NATIVISM AT BAY: IMMIGRATION AND THE LATINO MOVEMENT
ON THE AFTERNOON OF OCTOBER 3, AT THE BASE OF THE STATUE OF Liberty, LBJ signed the Immigration Act of 1965, thus putting in place one of the least-noticed but most important components of the Great Society. Citizenship in the United States was not to be based on blood, national origin, kinship, heredity, or color but on a commitment to certain governing political principles.1 This, allegedly, was what made America unique among all other polities. However, as particular ethnic, religious, or racial groups within the United States struggled to gain or maintain political and cultural dominance, state and federal laws sought to identify American nationality as peculiarly white or Protestant or Anglo Saxon. In turn, Congress passed citizenship laws that institutionalized those myths. Throughout most of the history of the United States, laws were on the books that declared the vast majority of the peoples of the world legally ineligible to become full citizens solely because of their race, origin, nationality, or gender.2 Even indigenous peoples were not immune from discrimination.
The Founding Fathers embraced immigration as a necessity to populate the vast hinterlands of the new nation. Indeed, high on the list of Thomas Jefferson’s grievances against King George III was the charge that he had endeavored to prevent the peopling of the American colonies by obstructing naturalization laws and making immigration from countries other than Great Britain or its colonies difficult. The framers of the Constitution clearly intended to encourage immigration when in Article I Section 8 they authorized Congress to “establish a uniform rule of naturalization” and made immigrants eligible for all federal offices save president and vice president.3 At the same time, many Americans evidenced hostile feelings toward immigrants in general and those from certain countries in particular. Benjamin Franklin did not like Germans. Reacting to an influx of Germans into Pennsylvania, he wrote in 1751:
Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of us Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion?4
In the 1830s and 1840s, violent anti-Catholic riots swept the cities of New England and Pennsylvania. The 1850s gave rise to a new political party, the Know-Nothings, as their critics labeled them, which focused primarily on limiting further immigration and restricting the rights of the foreign-born already in the country. The Civil War, which saw members of various ethnic groups fighting side by side under both flags, ended, for a time, the anti-immigrant furor. The adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment—which begins “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”—established for the first time a national citizenship and bestowed citizenship on former slaves who had been born in the United States.5
During its first one hundred years, the American Republic was overwhelmingly peopled by immigrants from northern and western Europe—the British Isles, Scandinavia, Germany, and France. But beginning in the late nineteenth century, a flood of some twenty million immigrants entered the country from eastern and southern Europe, most of them of darker skin, many of them Catholics and Jews. In 1907 alone, 1,285,349 persons from nations stretching from Greece to Russia came through Ellis Island. In addition, there was in the late nineteenth century a flurry of immigration from China and Japan, mostly manual laborers who were willing to work on the railroads, in the mines, and in the white households of the booming West. It was this influx that produced the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. US naturalization laws had always discriminated, limiting access to citizenship to “whites,” but the 1882 measure was the first to single out a nonwhite nationality by name.
By the turn of the century, the pseudoscience of “eugenics” (from the Greek, meaning “noble in heredity”) began to take root in the United States. Appealing alike to white southerners who were busily erecting Jim Crow statues and to nativists who wanted to keep the impure from America’s shores, eugenicists such as Dr. Harry H. Laughlin were writing popular articles positing a chain of being, setting up racial classifications in descending order, with the whitest and hence most civilized and most intelligent at the top and the darkest and hence least intelligent and least civilized at the bottom. Others equated race with nationality. Thus, Poles, Italians, Russians, and Jews were biologically different from the English, Scots, Germans, and Norwegians. The former, it came to be believed, were “inferior” and the latter “superior.” By the eve of the Great War, a vast nativist movement had emerged, insisting that immigration to the United States had to be regulated on the basis of national origin.6 The Immigration Act of 1917, passed over Woodrow Wilson’s veto, assuming that western Europeans were literate and southeastern Europeans were not, imposed a literacy test on would-be immigrants. It also established an Asiatic Barred Zone, but citizens of the increasingly powerful and nationalistic Japan were exempted.
