexican Americans in schools. He had long sparked controversy with his research on racial issues. What especially limited

20 Charles S. Johnson, "Section 8?The Negro Public Schools," in Louisiana Educational Survey (7 vols, in 8; Baton Rouge, 1942), IV, 216 (first quotation), 185 (second quotation). A copy of this volume is in Folder 5, Box 182, Charles Spurgeon Johnson Papers (Franklin Library).

21 A. C. Lewis to G. I. S?nchez, October 14, 1936, Folder 13, Box 207, Rosenwald Fund Archives; S?nchez to Dr. R. W. Todd, September 28, 1936, ibid.; S?nchez to Miss Clyde Mobley, September 28, 1936, ibid.; S?nchez to J. W. Bateman, September 28, 1936, ibid.; S?nchez to Lewis, September 28, 1936, ibid.; Edwin R. Embree to Lewis, September 29, 1936, ibid.; S?nchez to Lewis, September 30, 1936, ibid.; Dorothy A. Elvidge to Lewis, November 27, 1936, ibid.; Lewis to S?nchez, July 9, 1937, Folder 14, Box 207, ibid.; J. C. Dixon to Lewis, March 17, 1938, Folder 15, Box 207, ibid, (quotation on p. 2); S?nchez, "The Rural Normal School's Teacher Education Program Involves . . . ," September 17, 1936, Folder 16, Box 207, ibid.; S?nchez, "Suggested Budget?Grambling," April 9, 1937, ibid.; S?nchez, "Recommendations," December 9, 1936, ibid.

22 John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York, 1994), 91-92; George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge, 1967), 543, 544 (quotation); Matthew William Dunne, "Next Steps: Charles S. Johnson and Southern Liberalism," Journal of Negro History, 83 (Winter 1998), 10-11.

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WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 579

Sanchez's future in New Mexico was a 1933 furor over his distribution

of another scholar's Thurstone scale (a psychometric technique devel oped in the 1920s) on racial attitudes to pupils in New Mexico's public schools. Governor Arthur Seligman publicly demanded that S?nchez be ousted and that the General Education Board (GEB) cancel the grant funding his position in the state bureaucracy. Partly due to the influ ence of New Mexico's U.S. senator Bronson Cutting, a progressive Republican champion of Mexican Americans, S?nchez survived an ugly public hearing that resulted in the resignation of the University of New Mexico faculty member who devised the scale. Nevertheless, the incident severely constrained Sanchez's future in the New Mexican educational and political arena.23

But S?nchez was not pushed into African American education sim ply out of desperation for employment. He appreciated the opportuni ties that the Rosenwald Fund provided to broaden his activism as a service intellectual beyond the Southwest. He was direct about this to his most ardent supporter, President James F. Zimmerman of the University of New Mexico: "I'm sorry the [Rosenwald] Fund is vir tually prohibited from extending its interests and experiments into the Southwest. This is the only disappointment I feel in connection with my present work. I feel it keenly, however, as you know how deeply I am bound up with that area and its peoples. At the same time, though, being here has given me a wider viewpoint and experience that may well be directed at my 'first love' sometime." Zimmerman was disap pointed; he had groomed S?nchez for a faculty and administrative future at the University of New Mexico. Despite the uproar in 1933 Sanchez's talents were in high demand, however, as GEB agent Leo Favrot and Rosenwald director Edwin Embree coordinated which agency would carry Sanchez's salary with the New Mexico State Department of Education in early 1935 (GEB) and during a yearlong research project on Mexican higher education from 1935 to the middle of 1936 (Rosenwald Fund) until he joined the staff of the Rosenwald Fund on a full-time basis for his work at Grambling.24

23 G. I. S?nchez to Leo M. Favrot, April 27 and May 11, 1933, Folder 900, Box 100, General Education Board Papers (Rockefeller Archives Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York); Favrot to S?nchez, May 15, 1933, ibid.; Bronson Cutting to James F. Zimmerman, May 8, 1933, Folder "U.S. Senator Bronson Cutting," Box 12, Zimmerman Papers (University of New Mexico Archives, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque); Zimmerman to Cutting, May 1, 1933, Folder "U.S. Senator Bronson Cutting," Box 12, ibid.; Phillip B. Gonzales, Forced Sacrifice as Ethnic Protest: The Hispano Cause in New Mexico and the Racial Attitude Confrontation of 1933 (New York, 2001), 114, 130, 218, 244.

24 Edwin R. Embree to James F. Zimmerman, March 26, 1935, Folder "Organizations and

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S?nchez married the fields of southern, African American, rural education and southwestern, Mexican American, rural education. He discussed this fusion: "I am intensely interested in our programs at the [Rosenwald] Fund. Such projects as the Grambling experiment, the Louisiana Survey, etc., are very close to my own particular interests. However, I'd be much more effective if I were doing this same sort of work in the Southwest."25 S?nchez returned to New Mexico in 1938, when he came back from Venezuela, and carried over his understand ing of a southern, African American perspective to his work with southwestern Mexican Americans, particularly in a 1939 study of school equalization.26 In 1938 S?nchez also conceived his book Forgotten People with direct inspiration from the work of Howard W. Odum, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina. S?nchez explained that "the main purpose of the project is the preparation of a socio-economic 'bible' for New Mexico?Similar to Odum's Southern Regions and studies of the like." In fact, S?nchez attempted to per suade President Zimmerman to create an institute of the Southwest at

the University of New Mexico similar to the University of North Carolina's emphasis upon the South.27 Upon arriving at the University of Texas for a new job in the fall of 1940, S?nchez sought to continue blending African American and Mexican American educational re search through the Rosenwald Fund. Embree wrote that this was im possible: "Unfortunately, our foundation continues to feel that it should restrict its remaining limited resources to the pressing field of Negroes and Negro-white relations. Intellectually I agree with this decision, though I am terribly sorry not to take a direct part in the 'Mexican efforts.'"28

Sanchez's political activism cannot be separated from his pedagogi

Associations-Julius Rosenwald Fund, 1934-35/41/44," Box 8, Zimmerman Papers; G. I. S?nchez to Zimmerman, September 30, 1935, Folder "S?nchez, George I., 1933-35," Box 10, ibid. (quotation); S?nchez to Zimmerman, October 17, 1935, ibid.; Embree to Zimmerman, October 17, 1935, Folder "Organizations and Associations-Julius Rosenwald Fund, 1934-35/41/44," Box 8, ibid.; Zimmerman to S?nchez, October 22, 1935, Folder "S?nchez, George I., 1933-35," Box 10, ibid.

25 G. I. S?nchez to Leo M. Favrot, July 9, 1937, Folder 2043, Box 212, General Education Board Papers; S?nchez to Favrot, March 23, 1937, Folder 2983, Box 286, ibid.

26 George I. S?nchez, The Equalization of Educational Opportunity?Some Issues and Problems (Albuquerque, 1939), 37^10.

27 G. I. S?nchez to James Zimmerman, January 3, 1938, Folder "S?nchez, George I., 1938 41," University of New Mexico Archives?Faculty Files (Center for Southwest Research); Zimmerman to S?nchez, January 8, 1938, ibid.; S?nchez to Zimmerman, March 29, 1938, ibid.

28 G. I. S?nchez to Edwin R. Embree, April 3, 1940, Folder 5, Box 127, Rosenwald Fund Archives; S?nchez to Embree, March 12, 1945, Folder 4, Box 127, ibid.; Embree to S?nchez, March 19, 1945, ibid, (quotation).

