Berkeley La Raza Law Journal
Volume 18
Article 6
2007
More Than Whiteness: Comparative Perspectives
on Mexican American Citizenship from Law and
History
Marc Simon Rodriguez
Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/blrlj
Recommended Citation
Marc Simon Rodriguez, More Than Whiteness: Comparative Perspectives on Mexican American Citizenship from Law and History, 18 La
Raza L.J. 79 (2007).
Available at: http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/blrlj/vol18/iss1/6
Link to publisher version (DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.15779/Z38K37X
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals and Related Materials at Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository. It has been
accepted for inclusion in Berkeley La Raza Law Journal by an authorized administrator of Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository. For more information,
please contact [email protected].
Foreword
More Than Whiteness:
Comparative Perspectives on Mexican
American Citizenship from Law and History
Marc Simon Rodriguez*
the Mexicans are a treacherous race, and have too much Indian
blood in them to be trusted, however peaceable they may seem.'
...
He tried to intellectualize my blackness
2
To make it easier for his whiteness
INTRODUCTION
Persons of Mexican ancestry have always been a problem for those seeking
to establish a bright line in the history of race in the United States. In song and print
people of color have raised valid questions about the motives of those who seek to
"intellectualize" color, objectify minority people, and/or castigate certain minorities
for a lack of or an inappropriate "color" politics despite obvious racism and violence
in places like Texas. A great degree of ambiguity and ambivalence has always
defined life for Mexican-Americans and those trying to define their place in
American society. In a country defined by a black-white binary, MexicanAmericans' identity as "in-between" people has complicated their racial history in
the United States.3 For every formal legal claim based on Mexican ancestry people's
status as Caucasians, there is an abundance of historical examples that disprove the
actual enjoyment of the rights of whiteness by Mexican-Americans despite formal
legal recognition to the contrary.4 If they were legally white, but denied access to
* Assistant Professor, Department of History, Concurrent Assistant Professor of Law, University of Notre
Dame Law School. Rodriguez wishes to thank George Martinez who participated in the conference
roundtable for his help with this topic.
1. Quoted in RED-LANDER (Saint Augustine, Tx.) (Nov. 6, 1845).
2. SKIN LE ARRAN, INTELLECTUALIZE MY BLACKNESS (One Little Indian 1995). The author
wishes to thank to Karin Koell for finding this song.
3. Ian Haney L6pez, Race, Ethnicity, Erasure: The Salience of Race to LatCrit Theory, 85
CAL. L. REV. 1143 (1997), 10 BERKELEY LA RAZA L.J. 57 (1998); James R. Barrett & David Roediger,
Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationalityand the "New Immigrant" Working Class, 3 J. AM. ETHNIC HIST.
16 (1997). See also MATHEW FRYE JACOBSON, WHITENESS OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: EUROPEAN
IMMIGRANTS AND THE ALCHEMY OF RACE (1998).
4. See, e.g., Gary A. Greenfield & Don B. Kates, Jr., Mexican Americans, Racial
Discrimination, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, 662 CAL. LAW REV. 63 (1975). On the special role of
the Texas Rangers as a paramilitary and social control force, see JULIAN SAMORA ET AL., GUNPOWDER
BERKELEY LA RAZA LAWJOURNAL
[Vol. 18
whiteness across the Southwest, where then do Mexican-Americans fit within the
increasingly expansive definitional space of "whiteness studies" when it comes to the
enjoyment of citizenship rights? 5
In the past decade, the field of "whiteness" scholarship expanded rapidly,
growing out of a timely reconsideration of what W.E.B. DuBois dubbed the "social
and psychological wage" accorded white workers and citizens.6 Most prominently,
the work of historian David Roediger introduced a generation of historians to
DuBois' formulation, and the study of whiteness as a way to understand the
functioning of racial privilege and racial thinking in America. After the publication
of Roediger's seminal work, whiteness studies expanded rapidly as historians
uncovered
8 the white "racial" history of American ethnics and non-African ancestry
citizens.