Then came the Red Scare of 1919–1920, which featured mass deportations of suspected subversives and which helped to create the preconditions for the broader restrictionist movement to come. The Red Scare was fueled by wartime superpatriotism, by apprehension about job stealing among the working class, and by fears of many old-stock Protestant Americans who saw the ongoing influx of non-Protestants as a threat to their status and values. The Immigration Act of 1924, which included the Asian Barred Zone, limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2 percent of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890.7
By the late 1950s, primarily because of the post-Sputnik crisis of confidence and the perceived need to compete with the communist bloc for the allegiance of the peoples of the developing world, attitudes toward immigration had changed dramatically. In 1960, for the first time, the Democratic Party platform approved at the presidential nominating convention denounced the national origins system as “a policy of deliberate discrimination” that “contradicts the founding principles of this nation.” The Republicans, expressing a point of view not seen since William Howard Taft’s administration, declared that immigration had been a major contributing factor to the growth of the nation and observed that its ongoing decline was not serving the nation’s interests.8
The leading congressional proponent of immigration reform in the 1960s was Representative Emmanuel Celler (D-NY). The entire concept of quotas based on national origin was racist, he argued. To have on the books laws that validated the notion of “prepolitical” civil identity based on clan, tribe, race, or soil was un-American. Jack Kennedy had been receptive to Celler’s entreaties, and despite the fact that Lyndon Johnson had voted for the restrictive McCarran-Walter Act, so had he. Shortly after he became president, LBJ met with Celler; Myer Feldman, the White House aide who had handled immigration issues for Kennedy; and Abba Schwarz, a Jewish activist and expert on displaced persons. LBJ, who had helped smuggle European Jewish refugees into the United States before and during World War II, needed no persuading to support a new immigration bill. On January 13, 1964, he met with sixty representatives of church, nationality, and labor groups that supported immigration reform as well as with congressional leaders. LBJ left no doubt that he wanted prompt and positive action on the bill the Kennedy administration had devised and introduced in the House. Nevertheless, nativists kept the measure bottled up in committee until after the 1964 election. The large Democratic majorities elected to both houses opened a window of opportunity for the newly mandated Johnson, who included immigration reform on his “must” list.
In the House, the key to victory was Congressman Michael Feighan (D-OH), who had been in Congress since 1942 and who headed the key subcommittee. Johnson gave him the full treatment: midnight calls, invitations to White House soirees, trips on Air Force One. Feighan embraced the Immigration Act of 1965, and it passed the House by a vote of 320 to 70. In the Senate, James Eastland, one of a minority of two on the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration opposed to the House version of the bill, signaled his surrender by appointing Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) to manage the bill. Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) took up the nativist flag and denounced the administration’s measure. He insisted that the McCarran-Walter Act was not discriminatory but was rather “like a mirror reflecting the United States . . . recognizing the obvious and natural fact that those immigrants can best be assimilated into our society who have relatives, friends, or others of similar background already here.”9 But the tide had turned, and the Senate approved the Immigration Act of 1965 on September 3 by a vote of 76 to 18.
Under the provisions of the law, the national origins system, the central feature of US immigration policy for forty years, was to be phased out by July 1, 1968. Thereafter, immigrants would be admitted by preference categories—family relationships to American citizens and resident aliens, and occupational qualification—on a first come, first served basis without reference to country of birth. The bill imposed overall hemispheric limits on visas issued each year: 170,000 for persons from the Eastern Hemisphere, 120,000 for those from the Western Hemisphere. (A 1976 update of the bill did away with hemispheric quotas and established an annual limit of 290,000 immigrants.) The 1965 measure exempted certain close relatives from both preference requirements and numerical limits. Another provision admitted refugees of all kinds, who, as it turned out, came in unprecedented numbers. On the very day he signed the 1965 Immigration Act, LBJ issued an open invitation to Cubans hoping to flee the communist regime of Fidel Castro.
Standing at the foot of the Statue of Liberty after signing the measure, LBJ proclaimed that the new law repaired “a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice.” The national origins system, he said, “violated the basic principle of American democracy—the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man . . . it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.”10 Johnson made it clear that in his mind the intent of the bill was to right past wrongs, not wreak a major demographic change on American society. “This bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” he declared. “It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or really add importantly to our wealth or power.”11 For once, LBJ’s vision failed to match his actions.
