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Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans did not passively accept discriminatory treatment, however. In 1903, Mexican farmworkers joined with Japanese farmworkers, who were also poorly paid, to form the first union to represent agricultural laborers. In 1929, Latino civil rights activists formed the
League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) to protest against discrimination and to fight for greater rights for Latinos.
See Benjamin Marquez. 1993.
LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization . Austin: University of Texas Press.
Just as in the case of African Americans, however, true civil rights advances for Hispanics and Latinos did not take place until the end of World War II. Hispanic and Latino activists targeted the same racist practices as did African Americans and used many of the same tactics to end them. In 1946, Mexican American parents in California, with the assistance of the NAACP, sued several California school districts that forced Mexican and Mexican American children to attend segregated schools. In the case of
Mendez v. Westminster (1947), the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Court held that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students into separate schools was unconstitutional.
Mendez v. Westminister School District , 64 F. Supp. 544 (S.D. Cal. 1946).
Although Latinos made some civil rights advances in the decades following World War II, discrimination continued. Alarmed by the large number of undocumented Mexicans crossing the border into the United States in the 1950s, the United States government began Operation Wetback (
wetback is a derogatory term for Mexicans living unofficially in the United States). From 1953 to 1958, more than three million Mexican immigrants, and some Mexican Americans as well, were deported from California, Texas, and Arizona.
See Avi Astor. 2009. “Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization, and the Making of Operation Wetback,”
Latino
Studies 7: 5–29. To limit the entry of Hispanic and Latino immigrants to the United States, in 1965 Congress imposed an immigration quota of 120,000 newcomers from the Western Hemisphere.
At the same time that the federal government sought to restrict Hispanic and Latino immigration to the United States, the Mexican American civil rights movement grew stronger and more radical, just as the African American civil rights movement had done. While African Americans demanded Black Power and called for Black Pride, young Mexican American civil rights activists called for Brown Power and began to refer to themselves as
Chicano
s , a term disliked by many older, conservative Mexican Americans, in order to stress their pride in their hybrid Spanish-Native American cultural identity.
See John R. Chavez. 1997. “The Chicano Image and the Myth of Aztlan Rediscovered.” In
Myth America: A Historical Anthology (volume II), eds. Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords. New York: Brandywine Press; F. Arturo Rosales. 1996.
Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement . Houston, Texas: Arte Público Press. Demands by Mexican American activists often focused on improving education for their children, and they called upon school districts to hire teachers and principals who were bilingual in English and Spanish, to teach Mexican and Mexican American history, and to offer instruction in both English and Spanish for children with limited ability to communicate in English.
See Rosales,
American Civil Rights Movement .
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