The War Years
World War II has had, of course, a profound effect on Anglo-Hispano relations in the Southwest. The Spanish-speaking people had demonstrated their loyalty and patriotism during the Spanish-American War and World War I, but the enthusiasm with which they participated in the second World War had a special motivation. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the 200th and 515th Coast Artillery units of the New Mexico National Guard had been sent to the Philippines, largely because the officers and troops in these units spoke Spanish. That so large a percentage of the American troops captured or killed at Bataan were Mexican-Americans merely served to stress the intensity with which the Spanish-speaking identified themselves with the Allied cause.
While the precise number of Mexican-Americans who served in the armed forces is not known, the available estimates range from 375,000 to 500,000. That the figure was actually somewhat disproportionate to the size of the Spanish-speaking minority can be assumed from the large number of Mexican-Americans of draft age and the fact that so few Mexican-Americans served on selective service boards. Throughout the war long lists of Mexican-American casualties appeared in the newspapers of the Southwest, usually accompanied by stories of Mexican-Americans who had won special citations for gallantry. Long before the war was over, the cumulative effect of the casualty lists and the stories of Mexican-American gallantry had left a noticeable impress on the Anglo-American conscience.
1. Joe Martinez and Company
One of the most impressive stories of Mexican-American gallantry in the war was that of Joe Martinez. Born in Taos, Martinez was working in the sugar-beet fields of Colorado when he enlisted in the army. For exceptional gallantry in the Aleutians, where he was killed, Martinez was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. A chapter of the American Veterans Committee in Colorado has been named in his honor. Five Texas-Mexicans also received the Congressional Medal of Honor, as did Sylvester Herreras, of Phoenix, who lost both legs in battle, and Pfe. Manuel Perez, of Oklahoma City, who was killed in the Battle of Luzon. Indeed the list of Mexican-American war heroes is a long one and includes names from every state in the Southwest.
“As I read the casualty lists from my own state,” said Congressman Jerry Voorhis, “I find anywhere from one-fourth to one-third of those names are names such as Gonzales or Sanchez, names indicating that the very lifeblood of our citizens of Latin-American descent in the uniform of the armed forces of the United States is being poured out to win victory in the war. We ought not to forget that. We ought to resolve that in the future every single one of these citizens shall have the fullest and freest opportunity which this country is capable of giving him, to advance to such positions of influence and eminence as their own personal capacities make possible.”1
Born on the rancho Los Potreros in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Ricardo Noyola, like his father, could not speak English. Having worked as a farmhand since the age of thirteen, he had had little opportunity for schooling. There were fifty-five or sixty such boys at Camp Robinson, some from Texas, some from New Mexico, some from Colorado. Not knowing what to do with them, the post commander finally put them in a special platoon under the command of an officer who spoke Spanish. Within thirteen weeks, the members of the unit had not only mastered the technique of soldiering but had acquired a conversational knowledge of English sufficient to enable them to serve in mixed units. Several of these soldiers, including Noyola, won special citations for gallantry. For such men wartime service was a real opportunity for acculturation, perhaps the first such opportunity they had ever had.
In every phase of the war, including the defense plants and the training schools as well as the armed services, similar opportunities opened up for thousands of Mexican-Americans: to learn new skills, to acquire new experiences, to come in contact with entirely new currents of thought and opinion. In more than one community, joint service in various civilian defense agencies had a marked tendency to break down the barriers which had so long separated the Spanish-speaking from the rest of the population. Out of this wartime experience, as might have been expected, came a new pride in citizenship and a growing resentment of all forms of discrimination.
Sergeant Macario García was one of the five Texas-Mexicans who received the Congressional Medal of Honor. One day while home on furlough he dropped into the Oasis Café in Sugarland, Texas, for a cup of coffee. Informed that the Oasis Café did not serve Mexicans, he demanded service in no uncertain terms. Two sailors came to his aid in the fight which ensued when the proprietor attempted to eject him. A deputy sheriff, summoned to the café, broke up the fight and told the participants to “forget it.” The story naturally aroused a great furor in Mexico and Walter Winchell brought the facts to the attention of his radio listeners. Once Sugarland had received this unwelcome notoriety, the county authorities felt compelled to vindicate the honor of the community: García was then arrested on a charge of “aggravated assault!”