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WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 581

cal work. Like Charles S. Johnson and the philanthropic organizations that supported southern education, S?nchez sought to transform society through academic research. One of his Rosenwald publications, "The Community School in the Rural Scene," epitomized New Deal activist scholarship: "This graphic portrayal of the South's cultural lag is by no

means a complete one. There are many other evidences of educational maladjustment that could be mentioned?political demagoguery, su perstition, the wastefulness of dichotomous education (negro-white, male-female, public-private), racial attitudes that bemean [sic] the ne gro and rebound to the degradation of whites, unprepared leadership, an unresponsive church. Suffice it to say, in summary, that in no other large area of the country is there so great a need for the rehabilita tion of a people, socially and physically, culturally and materially, as there is in the South today."29 The comparison of S?nchez to Johnson is not a shallow one. In a 1939 essay Johnson spoke of rural African American education in similar terms of isolation and cultural lag. Like S?nchez, Johnson would be criticized in later years for a seeming conservatism that inhibited sharp denunciations of racism. Yet minor ity scholars like Johnson and S?nchez in their work more forcibly challenged racial prejudice than most liberals of the 1930s and 1940s.30

S?nchez continued his New Deal-style scholarly activism immedi ately after the war. Believing that the correction of deficiencies in educational administration and curriculum by progressive bureaucrats and researchers would spare Mexican Americans from segregated schools, he publicly predicted, "We can do it by existing laws; we don't need any new ones." In 1945 he formed the First Regional Conference of the Education of Spanish Speaking-People in the Southwest. This forum allowed educators to protest segregation as "un-American, un-Christian, and immoral" into the early 1950s.31 One historian argues that in Sanchez's ideological worldview changing how

29 George I. S?nchez, "The Community School in the Rural Scene," in Samuel Everett, ed., The Community School (New York, 1938), 164-215 (quotation on p. 172); William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill, 1992), 240-43.

30 Charles S. Johnson, "The Cultural Environment of the Negro Child and its Educational Implications," February 15, 1939, Folder 5, Box 160, Johnson Papers; Dunne, "Next Steps," 2-3, 8-9.

31 "Texas' Racial Antagonism Blamed on Schools by Educators," Austin Daily Texan, December 14, 1945, in S?nchez Vertical Files (first quotation); "Sanchez to Open Education Panel: Spanish-Speakers Problems Studied," Austin Daily Texan, December 13, 1945, ibid.; "Five-State Conference Brands Mexican Schools as Un-American," Austin Daily Texan, December 16, 1945, ibid, (second quotation); "Dr. Sanchez Warns Against 'Zoning' Culture Groups," Austin Daily Texan, February 8, 1951, ibid.

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educators perceived Mexican Americans represented the best way to alleviate discrimination: "The system had its faults but it could be reformed. S?nchez strongly believed that when Anglo Americans learned about and appreciated the history and culture of Mexican

Americans, they would support needed reforms."32 George I. Sanchez's civil rights activism should be viewed as an

extension of his New Deal-inspired ideology of gradual, liberal reform led by service intellectuals. From the 1930s to the mid-1940s S?nchez was optimistic about the prospects for progressive educators to trans form racial prejudice into mutual tolerance and respect. All that was needed was for the offices of a sympathetic government to aid reform ers with their work of uplift. Sanchez's reformist ideology encom passed all racial and ethnic minorities as allies in a larger effort to recast American society in line with its aspirations rather than its failures. This larger ideological worldview and its overlap with the African American civil rights movement must be seriously considered in any history of the Mexican American civil rights movement. This point of view also influenced a peculiar, very instructive emphasis upon U.S. citizenship among Mexican Americans during World War II and into the 1950s.

As opposed to the recent analytical focus upon whiteness, the issue of citizenship is underappreciated in the study of Mexican American civil rights. Historian Peter Kolchin argues of some whiteness studies that "in assigning whiteness such all-encompassing power, they tend to ignore other forms of oppression, exploitation, and inequality."33 George I. Sanchez's civil rights activism after World War II demon strates that for him whiteness was less important than the thorny issue of citizenship. Though he believed in basic human rights, he viewed the democratic nation-state as its best guarantor, particularly after the U.S. and its allies had just triumphed in a world war against racist, fascist empires. After the war S?nchez elevated the significance of U.S. citizenship in making Mexican American civil rights. This veneration of citizenship placed non-Hispanics in closer proximity to Mexican Americans than non-citizen, Mexican immigrants. Thus, in their pur suit of civil rights, Mexican Americans consciously cut themselves off from vital segments of their own communities?family, friends, neigh bors, and coworkers. They emphasized citizenship over culture and citizenship over race. Simultaneously, restlessness within the Mexican

32 Mario Garc?a, Mexican Americans, 271. 33 Kolchin, "Whiteness Studies," 170.

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American community spurred S?nchez to abandon pedagogical gradu alism for legal confrontations that utilized whiteness.

As national president of LULAC and a new faculty member at the University of Texas, S?nchez found that World War II provided fresh opportunities to advance civil rights. He publicly professed outrage at continued racial discrimination even as he served the U.S. government in an official wartime capacity.34 Sanchez's wartime superiors at the

Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs supported these complaints because the professor's international reputation as a cham pion of liberal reform proved useful in their efforts to cultivate a moderate-left ideological perspective among Mexican Americans as an acceptable balance between the fascist Sinarquistas of Latin America and the communist-influenced Spanish-Speaking Congress of the U.S.35 S?nchez injected racial integration into government policy by applying the wartime Latin American "Good Neighbor" policy to

Mexican Americans at home. He chaired the University of Texas's Committee on Inter-American Relations, served on the Texas Good Neighbor Commission, helped the Texas State Department of Education create multicultural curricula, set up teacher conferences, and directed integrationist research. S?nchez proclaimed at a wartime conference that school segregation was more hurtful to the war effort "than a shipload of Nazi agents."36

S?nchez intensified his focus on citizenship during World War II. Within weeks of the bombing of Pearl Harbor?and while serving as national president of LULAC?S?nchez sent Nelson A. Rockefeller a proposal for a "Latin American Research and Policies Commission" that over the course of a year and a half would give $71,000 toward studies on Mexican Americans.37 S?nchez eventually received $41,000 from Rockefeller's GEB in 1947 for a more narrowly defined proj ect, his "Study of Spanish Speaking People," in which he directed the research of others for several years. As part of the project Lyle Saunders of the University of New Mexico and Olen Leonard of

34 G. I. S?nchez to Dennis Chavez, October 17, 1941, Folder 11, Box 22, S?nchez Papers; S?nchez to U.S.O., May 31, 1943, ibid.; Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 201-2.

35 Victor Borella to Nelson A. Rockefeller, April 2, 1943, pp. 1-7, Folder 36, Box 5, Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs Subseries, Series O, Record Group 4, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers (Rockefeller Archives Center).

36 Guadalupe San Miguel Jr., "Let All of Them Take Heed": Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910-1981 (Austin, 1987), chap. 4; Blanton, Strange Career of Bilingual Education, chap. 6; "Justice Urged for Mexicans in U.S.," Washington Post, May 6, 1942, p. 13 (quotation).

37 G. I. S?nchez to Nelson Rockefeller, December 31, 1941, Folder 9, Box 31, S?nchez Papers (quotation); Guti?rrez, Walls and Mirrors, 131.

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Vanderbilt University created a "wetback" report alleging that illegal aliens from Mexico threatened Mexican Americans' economic, social, and political viability.38

The "wetback" studies brought out the central tension between Sanchez's veneration of U.S. citizenship and his position as a leader of an ethnic and still partially immigrant community. S?nchez was troubled by the presence of Mexican immigrants, even though they differed little from Mexican Americans apart from the almost magical imprimatur of U.S. citizenship. He held that the "wetbacks" fed ven omous problems: "1) disorganized, migratory populations; 2) segre gated schools, 3) hostilities and tensions; 4) political apathy; 5) economic waste; 6) peonage, and 7) a divided citizentry [sic]."39 S?nchez viewed the citizenship issue through the lens of a traditional Mexican American emphasis upon cultural and political assimilation. In 1951 he argued that illegal immigration harmed these goals: "From a cultural standpoint . . . the influx of a million or more 'wetbacks' a year transforms the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest from an ethnic group which might be assimilated with reasonable facility into what I call a 'culturally indigestible' peninsula of Mexico."40

The distinction between Mexican Americans and Mexican immi grants was rooted in recent history and a part of the ideology of the so-called Mexican American Generation. During the depths of the Great Depression the U.S. forcibly repatriated to Mexico approxi mately five hundred thousand people who the U.S. claimed were illegal residents. Over half of these unfortunate deportees were actually American citizens. In 1942 and 1944 LULAC, the leading Mexican American activist organization, broke with what had been full support of the war effort by publicly opposing the bracero agreements between the U.S. and Mexico due to the activist group's fear of an "avalanche" of Mexican workers and a "lowering of wage standards almost to a peonage level." LULAC also opposed the renewal of the treaty in 1953. In a 1954 sweep known as "Operation Wetback," the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) deported over half a million persons who, despite the ideological collaboration of Mexican American

38 W. W. Brierley to Theophilus S. Painter, June 19, 1947, Folder 5491, Box 515, General Education Board Papers. The word wetback is an epithet describing illegal aliens from Mexico who traverse the Rio Grande. Though derogatory, all figures of the period regularly used the term, and thus I will as well, though I shall keep this odium in quotation marks.

