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ESSAY II

“Analyse the strategies adopted by a specific organization or social movement in

defence of a specific area of rights”

The following essay will analyse the characteristics of the Hispanics living in the United

States during the last century and the procedure to become an identified group with civil

rights.

First things first: what is a Hispanic in fact? The term Hispanic has its first appearance in

the US census in 1980. Many people in the US have used this term to refer to the migrants

coming from South America and Spain. However, it is true that another term arises to

“label” them, which is the misleading word “Latino”. Whilst the two ethnonyms are used

indifferently, "Hispanic" has a narrower sense that only includes persons of Spanish-

speaking origin, whereas the term "Latino" is more habitually used to refer to the people

of Latin American origin or ancestry, including Brazilians. "Hispanic" thus incorporates

persons from Spain and Spanish-speaking Latin Americans but excludes Portuguese and

Brazilians.

During the beginning of the twentieth century, the great part of Hispanics were of

Mexican, Puerto Rico and Cube descent and lived in the southwest of the US (states like

Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas). After World War II, the Hispanic migrant

wave began to expand and include great numbers of Caribbeans and Central and South

Americans who commonly settled in the Eastern states and California.

Between 1900 and 1930, due to a political disorder in Mexico mixed with the rise of

agribusiness in the American Southwest drove a significant migration of Mexicans to the

U.S. There were motives on both sides of the border. Alterations in the Mexican economy

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and government left many laborers with no land and desperate: the low paid Mexicans

were frequently involved in strikes against the president Porfirio Díaz (Fox, 1997). In

1911, a minor but significant percent of Mexico’s population departed to the U.S. In this

country they found work in agriculture and mining, which were transforming the

economy of the Southwest from a area of small, business landowners into one controlled

by large enterprises employing wage labour.

Puerto Ricans and Cubans, the second and third largest Spanish-speaking nationalities in

the United States, got started in this country with equivalent histories. The United States

was a main haven for refugees form the turmoil of Latin America in the nineteenth

century, and Cubans and Puerto Ricans had been settling there and in other eastern cities

since the 1820s. The Puerto Rican migration was enabled after 1917 by the conceding of

US citizenship to every one of the residents of the island, which had been acquired from

Spain in the War of 1898. Nevertheless, the change of legal did not instantly produce a

stream of migration from Puerto Rico to the United States. Cuban early immigration was

given an unintended boost by rises in US tariffs on cigars in 1857 and later (Fox, 1997).

Cuban cigars were a very big business in Cuba and the United States was the main buyer.

When the tariffs affected small manufacturers, some of the smart ones moved their

productions to the US. However, apart from manufacturers, the expatriates included

professionals like doctors, lawyers or teachers.

According to Delgado and Stefancic (1998, p.82), opposition to Hispanic immigration

crystallized in the 1920s. The reactions towards Mexican people intensified as their

numbers became bigger. In early 1921 the bottom fell out of the US economy and a

depression provoked substantial unemployment in the US population. When in times of

prosperity their numbers generated hostility, in times of crisis Mexicans began to be the

victims for the failure of the US economy. The business interests which had recruited

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Mexicans felt little responsibility to them and these entrepreneurs left thousands of

Mexicans all over the country stranded and penniless and some of them were shipped to

the border. Although these workers were recruited by the United States, the US

government did little to ameliorate their miseries. By the year 1923, the economy had

sufficiently recovered to attract Mexican workers to the United Stated in large numbers

again. Nonetheless, this “legal” migration was convoyed by a crowd of undocumented

workers who were encouraged to avoid the legal procedures. This new migration wave

differed from that of earlier years, becoming stronger and more permanent. The large

numbers of Mexicans upset nativist, who condemned the fact that the Johnson bill, which

would become the Immigration Act of 1924, did not limit Mexican immigrants. In 1924,

aggression to Mexican immigration peaked. Even though the measures stablished by

border officials to control the immigrants, Mexicans still entered with and without

documents. During this shift, the Mexican’s strategies changed. Those who worked as

regular migrants found it difficult to organise, since the workers’ community used to be

limited to their immediate families. Exiled from friends and associates, they were

frequently on the move. When this migration decelerated, Mexicans formed a series of

temporary associations, usually called mutualistas, to solve the most pressing difficulties.

Regularly, Mexican merchants and the consul used mutual aid societies as a natural

vehicle for worker organization (Delgado & Stefancic,1998). Tactics varied according to

the economic situation in its state or region. In Texas, Mexican Americans formed

LULAC (League of United Latin American citizens), a middle class and professional

group that was devoted to the Americanisation of Mexicans.

Despite the fact that a little number of Mexicans were for formally deported, repatriation

was a traumatic, disorienting and sorrowful course for most individuals and families.

Many of the repatriates believed that Mexicans were unfairly blamed for events over

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which they had no control. Despised after a spending between ten and twenty (or more)

productive years as hard-working members of the American working class, Mexican

immigrant workers bore the impact of Americans’ antipathy about the economic

catastrophe. Although similar opinions had been heard in Mexican-American

communities since the 1850s, these attitudes took on importance with the establishment

of different types of Mexican-American organizations in Texas in the years closely after

World War I. Having returned from service in the Armed Forces, many Mexican

Americans were no longer satisfied to receive the treatment as second class citizens.