Sadly, later work has often been guilty of overreach because legal and other
tactical choices made by some ethnic and non-African ancestry racial groups are
examined without proper historical, ethnic, or racial context. In other related
literature, historians celebrate relatively short lived and un-influential movements or
individuals as a way to lament the missed opportunities or novel moments of proper
resistance along the road of whiteness, and/or citizenship privilege. This same line
of investigation has now extended to the case of Mexican-Americans, where as one
historian recently put it, individual Mexicans and Mexican-Americans made a
"decision to fight for white rights for some, rather than equal rights for all." 9 What
this remark highlights is a common misunderstanding among many historians of the
intricacies of diplomatic and legal strategy, two forms of communication that often
require advocates to deploy available legal or political definitions rather than
theoretical or ideal strategies and arguments in seeking protections for the oppressed.
Why did Mexican-American lawyers and organizations make what some might
JUSTICE: A REASSESSMENT OF THE TEXAS
(1979);
RICHARD WHITE, IT'S YOUR MISFORTUNE AND NONE
OF MY OWN: A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN WEST 241 (1991).
5. See Juan F. Perea, The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The "Normal Science" of
American Racial Thought, 85 CAL. L. REV. 1213 (1997), 10 BERKELEY LA RAZA L.J. 127 (1998);
Eduardo Luna, How the Black/White Paradigm Renders Mexicans/Mexican Americans and
Discrimination Against Them Invisible, 14 BERKELEY LA RAZA L.J. 225, 227 (2003). On the ongoing
debate over "whiteness studies," see Eric Amesen, Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination, 60 INT'L
LAB. & WORKING-CLASS HIST. 3 (2001) (criticizing the over-expansive deployment of whiteness studies
in labor history); Eric Arnesen, Passion and Politics:Race and the Writing of Working-Class History, 6 J.
HIST. SOC. 323 (2006); Eric Arnesen, No "Graver Danger": Black Anticommunism, the Communist
Party, and the Race Question, 13 LAB. STUD. INWORKING-CLASS HIST. OF THE AMERICAS 3 (2006)
(continuing and expanding criticisms made in 2001). For one of the many responses to Arnesen's
criticisms, see for exampple John Munro, Roots of "Whiteness," 175 LABOUR/LE TRAVAIL 54 (2004).
6. W.E.B. DuBois, BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA:
1860-1880 700 (Atheneum
Books, 1992) (1935).
7. DAVID R. ROEDIGER, THE WAGES OF WHITENESS (1991).
8. See, e.g., JACOBSON, supra note 3.
9. This critical tone is found in this otherwise well researched and balanced essay examining
elites and certain "Caucasian" protection efforts in Texas. See Thomas A. Guglielmo, Fighting for
Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in
World War 11 Texas, 92 J. AM. HIST. 1212, 1213 (2006). For different perspectives on the MexicanAmerican "whiteness" controversy, see Neil Foley, Becoming Hispanic: Mexican Americans and the
FaustianPact with Whiteness, in REFLEXIONES 1997: NEW DIRECTIONS IN MEXICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
53 (Victor J. Guerra ed., 1998); Neil Foley, Over the Rainbow: Hernandez v. Texas, Brown v. Board of
Education, and Black v. Brown, 25 CHICANO-LATINO L. REV. 139 (2005); lan Haney Lbpez, White
Latinos, 6 HARV. LATINO L. REV. 1 (2003).
2007]
MORE THAN WHITENESS
consider the wrong decision by failing to embrace race politics and by maintaining a
Caucasian status orientation in court cases and policy efforts? Perhaps if MexicanAmerican lawyers had made the case for Mexican-Americans as "people of color,"
they may have succeeded in transforming Mexican-Americans into non-white
peoples without changing the underlying law. If this had happened they may very
well have (depending on the era) remade Mexican ancestry peoples as ineligible for
citizenship and subjected them to formal segregation laws. The obvious pitfalls of
traversing the unproven terrain of racial solidarity jurisprudence was too risky
considering that the eventual demise of Jim Crow 0and the federal government's
expansion of minority rights were far from inevitable.'
One other reason for the lack of risk taking may have stemmed from the
fact that most Mexican-American litigation was an underfunded and often grass roots
affair and not a well organized bureaucratic effort with a functioning headquarters
and annual budget. Mexican-American civil rights lawyering, prior to the founding
of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund ("MALDEF") in
1968, lacked the organization and funding of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People's ("NAACP") Legal Defense Fund." MexicanAmericans lacked the national network of membership and supportive non-minority
sponsors that the NAACP relied on. Because Mexican-Americans existed outside
the black-white paradigm, the reform efforts relied on a small group of lawyers and
individual litigants who worked with meager budgets and their formal status as
"whites" to challenge their segregation and mistreatment at the hands of Anglos.
