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Journal of Policy History 15.2 (2003) 192-222



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A Distinct Minority:
LULAC, Mexican American Identity, and Presidential Policymaking, 1965-1972

Craig A. Kaplowitz


During the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, Mexican American civil rights went from being an addendum to civil rights for African Americans to a stand-alone policy with a bureaucracy, federal programs, and an independent rationale. Ever since President Harry Truman accepted civil rights in the Democratic platform in 1948, federal policymakers and politicians tried to fit Mexican Americans, and other minority groups, into the civil rights mold they had carved out for blacks in the South. While subject to severe discrimination and disadvantage, Mexican Americans did not face the consistent statutory segregation and discrimination faced by blacks. 1 Federal civil rights policy for Mexican Americans through the mid-1960s consisted of New Frontier and Great Society funding programs to which Mexican American organizations could apply for money to develop and carry out projects in their communities. By the end of Richard Nixon's first term, a federal bilingual education program was established, agencies and committees existed whose sole function was to coordinate Mexican American programs, and Mexican Americans were recognized by policymakers as a distinct minority group with unique needs that required particular federal remedies.

For their part, Mexican Americans generally resented being lumped with African Americans on civil rights issues. During the Jim Crow era, Mexican American organizations employed an "other-white" legal strategy in which they insisted that Mexican Americans are white and therefore not subject to racial segregation. In the early 1960s, the focus of the New Frontier and early Great Society—to help all disadvantaged (black and white) with general antipoverty programs—brought Mexican Americans into the domestic policy arena, as they could get federal aid for disadvantaged Mexican Americans [End Page 192] without inviting classification as a racial minority. But as the Johnson administration shifted into crisis management in the wake of urban riots, many Mexican Americans believed their problems were overshadowed by the attention given to blacks. They began to publicly insist on what had been a growing sentiment since the late 1950s—that Mexican Americans are a unique group whose problems require particular remedies rather than general programs.

The climax of this growing sentiment among the largest Mexican American civil rights organizations was a meeting of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) held on 28 March 1966. The conference had been called to discuss the employment problems facing Mexican Americans, but it did not progress very far. Barely an hour into the meeting, the leaders of four major Mexican American organizations rose and lodged complaints against the EEOC. They then led most of the other forty delegates out of the room, and met together elsewhere on the University of New Mexico campus to call for the EEOC to recognize the unique problems of Mexican Americans in its enforcement efforts.

The walkout made the newspapers—front-page stories locally, a wire report inside the New York Times. It also got the attention of the White House, the Mexican Americans' primary target. President Lyndon B. Johnson, from Texas, knew many of these leaders personally, and considered them among the most reasonable and moderate members of the Mexican American community. These leaders had not engaged in such tactics with the president before. One group in particular, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), had a reputation for negotiation and working within the system to bring change. For LULAC and the other organizations to use a walkout to make a point marked a new willingness within these groups to use public protest and a new wrinkle in the relationship between Mexican American organizations, including LULAC, and the federal government. For these reasons, studies of Mexican American civil rights count the walkout as a significant turning point in the struggle. 2

Interestingly, the organizations involved in the walkout virtually disappear from histories of Mexican American civil rights after March 1966. LULAC and the American G.I. Forum in particular are recognized as the most important...

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