39 Dick Elam, "Stop Wetback Flow, Texans Warned," Austin Summer Texan, June 12, 1949, in S?nchez Vertical Files (quotation); "Saturday Banquet to Honor Dr. Sanchez," Austin Daily Texan, April 21, 1950, ibid.; Guti?rrez, Walls and Mirrors, 145-46, 158-59.

40 Gladwin Hill, "Peons in the West Lowering Culture," New York Times, March 27, 1951, p. 31.

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WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 585

leaders like S?nchez, nonetheless included some U.S. citizens. Mexican Americans' willingness, pointedly demonstrated by S?nchez, to sacrifice those people lacking citizenship went unrewarded and unacknowledged.4 *

Though synchronous with Mexican American ideology, stressing American citizenship to such an extent was never free of controversy. S?nchez expected and received criticism from agricultural interests? those alleged to have mercilessly exploited Mexican farmworkers through both illegal immigration and the bracero program. However, S?nchez also received stinging criticism from Mexican Americans, including fellow LULAC members. Many Mexican Americans and

Mexican immigrants, though they may have supported most of LULAC s goals, were hostile to positions that caused pain to immi grants. Attorney Alonso S. Perales, one of LULAC's founders and an early supporter of immigrant restriction during the 1930s, criticized this research as racist and insulting. Nevertheless, the "wetback" re port had broad support among Mexican Americans, receiving public support from LULAC as well as the American G.I. Forum, a new, highly activist veterans group. The verve with which S?nchez em braced the attacks from within his own community reinforces the de gree to which he emphasized linking Mexican Americans with other ethnic groups in the U.S. more than he focused on helping their im migrant cousins; citizenship trumped race. This was a powerful, ulti mately fruitless sacrifice as Jim Crow discrimination against Mexican Americans stubbornly persisted.42

Viewed today, such attitudes appear to be insensitive, crassly op portunistic attempts by Mexican Americans who were legal citizens to utilize nativism, the tool of their oppressor, against the most vulnerable of their own community. This charge against LULAC and the G.I. Forum continues to appear in recent histories alleging of them a kind of middle-class conservatism connected to whiteness.43 The class com

position of Sanchez's audience through LULAC and the G.I. Forum is a complicated issue. The leaders of the organizations, like S?nchez himself, may have been middle-class professionals, but the rank and file of the Mexican American community and possibly even of those

41 Guti?rrez, Walls and Mirrors, 142 (third quotation), 144 (first and second quotations); L?pez, White By Law, 38.

42 "Study Attack Draws Retorts," San Antonio Light, December 9, 1951, in S?nchez Vertical Files; "University Praised By GI Forum Board," Austin Daily Texan, December 11, 1951, ibid.; Guti?rrez, Walls and Mirrors, 84-89.

43 Carroll, Felix Longoria's Wake, 9, 114; Foley, "Partly Colored or Other White," 132; Foley, White Scourge, 209-11.

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organizations was not. These aspirants to middle-class life may have embraced a middle-class ideology but were overwhelmingly repre sented in non-professional, blue-collar employment and lived in seg regated neighborhoods.44 Such conflations of the categories of whiteness and class are common in whiteness histories, according to one generally sympathetic critic. Charges of class warfare or com munity betrayal against Mexican American leaders call to mind the African American experience. Comparable organizations for African Americans like the NAACP bore similar charges from within the African American community then and from historians since.45

The elevation of the ideological rubric of citizenship made sense in the context of postwar liberalism. It fit with African American civil rights. Charles S. Johnson also emphasized U.S. citizenship and in

World War II wrote of African Americans and other ethnic Americans

as united in the struggle against racism. Also, the citizenship infatua tion did not conflict with support for unions, the most powerful com ponents of postwar liberalism. In Texas, for example, corporate business interests dominated the state's one-party political scene from within the "establishment" wing of the Democratic Party. Over the opposition of the smaller liberal wing of the Texas Democratic Party, these conservative interests enacted tough anti-labor statutes in the late 1940s. These same defenders of economic royalty also vigorously defended segregation and the unimpeded immigration of farm laborers. Mexican American organizations that were liberal on civil rights found ideologically compatible the claims by the pro-labor left that foreign workers threatened the wage scale; this fed Mexican Americans' pre existing emphasis upon sharp citizenship distinctions.46

That S?nchez so strongly opposed illegal immigration had more to do with the liberal ideology informing the Mexican American civil rights movement than it did with class antagonism. His denunciations of the "wetback" situation centered upon a belief that people were harshly exploited: "The life of a Wetback who escapes the attention of the Immigration Service is not pleasant .... He has no rights and no privi leges. He must stay off the highways and out of the towns. He must

44 Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame, 1979), chap. 5; Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 298-99.

45 Wickberg, "Heterosexual White Male," 151 ; Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 567-69. 46 Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York, 1943), 316; Dunne, "Next

Steps," 16; George Norris Green, The Establishment in Texas Politics: The Primitive Years, 1938-1957 (1979; reprint, Norman, Okla., 1984), 103-11, 139-41; Ricky F. Dobbs, Yellow Dogs and Republicans: Allan Shivers and Texas Two-Party Politics (College Station, Tex., 2005), 55-58.

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WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 587

work for whatever is offered under whatever conditions the employer chooses to provide. The Wetback's home is a shack or a brush shelter, or a blanket thrown beside a ditch. He owns nothing except that which he carries." This was no racialized critique of underclass Mexicans; rather, this passage highlights Sanchez's New Deal background of emphasizing the plight of powerless victims brutalized by powerful special interests. S?nchez said little about the victimization of immi grant Mexicans here that he did not also say of African Americans, Latin Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans through out his career. To S?nchez the fault lay with amoral capitalism?the solution with government action. By reconsidering the ideology in forming the Mexican American civil rights movement, Sanchez's seemingly elitist citizenship stance appears more consistent with his career's emphasis upon the sacred compact between governments and their citizens.47

Disappointed by society's retreat from Pan-Americanism after World War II, S?nchez eventually adopted a more confrontational approach. S?nchez explained this shift to Edwin Embree as the war was ending. He was alarmed at the durability of Mexican American school segregation and sketched how his own research agenda had shifted to meet this deepening problem: "While I am convinced that the segregated school as it now exists does not meet with the law, and while I have hopes that in the future its legality will be successfully challenged, the legal approach is a tedious one and one which, in any case, will have to be supported by expert educational evidence, a more enlightened public opinion, and fully documented evidence of various kinds. I have already started the ball rolling to gather data of a legal and of a pedagogical nature." Like African American activists after the war, Mexican Americans began to lose faith that discrimination could be gradually reformed away. A more confrontational effort was necessary.48

In the decade after World War II S?nchez shelved his New Deal gradualism for immediate confrontations of Jim Crow in the courts. By the early 1950s S?nchez coordinated civil rights litigation around the country through the Robert Marshall Civil Liberties Trust of the

47 Mario Garc?a, Mexican Americans, 270; Elam, "Stop Wetback Flow," (quotation); Gladwin Hill, "Interests Conflict on 'Wetback' Cure," New York Times, March 29, 1951, pp. 29, 30; "Justice Urged for Mexicans in U.S.," Washington Post, May 6, 1942, p. 13; George I. S?nchez, "New Mexicans and Acculturation," New Mexico Quarterly Review, 11 (February 1941), 62.