Along with the many comparative shortcomings facing Mexican-American
legal reformers, it is also worth noting that these activists sought protection in the era
before the revolutionary expansion of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection
Clause. 12 One problem in the historical literature is an oversimplification of legal
doctrine and the injection of a moralist viewpoint into the analysis. This approach
posits a belief in both the inevitability of progressive legal reform and a moral stance
which argues that Mexican-American lawyers and rights organizations should have
embraced a race politics because it was the right thing to do. Whatever the
explanation, legal reform is neither necessarily progressive nor inevitable and the
tactics deployed by Mexican-American lawyers before the opening of racial
jurisprudence reflected the limitations of the legal and social system of the
segregated South and Southwest and a world defined by a rather weak equal
protection environment for all minorities.
It might be worth considering if Mexican-Americans were classified and
10. For a good review of this literature, see Ariela J. Gross, Texas Mexicans and the Politics
of Whiteness, 195 L. HIST. REV. 21 (2003).
11. See, e.g., MARK V. TUSHNET, MAKING CIVIL RIGHTS LAW: THURGOOD MARSHALL AND
THE SUPREME COURT: 1936-1961, at 34 (2004) (discussing how the legal budget for the NAACP rose
from $4,000 to $63,000 annually between 1941-1944); Carlos K. Blanton, George L Sanchez, Ideology,
and Whiteness in the Making of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement: 1930-1960, 588 J. S. HIST.
72 (2006) (discussing how the American Council of Spanish Speaking People funded cases brought by
organizations including the Community Service Organization, LULAC, and the American GI. Forum
with a total budget of $50,000 between 1951-1957).
12. See Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954) (expanding the meaning of the
Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause to cover state action); Boling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497,
499 (1954) (binding the Federal government under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment);
Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U.S. 475 (1954) (expanding meaning of Fourteenth Amendment to cover groups
other than the two classes of "whites" and "Negroes," such as Mexican-Americans).
BERKELEYLA RAZA LAW JOURNAL
(Vol. 18
considered "white" by Anglo law, to what degree did they benefit, if at all, from the
"wages" of whiteness? In light of these issues, it is worth considering Dubois' view
of the "wage" of whiteness. As DuBois formulated white privilege in the American
South:
It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received
a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.
They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white.
They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public
parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts,
dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage
lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect
upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the
deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community... and
they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored
schools. 13
If these are the social and material wages of "whiteness," then MexicanAmericans as agroup, despite their legal status failed to receive the social benefits of
being "white. ' Mexican-Americans did not receive public deference from Anglos.
They did not attend high quality integrated schools, or experience respect before the
courts even if they did vote in some places. 15 Rather, many Mexican-Americans
faced formal and informal bans in public and private space much like AfricanAmericans. Certainly there were some Mexican-Americans who were able to cross
the color line, but for most Mexican-Americans in places like Texas (except in those
places where large border-area Mexican-American landowners or urban community
leaders played a role in politics), their formal status as "Caucasians" was more
rhetorical rather than real - even if they were or aspired to middle class status or
even considered themselves white. 16
These are just some of the questions and problems considered by historians
in this special volume, drawn from a roundtable organized at the Western History
Association Conference in the fall of 2006. The essays in this volume bring together
a group of historians to analyze and discuss Mexican-American citizenship in light
of the often contradictory nature of policy formation. This roundtable was an effort
to move beyond the often condemnatory historical gaze of some scholarship on
Mexican-American citizenship politics and legal strategy to understand the process
of policy formation among this minority group. These essays increase our
13. DU BoIs, supra note 6,at 700-01.
14. See generally MARIO BARRERA, RACE AND LABOR IN THE SOUTHWEST (1979).
15. See GUADALUPE SAN MIGUEL, JR., "LET THEM ALL TAKE HEED": MEXICAN AMERICANS
AND THE CAMPAIGN FOR EDUCATIONAL EQUALITY IN TEXAS: 1910-1981 (1987); Gilbert G. Gonzalez,
Segregation and the Education of Mexican Children 1900-1940, in THE ELUSIVE QUEST FOR EQUALITY:
150 YEARS OF CHICANO/CHICANA EDUCATION 53, 72-73 (Jose F. Moreno ed., 1999); ALFREDO
MIRANDE, GRINGO JUSTICE (1987).
