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chaPTer 1 introduction How and when to protect groups from discrimination is an enduring puzzle in american politics. Designing policies and navigating the political landscapes of institutions have arisen as concerns throughout american political history. since the beginning of the twenty-first century, latinos have become the largest community of color and minority group in the United states, constituting 15.8 percent of the population.1 The approximately 31.7 million people of Mexican origin2 residing in the United states make up 10.3 percent of the population. issues regarding immigration, border control and security, and citizenship tend to implicitly address the place of people of Mexican origin within theamerican polity. as the black-white binary holds less and less relevance to the reality of difference in the United states, turning to people of Mexican origin provides a possible road map for formulating strategies for democratic management of diversity. exploring a model of political incorporation for people of Mexican origin through institutional interaction can be instrumental in designing strategies for including traditionally marginalized groups in the american polity. Federal civil rights policy began two decades before the landmark Civil rights act of 1964. a great deal of attention in politics, popular culture, and academic literature has been devoted to the african american civil rights struggle, while the concurrent journey of people of Mexican origin lacks adequate attention and study. on June 25, 1941, President Franklin roosevelt issued executive order 8802, creating the United states’ first federal antidiscrimination agency, the Fair employment Practices Committee (FePC). While the impetus for roosevelt’s order was primarily pressure from african american groups, executive order 8802 described the FePC’s mission as “to encourage full participation in the national defense program by all citizens of the United states, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin, in the firm belief that the democratic way of life within the nation can be defended successfully only with the help and support of all groups within its borders.”3 as a result the FePC was created with the explicit mantra of promoting democracy at home through combating discrimination in the workforce. The inclusion of race, creed, color, and national origin in executive order 8802 2 • chaPTer 1 shows an explicit understanding that discrimination occurred in instances far beyond the black-white binary. in existence from 1941 to 1946, the FePC’s institutional apparatus and organization became the model for state-level fair employment agencies during the period between 1945 and 1964 and, after passage of the Civil rights act of 1964, the federal equal employment opportunity Commission (eeoC). Procedures used today by the eeoC and by state and local discrimination and human rights commissions are based in large part on those the FePC developed. examining the origins of antidiscrimination policy is crucial to informing policy debates in the contemporary era. People of Mexican origin are a focus of immigration debates that characterize them as an “other,” while antidiscrimination policy explicitly includes them. studying people of Mexican origin as a group included rather than excluded from the american polity will frame this analysis. People of Mexican origin lack a homogeneous physical appearance and cultural background, speak a variety of languages, and have a diversity of citizenship statuses. However, they are often racialized and perceived as a monolithic group of outsiders. De Facto rather than de jure segregation and ostensibly color-blind legislation and policy have been the prime state source of discrimination. The experience of african americans and the toll of de jure discrimination are not minimized by this analysis; rather, this book shows the long-standing ways that people of Mexican origin have experienced discrimination as well as models of small-scale state building designed to address the problems of the community-specific policies designed by Mexican american civil rights leaders. nearly a half century after the passage of civil rights legislation , it is worth using the experiences of discrimination of people of Mexican origin to find some challenges and possibilities for an increasingly diverse polity. after african americans, people of Mexican origin4 were the second largest group to benefit from the FePC. Mexican american civil rights leaders,5 Mexican consuls, and FePC officials shaped the way people of Mexican origin were included in the agency. They formed transnational issue networks that worked at the international, national, and local levels to incorporate people of Mexican origin. Most strikingly, many of the original complainants to the FePC were brought to the agency through the efforts of Mexican consuls. after...

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