Sergeant José Mendoza López, of Brownsville, another winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, was denied service in a restaurant in a small town in the Rio Grande Valley, under similar circumstances, following his return from a goodwill tour of Mexico which had been arranged by the army.2 Needless to say, Sergeant López protested the incident with a vehemence which must have come as quite a surprise to the Anglo-American residents.
On February 25, 1946, Pfe. Daniel S. Elizalde, while on leave in Los Angeles, was killed by a special night watchman under circumstances that might easily have resulted in a murder prosecution had the victim not been a Mexican-American. The failure of the authorities to prosecute, despite the most insistent pressure from the Mexican community, resulted in the formation of the Elizalde Anti-Discrimination Committee made up of Mexican-American veterans.
“Mexican-American soldiers,” said Marine Corps veteran Balton Llanes, “shed at least a quarter of the blood spilled at Bataan. … What they want now is a decent job, a decent home, and a chance to live peacefully in the community. They don’t want to be shot at in the dark.”
On the evening of April 23, 1947, Charles White, a Mexican-American war veteran who had been awarded the Silver Star, the Purple Heart, the Infantry Badge, and a Presidential Citation, demanded service at the Silver Slipper Nite Club near La Junta, Colorado, after two other Mexican-Americans had been denied service. In a fight with the proprietor, Sergeant White was killed. Petitions signed by three thousand Mexican-Americans demanded the indictment of the night-club owner but the authorities ignored the petitions and even refused to revoke the liquor license for the club. Out of this incident came a committee which has been conducting a militant campaign in Colorado against all forms of discrimination. In fact, wherever incidents of this sort have occurred, similar committees have been formed, usually spearheaded by Mexican-American veterans.
2. A Tear for José Davilla
During the war an increasing number of Anglo-Americans began to protest acts of discrimination against Mexican-Americans. While working in the cherry orchards near Hart, Michigan, José Davilla, nineteen years of age, became acquainted with an Anglo-American girl. They played together; worked together; and, on several occasions, went out together. One day, as a silly prank, young Davilla took the girl’s glasses and refused to return them. Hearing of this affront to Anglo-American womanhood, the sheriff of Oceana County sought out Davilla in the main street of Hart and attempted to arrest him without a warrant. For half an hour the man and the boy fought in the street. When the sheriff was unable to subdue the boy, even with the aid of an eighteen-inch blackjack, he shot and killed him.
Swift Lathers, editor of the local Mears News,—“the smallest newspaper in the world”—promptly wrote an editorial accusing the sheriff of murder. When the sheriff had Lathers arrested for criminal libel, he replied:
Do I stand alone facing the sullen crowd? I have stood there before. I am that way. I would rather stand up against the whole world to defend the underdog than to sit on the plush chairs of the aggressors. I know that somewhere there is a tear for José Davilla. Short days ago he worked and sang among us, felt dawn and saw sunsets glow. A few more days and his lingering countrymen will go back to the Border. But that pool of blood on the sidewalk of Hart will not wash away.
With such newspapers as the Detroit Free Press rushing to his defense, Lathers was finally acquitted. “The streets of Hart are wet today,” wrote James S. Pooler in the Free Press (November 1, 1944), “and golden leaves are plastered over the spot where José Davilla died. José hasn’t been dead a month. In fact it was only a week ago that his family took their son’s body home to Texas. José has no tomb or tombstone here but he has an epitaph, written by Swift Lathers.”
Nor was Swift Lathers the only editor who wrote an epitaph for a Mexican-American during the war. Led by the St. Louis Star-Times, the newspapers of St. Louis devoted five hundred thousand words of copy to their contention, finally vindicated, that Edward Melendes, a Mexican-American, had been kicked to death by policemen in a St. Louis jail on July 2, 1942. “If Melendes can die in a St. Louis police cell,” wrote the Star-Times, “as the result of an inhuman beating, and the perpetrators go unpunished, the painfully established liberties of all men have been whittled away. Human beings in a democracy cannot be divided into two classes, those who may safely be beaten and left to die in police stations and those who may not. That is why the Star-Times will continue to fight to learn and print the truth, and continue to ask, ‘Who Killed Edward Melendes?’”