16. See AMERICO PAREDES, WITH HIS PISTOL IN HIS HAND: A BORDER BALLAD AND ITS
HERO (8th ed. 1990); MIRANDE, supra note 15; GUADALUPE SAN MIGUEL,supra note 15;FRANCISCO A.
ROSALES, POBRE RAzA!: VIOLENCE, JUSTICE, AND MOBILIZATION AMONG MEXICO LINDO IMMIGRANTS:
1900-1936 (1999); DAVID MONTEJANO, ANGLOS AND MEXICANS IN THE MAKING OF TEXAS: 1836-1986
(1987); BENJAMIN HEBER JOHNSON, REVOLUTION IN TEXAS: How A FORGOTTEN REBELLION AND ITS
BLOODY SUPPRESSION TURNED MEXICANS INTO AMERICANS
UNITED STATES 20 (1985).
(2003);
JOAN W. MOORE, HISPANICS IN THE
2007]
MORE THAN WHITENESS
understanding of the often pragmatic response of some Mexican-Americans
(admittedly sometimes self identified as Caucasians) seeking protections for a
Mestizo (mixed race) group who, like African-Americans, included people of diverse
racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds. Unraveling the complicated nature of
Mexican-American identity and politics is an ongoing project, and these essays go a
long way in expanding our understanding of the often pragmatic response of activists
and organizations as the nature of racial jurisprudence and identity politics changed
rapidly after World War 11.17
I.
CITIZENSHIP BY TREATY, WHITENESS WITHOUT RIGHTS
Although Mexican-American and Western history scholars have taken the
conquest of Northern Mexico seriously, there lacks an appreciation of this legacy of
conquest in the general narrative of United States' history. This erasure is less
severe today than it was just a few decades ago, but it is still noticeable if one
peruses the scant coverage of this war in history survey textbooks. 18 The war and its
aftermath deeply affected Mexican residents living in the conquered territory. It also
helped establish the racialized nature of relations between Anglos and MexicanAmericans. In her essay, Guadalupe T. Luna summarizes key elements of her
research into the failure of the United States' government to abide by the "promises"
of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty ended the military occupation of
Mexico and brought about the withdrawal of United States' troops from the capital19 at
Mexico City, yet also ceded nearly half of Mexico's territory to the United States.
The end of the war brought United States citizenship to those Mexican
citizens who remained in the conquered northern half of Mexico. The treaty granted
them Caucasian status and naturalization eligibility. Although they were legally
"white" this document did not make them white in the eyes of the Anglo immigrants
to what is now the American Southwest. In the Southwest, Mexicans might not have
been Black, but they were definitely not white. As one Texas farmer summed up this
non-white caste hierarchy, "[w]e feel toward the Mexicans just like toward the
nigger, but not so much."
One of the "wages" of whiteness is the protection of property rights and the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formally recognized the property rights of those
holding Spanish and Mexican titles to land in the Southwest. However, as Luna
shows, the United States may have granted formal property protections to these
landholders, yet it denied these rights to Mexican-American landholders through the
17. For an examination of the hybrid nature of Mexican-American life, see MARTHA
MENCHACA, RECOVERING HISTORY, CONSTRUCTING RACE: THE INDIAN, BLACK, AND WHITE ROOTS OF
MEXICAN AMERICANS (2001).
18. See, e.g., JOHN MACK FARAGHER ET. AL., OUT OF MANY: A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN
PEOPLE (4th ed., 2005).
19. See. e.g., Guadalupe T. Luna, Chicana/Chicano Land Tenure in the Agrarian Domain: On
the Edge of a "Naked Knife, "4 MICH. J. RACE & L. 39 (1998); Guadalupe T. Luna, On the Complexities
of Race: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and Dred Scott v. Sandford, 53 U. MIAMI L. REV. 691 (1999);
Guadalupe T. Luna, This Land Belongs to Me: Chicanas, Land Grant Adjudication, and the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo, 3 HARV. LATINO L. REV. 115 (1999); Richard Griswold del Castillo, Manifest
Destiny: The Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 5 Sw. J.L. & TRADE AM. 31,
32(1998).