48 G. I. S?nchez to Edwin R. Embree, March 12, 1945, Folder 4, Box 127, Rosenwald Fund Archives (quotation); David L. Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Baltimore, 1994), 49.

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American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Roger N. Baldwin, executive director of the ACLU, oversaw the Marshall Trust, designed for Spanish speakers of the Southwest, and in 1951 appointed S?nchez, through the new organization S?nchez founded?the American Council of Spanish-Speaking People (ACSSP)?to administer block grants for the funding of civil rights lawsuits. S?nchez approved the disbursement of over $50,000 in Marshall funds for Mexican American civil rights efforts between 1951 and 1957.49 S?nchez and Baldwin regarded this effort as an attempt to create for Mexican Americans a national civil rights presence. Mexican American leaders like S?nchez and civil rights attorneys Ed Idar and Carlos Cadena believed that their community lagged behind African Americans in organization and viewed the ACSSP as emulating the NAACP and what Cadena described as the "ultra-progressive Negro Americans."50

Surprisingly, part of this money went to defend the rights of Mexican immigrants at the moment S?nchez was completing the "wet back" phase of his career in 1953 and 1954. These cases involved the deportation of longtime Mexican laborers because of ties to commu nism. A. L. Wirin, a prominent Los Angeles civil rights attorney and director of the Southern California ACLU, lost Galvan v. Press (1954) at the United States Supreme Court. Later the same year a separate case, Garcia v. Tandon (1954), was something of a victory for Wirin and ACSSP in that the vigorous dissents in Galvan had by Garcia prodded the INS to reconsider deportations when it could be demon strated that the communist affiliation was merely to secure food and shelter or was otherwise entered into out of ignorance of party beliefs. S?nchez made clear his lukewarm position on using Marshall money for non-citizens: "As to the deportation cases: Frankly, I do not regard them of great consequence to Mexican-Americans. I think they are worthy as general civil liberties cases, but not in the same class with housing, jury, school, etc. where Mexicans are specifically singled out for discrimination. I'll agree to sweeten the pot for these cases, but with very little sugar." Other Mexican American Generation leaders, par

49 Roger N. Baldwin to Robert Marshall Civil Liberties Trust, August 16, 1951, Folder 6, Box 31, S?nchez Papers; G. I. S?nchez to Robert Marshall Civil Liberties Trust, October 2, 1952, Folder 5, Box 31, ibid.; S?nchez to Simon Gross, August 12, 1953, Folder 6, Box 31, ibid.; Ed Idar Jr. to S?nchez, September 13, 1954, Folder 7, Box 31, ibid.

50 Pycior, LBJ and Mexican Americans, 95, 96 (quotation); Ricardo Romo, "George I. S?nchez and the Civil Rights Movement: 1940-1960," La Raza Law Journal, 1 (1986), 353-55.

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WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 589

ticularly attorneys, maintained ties to Mexican immigrants as well as to the Mexican government's consular offices.51

S?nchez held to these citizenship distinctions so strongly he risked alienating the granting agencies that supported Mexican American civil rights. When he met with some hesitation by the GEB regarding a 1949 grant application due to his insistence on sharp citizenship distinc tions, S?nchez countered that the need for such distinctions went be yond just Mexican Americans: "Keep in mind also that this year we may have as many as 500,000 illegial [sic] aliens working under virtual peonage in this area and undermining the entire socio-economic structure of a million or two Spanish-speaking people (to say nothing of the effects upon the Negroes and 'poor whites')." In 1952 the ACLU asked S?nchez if the ACSSP would support a National Farm Labor Union lawsuit against the secretary of labor over the bracero program's depression of domestic wages. S?nchez argued that the more pressing matter was "trying to stem the tide of illegal Mexican labor into this country," not "legally contracted workers from

Mexico."52 In this postwar shift away from the gradualism of transformational

pedagogy to the immediacy of civil rights law, S?nchez found him self collaborating with different kinds of activists. He worked a great deal with the ACLU's A. L. Wirin, who litigated the groundbreaking Westminster v. M?ndez, a 1947 case that fought Mexican American segregation in California. Using a temporary LULAC fund he admin istered, S?nchez hired Wirin the next year for the Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District case that attacked separate schools for

Mexican Americans in Texas. In 1950 Wirin called upon S?nchez to testify in Arizona's Gonzalez v. Sheely school segregation case. These suits were partial victories for Mexican Americans as the federal courts declared racial segregation illegal but left substantial loopholes regard ing curricular segregation based on language proficiency.53 Wirin was

51 A. L. Wirin to James Marshall, September 2, 1954, Folder 19, Box 62, S?nchez Papers; G.I. S?nchez to Wirin, December 11, 1953, Folder 18, Box 62, ibid, (quotation); F. Arturo Rosales, ?Pobre Raza! Violence, Justice, and Mobilization Among M?xico Lindo Immigrants, 1900-1936 (Austin, 1999), 134-35; Galvan v. Press, 341 U.S. 522 (1954); Garcia v. Landon, 348 U.S. 866 (1954).

52 G. I. S?nchez to Fred McCuistion, February 16, 1949, Folder 5492, Box 515, General Education Board Papers (first quotation); S?nchez to Simon Gross, April 3, 1952, Folder 6, Box 31, S?nchez Papers (remaining quotations).

53 G. I. S?nchez to A. L. Wirin, June 3, 1950, Folder 15, Box 62, S?nchez Papers; Wirin to S?nchez, November 18, 1950, ibid.; Westminster School Dist. of Orange County et al. v. M?ndez et al, 161 F.2d 774 (9th Cir. 1947); Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District, (No. 388 Civil, unreported; W.D. Texas 1948). The Delgado case may also be found in mimeographed

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an intermediary between S?nchez and Baldwin, traveled to the ACLU's national offices in New York to lobby Marshall trustees for ACSSP budgets, and conferred with S?nchez on a wide spectrum of court cases. Sanchez's shyness about defending immigrant communists was not shared by Wirin and Baldwin, who were unfamiliar with the ideology of the Mexican American Generation. Indeed, Sanchez's dis comfort about communism echoes the discomfort that Walter White, head of the NAACP, felt in the involvement of the communist Inter national Labor Defense with the racially charged Scottsboro, Alabama, and Angelo Herndon cases in the 1930s.54

This partnership was fruitful. The Marshall Civil Liberties Trust empowered local Mexican American groups to initiate litigation pro grams. Sanchez's ACSSP was a shell organization. It met only once a year, had a changing list of officers representing the organizations to obtain Marshall grants for specific cases, and was directed by S?nchez through his executive secretary, Ed Idar, with additional support from the G.I. Forum. The ACSSP disbursed funds to the Texas-based G.I.

Forum, the California-based Community Services Organization (CSO), and the Arizona-based Alianza Hispano-Americana. The part nership with the Alianza resulted in successful cases involving dis crimination at a Winslow, Arizona, swimming pool and school segregation in Tolleson, Arizona. The CSO initiated unsuccessful cases attacking police brutality and press hysteria in Los Angeles. The G.I. Forum partnership resulted in two successful federal cases: the 1957 Hernandez v. Driscoll school segregation case and the highly impor tant 1954 Hernandez v. Texas jury case. In Hernandez v. Texas the U.S. Supreme Court, weeks before the more widely recognized Brown v. Board decision, held that Mexican American exclusion from juries was unconstitutional. Mexican Americans claimed that, by law, they were white, and thus the practice of segregation directed against them was illegal. This is commonly referred to as Mexican Americans' "whiteness strategy." Many regarded such efforts as highly successful. One of Sanchez's GEB contacts wrote that Jim Crow for Mexican Americans, as a result of these decisions, would soon be eradicated. It seemed to S?nchez and others in the middle 1950s as if Mexican

form in the S?nchez Papers. It went unreported to the legal publishing agencies and is thus difficult to find. For more on this see Wilson, Rise of Judicial Management, 316n\AA.