3. Across the Border
During the war, also, Mexican-Americans began to receive some extremely effective assistance from their brothers across the border. Anxious to see the Good Neighbor Policy realized, many groups, individuals, and organizations in Mexico began to give a new emphasis to the treatment of Spanish-speaking people in the United States. One of the most effective of these groups was the Comité Mexicano Contra el Racismo, formed in August 1944. In its publication Fraternidad appeared a regular column entitled “Texas, Buen Vecino?” (“Texas, Good Neighbor?”). In issue after issue, the column kept listing acts of discrimination against Mexicans in Texas. Giving names of establishments, and the dates of “incidents,” Fraternidad documented a long list of discriminatory practices which had occurred in approximately 150 Texas communities. This constant needling soon began to have its effects on both sides of the border. Mexican officials were compelled to bring pressure on both the State Department and the Texas authorities to correct these conditions, while, on this side of the border, Texans began to make “goodwill” tours in Mexico and to play up the Good Neighbor Policy.
At the same time, the issue of discrimination was raised at a series of official or semiofficial meetings in Mexico City: at the meeting of the Inter-American Bar Association in August 1944; at the conference of the International Labor Organization in April 1945; and at the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace at which the Act of Chapultepec was adopted on March 6, 1946. In a resolution adopted at this conference all of the nations of the Western Hemisphere entered into a pledge “to make every effort to prevent in their respective countries all acts which may provoke discrimination among individuals because of race or religion.” These international pronouncements, coupled with the insistent pressure of Mexican officials, brought about a new recognition of the importance of equal treatment of Mexicans, aliens and citizens, in this country.
At the same time, social tensions in the borderlands were consistently aggravated, during the war years, by agents of the Sinarquista movement, founded in Leon, Mexico, in 1937, by Oskar Hellmuth Schreiter, a German Nazi, José Antonio Urquiza, and Trueba Olivares, both with close Falangist connections. Adopting a Fascist ideology, Point 13 in the movement’s “16 Principles” stated that Mexico’s true sons must be “worthy of their fatherland and reclaim as well as honor and respect its lands,” a clear reference to the recapture of the borderlands taken from Mexico in 1848.3
The first regional Sinarquista Committee was organized in Los Angeles on November 1, 1937, shortly after the movement was founded in Mexico. By 1942 the movement boasted of two thousand members in the United States and “cells” were known to exist in such Southern California communities as Pacoima, San Fernando, San Bernardino, La Verne, Ontario, Watts, El Monte, Oxnard, Pomona, and Azusa; and, in Texas, at El Paso, McAllen, Mission, and Laredo. The first meeting of Sinarquista chiefs in the United States took place in El Paso on September 27, 1942. Stories in El Sinarquista tell, in elaborate detail, of how local committees were formed in the Belvedere section of Los Angeles. In April 1943—and the date is important both in relation to the meeting of President Roosevelt and President Camacho in Mexico and to the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles—four Mexican “students”—all men over thirty years of age—toured the United States lecturing on the principles of Sinarquismo to Mexican-American audiences. Two of these men were high-ranking officials of the Sinarquista movement in Mexico.
In the latter part of 1942 and throughout 1943 local Sinarquista committees were seeking to capitalize upon discrimination against Mexican-Americans in the borderlands to interfere, if possible, with the war effort. The Mexican government regarded the agitation with sufficient seriousness to send Ernesto Felix Díaz to Los Angeles, as its official representative, to alert the Mexican residents to the dangers of Sinarquista propaganda.4 Testifying before a legislative committee, Pedro Villasenor, president of the Southern California branch of the movement, said that the local branches had five hundred members; but the Department of Justice reported that the membership was nearer two thousand. With the local press charging that the Zoot Suit Riots had been fomented by subversive left-wing elements, it is ironic to note that the Sinarquista movement was completely whitewashed in this investigation which ended up by being yet another investigation of “Communism.”5 While it would be highly inaccurate to say that the Sinarquista movement had a direct responsibility for the Zoot Suit Riots, it is true that its propaganda had a most disquieting effect on Mexican opinion and, to this extent, was a factor in the riots. By harping on the theme that the United States was fighting another war of “Yankee imperialism” and aggression, Sinarquista had inflamed a small section of Mexican opinion and had treated the issue of discrimination in the most demagogic manner.6
4. Los Braceros
With World War II the same clamorous demand for Mexican labor of 1918 was repeated. Concerned over the Good Neighbor Policy, however, the government did not capitulate quite so easily to these demands as it had in World War I. For one thing, the Mexican government looked with some considerable disfavor upon the proposal. But following Mexico’s declaration of war on Germany, Italy, and Japan, on May 22, 1942, negotiations were renewed, and, in August, an agreement was entered into between the two nations setting forth the conditions on which Mexican labor might be recruited for wartime employment.
