Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston

Notes

Notes preface 1. In this study three basic labels will be used to identify the community being studied : Mexican-origin, Mexican American, and Chicano. The first term will be used to describe the community in general. The second label will be used to describe those individuals who shared many, if not most, characteristics of the Mexican American Generation to be discussed later and who were active in community struggles in Houston during the period after 1960. The term “Chicano” will be used primarily in reference to youth and to those activists who shared some elements of the ideology of racial awareness and commitment to social change. For a brief history of the manifestations of this ideology in California during the 1960s and 1970s see Carlos Muñoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (New York: Verso, 1989). See also Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940–1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), especially pp. 101–154. 2. Thomas H. Kreneck, Del Pueblo: A Pictorial History of Houston’s Hispanic Community (Houston: Houston International University, 1989), p. 159. chapter 1. diversification and differentiation in the history of the mexican-origin community in houston 1. For two different examples of the diversity of the historical experiences of Mexicans see Mario García, Desert Immigrants (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979); and Michael M. Smith, The Mexicans in Oklahoma (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980). 2. This region was not without a Spanish or Mexican presence. During the Spanish era the Spanish explorer Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca passed through the vicinity of Houston, a presidio was established on the lower Trinity River in the mid 1700s, and in the 1810s the Galveston Bay was the scene of minor Spanish/Mexican activity . During the Mexican era the major episodes of the Texas Revolution, save for the Battle of the Alamo, occurred around the Houston area. After Texas independence , some Mexican individuals began to settle in Houston or its surroundings. Lorenzo de Zavala, the federalist liberal from Yucatán, who fled to Texas to escape the Centralists in Mexico and became vice president of the first government in an independent Texas, settled in the Houston area. Some of Santa Anna’s defeated army became servants for Texians living in Galveston. In Houston proper, Mexicans helped develop the city by clearing the swampy grounds around the city in the 1830s or acted as servants in the young town during the early years of the republic . No evidence is available on the period from the late 1830s to the 1840s. In the years from 1850 to 1880 only a handful were living in the city. Between 1880 and 1900 the number of Mexican-origin individuals increased from seventy-five to five hundred. See Arnoldo De León, Ethnicity in the Sunbelt: A History of Mexican Americans in Houston (Houston: Mexican American Studies Program, 1989), pp. 5–6. 3. The size of the Mexican population was seventy-five in 1880, five hundred in 1900, fifteen thousand in 1930, and seventy-five thousand in 1960. During the thirty-year period from 1960 to 1990 the population grew to over three hundred thousand. See De León, Ethnicity in the Sunbelt, p. 98. 4. Between 1930 and 1940 the population experienced only a five-thousand-person increase. The Mexican population was 19 percent of the total Houston population in 1980. See ibid., p. xviii. 5. During the 1920s religious exiles left Mexico and immigrated to the United States. The immigrants came largely from the central and western parts of Mexico. After 1940 most of the immigrants came from the central and eastern parts of Mexico. See ibid., pp. 98–99. 6. One example of this type of migration was the family of Mary Villagómez, a lifelong resident of Houston. Her family came to Houston by way of the East Texas lumber mills. The family had worked briefly in these lumber mills before settling in Magnolia in the late 1910s. See Mary C. Villagómez, interview by Roberto R. Treviño, Oct. 25, 1990, Houston, Tex., in Roberto R. Treviño, “La Fe: Catholicism and Mexican Americans in Houston, 1911–1972” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1993), p. 61. 7. Few studies have been done on the urbanization process among Mexicans in general . For one excellent overview of this urbanization process in the Southwest for the period from 1900 to 1930 see Ricardo Romo, “The Urbanization of Southwestern Chicanos...