54 A. L. Wirin to G. I. S?nchez, August 21, 1950, Folder 15, Box 62, S?nchez Papers; S?nchez to Wirin, August 24, 1950, Folder 15, Box 62, ibid.; Wirin to S?nchez, June 14, 1951, Folder 16, Box 62, ibid.; Charles H. Martin, The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice (Baton Rouge, 1976), 68-72, 202-^.

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Americans' whiteness legal strategies and sharp citizenship distinc tions were working.55

However, others assessed these efforts by comparing the civil rights organizational structure of Mexican Americans to that of African Americans. Mexican Americans suffered when measured by such a yardstick. By 1959 the Marshall Trust assessed its nineteen-year ex penditure of nearly a third of a million dollars as a failure. This dis appointment included Sanchez's ACSSP. Though acknowledging "encouraging results," Roger Baldwin concluded that "it became ap parent that the major efforts in this field were localized" and that "the Trustees are disinclined to make grants for purely local enterprises or to set up new agencies." S?nchez was wounded by the decision. He felt the ACSSP stimulated a self-sustaining legal program at the G.I. Forum and regarded the Alianza venture as groundbreaking. As a result S?nchez assessed the efforts differently: "I cannot imagine how, in this area of endeavor, the Marshall Trust could invest money more profit ably than how it has done so far." S?nchez estimated, "I venture to say that civil liberties principle was not bought so cheaply (in dollars) in any other major operation." He argued that the desire to create at that time for Mexican Americans a single NAACP-type national organiza tion was unrealistic. Though the ACSSP was regional in appearance, S?nchez argued, its work was national in effect. The Marshall Trust liquidated its assets, the ACSSP disappeared, and a national civil rights organization for Mexican Americans had to wait until creation of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund using Ford Foundation money nearly a decade later.56

After World War II George I. Sanchez's liberal reform ideology, one that had been as internationalist as it was gradualist, shifted to

55 A. L. Wirin to G. I. S?nchez, July 18, 1951, Folder 16, Box 62, S?nchez Papers; S?nchez to Wirin, October 30, 1951, ibid.; Gonzalez et al. v. Sheely et al., 96 F. Supp. 1004 (1951); S?nchez to Wirin, March 26, 1953, Folder 18, Box 62, S?nchez Papers; Wirin to S?nchez, September 28, 1953, ibid.; John F. Finerty to S?nchez, October 1, 1953, and enclosed memo from

Wirin to Robert Marshall Trust Fund, September 22, 1953, ibid.; Wirin to S?nchez, March 3, 1954, Folder 19, Box 62, ibid.; Wirin to S?nchez, March 23, 1954, ibid.; Wirin to S?nchez, April 9, 1954, ibid.; Wirin to James Marshall, June 2, 1954, ibid.; Wirin to S?nchez, October 5, 1954, ibid.; S?nchez to Simon Gross, August 19, 1957, Folder 8, Box 31, ibid.; S?nchez to Roger N. Baldwin, October 26, 1954, Folder 7, Box 31, ibid.; Hernandez et al. v. Driscoll Consolidated Independent School District et al, 2 Race Relations Law Reporter 329 (S.D. Texas 1957); Hernandez v. Texas, 74 S.Ct. 667 (1954).

56 Roger N. Baldwin to Robert Marshall Civil Liberties Trust, March 17, 1959, Folder 8, Box 31, S?nchez Papers (first three quotations); A. L. Wirin to G. I. S?nchez, May 17, 1956, Folder 2, Box 63, ibid.; S?nchez to Baldwin, May 26, 1954, Folder 7, Box 31, ibid.; S?nchez to Baldwin, March 24, 1959, Folder 8, Box 31, ibid, (last two quotations); San Miguel, "Let All of Them Take Heed," 169-72.

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heighten an emphasis upon a very exclusive conception of national citizenship and demands for an immediate end to Jim Crow. Like other minority reformers shaped by the New Deal, S?nchez felt discouraged about the stubborn persistence of racial discrimination. Significantly, not only did S?nchez privilege Mexican American citizens above Mexican immigrants, but he also placed other non-Latino minorities like African Americans above Mexican immigrants. All the while he urged the employment of whiteness strategies in the courts. But for S?nchez whiteness has less explanatory power than the divisive issue of citizenship.

Understanding Sanchez's ideology and his interaction with major foundations underscores the fascinating parallels and oblique ties be tween the Mexican American and African American civil rights move

ments. At times, though, interaction between the movements was direct. S?nchez debated civil rights strategy in the 1940s and 1950s with Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP's storied litigator and a future justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. These early connections demand a reconsideration of historical interpretations arguing that Mexican Americans' utilization of whiteness severed contact with the African

American civil rights movement and was, in effect, an embrace of white racism. Though Mexican American leaders like S?nchez pursued whiteness in the courts, they still believed in common cause with African Americans.57

First, however, it is necessary to understand differing historical in terpretations of Mexican American whiteness. All historians of

Mexican American civil rights have noted the whiteness strategy in negative terms. Though the whiteness strategy seemed to make sense at the time, it was ultimately shortsighted. At the pinnacle of success it was made instantly obsolete by the Brown v. Board decision. None of this is disputed. Rather, at issue is whether or not the embrace of whiteness legal arguments inside the courtroom metastasized into anti black bigotry outside the courtroom. Or, put another way, did Mexican Americans internalize the racism they experienced from whites and in turn re-direct that racism toward African Americans? Scholars in the

whiteness camp answer yes. George Lipsitz maintains that "Aggrieved communities of color have often curried favor with whites in order to

make gains at each other's expense" and lists as an example Mexican

57 The records documenting this limited yet surprising cooperation have gone unnoticed by historians until very recently. Amilcar Shabazz, Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas (Chapel Hill, 2004), 58, 240?75.

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Americans' insistence on being classified as white. Historian Patrick Carroll tentatively explains that "well-to-do and successful Tejano leaders seemed to be aping and perhaps even strengthening the climate of racism" due to an unintentional internalization of whiteness. Neil

Foley argues there was no unintentional innocence about Mexican American whiteness: "Growing numbers of middle-class Mexican Americans thus made Faustian bargains that offered them inclusion within whiteness provided that they subsumed their ethnic identities under their newly acquired White racial identity and its core value of

White supremacy."58 Examples of Mexican American racism do exist. In one essay Foley

cites a LULAC News article from the 1930s lamenting the romantic couplings of African Americans and Mexican Americans at dances. Foley also notes a Mexican American businessman from Dallas in the 1950s who objected to the G.I. Forum and LULAC alliance with the

NAACP in pursuit of shared civil rights. Another essay notes a con troversy in the 1930s when the federal government upset decades of custom by substituting a "Mexican" category for Mexican Americans in place of their traditional designation as "white" in the U.S. census. Protests of this action in El Paso produced a racist, anti-black dis course.59 Beyond these and other identifiable anecdotes, however, the argument for Mexican Americans' internalization of whiteness is largely based on the idea that the whiteness legal strategy was inher ently racist. This thinness of primary evidence may have to do with the fact that whiteness studies are just beginning to explore the issue. One critic generously explains, "It is not surprising that authors in the field have sometimes claimed more for whiteness than the evidence will support or that their work is often characterized more by boldness than by finesse, for such is typically the nature of new disciplines or approaches."60

Other historians resist such interpretations. Steven H. Wilson has recently addressed whether or not legal whiteness strategies had any larger significance for Mexican Americans. While admitting the possibility of some degree of internalization, Wilson argues against any group-wide attribution of racialist beliefs and holds that legally

58 Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 3-4 (first quotation on p. 3); Carroll, Felix Longoria's Wake, 114-15 (second quotation on p. 114), 124-25; Foley, "Becoming Hispanic," 54-64 (third quotation on p. 63).

59 Foley, "Becoming Hispanic," 54 (quotation), 63-64; Foley, "Partly Colored or Other White," 129-34.

60Kolchin, "Whiteness Studies," 172.