This agreement stipulated that imported workers were to be assured of free transportation to and from their homes; that they were to be provided subsistence en route; that they were not to be used to displace other workers or to reduce wage rates; and that certain minimum guarantees, governing wages, and working conditions, would have to be observed. Both the idea of such an agreement and its form can be traced back to proposals which Dr. Manuel Gamio and Mr. Ernesto Galarza, of the Pan-American Union, had previously advanced.
On September 29, 1942, the first shipment of 1,500 Mexican braceros arrived in Stockton, California, with the slogan “De Las Democracias Será La Victoria” scribbled in chalk on the Pullman cars. Previously the Farm Security Administration had worked out the various forms and had defined the various relationships to be used in carrying the agreement into effect. Individual agreements were entered into with each worker recruited, which embodied the guarantees of the master agreement. The FSA then entered into agreements with various farm organizations which contained similar guarantees. To police the agreements, Mexican consuls and a limited number of Mexican labor officials were authorized to make inspections and to investigate complaints and grievances. The FSA officials were also careful to provide a friendly reception for the workers. Reception committees were on hand at the station, flags waved, bands played, and many speeches were made. Excellent recreational and educational programs had been worked out with the thought in mind of using the braceros as future ambassadors of goodwill in Mexico. As long as the FSA was in charge of the program, the agreement was carried out to the letter; but, on July 1, 1943, the War Food Administration was substituted for the FSA as the enforcing agency—a change which was tantamount to turning the whole program over to the farm associations.
Once they were in control of the program, the new arrangement could not have been improved upon from the growers’ point of view. With the government paying all transportation and administration expenses, they were spared even the trouble of recruiting labor. Assured an unlimited market and a high level of prices, the large-scale employers of farm labor made fabulous wartime profits. From 1943 through 1947, the federal government appropriated $120,000,000 for the labor importation program—every penny of which should be regarded as a direct subsidy to the large-scale employers of farm labor in a period of unprecedented prosperity. While the War Food Administration did insist upon livable camps, the wage guarantees were farcical: braceros were assured $33 for each two weeks of employment. In an effort to ensure payment of prevailing wage rates, hearings were held for each major crop in advance of the season. But these “hearings” were ludicrous. For example, on January 27, 1946, officials of the War Food Administration refused to hear the testimony of Isabel Gónzales, David Braco, and Vincent G. Vigil who had come to Salt Lake from Denver to present evidence that Mexican-American sugar-beet workers were earning, on an average, not more than $550 per year.
To appreciate what a bonanza this program was to the large farm-factories, it should be pointed out that the braceros were limited to agricultural employment. If any worker accepted a job in industry, he was subject to immediate deportation. The effect of this provision was to remove the farm-labor market from competition with industrial wage rates. Theoretically the employment of the braceros was not supposed to reduce wage rates; actually, with no fault on their part, it had this effect.
Nevertheless the agreement represented a notable advance over the 1918 experience and it also demonstrated that a migratory labor movement can be planned and rationalized. Workers were paid transportation and subsistence en route; they were provided with better camps, medical care, accident insurance, and minimum earnings were guaranteed. Ten percent of these earnings were deducted by the government and transmitted to Mexico City for the account of the workers: in the nature of a compulsory savings fund. From 1943 to 1947, the braceros transmitted a huge sum to their families and dependents in Mexico. Thousands of Mexican workers were eager to enlist and even paid sizable sums, in the way of bribes, to be enrolled. Three members of the Chamber of Deputies in Mexico City, as well as a number of minor officials, were indicted for having solicited these bribes.
