The Tejano Diaspora: Mexican Americanism and Ethnic Politics in Texas and Wisconsin

1 Post–World War II Mexican Americanism in Crystal City, Texas

1 Post–World War II Mexican Americanism in Crystal City, Texas In early 2003, the Zavala County Sentinel ran a newly discovered photo of nearly a dozen uniformed service men and women posing in downtown Crystal City. The image captured the high level of World War II military participation among Mexican Americans in this small South Texas city.1 Many of the veterans pictured spent their lives as politically active citizens in motion between Texas, the Midwest, California, and beyond. In the early postwar years, some engaged in a civil and patriotic form of activism in an effort to remake their hometown in the image of the America they had imagined and defended in uniform, seeking a place for Mexican-ancestry citizens within the broader society.2 For Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest, as for African Americans in the South, the post–World War II period witnessed increasing civil rights activism. Among the southwestern states, Texas served as a central location of postwar militancy on the part of Mexican Americans, in part for reasons of demography: although California would surpass Texas in total Mexican-ancestry population by 1960, Texas had the largest established Mexican American population in the United States after the war, with 1,033,768 Spanish-surnamed residents in 1950 compared to California’s 760,453. Texas hosted both of the nation’s largest Mexican American civil rights organizations. The League of United Latin-American Citizens (lulac), a national organization founded in 1929, fought discrimination against Latinos, particularly through its long effort to end discrimination against Mexicanorigin children in public education. The American gi Forum (agif), established in 1948 by Dr. Hector P. Garcia to advocate for veterans’ rights, subsequently committed itself to the elimination of the poll mexican americanism in crystal city 16 tax and to Mexican American voter registration, and it joined with lulac in bringing a number of antidiscrimination court cases in the 1950s.3 To understand the successes and failures of postwar Mexican Americanist politics and the foundation it created for subsequent activism across the migrant stream, this chapter sets the efforts of the agif within a local context in Crystal City, Texas. It begins with an examination of spatial separation from the early twentieth century through the 1950s to reveal the way Anglos and Mexicans structured what was a racialized community. From the founding of Crystal City, Mexicanancestry people served primarily as an agricultural and increasingly migratory labor force—a position that compelled a large majority of this population to spend much of the year in transit, working in Texas and other locations across the United States. The postwar era brought the introduction of Mexican braceros, or contract workers, whose presence strengthened divisions between Mexicans and Anglos in ways that bene fitted some ethnic entrepreneurs but also preserved the perception of all Mexican-ancestry people as foreign. Within this social environment, agif members practiced a politics of civility in an attempt to carve out a role for themselves as representatives of the Mexican American majority. This approach failed repeatedly : Anglos rejected it as a threat to the hardened racial boundaries they had created to control the participation of the Mexican American majority. Indeed, the virulence of Crystal City Anglos’ reaction to the efforts of the agif’s “moderate” politics suggests the radical challenge that early Mexican Americanism represented to the social and political practices of Anglo-controlled South Texas. Its limitations and its failure led subsequent activists to fashion their own, more radical version of Mexican Americanist politics.4 Social Separation in the Heart of the Winter Garden District From its establishment in 1907 from the culled-together remains of the Cross-S Ranch, a property built by combining unperfected Spanish grants in Zavala County, Crystal City grew as two cities, one Anglo and the other Mexican. Located 120 miles southwest of San Antonio and 50 miles from the Mexican border at Eagle Pass, Crystal City experienced significant growth in its first twenty years, as entrepreneurs, mexican americanism in crystal city 17 speculators, and labor migrants from Texas and Mexico joined the small ranching class that had settled Zavala County in the late nineteenth century along the banks of the Nueces River. Between 1920 and 1930, the population of Crystal City grew from 3,108 to 10,349 as the region experienced a farming boom, and this population remained stable and divided, with Anglo and Mexican urban communities on separate...