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opportunistic arguments inside the courtroom do not necessarily trans late into sincere belief outside the courtroom. Benjamin Heber Johnson

maintains that the "Progressive" cadre that formed LULAC in Texas "displayed little interest in the whiteness strategy. They did not seem to think of themselves as white or even to aspire to such a status." For example, J. Luz Saenz, an early LULAC organizer, con sistently opposed all forms of racial discrimination, including that which was directed against African Americans; he believed that his own people "were unlikely in any event to be treated as equals in a society with stark racial hierarchies." Also, recent work demon strates that anti-miscegenation laws in California crumbled in 1948 due to couples made up of African Americans and Mexican Americans.61

In light of this interpretive dispute, an analysis of the relationship between contrasting civil rights figures such as George I. S?nchez and Thurgood Marshall can be an especially instructive exercise in com parative civil rights history. Both men sought alliances with the politi cal left, believed in working within the system to end discrimination, and regarded racial discrimination as one of the most pressing issues in American life. But much separated these seemingly similar activists. Sanchez's pedagogical approach to civil rights depended on the gov ernment and the schools to progressively transform the nation's social deficiencies from within the classroom; Marshall's legal focus sought to combat Jim Crow from within the courtroom. S?nchez the idealist believed that local authorities, if confronted with documentation of racism, would capitulate?reason and professionalism would prevail. A realist, Marshall had less use for efforts to convince segregationists to become more benevolent?legal force would prevail. S?nchez was a watchdog over curricular justifications (like language or testing) for segregation, for Mexican Americans were segregated on these criteria. African Americans, on the other hand, faced separate facilities due to being legally defined as another race. This did not mean that peda gogical content was unimportant to Marshall and the NAACP?later successes depended in part upon the use of such data?just that their legal strategies focused on undermining the 1896 "separate but equal"

61 Steven H. Wilson, "Tracking the Shifting Racial Identity of Mexican Americans," Law and History Review, 21 (Spring 2003), 211-13; Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 51 (first two quota tions), 193-94 (third quotation), 240^35; Dara Orenstein, "Void for Vagueness: Mexicans and the Collapse of Miscegenation Law in California," Pacific Historical Review, 74 (August 2005), 367-407.

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doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson, a racist legal rationale that did not apply to Mexican Americans.62

The Sanchez-Marshall relationship began in the summer of 1948. A. L. Wirin and other attorneys (paid from a special LULAC legal fund administered by S?nchez) had just won Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District. Wirin passed to S?nchez a message from the NAACP's chief litigator. Marshall had telephoned Wirin to con gratulate him and, in Wirin's words, to ask "for the benefit of our experience so that he may use it in his school segregation cases." As

Wirin described the conversation, "I told him that you were [Gus] Garcia's and my 'brain trust' and that you knew everything that we knew plus a limitless amount more . . . and that you might be willing to furnish him with the results of our experience." Marshall wished to examine the affidavits of Sanchez's expert witnesses. That same day Marshall wrote S?nchez to express his interest in the affi davits as both he and Wirin were "of the opinion that there is material in this file which will help us in our case concerning segregated schools in Hearne, Texas." The trial, however, was postponed (and eventually abandoned). Marshall sent word of this to S?nchez, but not before S?nchez replied to Marshall's first letter: "I doubt very much that the affidavits which I have would be of any assistance to you, since those affidavits are pointed specifically towards a denial of the pedagogical soundness of segregation that is based on the 'lan guage handicap' excuse. In addition, my experts on this particular issue could not very well qualify as experts in the issue such as is being raised at Hearne. Nevertheless, I shall be glad to show you the file when you come to Austin, and will be glad to go over it with you." S?nchez offered additional advice: "While the affidavits will proba bly not be of any help to you, it may be that the plan of attack that we have used may be. Our segregation suit was won before we went to court! . . . You can count on me for any assistance that I can give you in that regard." S?nchez referred to the strategy of enjoining the state superintendent in the suit and forcing the state attorney gen eral to issue a pre-trial legal opinion on recent federal rulings (the California M?ndez decision in particular) that hamstrung the school districts.63

62 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955; new ed., New York, 2002), 146-47; Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP's Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925 1950 (Chapel Hill, 1987), 21-25, 131.

63 A. L. Wirin to G.I. S?nchez, July 1, 1948, Folder 15, Box 62, S?nchez Papers (first two quotations); Thurgood Marshall to S?nchez, July 1, 1948, Folder 8, Box 24, ibid, (third

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The next year Wirin wrote to S?nchez about filing an amicus curiae brief supporting the NAACP's groundbreaking Sweatt v. Painter seg regation case that allowed blacks to enter the University of Texas law school. S?nchez eagerly responded, revealing his inner pedagogue: "I would like to see an amicus brief developed along somewhat different lines from those followed by Thurgood Marshall. In the first place, 'equal protection' should go far beyond mere comparison of professors books-buildings in [the] law school. The comparison should be one which involves the whole of education that has been made available to

the white law-school graduate and the whole of education available to the Negro. . . . Furthermore, the whole idea of dichotomous education implies ostracism?and its whole spirit is based on the concept of inequality." S?nchez did not anticipate how the NAACP in Brown v. Board would soon use social science to demonstrate the harmful ef fects of Jim Crow, nor did he demonstrate a thorough grounding in law. S?nchez asked, "Isn't there some principle in law that makes it obliga tory that a law must be reasonable and conducive to the general wel fare?" This was what the NAACP attempted to show in Sweatt. S?nchez also exhibited a bit of naivete by remarking that segregation, if followed to its logical ends, would mean that "any legislature could in the heat of hysteria segregate Baptist, or Italians, or Republicans, ad absurdum" thus ensuring that "U.S. citizenship would become a very empty legal fiction." Having represented interned Japanese Americans during World War II, Wirin, more than most, understood that "ad absurdum" segregation did indeed happen. LULAC s inability to pro vide the necessary $500 after the termination of its meager legal fund meant that the brief never materialized; the opportunity to forge a more formal link with the NAACP was delayed.64

S?nchez never gave up on trying to strategize with Thurgood Marshall. He went through Roger Baldwin of the ACLU to pester

quotation); telegram from Marshall to S?nchez, July 14, 1948, ibid.; S?nchez to Marshall, July 6, 1948, ibid, (last two quotations).

64 A. L. Wirin to G. I. S?nchez, November 16, 1949, Folder 15, Box 62, S?nchez Papers (first quotation); S?nchez to Wirin, November 18, 1949, ibid, (remaining quotations); Wirin to S?nchez, November 28, 1949, ibid.; S?nchez to Wirin, December 14, 1949, ibid. LULAC s lack of resources for litigation cannot be underestimated. S?nchez in 1946 used a grant from the University of Texas board of regents to document school segregation (a request the GEB had earlier denied), thus providing evidence for LULAC s legal challenges. It is highly doubtful that the infamously reactionary University of Texas board of regents knew of this or of the defense of deported Mexican communists by ACSSP in the 1950s. See S?nchez to Fred McCuistion, June 17, 1946, Folder 5490, Box 514, General Education Board Papers; and McCuistion to S?nchez, July 11, 1946, ibid.

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Marshall with suggestions on how best to proceed with school segre gation lawsuits in the post-Brown v. Board atmosphere. S?nchez re flected a distinctively Mexican American civil rights experience (local/ regional organizations, mediation, and preoccupation with education hierarchies) as compared to Marshall's distinctively African American civil rights experience (national organizations, concern with federal court mandates instead of mediation, and disinclination to involve state officials). S?nchez asked why the NAACP did not enjoin education officials or take action in state courts? Marshall explained the NAACP's strategy and assured S?nchez that there was "no deep seated problem of personalities." Marshall asked A. Maceo Smith of the Texas NAACP to consult S?nchez about how Mexican Americans then

dealt with the issue of choice in school desegregation.65 The corre spondence was cordial and shows that both realized the value of

maintaining contact. But it also depicts two activists talking past one another. Sanchez's pedagogical approach to civil rights was due to his academic background, to his subscription to Mexican American Generation ideology, and to the realities of Mexican American segre gation, not to internalized racial antipathy.