The number of workers recruited for agricultural employment were as follows: 1942—4,203; 1943—52,098; 1944—62,170; 1945—120,000; 1946—82,000; 1947—55,000. These are the totals for “foreign labor” and include a few thousand Puerto Ricans and other workers from the West Indies; but most of those imported were from Mexico. Each year, of course, workers returned to Mexico at the end of the season, with the number employed throughout the year not being in excess of twenty-two thousand. Hence it is impossible to give the actual total of workers recruited for agriculture during the war but it would be in excess of one hundred thousand.
These workers helped produce and harvest practically every major crop: sugar beets, grapes, tomatoes, apricots, peaches, prunes, cotton, and many others. In the Rocky Mountain states, they constituted half the labor supply used in harvesting 354,000 acres of sugar beets. Throughout the Middle West, they helped cultivate and harvest sugar beets, vegetables, orchard crops, and hay and grain. Working in twenty-one states, they harvested crops the value of which was estimated in 1944 at $432,010,000.
In addition to those employed in agriculture, eighty thousand Mexicans were recruited and brought to this country for employment as section hands and maintenance workers on the railroads at a minimum hourly rate of 57¢ with no guarantee of minimum earnings. Employed by thirty-two rail lines, these workers performed an indispensable service in keeping the Western lines in repair during a period of exceptionally heavy freight and passenger traffic. It has been estimated that the railroad workers received $63,000,000 in wages in 1944, a large portion of which was remitted to Mexico in the form of money orders.
The farm-labor importation program came to an end on December 31, 1947, but the large growers have kept up an incessant clamor for its renewal. Should the agreement be renewed, it is apparent that the planned migration of the war years can serve as an extremely important precedent. Although the wartime agreement was frequently violated it did provide a measure of protection against the hazards and rigors of migratory employment. Over the years the use of Mexican labor to relieve acute manpower shortages in the United States has proved to be of benefit to both nations. The issue has always turned on the choice between planned migration and unplanned immigration. For it is extremely debatable whether, under any circumstances, Mexican workers can be kept from crossing the border. Given the attraction of industrial employment in the United States and the ease with which the border can be crossed, Mexicans will continue to follow the old, familiar paths which lead north from Mexico. At the present time hundreds of them are paying as much as $150 to be smuggled into the United States in trucks and airplanes and recently one Mexican was so anxious to return to California that he rode a log upstream on the Colorado and then walked a hundred miles through the desert to a ranch in Imperial Valley. In 1946, alone, sixty-six thousand “wetbacks” were apprehended by the Immigration Service along the far western section of the border.7
5. The Counterpoint of Migration
One of the conspicuous advantages of the farm-labor importation agreement of 1942 was that it gave the Mexican government a firm basis on which to protest acts of discrimination against Mexicans in the borderlands and also provided a means by which these protests could be backed up. After the Farm Security Administration had been relieved of responsibility for enforcing the agreement, complaints began to multiply and repeated charges were made that the growers were chiseling on guaranteed wages and working conditions. On July 30, 1945, Ernesto Galarza prepared a fourteen-page memorandum setting forth in detail the various ways by which American employers in the Southwest were undermining the agreement. More important than any specific violations of the agreement, however, were the incidents of discrimination involving both Mexican nationals and Mexican-Americans, particularly in Texas.
In Snyder, Texas, an Anglo-American dentist refused to treat an American soldier of Mexican descent and in Melvin permission was refused a Mexican-American PTA group to use a community center built by the National Youth Administration. On October 15, 1943, the Mexican government formally protested against the segregation of children of Mexican descent in certain Texas schools. This protest was filed after a large number of Mexican-American families in Bolling and Goose Creek, Texas, had refused to send their children to the jim crow school. Visiting New Gulf, Texas, to participate in the celebration of the Sixteenth of September, Adolfo G. Gominguez, Mexican consul at Houston, was denied service in the Blue Moon Café. Alejandro Carillo, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, immediately brought the facts of this incident to the attention of President Ávila Camacho. Three days before Governor Coke Stevenson proclaimed the Sixteenth of September an official holiday in Texas, Sergeant Macario García had been arrested in Sugarland.