20. Quoted in PATRICIA LIMERICK, THE LEGACY OF CONQUEST 247 (1988).
BERKELEY LA RAZA LA WJOURNAL
[Vol. 18
creation and manipulation of formal legal institutions and procedures. In this way,
this new population of Mexican-Americans who might have been "white" based on
class or culture lacked meaningful protection as Luna shows in her examination of
Peralta v. United States.21 In Peralta, a privileged female land owner's heirs in
possession of land in Northern California failed to secure protection because the
state's archive lacked a copy of the grant, even though the grantee had complete
documentation. Thus, the wages of whiteness had little value as the property rights
of even elite Mexican-Americans were not protected by the United States.
II.
MEXICAN-AMERICANS, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE STRUGGLE
FOR MEMBERSHIP
Although they may have pursued a litigation strategy that maintained a
commitment to Caucasian status, from the 1940s forward, Mexican-American
activist elites and attorneys fought for a broad array of civil rights, often in coalition
with whites and African-Americans. By looking at the activism of the Community
Service Organization ("CSO") in the Cold War period, Shana Bernstein sheds light
on the local struggle in Los Angeles, California for freedom and equality - including
grass roots movements for street lighting, and against segregated public
accommodations, segregated schools, and against police brutality. These efforts
were often social movements that involved cooperation among Anglos, AfricanAmericans, Jewish-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Mexican-Americans in
Southern California. It appears that non-elite and middle-class Mexican-Americans
alike struggled in coalitions for citizenship rights rather than seeking privilege in
"whiteness." As Bernstein shows, whiteness politics did not shape the formation of
political movements in diverse admittedly urban communities or limit the ability of
some Mexican American activists to cross the color line in an effort to change
society for the benefit of diverse racial coalitions. 23
Reform movements and individual efforts aimed at expanding the rights of
Mexican-American citizenship are likewise the topic of the essays by Craig
Kaplowitz, Nancy MacLean, and Tom Romero. For Kaplowitz, the civil rights
organization League of United Latin American Citizens ("LULAC") from its start,
but increasingly after World War II, placed its emphasis on a "commitment to, or a
vested interest in, life in the United States., 24 This grew from a long-term desire on
the part of the organization to struggle for the working class and middle class
aspirations of persons of Mexican-ancestry living in the United States as citizens or
on the citizenship track. Why did LULAC fail to fight for all persons of Mexican
ancestry by privileging citizenship over ethnic affiliation?
As Kaplowitz
demonstrates, LULAC worked to improve conditions for Mexican-Americans at a
21.
70 U.S. (3 Wall.) 434 (1865).
22. The United States unilaterally rejected section 10 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
(1848), and in so doing, required perfected titles for all Mexican and Spanish grants in the newly ceded
territories. This worked a hardship on those parties who because of war, or other frontier conditions,
perhaps failed to perfect title. See, e.g., Cessna v. United States, 169 U.S. 165 (1897).
23. See Shana Bemstein, Building Bridges at Home in a Time of Global Conflict: Interracial
Cooperation and the Fight for Civil Rights in Los Angeles: 1933-1954 (2003) (unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, Stanford Univ.) (on file with the author).
24. Craig L. Kaplowitz, Citizens, Stakeholders and Civil Rights, 18 BERKELEY LA RAZA L.J.
193 (2007).
2007]
MORE THAN WHITENESS
time when domestic workers experienced direct or indirect competition from both
legal contract labor and illegal or undocumented labor flows from Mexico, two
policies supported by agricultural and business interests. In this time of immigration
and labor competition, LULAC leaders often compared themselves to "white"
ethnics. 25 Yet at the same time, Mexican-Americans were often quite poor and
suffered horrible social, health, and educational conditions in the United States living
daily lives defined by a brown-white color line. When civil rights and social rights
protections expanded in the 1960s, LULAC shifted tactics and increasingly sought
protections for Mexican-Americans as a distinct racial group. In this light, a form of
racial pragmatism appears to have defined LULAC's organizational response to
issues of race, minority status, and governmental programs in the period following
the landmark changes in civil rights law and policy after the triumph26of race based
civil rights and the emergence of the "Chicano" civil rights movement.