Though Sanchez's extension into African American issues was less intensive in the 1940s and 1950s than it had been during his Rosenwald days in the late 1930s, it nevertheless involved more than correspon dence with Thurgood Marshall. During this period S?nchez conveyed the civil rights experiences of Mexican Americans to the African American civil rights movement by speaking to NAACP groups in Texas. In addition, S?nchez, who had been involved in the govern ment conferences in 1942 that resulted in the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), worked with NAACP chairman Walter White to successfully recommend the appointment of a University of Texas colleague, historian Carlos E. Casta?eda, to the FEPC. Casta?eda was an active and capable FEPC investigator of both Mexican American and African American discrimination complaints during the war.66

65 Thurgood Marshall to G. I. S?nchez, July 11, 1955, Folder 8, Box 24, S?nchez Papers; Marshall to S?nchez, September 12, 1955, ibid, (quotation); S?nchez to Marshall, September 24, 1955, ibid.; Marshall to A. Maceo Smith, October 7, 1955, ibid.

66 "Sanchez to Discuss Negro Education," Austin Daily Texan, April 28, 1948, in S?nchez Vertical Files; "Sanchez to Speak at NAACP Meet," Austin Daily Texan, October 7, 1951, ibid.; Emilio Zamora, "The Failed Promise of Wartime Opportunity for Mexicans in the Texas Oil Industry," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 95 (January 1992), 330-33; F?lix D. Almar?z Jr., Knight Without Armor: Carlos Eduardo Casta?eda, 1896-1958 (College Station, Tex., 1999), 260-62; Romo, "George I. S?nchez and the Civil Rights Movement," 346-48.

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Also, S?nchez continued a cordial and professional relationship with Charles S. Johnson, one of Fisk University's most distinguished schol ars, who became president of the university in 1947. S?nchez shared with Johnson a draft copy of his influential 1943 essay in Common Ground, "Pachucos in the Making," for comments before its publica tion. In it S?nchez, like Johnson and other African American civil rights figures, portrayed the fight against racism in the U.S. as an extension of the fight against fascism abroad. Moreover S?nchez was a featured speaker at Johnson's Race Relations Institute at Fisk University in 1950 and again in 1957. (These talks were not insignifi cant affairs. In the summer of 1956, for example, historian C. Vann

Woodward delivered "An Historical View of Segregation," an encap sulation of his influential book The Strange Career of Jim Crow, then less than a year old.) In his 1957 address to the Race Relations Institute, S?nchez garnered some press attention with his claims that

Mexican American discrimination had unique sources: the United States' colonial subjugation of the Southwest and its rapacious desire for cheap labor. S?nchez also recommended to Johnson other speakers on the Mexican American experience.67

In light of his wide-ranging interest in African American civil rights, what did whiteness mean personally to George I. S?nchez? While generally more concerned with class and poverty than concepts of race, S?nchez did demonstrate an acute intellectual self-awareness about the

relationship between whiteness and civil rights. In attempting to con vince the ACLU to continue its financial sponsorship of the ACSSP, S?nchez pleaded that the Mexican American situation was unique. He explained that "the Mexican-Americans are not and do not regard themselves as a homogenous ethnic group or cultural group. This

means that resistance to discrimination becomes fragmented, local, and personal. . . . This is far different from the case of Negroes, Japanese, Jews, and other disadvantaged groups. We have a unique situation here?and the remedies cannot follow usual procedures." He then

67 G. I. S?nchez to Charles S. Johnson, "Pachucos?In the Making," undated [1942 or early 1943], pp. 1-13, Folder 6, Box 203, Johnson Papers; S?nchez to Johnson, June 3, 1950, Folder 2, Box 36, ibid.; C. Vann Woodward, "An Historical View of Segregation," pp. 1-17, undated [July 2-14, 19561, Folder 16, Box 38, ibid.; Wallace Westfeldt, "Institute Studies Indians, Latins: Fisk Panel Reviews Racial Problems of U.S. Southwest," Nashville Tennessean, July 5, 1957, clipping in Folder 5, Box 39, ibid, (quotation); S?nchez to Johnson, April 1, 1954, Folder 16, Box 20, S?nchez Papers; S?nchez to Fisk University Race Relations Institute, May 24, 1957, Folder 9, Box 13, ibid.; S?nchez, "Pachucos in the Making," Common Ground, 4 (Autumn 1943), 13-20;

Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 221-25; Patrick J. Gilpin and Marybeth Gasman, Charles S. Johnson: Leadership Beyond the Veil in the Age of Jim Crow (Albany, 2003), 192. Johnson died in late 1956.

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heightened the importance of Mexican Americans: "Let us keep in mind that the Mexican-American can easily become the front-line of defense of the civil liberties of ethnic minorities. The racial, cultural, and historical involvements in his case embrace those of all of the other minority groups. Yet, God bless the law, he is 'white' ! So, the Mexican-American can be the wedge for the broadening of civil liberties for others (who are not so fortunate as to be 'white' and 'Christian'!). Here it is well to note that the Brown vs. Board of

Education judgment was preceded by two weeks by the Hern?ndez judgment?and no one reading the latter could have doubted the out come of the former." With a trace of bitterness S?nchez confided, "I am sorry that Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP have not seen fit to consult us in these matters. They are just now facing segregatory measures we faced and solved some time ago."68 S?nchez exuded a false bravado; Mexican Americans had not "solved" anything despite their increasingly hollow legal victories. His prediction of further hurdles was correct, however, as Brown was only the beginning of a new phase in the ongoing struggle for racial justice in the United States.69

But S?nchez, even late in life, still viewed race with an outlook wedded to the New Deal models of his youth. He also shed light on his understanding of the racial middle ground he himself occupied. S?nchez recalled his Rosenwald days in 1966 with unintentionally insensitive language that echoed the academically mainstream and ul timately discredited Moynihan Report:

I went into work with two fantastic communities?that of the southern Whites

and that of the southern Negroes. As far apart as the poles. To them, fortunately, I was neither a White or a Negro?but a little of both. How do you get a southern demagogue to urge their respective Legislatures to appropriate funds for Negro welfare? Then as now any improvement for the Negro was against the interest of the power structure. The community mores in most of the South then are beyond description by me. The miserable, stinking, stomach-turning schools offered the Negro (and also the poor White, by the way) still haunt

me in my nightmares. The repression, the abandonment, the lack of humane ness, was unbelievable. Here, indeed, was a community become animalistic. No longer a slave, the Negro was thrown on the dung heap?to fester, and to rot, and to stink. His community had become insane, criminally insane. And the end is not yet. Nor is that of the American of Mexican descent in the Southwest.

68 G. I. S?nchez to Roger N. Baldwin, August 27, 1958, Folder 8, Box 31, S?nchez Papers. 69 For the NAACP's continuing desegregation efforts after Brown, see J. W. Peltason, Fifty

Eight Lonely Men: Southern Federal Judges and School Desegregation (1961; new ed., Urbana, 1971).

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S?nchez used such language not to humiliate African Americans but to decry the discrimination they faced. The scar of racism was borne more by its proponents: "The poor whites, some poor economically, some better off, but all of them poor in their heads and in their souls?have paid and are paying the price of bigotry, of racism. And they are paying more than is the Negro. If there ever was a sick community, that is it."70 Efforts of liberal social scientists and intellectuals like S?nchez

to portray the victimization of African Americans with such lan guage were just then being met with disdain and charges of cultural ignorance.71

During the ^osi-Brown climate of massive southern resistance, the Mexican American and African American civil rights movements had arrived at a point at which they both would fight segregation on more similar ground. For example, during the height of massive resistance in Texas in 1957, Mexican American state senator Henry B. Gonzalez of San Antonio successfully filibustered several segregationist bills aimed at rolling back the Brown decision and African American civil rights in general. This is highly significant since at this time even many south ern white liberals were "paralyzed by their belief that mass white segregationist sentiment was overwhelming." Though surely there were some Mexican Americans who gave voice and action to racism against African Americans, that many significant Mexican American leaders so publicly supported African Americans during massive re sistance is an important counterpoint.72

By the late 1950s S?nchez recognized that the two struggles were growing closer. In a plea to Baldwin to continue the support of the

Marshall Trust, he wrote that "resistance to the integration of Negroes and whites in public schools is bound to affect the Mexican adversely. For example, if school authorities can assign Negroes to schools and classes on the basis of capricious criteria, as provided by recent leg islation, they can do likewise for the Mexican." S?nchez then viewed

Mexican American activism as stagnant: "But, in the Southwest, cur

70 George I. S?nchez, "Southwest Spanish-Americans Prepare to Challenge Power-Structure Forcing Second-Class Citizenship," Southwesterner, 6 (December 1966), 22 (first quotation), 23 (second quotation).