In October 1943, a Mexican boy, seventeen years of age, entered a café in Levelland, Texas, to buy a package of cigarettes. The usual altercation developed in the course of which the owner of the café hit the boy over the head with a coke bottle. Within a few moments, a thousand or more Mexicans gathered outside the café and the sheriff arrived just in time to prevent a riot. In December 1944, some three hundred AFL members went on strike at Huron, South Dakota, against the employment of Mexican braceros. A storm of protest immediately appeared in the Mexican press and the State Department received a call from the Mexican ambassador. Incidents of this sort had been occurring for a hundred years but never, prior to the war, had such significance attached to them.
Conditions reached such a point in Texas that Roberto Medellin of the Mexican Ministry of Labor announced in 1943 that no more braceros would be sent to work in the state “because of the number of cases of extreme, intolerable racial discrimination.” In an effort to induce the Mexican government to lift this ban, Governor Stevenson made a “goodwill” tour of Mexico and on his return appointed a Good Neighbor Commission. On June 25, 1943, the governor issued a formal proclamation calling upon all tried-and-true Texans to adhere to the Good Neighbor Policy. A few days later, the Commissioners’ Court in Cameron County adopted a resolution “condemning any discriminations against our fellow citizens of Latin-American extraction” and expressing regret that “embarrassing occurrences have injured the feelings of our said fellow citizens and neighbors.” These feeble gestures of “goodwill,” however, were largely offset by the tone of the press which proceeded to add insult to injury by explaining that the only reason Mexicans were discriminated against in Texas was because they were “dirty”!—.
It is interesting to note, however, that Resolution No. 105, in which Governor Stevenson proclaimed the Good Neighbor Policy in Texas, merely called upon the citizens of the state to adopt a nondiscriminatory policy as to “all persons of the Caucasian race,” thereby attempting to deny long-resident Negro citizens a status sought to be conferred on Mexican nationals. It should also be noted that the three “Mexicans” named to the commission were upper-class, old-resident Tejanos. For these and other reasons, the Good Neighbor Commission has not been particularly effective although the mere appointment of such a commission, of course, is a significant gesture. Long after the proclamation creating the commission was issued, many Texas jails continued to exhibit signs which specified a special visiting day for “Negroes and Mexicans.” Noting the reluctance of the Texans to abandon their folkways, the Mexican weekly Mañana said that “The Nazis of Texas are not political partners of the Fuhrer of Germany but indeed they are slaves to the same prejudices and superstitions.”
During the visit of American dignitaries to Mexico City for the Independence Day celebration of 1943, Francisco de P. Jiménez, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, made a speech in which he bitterly denounced the mistreatment of Mexicans in the borderlands. A former member of the Mexican consular corps in Texas, he called attention to the case of one Antonio Rangel who had been murdered by an Anglo-American. The defendant was released, shortly after his arrest, on $25 bail! He also mentioned the case of one José Aguilar who, in the course of an assault, had been seriously injured by an Anglo-American. In this case, the aggressor was exonerated upon payment of a $50 fine. In the same speech, Deputy Jiménez quoted a pastoral letter in which Archbishop Lucey of San Antonio had denounced, by name, a certain Catholic church which had openly exhibited a sign reading: “no se admite a Mexicanos.” Concluding a long recital of similar discriminatory acts, he demanded the appointment of a commission to meet with Governor Stevenson and to investigate conditions in Texas. A resolution to this effect was unanimously adopted by the Chamber of Deputies.
After appointing the Good Neighbor Commission, Governor Stevenson again appealed to Foreign Minister Padilla to lift the ban against sending braceros to Texas. The foreign minister replied that the appointment of the commission had not brought about a satisfactory correction of conditions in Texas. “In many parts of Texas,” he said, “Mexicans cannot attend public gatherings without being subject to vexations, complaints and protests. There are towns where my fellow countrymen are forced to live in separate districts. Just a week ago the daughter of a Mexican consul was refused service in a public establishment.” The ban would not be lifted, he went on to say, until Texas had passed a law prohibiting such practices. A bill to this effect was introduced in the 1945 session of the Texas legislature but, needless to say, it did not pass. As a consequence, Texas still remains on Mexico’s blacklist. The boycott, however, has not seriously cramped the Texas growers for they still have a large pool of Mexican labor, including some forty thousand illegal entrants or “wetbacks.”
