Claiming Citizenship: Mexican Americans in Victoria, Texas

Introduction

Introduction C arlos solís was born in Saltillo in the Mexican state of Coahuila on November 4, 1903. He immigrated to the United States in June, 1926, working in San Antonio until September when he moved to Victoria where he found employment as a carpenter. Solís never joined a union. He never picketed a business or government institution. He was never arrested or attacked by the police . Yet neither was he satisfied with the state of relations between Mexican Americans and Anglo-Americans he found in Victoria in the 1920s. Solís, therefore, became an activist for social change, seeking to create a more egalitarian world for his family. But in that activism Solís never challenged the core structure of American society. Indeed, he accepted the existent economic and political systems in principle. His concerns lay with the marginalization and discrimination that Mexican Americans like himself experienced.1 Victoria’s other Mexican American activists after World War II, like Solís, also questioned the inequities of American society while simultaneously embracing its structure and the spoken and unspoken values, practices, traits, and beliefs that had come to define first-class American citizenship. World War II, according to most scholars, was a watershed event in the history of Mexican American identity formation. Returning veterans, their families, and friends saw Mexican American war involvement at home and abroad as evidence of their community’s patriotism . Their contributions to the war and the experiences gained from it emboldened Mexican Americans to challenge a racist social order that had traditionally cast them as second-class citizens. Negotiating xv primarily through the classroom, the ballot box, and the court (only in rare instances did activists engage in strikes or demonstrations), Victoria ’s Mexican Americans during and after World War II actively and aggressively challenged the predominant, narrow definitions of American citizenship created and guarded by the Anglo majority. The World War II victory over fascism and the emerging cold war against communism signified a dramatic change in the primary markers of citizenship. More clearly than before citizenship in the cold war years came to be defined in ideological terms by mainstream society. This is not to suggest that racialized concepts of citizenship disappeared . Quite the contrary, the new ideological struggle against communism gave racists a new language and new rhetorical weaponry, which they marshaled against the rising tide of civil rights sentiment. Support for equal status in the early cold war years could be undermined by linking it with that supposed worst of all evils—communism. Ironically, the increased desires for social justice embraced by the civil rights movement stemmed in part from the new anticommunist understanding of citizenship, for postwar emphasis on ideological conformity seemed to offer access to citizenship for those who were willing to embrace certain ideological prescripts that stood as antithetical to the temptations of fascism or communism. Mass culture, individualism , and consumerism, and the mythology of American exceptionalism at midcentury, further shaped new notions of rights owed to those living in the era. Such understandings engendered fertile intellectual ground for Mexican Americans to question long-standing exclusionary definitions of citizenship in two ways. First, as legal loyal citizens, Mexican Americans could now make claims on society for public legitimacy . If the United States was to convincingly promote itself globally as the superior alternative to communism, it had to emphasize not only its economic but also its political and social superiority. The egalitarianism embedded within the American language of politics opened the door for Mexican Americans to challenge exclusionary political and legal definitions of citizenship. In confronting the status quo, Mexican Americans never sought a dramatic cultural shift of any sort, rather, they hoped to maintain their language, customs, and traditions, and legitimize them by showing that these characteristics could exist in ideological harmony with the antiradical mentality advocated by mainstream (white) culture. This desire to join a unified American effort Introduction xvi that would stand against socialism allowed for a second challenge to discrimination. If Mexican Americans could prove that they had internalized specific ideas, they could call for a renegotiation of definitions of citizenship, which, at least in the public discourse, were increasingly, though never completely, driven by ideology. Consensus constituted the major feature of the cold war thinking prevalent within Mexican American society in Texas, and by extension, Victoria. At least five considerations...