The Struggle for Latino Civil Rights

The struggle for Latino civil rights has been hard fought. Like African Americans, Latinos have faced many challenges in their fight for equality. Due to the unique circumstances faced by each group, the strategies and paths taken by Latinos and African Americans often took divergent paths throughout the civil rights era. However, both communities have played important roles in advancing social change and in fighting discriminatory laws and practices.

During the post-Reconstruction era in the United States, African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities faced segregation, discrimination, and political disenfranchisement. These groups fought back for social change through a number of different avenues--forming organizations, filing lawsuits, promoting education, lobbying for legislation, and mobilization of the masses. The role of Latinos is often overlooked in history, but Latinos were involved in all aspects of the movement. Groups, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the American G.I. Forum, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), were created to address the plethora of challenges faced by the Latino community. These groups were involved in supporting and arguing some of the most influential cases in the civil rights movement. Early on, litigation strategies used by Latino lawyers differed greatly from that used by African American groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The main cause of the early divergence in strategies employed by Latinos and African Americans was the unique experiences each group faced in the binary racial categorization of the time. In Jim Crow society, people were either black or white. Under this regime, Mexican Americans and other Latinos were legally considered part of the "other white races. " Latinos thus experienced (and responded to) discrimination from the Anglo majority differently than African Americans did. The early Mexican American strategy often revolved around being recognized as white in this white/black divide, and did not focus on dismantling the prevalent Jim Crow system. Their arguments under the Fourteenth Amendment often rested on denial of due process rather than denial of equal protection, and on discrimination based on "language deficiency" rather than race. That is, Latino lawyers argued that discrimination they faced was not sanctioned by law and was thus a denial of due process. A large drawback to being recognized as "white" was that those promoting segregation could make the same argument when it suited their position - for example, classifying Mexican Americans as white and "integrating" African Americans into Mexican schools for purposes of "desegregation." The Latino litigation strategy eventually evolved in the 1960. Latino litigation, throughout the whole civil rights movement, was largely successful. Latinos played an important role in cases dealing with desegregation of schools, administration of justice, voting rights (and other forms of civic participation), employment, immigrant rights, and other areas that advanced the civil rights for all groups in the U.S.

The Latino litigation cause has been particularly active in the area of education. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), is the most famous case in the desegregation of schools and arguably in the overall civil rights movement, however, it's largely accepted that Westminister School Dist. of Orange County v. Mendez, 161 F.2d 774 (9th Cir. 1947), a federal case involving the segregation of Mexican American students, paved the path for Brown. Mendez was the first case in which segregation was successfully challenged in federal court. In 1945, with the help of funding from LULAC, the parents of Mexican and Mexican American children who were forced to go to "Mexican schools" in California filed a class action suit against several school districts to enjoin the application of this discriminatory practice. Throughout the southwest, school boards enforced strict segregation policies (much like those faced in the South by African Americans) requiring Mexican and Mexican-American children to register at substandard "Mexican schools." Not only were these schools often in physical disrepair, the curriculum for children of Mexican descent was largely dedicated to training them in manual jobs such as handiwork for boys and homemaking skills for girls. In Mendez, the plaintiffs fought for desegregation of these schools, though they did not claim racial discrimination, since Mexicans were legally considered white. Instead, the plaintiffs claimed the children were being denied due process and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment based on "language deficiency" and ancestry. The defense cited Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), as support for the constitutionality of a "separate but equal" system. The trial court found for the plaintiffs, holding the practice of segregation to be an unconstitutional denial of equal protection. The opinion rested on the theory that segregation was inherently unequal and would stigmatize Spanish-speaking children, anticipating arguments that would later be made in Brown. In 1947 the case was appealed to the Ninth Circuit and several civil rights groups (ACLU, National Lawyer's Guild, AJC, JACL, and NAACP) wrote amicus briefs calling for the court to reverse the holding in Plessy. Scholars acknowledge that the arguments made by the NAACP in their amicus brief served as a dry run for Brown. The Mendez attorneys continued to argue that there was no question of race at issue, since