Subsequently, in the early 1920s, Mexican American community leaders in numerous

Texas cities established a number of new public organizations designed to protect and

improve the interests of their people. The three largest of this new groups were El Orden

Hijos de América (The Order of the Sons of America), El Orden Caballeros de América

(The Order of the Knights of America) and the League of Latin American Citizens. Such

groups were made by lower middle class members of the Texas Mexican community, and

their leaders were normally attorneys, teachers, printers, and small entrepreneurs serving

the Spanish speaking community. By the year 1927, these groups had established a wide

network of chapters throughout Texas. These new organizations adopted a political

perspective that departed expressively from the attitudes of older Mexican American

voluntary associations, such as the mutualistas and other honorific societies. In contrast

with earlier groups, which based their organizations on the principle of mutual

cooperation between Mexican immigrants and Americans of Mexican descent, the new

organizations excluded non-American citizens from membership (Delgado & Stefancic,

1998, p.424).

To these organizations, Mexican Americans were American citizens and should make

every effort to integrate into the American social and cultural mainstream. Even though

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most of them were generally proud of their ethnic legacy, they believed that Mexican

Americans focused too much on keeping their ethnicity and culture in the United States

and, in the process, had hindered their improvement as active members of the American

society. Therefore, while members of this new organizations continue to admit respect

for Mexico and for their Mexican cultural heritage, they claimed that the best way to

move forward in American Society was to persuade other Americans that they were loyal,

worthy American citizens in the same way. To keep with this beliefs, the new Mexican

American organizations carefully worked on what they considered to be a proper

American public image by conducting the procedures in English, by prominently

displaying the American flag in the ceremonies, stationery and iconography, by singing

songs as "America" at their congregations, and by opening their meetings with a recitation

of the George Washington prayer. The political programs of the Sons of America, the

Knights of America and the League of Latin American Citizens reflected these basic

grounds.

For instance, the by-laws of the Sons of America expressed the political assumptions and

the general plan of actions by claiming that “citizens of the United States of America of

Mexican or Spanish extraction have a wide field of opportunities to protect and promote

their interests to elevate their moral, social intellectual conditions, and to educate them in

the proper extension of their political rights" (Delgado & Stefancic, 1998, p.425). These

ideas rapidly gained acceptance after some of the Texas-based groups were combined

into a new, higher organization just before the Great Depression. At the end of the 1920s,

after a series of meetings in which the terms of consolidation of the various organizations

were negotiated, the League of United Latin American citizens was officially founded

(LULAC).

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One of the most important things among these objectives was a pledge to encourage and

develop among LULAC members what they called the "best and purest" form of

Americanism. They also took care to teach English to their children and to impregnate in

them a sense of their rights and responsibilities as American citizens, and they guaranteed

to fight injustice against Mexican Americans citizens wherever they encountered it.

Although LULAC members maintained that their organization did not characterize a

political club, most of the group's aims were clearly political in fact. They remained

awfully sensitive to the anti-Mexican feeling that was growing in Texas and other cities

of the Southwest during the first years of the Depression, yet, members were cautious to

reject the use of political tactics that could be interpreted as radical even though there was

a strong commitment to "destroy any attempt to create racial prejudices".

LULAC leaders deliberately decided to emphasize the American side of their social

identity as the primary basis for organization. Therefore, in pursuit of reforms they created

a political program designed to trigger a sense of Americanism among their citizens.

Because they considered themselves part of a progressive leadership elite, the leaders

proposed to introduce objectives and a political strategy that were similar in form and

content to those supported at the beginning of the century by W.E.B. Du Bois and the

national Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) where they

fought for "an educated elite" "to provide the masses with appropriate goals and lift them

to civilization". LULAC's political actions differed from chapter to chapter according to

local political conditions, but, according to Delgado & Stefancic (1998): “the

organization adopted a three-pronged plan of attack in the 1930s and 1940s”, which

strongly highlighted the desegregation of public education for Mexican American

children; encouraged Mexican American citizens to register, pay their taxes, and vote;

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and supported hostile local legal campaigns to battle discrimination against Mexican

Americans in public facilities and juries.

LULAC grew all along the 1930s in Texas, and by the outbreak World War II the

organization had established practicable chapters in New Mexico, Arizona, California

and other states, and by early 1940s it was the largest and best-stablished Mexican

American civil rights organization in the United States. LULAC also proved effectiveness

as they achieved many of its specified political purposes. Indeed, despite the aggressive

political atmosphere towards Mexican Americans during this epoch, LULAC scored a

number of important legal victories in Texas, and the organization supported Mexican

Americans in other states to fight against local discriminatory practices.

REFERENCES:

Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (1998). The Latino/a condition: A critical reader. New York:

New York University Press

Fox, G. (1997). Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics and the Constructing of Identity.

Arizona: University of Arizona Press.