6. Good Neighbors and Band Music
During the war years the circumstance that Mexico was our ally against an enemy that preached the doctrine of a master race, the magnificent record made by Mexican-Americans in the service, the emphasis on the Good Neighbor Policy, and our dependence on Mexican labor, all served to bring out and to emphasize the mistreatment of persons of Mexican descent in the United States. For the first time since 1848, the full pattern of this treatment was brought to light and glaringly exposed.
In a carefully documented article in Common Ground,8 Dr. George I. Sanchez, of the University of Texas, former president of the League of United Latin-American Citizens, called attention to the pattern of discrimination in employment, in the schools, and in civic life throughout the borderlands. In the course of a hike, a Scoutmaster and his troop of Boy Scouts, all in uniform, were ordered out of a public park, where they had stopped to rest, because they were “Mexicans.” Texas churches posted signs reading “For Colored and Mexicans” and refused Mexicans permission to attend the “white churches” on Sundays. “In many cemeteries, whether owned by county authorities, by private individuals or corporations, or by religious organizations … the bodies of ‘Mexicans’ are denied the right of burial. … In those cemeteries where such bodies are received they are assigned a separate plot of land, far enough from the plot destined for the so-called ‘whites’ so as to be sure that the bodies of the ‘whites’ will not be contaminated by the presence of the bodies of the Mexicans.” Toilets in many Texas courthouses have signs which read: “For Whites—Mexicans Keep Out.”
Mexicans are segregated with Negroes in the balconies of many motion picture theaters in the Southwest. Certain subdivisions in Southern California are restricted against Mexican occupancy, although in at least one case such restrictions have been ruled illegal. Although the pattern of discrimination against Mexicans is “spotty” and less rigid than against Negroes, it is nevertheless true that Mexicans are generally assigned a second-class status throughout the borderlands today. A careful study of the status of minority groups in Los Angeles has shown that, by reference to a number of conventional indices of status, Mexicans occupy a lower position in the community than that occupied by Negroes.
In an article in The Texas Spectator for October 11, 1946, Hart Stilwell, the author of a fine novel about Mexicans in a Texas bordertown, placed his finger on the real crux of “The Mexican Problem” in the Southwest:
An Anglo-American was tried in a criminal district court in a small Texas town recently on a charge of murder.
The man who was killed was a Texas-Mexican, a Latin-American if you prefer that term.
The Anglo-American was acquitted.
The trial attracted small attention in Texas. It was not even reported fully in the newspapers printed in the town where it took place. If it made the wire services, I failed to see it in any of the larger Texas papers.
I happened to be familiar with some of the details of this case. And from what I know of it, I make the following observations: if the man who was killed had been an Anglo-American and the man who did the killing had been a Latin-American,
I believe the verdict would have been different. And if both men had been Latin Americans, I believe the verdict would have been different.
What happened in this case is typical of what has been happening in Texas courts for a hundred years or more—twenty-five years to my personal knowledge. I have been a newspaper man in Texas for twenty-five years and I have carefully watched criminal cases in which members of the two races were involved. And if an Anglo-American has served one day in the penitentiary for the killing of a Latin-American during that period of time, I have not heard of it. …
We can bring ten thousand Tipica Orchestras to Texas and send five thousand Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis Clubs and other goodwill delegations into Mexico, yet so long as the Mexican knows that he may be killed with impunity by any American who chooses to kill him, then all our talk about being good neighbors is merely paying lip service to a friendship we both know is a joke.
In a broadcast on May 10, 1947, Antonio Espiñosa de los Monteros, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, called upon the people of the United States to make “a sincere, determined effort to do away with racial prejudices” against persons of Mexican descent. “The citizens of those sections,” he said (referring to the borderlands), “should realize that the day has come when it is absolutely necessary to give the Mexican absolute equality of opportunity.” There can be no doubt but that this issue is today the most sensitive test of good neighborly relations between Mexico and the United States. “Discriminations of this character,” said Sumner Welles, “inevitably cut deep. They create lasting resentments, which no eloquent speeches by government officials, nor governmental policies, however wise, can ever hope to remove. … So long as they continue anywhere in the United States they are bound to undermine the foundations which the two governments have laid for those cooperative ties which are so greatly to the interests of both countries, and they will, in the wider sense, impair that inter-American relationship which is today more necessary than ever before. Unless these discriminations are obliterated, and obliterated soon, the term ‘good neighbor policy’ will lose much of its real meaning.”9