Continuing this thread of analysis, MacLean shows how pragmatism was
long an approach used by Mexican-American organizations and leadership when it
came to questions of racial status and legal protection. MacLean examines the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 as a window into Mexican-American identity and politics. She
shows how when the legal terrain and political environment changed to allow for a
shift from "whiteness" to an acknowledgement of minority status or "brownness,"
Mexican-American organizations took a "sharp turn" and built meaningful and
27
lasting coalitions with African-Americans and other minorities. This is not to say
this road to the protections of minority status or "color" was an easy one. MexicanAmericans as a group had been nearly ignored by the New Deal and the expanding
welfare state of the post World War II period. MacLean shows how difficult it was
for Mexican-Americans to put their community's problems of poverty, racism,
health, and other issues on the national agenda. MacLean ends with a discussion of
the long-term prospects for continued alliances between African-Americans and
Mexican-Americans in a period of political and economic change.' 8
Romero likewise focuses attention on the changing legal, social, and
political mechanisms that enabled a shift from Caucasian status to minority status
Expanding his "possessive investment in color"
among Mexican-Americans.
analysis, Romero shows how the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education
Fund ("MALDEF") constructed the "color" status of Mexican-Americans as they
group.
unmade a "white" identity and created one as an identifiable minority
LULAC and other Mexican-American civil rights organizations from across the
political spectrum increasingly argued that Mexican-Americans experienced unique
forms of discrimination that required solutions different from those designed to
remedy African-American inequality. In making the case, MALDEF rejected
assimilation per se, and called on the government to recognize difference as they
fought for the "non-Whiteness" and "non-Blackness" of Mexican-Americans even as
25. JOHNSON, supra note 16, at 50-51 (discussing efforts on the part of Mexican American
reformers to identify with ethnic immigrants).
26. See Kaplowitz, supra note 23.
27. See Nancy MacLean, The Civil Rights Act and the Transformation of Mexican American
Identity and Politics, 18 BERKELEY LA RAZA L.J. 219 (2007).
28. See id.
29. Tom Romero, MALDEF and the Legal Investment in a Multi-Colored America, 18
BERKELEY LA RAZA L.J. 231 (2007).
BERKELEY LA RAZ4 LAWJOURNAL
[Vol. 18
the new language of racial identity politics.3"
In many ways, the growth of a civil rights infrastructure brought MexicanAmericans and African-Americans together as often unstable allies.
CONCLUSION
As people of Mexican ancestry again face the onslaught of discrimination
brought by nativists and anti-immigrant forces today, it is instructive to look back
and unravel the often-pragmatic history of racial and ethnic politics of MexicanAmericans. Mexican-Americans certainly deployed "whiteness" as a tactic when it
was the only available legal strategy to seek remedies in an age defined by the blackwhite binary and real issues of citizenship and naturalization eligibility. To do
otherwise might have brought a formalization of the de facto segregation and
discrimination faced by Mexican-American people every day in the United States.
Yet, when the legal tide shifted in favor of a more expansive understanding of race
and politics in the United States Mexican-American rights organizations joined
African-Americans and abandoned the politics of whiteness. Now, there are
problems with this racial orientation as it has evolved since its expansion as
immigration to the U.S. test the limits of identity and minority status benefits and the
utility of remedies and reforms designed to counteract past prejudice suffered by
citizenship groups. One often hears of elites from the Spanish-speaking world
becoming "Latino" to qualify for many of the benefits of "color" despite the fact that
these individuals suffered no past discrimination within the United States. This
globalization of color and multicultural politics has led some commentators to call
for economic justice first and the consideration of race as only one of several factors
considered especially when it comes to elite institutional policies and the
cosmopolitan class of multicultural elites who many feel reap the benefits of past
civil rights litigation within the United States. 3 1 These essays are presented here as a
way to engage the past history of racial reform among Mexican Americans and as
part of an ongoing effort to understand the context, history, and activism of those
who worked to expand the meaning of citizenship for minorities in the United
States.32
30. See id.
31. See WALTER BENN MICHAELS, THE TROUBLE WITH DIVERSITY: How WE LEARNED TO
LOVE IDENTITY AND IGNORE INEQUALITY (2007); HUGH DAVIS GRAHAM, COLLISION COURSE: THE
STRANGE CONVERGANCE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND IMMIGRATION POLICY IN AMERICA (2003).
32. For a path breaking and promising new approach to these issues, see Ariela J. Gross, The
Caucasian Cloak: Mexican Americans and the Politicsof Whiteness in the Twentieth-Century Southwest,
95 GEO. L.J. 337 (2007).