As intended, the Immigration Act of 1965 did ensure that America remained a land of diversity whose identity rested upon a set of political principles rather than blood-and-soil nationalism. As not intended, the measure led to an increase in immigration so that America in 2000 was as diverse as it had been in 1900. Illegal immigration had something to do with this, but the 1965 measure exempted from preference and numerical requirements relatives of US citizens and permanent resident aliens, skilled workers, and refugees from communist countries.12 By 1965, western Europe was prosperous, thus eliminating a primary motive to emigrate to the United States, and the peoples of eastern Europe were prohibited from emigrating by their communist governments. By the 1980s, more than four-fifths of all legal immigrants came from either Asia or Latin America.13
THE SECOND RECONSTRUCTION WAS PART OF A BROADER MOVEMENT of ethnic minorities, including those who traced their heritage to Latin America, for equal treatment under the law and greater cultural autonomy. By far, the largest Hispanic group was Mexican Americans, many of whose ancestors had been living in the American West and Southwest before the arrival of the first “Anglo” settlers. Like Native Americans, they found themselves victims of exploitation and discrimination, relegated in most cases to second-class citizenship. Galvanized by the rhetoric of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, the Anglo-American promise of a new world of equal opportunity and justice, and by their contributions to the war effort, Mexican Americans began organizing after World War II in an effort to penetrate the white-dominated power structure.
Similar to the civil rights movement for black Americans, the Hispanic empowerment movement stressed both pride in native culture and assimilation into the mainstream white society. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in Texas in 1928, increased its membership after the war to fifteen thousand. LULAC and the Mexican American GI Forum, established in 1948, also in Texas, stressed English literacy, education, and exercise of the franchise. LULAC successfully guided two cases through the federal court system that anticipated Brown. In 1947, the Supreme Court in Mendez v. Westminster upheld a lower court ruling that prohibited the segregation of Mexican Americans in public facilities. In 1954, LULAC lawyers obtained an order from the high court forbidding the exclusion of Mexican Americans from Texas jury lists. These breakthroughs did not end segregation and discrimination, but they did establish a firm legal basis from which Mexican American activists could attack racial barriers.
The number of Mexican nationals coming to the United States had increased dramatically during World War II, when the American and Mexican governments cooperated in establishing the bracero program. Under this arrangement, approximately three hundred thousand Mexicans entered the United States as temporary laborers, working primarily on farms and railroads. The labor shortage, and along with it the bracero program, continued into the postwar period. Agribusiness in the West and Southwest gradually became dependent on this cheap source of farm labor, and despite harsh working conditions, low pay, and lack of social services, immigration mounted annually. Thousands of braceros and their children took up residence in urban ghettoes, called barrios, in Los Angeles, Denver, San Antonio, and El Paso in search of better jobs and conditions.
Despite the harshness of life in the barrios and on American farms, economic opportunity in the United States was far greater than in Mexico. As a result, during the 1950s tens of thousands of mojados, or “wetbacks”—so named because many swam the Rio Grande to gain entry—entered the United States illegally. Beginning in 1954, the Eisenhower administration launched “Operation Wetback,” and over the next few years some 3.7 million allegedly illegal immigrants were rounded up and deported. Immigration officials often ignored due process, and consequently, legal aliens and even some American citizens were caught up in the deportation process. Operation Wetback broke up families and left an enduring legacy of anger and mistrust of Anglo culture and politics among many Hispanics.
Despite the Eisenhower administration’s mass deportation scheme, by 1960 Mexican Americans constituted the second-largest ethnic group in the United States. Although numbering only 3.5 million and representing 2.3 percent of the national population, Hispanics made up 12 percent of the combined populations of California, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico.14
A Texan, Lyndon Johnson came from a culture that was heavily influenced by its large Hispanic minority. The Lone Star State was a primary breeding ground for Mexican American political activists, the birthing ground of both LULAC and the GI Forum. There is no doubt that LBJ’s experience as principal at the Welhausen School in Cotulla played a key role in his developing social consciousness. His exhortations to the students to have the same aspirations as any other American left no doubt about his attitude toward equal rights and equal opportunity for the browns of the nation. Shortly after his election to the Senate, Johnson garnered favor among Mexican Americans when he intervened in the case of Felix Longoria, a World War II veteran from Three Rivers, Texas. When a white-owned funeral home refused to accept Longoria’s body, Johnson condemned it and arranged for the young soldier to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. But as senator, representing a state with vast agricultural interests that depended on cheap Mexican labor, LBJ felt he could not oppose the bracero program, and he refused to raise his voice against the existence of separate and vastly inferior schools for Mexican children.15
