The Mexican American Experience in Texas: Citizenship, Segregation, and the Struggle for Equality

by Martha Menchaca

For hundreds of years, Mexican Americans in Texas have fought against political oppression and exclusion—in courtrooms, in schools, at the ballot box, and beyond. Through a detailed exploration of this long battle for equality, this book illuminates critical moments of both struggle and triumph in the Mexican American experience.

Martha Menchaca begins with the Spanish settlement of Texas, exploring how Mexican Americans’ racial heritage limited their incorporation into society after the territory’s annexation. She then illustrates their political struggles in the nineteenth century as they tried to assert their legal rights of citizenship and retain possession of their land, and goes on to explore their fight, in the twentieth century, against educational segregation, jury exclusion, and housing covenants. It was only in 1967, she shows, that the collective pressure placed on the state government by Mexican American and African American activists led to the beginning of desegregation. Menchaca concludes with a look at the crucial roles that Mexican Americans have played in national politics, education, philanthropy, and culture, while acknowledging the important work remaining to be done in the struggle for equality.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Race, Social Issues

338 pages, Hardcover

Published January 11, 2022

Reviews

[Cynda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is very dry with court cases named and briefly discussed with generalizations to fill in the social situations before and after court cases. The generalizations were just that with too little description for my taste. In fact I filled out the text for me and my Goodreads friend I read with stories about the experiences of my mother and her family who are ethnically ambiguous and the experiences of my father and his family who are clearly ethnic. Plus I filled in the experience of other Mexican Americans in Corpus Christi as it has been described to me and as I have seen/experienced. Overall the information Menchaca provides is correct but not nuanced.

Read as buddy read at GR Non Fiction Book Club.

[Synful · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every American should read books like this one. I wasn't sure where to start with this review, but the short version of it is that. The history of ethnic Mexicans in what's now the U.S. is rarely to never talked about let alone taught to residents. It's infuriating that racism is treated like a binary and all other groups are mentioned in passing, if not begrudgingly. If at all. It's infuriating that Mexican Americans are mainly spoken about as "alien citizens," to use a term mentioned a few times near the end of this book. As though the only reason for the mention is in relation to immigration and what to do about the group based on that. As the old saying goes, many many people didn't cross the border, the border crossed them. Before the current border was set and since then it's been one injustice after another and this book covers a lot of it thoroughly. It maybe wasn't the best idea, but it was pre-sleep reading and without fail I had to put the book down because it made me so angry.

The middle section was just tough to get through because it covered the Mexican period a decade or two pre-Texas Republic through the following century. That's when the stealing of land, the repeated attempts at stripping citizenship, not to mention the success in the robbing of education for some 150 years mainly happened. It was depressing and sad and was made more so when just as I was going through that section, the newly majority neo-con SCOTUS draft opinion was leaked and every case I was reading about which was won based on the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause felt like reading a list of all the things vulnerable to be thrown out in the coming years. All that said, then, I can't recommend this book enough to all people in the U.S., to learn more about Hispanics who now make up 39.3% of Texas, some 12 million Hispanic people, about 38 million ethnic Mexicans nationwide. Get to know our struggles.

The following are notes for me, which you're free to read:
-In typical arrogant fashion, during the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War, the U.S. govt really did debate whether to just occupy all of Mexico, not just the adjacent bits they wanted. Something I'd not read before was that once they beat Mexico, they actually considered making the El Paso valley and South Texas a separate state before just adding to the existing Texas. How different politics would be today considering the rather pronounced difference in demographics between those areas and most of the rest of the state! Speaking of which, this was only the first time they waffled over what to do with the locals since the population was known to be quite racially diverse. If only there hadn't been ethnic Europeans in the mix, they would've stripped everyone of any rights then and there like was done to outright Indigenous people.
-The history that lead to said diversity was quite thoroughly covered including the labeling/classing attempts which were largely ignored through a lot of populated Texas for the spectrum of people from Spanish descent "criollos," through the various permutations of mestizaje with Europeans/Amerindians/Africans, and the free Afromexicanos. I generally knew things were less... hardline then, but it really was interesting how things were when far from the central seat of Mexico's power and of course especially after the first (and only?) Afromexicano president, Vicente Guerrero Saldaña, issued the 1829 Emancipation Proclamation. And before all that radically changed after Anglo-Americans moved in and annexed the area.
-One of the many ways Mexicans were robbed of land, eminent domain was used to take huge swaths of land and handed it over to railway lines who then turned around and all the vast areas they didn't use they sold to fellow Anglo-Americans.
-Evil keeps using the same old tricks and from the start, districting/packing was used to pile apart from Anglo-Americans all the POC into as few districts as possible so as to receive the least amount of representation, if at all. Still done to this day, see 2020 Census redistricting.
-Generally the same method was used for schooling, starting with separate schools and pretending like conditions were anywhere near equal to the much better built and maintained Anglo-American schools, e.g. in the early 1900s Del Rio Mexicans eventually got a school they were allowed to attend near the neighborhood where they were allowed to live, but it was a shack especially compared to full-sized Anglo school. Mexican kids could only go to school through 7th grade and to go to high school students needed to finish 8th grade. Because of course. That's how Mexican/MAs were kept from getting higher education.
-Funny how when the Anglo Del Rio schools were broke, suddenly they wanted to annex "Mexican" schools, but only the ones in areas that had managed to prosper and were contributing higher taxes. That b.s. got thrown out in a court, surprisingly.
-In the fights for education equality, some districts didn't even go up to 7th grade. Some ended in 4th grade, not even close to being able to go to h.s. San Antonio-based lawyer Gustavo C. García, with Carlos Cadena, did a lot of work to fight these types of things, notably the SCOTUS case Hernández v. Texas. There was a whole series of cases brought by Mexican Americans starting in the early 1940s which were already working on the equality and segregation of students well before the Civil Rights era and at least a decade after, too.
-Because old tricks (almost) always work, very familiar in 2022, I had never heard the fact that JFK won in 1960 thanks to the surprise Mexican-American vote in Illinois and Texas:

Immediately, the Republican Party challenged the election results in Texas and Illinois, claiming that political bosses had manipulated the ethnic vote... If the votes in both states were proved to have been cast illegally, the election results could be challenged in court. In Texas, republican operatives charged that the votes in San Antonio and throughout South Texas were fraudulent. They alleged that paper ballots had been manipulated. This claim could not be substantiated, however, because San Antonio and many South Texas counties used election machines. Challengers also voiced traditional critiques to devalue and attempt to disenfranchise Mexican American voters.

Leaders who helped get out that vote tried to pressure Democrats to be rewarded with high-level assignments for Mexican Americans, but having gotten what they wanted, as always, they said thanks and gave excuses to blow them off.
-That at least kicked off energizing people to work for other things, in particular desegregating just about everything in the 1950s and 1960s. It was nice to read that San Antonio continued to be progressive and didn't really fight over accomplishing that in public spaces. El Paso was tops in both public and private, though. The usual suspect north and east of those footdragged and used excuse after loophole to prevent desegregation as much and as long possible. No surprise.
-There was no footdragging or outright ignoring of the law, though, like reforming voting and representation. Good old gerrymandering and district packing, that old trick. Then Gov. Connally even tried to get a Constitutional Amendment to prevent the feds having a say in how they made their crooked districts, which technically has thus far not happened.
-Oh, my favorite topic, the Texas Rangers, here besides their beginnings of terrorizing and massacring POC, harrassed and terrorized farm workers and their supporters in the mid to late 1960s while they tried to unionize to improve work conditions and increase wages. In court they lost due to that behavior, blocking people's rights to that and to protest with arrest intimidations.
-I don't think I'd ever learned about the crazy long walks of 300-400 miles from the RGV to Austin trying to get those things for farm workers. Definitely something that needs to be talked about a lot more!
-The GOP really has been losing their minds since the mid-1960s with the increase of POC immigrating, but they managed to pass some much more restrictive laws not since the 1920s/1930s probably. Now that I think of it, I don't remember this book covering the period where the U.S. actively deported millions of Americans to Mexico because of their ancestry during that earlier period. Anyway, they managed in 1976 to restrict people having children in the U.S. and gaining residency based on babies to requiring their children be adults and the parents living abroad before getting residency/citizenship.
-Since this book was published in early 2022, it did manage to have some content related to Donald Trump and angered once again to see his going back to the same b.s from the 1800s/early 1900s to demonize and "other" Mexican Americans. And of course plenty of non-POC went right along with it. Right back to loudly proclaiming myths of people who've been in U.S. lands for centuries, like abovementioned "alien citizens," forever treated like (dangerous, hostile) foreigners in our lands when those currently in power are the most recent to arrive.
-This book only begins to cover the (re)start of loud and proud racism, in particular the Aug. 2019 targeting by a DFW-area racist against El Paso Mexican Americans to whom he drove hundreds of miles explicitly to mass murder.
-The books ends with the attempt at positivity against the barrage of attempts that have escalated to strip Mexican Americans from voting or even American citizenships trying to loophole those attempts based on parental statuses at their birth, denying birth certificates, etc. In the last couple of weeks I've already seen the racists gearing up to remove the requirement to educate or even feed (!!!) children of people in the U.S. illegally, so things aren't getting better. They're only going to get worse, back to the late 1800s, at best, for us, I fear.

[Alejandro Morales · Rating 5 out of 5]

Race as a policy has existed everywhere in the world. It is used as a tool by dominant groups to separate the majority of society who may choose to reject systems of oppression. In the USA, an 'accident of birth' (namely, heritage and phenotype) continues to dictate economic and social policy. The essays in this collection present the damning case of this inhumanity. Even when people of Mexican descent 'follow the rules,' their actions are invalidated in a shameful disregard for human dignity. Politicians and opinion voices in the media facilitate this open display of racism (as well as advocating for illegal behavior by using vile images to characterize those seeking the opportunity for community and ultimately citizenship. The choice to change belongs to anyone who wants to express it. Please understand the history so you better understand the nature of this situation.

[Mara · Rating 3 out of 5]

For my history class we had to do a book report and he had this massive list of niche books and out of all of them this one stood out to me the most. I think it's common not to want to read books for school because they're pretty boring, but this book was actually much more interesting then I was expecting. Granted it was pretty slow paced, and some sections kinda dragged, but overall I found it very interesting. It was pretty straight forward and informative and honestly I don't have much to say about it. I've read worst books for school so it'll take it.

[Parliament · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written very warm and respectfully, but I have questions about Tejano evolutions beyond the laws that were passed or fought for. This is a really comprehensive overview of laws. We need a second half to flesh it out beyond the court trials rather than using court trials to mark eras because I thought I was missing out. If you are studying Texas laws or are interested in legal activism, this is a don't-miss

[Rolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent and thorough work of history. The best one-volume work on the history of school segregation in Texas that I have yet read.

[Pamela Arjona · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is another book that just felt like a textbook read to me. It has SO much potential! I wish I could take this and write it myself because there is sooo much you can do here and its also more personal to me so it was just double the disappointment.