Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II

Chapter 5: The FEPC and Mexican Workers in Texas

Chapter 5: The FEPC and Mexican Workers in Texas After the United Nations meeting, Perales reminded a group of friends welcoming him back to San Antonio that the international assemblies in Mexico City and San Francisco called on nations throughout the world to enact the kind of civil rights statute that President Roosevelt had anticipated with his executive orders against employment discrimination. According to Casta- ñeda, one of the hosts at the function, Perales added that “the principles of the FEPC were irretrievably fused with those of the Charter framed at San Francisco” and Congress was now obligated to retain the agency as evidence of the United States’ commitment to the human rights principles enunciated at San Francisco. He reportedly concluded that the world “would question the sincerity of the U.S. in the postulates made at San Francisco” if Congress did not make the FEPC a permanent agency after the war. Perales understood that southern congressmen were intent on ending the life of the FEPC as they campaigned to end the New Deal and preserve the racial order in the South. Nevertheless, he was intent on making use of the San Francisco proclamations on human rights and the nation’s nondiscrimination policy to justify civil rights legislation in the United States, or at least in his state of Texas. Perales saw the agency’s work in Texas as more than a response by the state to improve working conditions and to ensure the full and effective use of Cartoon depiction of Hitler parachuting into a giant cactus, while Uncle Sam and a Mexican laugh and dance, n.d. (Artist: Antonio Arias Bernal, Coordinador de Asuntos Interamericanos . The Holland Collection of World War II Posters, Center for Southwestern Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico.) 126 Chapter 5 the available labor supply. It was also part of a larger fight against discrimination , occurring at an important historical juncture in the social incorporation of Mexicans into American society. For him and no doubt many other civil rights leaders, the work of the FEPC represented a galvanizing and transformative moment that joined the cause for Mexican rights with the government ’s initiative on behalf of war workers. This broadly conceived social history allows us to incorporate Mexicans into the larger discourse over civil and labor rights in the United States. It also permits us to further reconceptualize the history of LULAC and the Mexican civil rights movement. Some historians may prefer to see LULAC largely as a conservative organization collaborating with the state instead of developing an independent critical voice on behalf of Mexican workers. This view, however, would overlook that LULAC leaders recognized the unprecedented opportunities that the war and an activist state offered marginalized communities. The bureaucratic machinery of the FEPC presented them with an untried and undeniable means to give voice to Mexican workers and to participate directly in high-level policy discussions in employment and civil rights. LULAC’s intermediary position between the U.S. and Mexican government also allowed its leaders to bring further attention to discrimination, inequality, and Mexicans in the United States. Our focus in this chapter is not restricted to the instances of collaboration between LULAC and Mexican consuls in support of the FEPC and the larger issue of equal rights. It also treats the FEPC as a place of struggle between contending ideas and projects in Texas. The FEPC, in other words, became a site for the fight between egalitarian and segregationist ideas, much like the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board is said to have functioned as a state-managed site of mediation for political battles migrating from the farms during the s and s. This involved the importation of ideas and causes from a larger political terrain into the internal workings of the FEPC, with LULAC and the Mexican government once again working together for equal Mexican rights. The grievance process, on the other hand, represented a concession by the Mexican social movement much as the U.S. working-class movement subjected itself to a process of labor bargaining that was ultimately beyond their control. African Americans also took part in this give-and-take as both actors and issues of contention. The Mexican cause, especially when set against the hemispheric political setting within which it operated, attracted much official attention in Texas, is lesser known, and, consequently, deserves our concerted attention. The FEPC and Mexican...