Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas

Conclusion

224 Conclusion The 2001 mayoral race in Houston pitted incumbent Democratic mayor Lee P. Brown against Republican challenger and Houston City Council member Orlando Sánchez. Mayor Brown, an African American political wunderkind, had served as police chief in Houston, police commissioner in NewYork City, and “drug czar” during the presidency of Bill Clinton before his election as mayor of Houston in 1997. Brown represented liberal, Democratic politics in the Bayou City. He made concerted appeals to Mexican American voters and had appointed a number of Hispanics to positions in his administration. Sánchez, a fair-complected, blue-eyed Cuban American, seemed politically out of step for the Mexican-origin community. He was a conservative Republican in a city where most Mexican Americans voted Democratic. And, of course, he was not of Mexican descent. Yet 72 percent of Hispanics voted for Sánchez, while 90 percent of African Americans voted for Brown.1 The Houston mayoral race demonstrated once again the Mexican American /African American divide in Texas. Mexican Americans voted for their candidate; African Americans voted for theirs. Despite Brown’s appeals to Mexican American voters, he could not overcome Mexican American ethnic solidarity with Sánchez. By the same token, Orlando Sánchez failed to overcome black racial solidarity with Lee Brown. While this seemed to astonish many political observers, the broader history of African American and Mexican American relations shows that the political contours of this election were hardly surprising. Throughout the twentieth century, and clearly into the twenty-first, unification eluded Mexican Americans and African Americans. While both groups fought a powerful and entrenched racial caste system, they ultimately did so alone. Blacks and Mexican Americans had manyobstacles to overcome in their respective civil rights movements. Aside from combating segrega- conclusion 225 tion, poverty, disenfranchisement, and other forms of discrimination, they also had to overcome their animosities toward each other. In this effort, they largely failed. African Americans and Mexican Americans began to challenge Jim Crow segregation inTexas in the early twentieth century. For blacks, the first task involved creating prosperous, stable communities. But segregation and racism hampered the feasibility of this approach. So blacks began to more forcefully challenge Jim Crow by pushing lawsuits such as the Nixon cases, Smith v. Allwright, and Sweatt v. Painter. Mexican Americans also hoped to establish prosperous communities, but they primarily focused on winning recognition as a group of white people. Successful legal challenges and appeals to state leaders demonstrated to Mexican Americans the efficacy of promoting white rights, although the whiteness strategy failed to eliminate racism. Between 1930 and 1950, the inchoate struggles of blacks and Mexican Americans gained momentum, but few leaders discussed uniting these separate movements . In the 1950s, Mexican American and black civil rights groups began to engage in more confrontational tactics, especially when it came to the separate education of their children. For both communities, school segregation violated the principles of a fair and just society. Mexican Americans continued to argue that, as whites, their children should not suffer the burden of segregation. Leaders won a number of victories in securing white rights, but the whiteness strategy did not forge the promised integration that Mexican Americans desired. After Brown v. Board of Education, black civil rights groups urged state officials to fairly implement desegregation. In almost every case, elected leaders resisted these efforts. While both blacks and Mexican Americans engaged in similar attempts to eradicate segregated education, they did so separately. The sit-in movement of the early 1960s exacerbated tensions between African Americans and Mexican Americans in Texas. Direct action demonstrations reenergized the black freedom struggle, which gave it many victories. Rather than face prolonged protests and possible racial violence, numerous communities began the process of integration. Mexican Americans seemed stunned. Many Mexican American leaders viewed direct action in a negative light. Protests lacked dignity and potentially tarnished the image of the United States. And while some Mexican-origin communities began their own, more aggressive demonstrations, particularly in Crystal City, on average Mexican Americans looked askance at black protests. Their negative perceptions damaged hopes for a unified movement. 226 conclusion Despite the opposition of some Mexican Americans to the sit-in movement , these protests ultimately helped radicalize the Mexican American struggle. When the Mexican-origin community engaged in the Minimum Wage March of 1966, it learned the value of direct action. More demonstrations followed. While the whiteness strategy remained, more aggressive...