After ascending to the presidency, Johnson moved to appoint prominent Mexican Americans to federal positions, one of the primary goals of LULAC and the GI Forum. In the spring of 1964, Johnson called Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann to urge appointment of a Mexican American as ambassador to Mexico and suggested Daniel Luevano, finance commissioner for the state of California. When Mann observed that “the Mexicans don’t like what they call ‘pochan,’” a derisive term for those born in the United States but who called themselves Mexican Americans, the president replied, “I don’t godamned think I understand that. . . . Go get me a good one. I want to help ’em. We’ve been miserable to the Mexicans.” He had better luck with Secretary of Defense McNamara, whom he urged to appoint Luevano to a prominent post in the Pentagon. “He’s a Mexican boy and we got ’em dying all over the world as privates but we never do put any of them in any of these top jobs,” Johnson complained. “The Mexicans just are all raising hell that you’ve got Negros all over the government but you haven’t got any Mexicans, and California’s got 23 percent of all the Mexicans in the United States.” Luevano was sworn in as assistant secretary of defense on July 1, 1964.16
Mexican Americans benefited from both the intended and unintended consequences of the Great Society. To a degree, the Mexican American community in the United States was for Johnson a model of what African Americans could become politically. Early in his career, LBJ had established a strong working relationship with Doctor Hector P. Garcia of the GI Forum. Johnson looked to Garcia to deliver the Mexican American vote, and in return Garcia expected and received for his constituents the benefits of state and federal New Deal/Fair Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society programs. The Forum and LULAC were Johnson’s kind of civil rights organizations. Garcia and others supported English-language-only schools and looked to the political and legal arena for the redress of grievances. There was some disillusionment when in the wake of the failed White House Conference on Civil Rights in 1966, Johnson refused the Forum and LULAC’s request for a White House gathering to discuss the state of the Hispanic community. Nevertheless, relations between the old-line organizations and the Johnson administration were generally positive. Though LULAC and the GI Forum lacked the professional staff that enabled the NAACP and the Urban League to develop specific legislative proposals and file an unending series of court cases, Mexican Americans benefited from initiatives emanating from the black community. By the end of the decade, Hispanic activists had largely dismantled segregation as it had operated in the Southwest.17
The Great Society’s emphasis on community action and maximum feasible participation may have, next to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had the longest-lasting effect on the Mexican American community. The Great Society provided people of color, including Mexican Americans, at the local level the opportunity to become politicized and consequently demand more of their government. Indeed, Johnson’s War on Poverty produced the same unintended consequences within the brown community as it did in the black. Many Office of Economic Opportunity–funded projects in Texas served as training centers for activists who subsequently went on to promote meaningful change in their communities. For example, following a fire in an El Paso barrio that killed three children, members of a community action group called MACHOS, which stood for Mexican-American Committee for Honor, Opportunity, and Service, led a successful campaign for safer housing. In Wisconsin, migrant farm workers from Texas, embracing the notion of maximum feasible participation, took control of an OEO-funded agency called United Migrant Opportunity Service. Founded by white liberals, the organization was originally intended to dispense temporary aid to temporary residents. Under the control of the farm workers, UMOS became a hotbed of labor activism that enabled its members to earn a living wage and secure permanent residency in Wisconsin.18
The Mexican American rights movement experienced the same generational conflict that the African American civil rights campaign did. Traditional activists in LULAC and the GI Forum stressed racial advancement through political action and assimilation. By the late 1960s, however, a new generation of activists emerged to advocate direct action as a means to improve wages and living conditions for Mexican Americans. Like black power leaders, they preached cultural autonomy rather than assimilation as a means to race empowerment. A pioneer in this new wave, known as the Chicano movement, was Cesar Chavez, a Mexican American farm worker who organized the United Farm Workers Association in 1963 and who between 1965 and 1969 led a series of dramatic strikes and boycotts that forced growers to recognize the union and bargain with it. Meanwhile, in Texas, Jose Angel Gutierrez established a new political party called La Raza Unida. La Raza celebrated the Hispanic heritage and lobbied for bilingualism in schools. Young activists declared that “brown is beautiful,” and movement newspapers such as El Papel and La Raza appeared in Albuquerque and Los Angeles.19
In the wake of World War II, Mexican Americans had developed a civil rights tradition that pointed to ethnic group patriotism and particularly military service as justification for granting first-class citizenship. During the Vietnam War, these traditionalists, particularly leaders of the GI Forum, clung to that approach, strongly supporting LBJ and the war effort in Southeast Asia. By the mid-1960s, Chicano activists were challenging that tradition. Not only did they object to Vietnam for draining funds from the War on Poverty, they also protested the disproportionately high casualty rates among Mexican American soldiers. Increasingly, Chicano activists expressed empathy with the people of Vietnam as common victims of US imperialism.20