Lulac Mexican Americans And National Policy

Through the dedicated intervention of LULAC and other Mexican American activist groups, the understanding of civil rights in America was vastly expanded in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mexican Americans gained federal remedies for discrimination based not simply on racial but also on cultural and linguistic disadvantages. Generally considered one of the more conservative ethnic political organizations, LULAC had traditionally espoused nonconfrontational tactics and had insisted on the identification of Mexican Americans as "white." But by 1966, the changing civil rights environment, new federal policies that protected minority groups, and rising militancy among Mexican American youth led LULAC to seek federal protections for Mexican Americans as a distinct minority. In that year, LULAC joined other Mexican American groups in staging a walkout during meetings with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Albuquerque. In this book, Craig A. Kaplowitz draws on primary sources, at both national and local levels, to understand the federal policy arena in which the identity issues and power politics of LULAC were played out. At the national level, he focuses on presidential policies and politics, since civil rights has been preeminently a presidential issue. He also examines the internal tensions between LULAC members? ethnic allegiances and their identity as American citizens, which led to LULAC?s attempt to be identified as white while, paradoxically, claiming policy benefits from the fact that Mexican Americans were treated as if they were non-white. This compelling study offers an important bridge between the history of social movements and the history of policy development. It also provides new insight into an important group on America?s multicultural stage.

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) is one of the best-known and active national organizations that represent Mexican Americans and their political interests. Since its founding in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1929, it has served as a vehicle through which Mexican Americans can strive for equal rights and economic assimilation into Anglo American society. This study is the first comprehensive political history of LULAC from its founding through the 1980s. Márquez explores the group’s evolution from an activist, grassroots organization in the pre– and post–World War II periods to its current status as an institutionalized bureaucracy that relies heavily on outside funding to further its politically conservative goals. His information is based in part on many primary source materials from the LULAC archives at the University of Texas at Austin, the Houston Public Library, and the University LULAC publications, as well as interviews with present and past LULAC activists. Márquez places this history within the larger theoretical framework of incentive theory to show how changing, and sometimes declining, membership rewards have influenced people’s participation in LULAC and other interest groups over time. Ironically, as of 1988, LULAC could claim fewer than 5,000 dues-paying members, yet a dedicated and skillful leadership secured sufficient government and corporate monies to make LULAC one of the most visible and active groups in Mexican American politics. Given the increasing number of interest groups and political action committees involved in national politics in the United States, this case study of a political organization’s evolution will be of interest to a wide audience in the political and social sciences, as well as to students of Mexican American and ethnic studies.

Like all descendants of immigrants, Mexican Americans have faced tensions between their ethnic identity and their identity as American citizens. The federal policy arena is an important, but largely unexplored, venue in which these tensions play out. This project examine the emerging ethnic identity of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the oldest and largest Mexican American organization in the country. From 1942, when the U.S. government began importing laborers from Mexico, through 1975, when the government mandated bilingual/bicultural education and voting protections, LULAC members engaged a series of policy issues, each time adjusting the balance between the Mexican and American elements of their identity. Significantly, throughout this period LULAC refused to call Mexican Americans a racial minority. As they became more convinced that Mexican Americans deserved particular remedies as a disadvantaged group, they supported programs to remedy cultural, rather than racial, discrimination. This dissertation explores the way LULAC members balanced their ethnic identity and American citizenship, how those views and the systemic changes of the 1960s shaped their expectations of the federal government, and how federal policymakers reacted to the entrance of LULAC, and Mexican Americans in general, into the federal policy arena. By relating the study of developing views of identity and ethnicity at the grassroots level with the study of federal policy and party politics, this dissertation offers an important bridge between the history of social movements and the history of policy development.

Through the dedicated intervention of LULAC and other Mexican American activist groups, the understanding of civil rights in America was vastly expanded in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mexican Americans gained federal remedies for discrimination based not simply on racial but also on cultural and linguistic disadvantages. Generally considered one of the more conservative ethnic political organizations, LULAC had traditionally espoused nonconfrontational tactics and had insisted on the identification of Mexican Americans as “white.” But by 1966, the changing civil rights environment, new federal policies that protected minority groups, and rising militancy among Mexican American youth led LULAC to seek federal protections for Mexican Americans as a distinct minority. In that year, LULAC joined other Mexican American groups in staging a walkout during meetings with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Albuquerque. In this book, Craig A. Kaplowitz draws on primary sources, at both national and local levels, to understand the federal policy arena in which the identity issues and power politics of LULAC were played out. At the national level, he focuses on presidential policies and politics, since civil rights has been preeminently a presidential issue. He also examines the internal tensions between LULAC members’ ethnic allegiances and their identity as American citizens, which led to LULAC’s attempt to be identified as white while, paradoxically, claiming policy benefits from the fact that Mexican Americans were treated as if they were non-white. This compelling study offers an important bridge between the history of social movements and the history of policy development. It also provides new insight into an important group on America’s multicultural stage.

Between 1940 and 1975, African Americans and Mexican Americans in Texas fought a number of battles in court, at the ballot box, in schools, and on the streets to eliminate segregation and state-imposed racism. Although both groups engaged in civil rights

This historical study examines how Mexican American experiences during WWII galvanized the community’s struggle for civil rights. World War II marked a turning point for Mexican Americans that fundamentally changed their relationship to US society at large. The experiences of fighting alongside white Americans in the military, as well as working in factory jobs for wages equal to those of Anglo workers, made Mexican Americans less willing to tolerate the second-class citizenship that had been their lot before the war. Having proven their loyalty and “Americanness” during World War II, Mexican Americans began to demand the civil rights they deserved. In this book, Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard Steele investigate how the wartime experiences of Mexican Americans helped forge their civil rights consciousness and how the US government responded. The authors demonstrate, for example, that the US government “discovered” Mexican Americans during World War II and began addressing some of their problems as a way of ensuring their willingness to support the war effort. The book concludes with a selection of key essays and historical documents from the World War II period that provide a first-person perspective of Mexican American civil rights struggles.

“A refreshing and pathbreaking [study] of the roots of Mexican American social movement organizing in Texas with new insights on the struggles of women” (Devon Peña, Professor of American Ethnic Studies, University of Washington). Historian Cynthia E. Orozco presents a comprehensive study of the League of United Lantin-American Citizens, with an in-depth analysis of its origins. Founded by Mexican American men in 1929, LULAC is often judged harshly according to Chicano nationalist standards of the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed presents LULAC in light of its early twentieth-century context. Orozco argues that perceptions of LULAC as an assimilationist, anti-Mexican, anti-working class organization belie the group's early activism. Supplemented by oral history, this sweeping study probes LULAC's predecessors, such as the Order Sons of America, blending historiography and cultural studies. Against a backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, World War I, gender discrimination, and racial segregation, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed recasts LULAC at the forefront of civil rights movements in America.