71 Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-J 925 (New York, 1976), xvii-xxii; Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the ?mage of the

Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996 (Chapel Hill, 1997), chaps. 6 and 9. For an African American social scientist who utilized such inflammatory academic descriptions of African Americans, see E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, 111., 1957).

72 Green, Establishment in Texas Politics, 190; Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 276; Tony Badger, '"Closet Moderates': Why White Liberals Failed, 1940-1970," in Ted Ownby, ed., The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South (Jackson, Miss., 2002), 111 (quotation).

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rently there is a complacency or an indifference that could become dangerous?the notion that 'time will take care of it,' and ideas to the same effect. I am afraid that this will dull the leadership to a blindness to the fact that there is a widening gap between the status of the 'Mexican' and that of the dominant group."73 After much hard work and many hollow legal victories, discrimination still existed. S?nchez inchoately gave voice to the frustration that would a decade later boil over into a revolution in political identity?the Chicano movement. African American activists and intellectuals experienced similar frustrations. Between 1954 and 1956 Charles Johnson uncharacteristi

cally decried more sharply than ever before the tempering of the liberal reform ethos on civil rights. Farther to the left along the ideological spectrum W. E. B. Du Bois had already expressed grave pessi

mism over the sincerity of white liberals and philanthropists regarding African Americans.74

The interchange of ideas directly between S?nchez and Thurgood Marshall and indirectly through their intermediaries, Wirin and Baldwin, tantalizes historians with possibilities, as do Sanchez's long term links to Charles S. Johnson. Yet there were even firmer connec

tions between the two civil rights movements. In the mid-1950s the Alianza Hispano-Americana filed a lawsuit in cooperation with the NAACP in southern California, the Romero v. Weakley case. The parents of twenty African American and forty-four Mexican American children argued that the El Centro school district and Imperial County board of supervisors, after years of broken promises, continued to place their children together, segregated into separate and unequal schools. Though the Alianza and the NAACP intentionally filed separate law suits on the same day, the court consolidated them. The Alianza ob tained crucial financial support from Sanchez's ACSSP.75 The Alianza and the NAACP settled the case by forcing the schools to stipulate that segregation would end. The win was crucial for the Alianza since it, with the support of S?nchez and the ACSSP, was pursuing an

73 G. I. S?nchez to Roger N. Baldwin, August 8, 1958, Folder 8, Box 31, S?nchez Papers. 74 Dunne, "Next Steps," 24-26; Gilpin and Gasman, Charles S. Johnson, 219-24. For the

tangled relationship of African American colleges and philanthropy, see James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill, 1988), 263-70.

75 A. L. Wirin to G. I. S?nchez, February 3, 1955, and enclosed article, "Segregation Charged in Southland: Suits Hit El Centro, Imperial County School Officials," Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1955, pt. II, p. 6, in Folder 1, Box 63, S?nchez Papers; Wirin to S?nchez, June 27, 1955, ibid.', Joe R. Romero, etc. et al, v. Guy Weakley, et al., Brief for Appellants, Folder 3, Box 63, ibid.; Romero et al. v. Weakley et al; Burleigh et al. v. Weakley et al, 131 F. Supp. 818 (S.D. California 1955).

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endowment for a permanent civil rights program from the Ford Fund for the Republic. The Marshall Trust approved; it wanted its seed money to grow into a national Mexican American civil rights or ganization. Though the Alianza did obtain Ford support, on the eve of the Romero victory it abandoned the grant due to internal consternation at changing its decades-old tax status from "fraternal" to "charitable." By 1958 the money dried up, and, despite impassioned pleas by S?nchez, the Marshall Trust was negatively assessing the entire ven ture.76 Nevertheless, a surprising degree of cooperation did exist be tween the Mexican American and African American civil rights

movements. George I. Sanchez's part in the making of the Mexican American

civil rights movement invites comparisons to the African American experience. First, given that current scholarship treats the two civil rights movements, black and brown, as separate, parallel entities that did not touch until the 1960s, the numerous connections during this period are significant. These ties also highlight what separated the movements. The legal whiteness imposed upon and later claimed by Mexican Americans meant that though they fought the same demon of racism as African Americans, the two groups did so from opposite directions. Whatever racism toward African Americans that may have existed within individual Mexican Americans in this period was not shared by S?nchez and the activists with whom he surrounded himself, nor was it supported in his particular blend of intellectual activism. In regard to school segregation, for example, Mexican Americans' legal whiteness meant that demonstrating the unfairness of pedagogy was paramount, whereas for African Americans, belying the "separate but equal" doctrine was the key. Factors of culture, leadership, and history resulted in a regionally oriented Mexican American civil rights movement that stressed mediation and local solutions. In the NAACP, African Americans had a more cohesive national organization and a more professional, aggressive program of civil rights litigation. More comparison of the movements is needed. However the civil rights connections of George I. S?nchez with Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP and with Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University, along with the context of wider cooperation, demonstrate that the early Mexican

76 A. L. Wirin to G. I. S?nchez, September 20, 1955, Folder 1, Box 63, S?nchez Papers; Ralph Estrada to James Marshall, November 17, 1955, ibid.; Wirin to Marshall, December 20, 1955, ibid.; Roger N. Baldwin to S?nchez, August 14, 1958, Folder 8, Box 31, ibid.; S?nchez to Baldwin, August 8, 1958, ibid.

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WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 603

American civil rights movement was complex and nuanced in ways that defy simplistic, flat categorization.

In conclusion, the study of George I. Sanchez's activism in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s invites an examination of a number of im portant themes in Mexican American civil rights history such as the influence of a reform ideology inspired by the New Deal, the Mexican

American Generation's infatuation with the issue of citizenship, and intriguing connections between the Mexican American and African American civil rights movements. Though whiteness scholar ship has provided a stimulating, challenging interpretation of Mexican

American civil rights, its assertions are not borne out in this work. First, the context of Sanchez's reform ideology calls for some hesita tion in ascribing too much to whiteness alone. It is simplistic to brand as racist Mexican American multiculturalists and integrationists be cause U.S. society imposed upon them a technical whiteness with which they sought in the courtroom to subvert the effects of white supremacy. Second, whiteness scholars have created a hegemonic cat egory of race that neglects important ideological issues like the citi zenship debate within the Mexican American community and how it produced a lively struggle of liberal, Mexican American Generation purists against more provincial, pragmatic ethnic leaders. Mexican American dogmatism regarding citizenship resulted in deportations, incarcerations, and worse for members of their own communities. Did their invocation of the language of whiteness in the courtroom have any corresponding effect upon African Americans? The citizenship debate had real consequences whereas some analyses of whiteness discourses do not connect ideas to power. Finally, Sanchez's civil rights career rebuts claims that Mexican Americans could not and did not cooperate with African Americans because the Mexican Americans had internalized whiteness. The connections between S?nchez and Marshall?between the Mexican American and African American civil

rights movements?are real, they are complex, and they need more study.

There are very good reasons why whiteness as a category of analy sis is fascinating for historians. It involves the productive archaeol ogy of historical discourses on race; it illustrates that race truly is socially constructed; and it adds a great deal to our understanding of race's nuances. However, the distance between the African American and Mexican American civil rights movements is less significant than historians have generally held and ultimately explained far better by factors other than whiteness alone. Whiteness is an important

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part of the Mexican American past. It was obviously a matter of failed legal opportunism. And after more research, perhaps historians

may even be able to compellingly demonstrate that whiteness was a sizable, racist factor in Mexican American identity. But until that work is done, the making of Mexican American civil rights by George I. S?nchez instructs us that in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s the African American and Mexican American civil rights move

ments were not as far apart or alien to one another as historians have assumed.

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