No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement

THREE. Rise of a Movement

Rise of a Movement T H R E E We declare it the duty of citizens of the United States of Mexican or Spanish extraction to use their influence in all the fields of social, economic, and political action to secure the fullest possible enjoyment of all rights, privileges, and prerogatives granted to them under the American Constitution and to accomplish this we believe that a national organization should exist. —order sons of america constitution, 1922 Historian David Montejano asserts, “There would be no vigorous or unified opposition against segregation until after World War II, when Texas veterans would organize to challenge the dramatic condition of race supremacy .”1 Eleazar Paredes contends, “It was not until World War II that the Chicano . . . emerged as his true self—a man of dignity, a man who knows his rights and will demand them, not request them.”2 Historian María Eva Flores has argued that World War II “made Mexican American men and women feel entitled to equal treatment.”3 Most scholars find that the American GI Forum, a veterans’ organization, initiated true civil rights activism in Texas. Yet scholars Guadalupe San Miguel Jr., Thomas Kreneck, Mario García, Richard García, and Arnoldo De León have documented civil rights struggles in the 1930s, especially by LULAC.4 A closer look reveals that the origins of the Mexican American civil rights movement can be found in the 1920s with the founding of the Order Sons of America by men including 6 6 Politics World War I veterans who organized the OSA to defend La Raza. Historian Julie Leininger Pycior was the first to stress the OSA’s significance.5 The OSA inspired activism throughout the 1920s and would culminate in the founding of LULAC in 1929. In this chapter I address struggles against racial oppression before 1929 and explain why a permanent civil rights organization did not take root until the OSA in 1921. I examine strategies of resistance by networks, mutual aid societies, and the Mexican consulate. These efforts included the Gregorio Cortéz defense network, the Primer Congreso Mexicanista, the Agrupación Protectora Mexicana, and La Liga Protectora Mexicana. After 1921 a more Mexican American politics arose. The most important was the OSA, with chapters in San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and Alice. While the OSA was successful in spreading civil rights agitation across South Texas, a split in San Antonio led to the formation of the Order Sons of Texas and the Order Knights of America. Most of these groups would rejoin in 1929 to form LULAC. As each organization is discussed here, class, gender, and citizenship will be addressed so as to explain the rise of a Mexican American male middle-class politics. RE SISTANCE TO R ACIAL OPPRE SSION Mexican Consulate La Raza protested through letter-writing campaigns, petitions, boycotts, and, in the late nineteenth century, appeals to the Mexican consulate. Mexico established consular offices in the Southwest after 1848. Fifty-one such offices existed in the United States in 1920, and by 1921 sixteen of them had been established in Texas in places like San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Laredo, and Brownsville.6 The consulate was to maintain “friendly” relations with the United States and was prohibited from meddling in U.S. politics.7 La Raza appealed to the Mexican consulate to seek redress for lynching , segregation, racial discrimination, and labor exploitation. In 1922, for instance, the Mexican government protested the murder and lynching of sixty Mexicans throughout the United States. In 1926 San Antonio Consul Alejandro P. Carrillo petitioned Governor Miriam A. Ferguson to ban discrimination against Mexicans in public places.8 Over time, La Raza increasingly recognized the consulate’s limited power in solving racial oppression. In 1928 El Heraldo Mexicano, a San Antonio newspaper, asserted that the consulate “has not obtained any success . . . Rise of a Movement 6 7 Therefore we believe that we ourselves ought to leave these places, mainly rural, where we cannot count on justice.”9 The consulate clashed with political refugees from Mexico who were enemies of the Mexican government . In February 1919 La Prensa wrote that consulates were refugees’ worst enemy.10 Moreover, the consulate had no power or authority to work on behalf of U.S. citizens who were Mexican Americans. Mutual Aid Societies There were a few Raza national or statewide organizations. The Alianza Hispano Americana, a national mutual aid association founded in Arizona in...