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Making Hispanics
How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American
By G. CRISTINA MORA THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-03383-9
CHAPTER 1
Civil Rights, Brown Power, and the "Spanish-Speaking" Vote: The Development of the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish Speaking People
The late 1960s were rife with protests and demands from Mexican and Puerto Rican civic leaders. In the Southwest, Mexican Americans took to the streets to forge grassroots organizations whose goal was to bring national attention to the discrimination that they endured and to the appalling conditions suffered by migrant farmworkers. Thousands of miles away in the Northeast, Puerto Rican activists created organizations that mobilized their communities around concerns related to urban poverty and the ever-present issue of Puerto Rican sovereignty. And in Washington, the Johnson and Nixon administrations grappled with how to manage the unrest. While the protests were not as loud or as well organized as those staged by African Americans, Johnson's and Nixon's advisers feared that they eventually could be. With potential electoral votes on the line, both administrations sought ways to turn Mexican American and Puerto Rican protests into political opportunities.
This chapter sheds light on that era by focusing on the establishment of Johnson's Inter-Agency Committee on Mexican American Affairs (IMAA) and tracing how it evolved into Nixon's Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish Speaking People (CCOSSP). It argues that the IMAA and CCOSSP reframed activists' claims by developing an administrative category for the "Spanish Speaking" population, which lumped together demands from Mexican American and Puerto Rican communities. As part of this effort, bureaucrats penned reports that defined the needs of Spanish speakers, they lobbied for the collection of data on the Spanish speaking, and they helped elected officials create campaign strategies for securing the Spanish-speaking vote. This process of co-optation through classification developed as federal officials took measures to disarm and discredit the nascent, but growing, Chicano and Puerto Rican nationalist projects and as they sought to institutionalize the idea that Latin American subgroups were part of a national, panethnic constituency.
The story begins, however, in the mid-1960s, with the tense struggles of the African American civil rights movement.
The Civil Rights Context
On January 15, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson telephoned the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., seeking his assistance. Just six months earlier, Johnson had pushed through the historic and comprehensive Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, among other things, sought to create equal opportunity in employment. Now Johnson was determined to pass a voting rights bill that would help protect the right to vote for America's black citizens. Civil rights activists like King had spent years rallying and lobbying for such legislation. In fact, when Johnson telephoned, King was in Alabama, where he hoped to bring attention to the fact that only 2 percent of black adults in Selma were legally eligible to vote. Johnson called King with a request: he needed the reverend to develop a galvanizing message about black disenfranchisement that week and to "get it on radio, and get it on television, and get it in the pulpits ... every place you can." If the message spread quickly, Johnson believed that he would be able to push a voting rights bill through Congress. Johnson told King that the passage of this legislation would be "the greatest breakthrough of anything ... the greatest achievement of my administration."
America in the 1960s was undoubtedly marked by the African American struggle for civil rights. Organizations such as King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee entered courtrooms and took to the streets to protest the lack of civil rights for African Americans. Unable to ignore this momentum, policy makers took action. Between 1957 and 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed two civil rights acts that were designed to assist African American voters. In 1963 President John F. Kennedy began a series of policy meetings to discuss employment discrimination. Johnson resumed this work after Kennedy's death, making the issue of African American civil rights an administrative priority.
Specifically, the Johnson administration helped to usher in a series of policies and practices that, although formally inclusive of other minorities, were targeted mainly toward African Americans. For example, the 1965 Voting Rights Act focused primarily on outlawing the preclearance practices that southern states used to bar African Americans from voting. Additionally, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) mainly processed claims involving African Americans. Moreover, African American communities received much of the funding from several of Johnson's Great Society policies, such as his Model Cities Program. Throughout his tenure in office, Johnson would state that the issue of black civil rights was his, as well as the nation's, most pressing domestic concern.
Policy makers were not the only ones to pay attention to the issue of black civil rights. Foundations also sought to aid the African American struggle by providing funds to organizations such as the NAACP and the National Urban League. In 1966 the Ford Foundation established a Division of National Affairs, whose primary goal was to provide grants to "black-oriented" organizations. This effort stemmed in part from Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy's belief that "full equality for all American Negroes [was] the most urgent domestic concern of this country." Other foundations shared the sentiment. In an analysis of grant-making data reported by the Council on Foundations, political scientist Christine Sierra found that between 1960 and 1970, foundations provided more than four hundred grants to African American organizations and causes; by comparison, only seventy went to Native American and Mexican American organizations combined.
Nationally renowned academics helped to sustain the nation's focus on African American communities by penning studies and reports. Among the most prominent of these scholars was Gunnar Myrdal, who decades before had received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to produce the landmark text An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. In the 1960s Johnson's Great Society team included Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard social scientist, who drafted a widely circulated report on the state of America's poor black families. Labeled the "Moynihan Report" by the press, the text received much early support from policy makers throughout Washington.
The collaboration between policy makers, activists, foundations, and academics helped make the issue of African American civil rights a defining one for the 1960s. Black civil rights activists not only organized important, large-scale protests and marches but also helped policy makers push through civil rights legislation. Policy makers hired social scientists to advise them on the state of black America. Foundations funded the work of social scientists and also contributed to the coffers of black organizations, enabling them to further develop a national agenda for African American civil rights.
Civil Rights for Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans
Even though the 1960s civil rights discourse was mainly about African American issues, this did not mean that other groups were not equally aggrieved. Along the US-Mexico border, Mexican American families lived in shantytowns where houses lacked running water and public schools lacked electricity. Mexican Americans also faced severe levels of racial discrimination across the Southwest, where they were systematically segregated. They were barred from entering all-white public and private spaces, and Mexican children were often relegated to all-Mexican schools. Conditions for Mexican Americans were so poor that early on Dionisio (Dennis) Chávez, a Democratic senator from New Mexico, had collected hundreds of press reports and letters documenting instances of discrimination against Mexican Americans and used them to convince bureaucrats and congressional leaders that Mexican Americans should be deemed a protected minority for the purposes of civil rights policy.
For their part, Mexican American leaders developed a variety of civic organizations, including the American GI Forum (AGIF) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), that advocated the benefits of Mexican American integration while trying to bring government attention to their issues. Their members were often second-generation-plus Mexican American citizens whose main focus was on garnering state resources for civic projects that could help create a robust Mexican American middle class. Among their leaders were World War II veterans such as Hector P. Garcia, Vicente Ximenes, and Edward Roybal, who throughout the 1960s lobbied federal government entities, including the EEOC and the US Commission on Civil Rights, for bilingual education, Mexican American voting protections, and equal representation in federal and state employment. In the Southwest, where the press often associated Mexican Americans with poverty and cultural backwardness, these organizations identified their members as "Spanish American," "Hispano," or "Spanish Speakers" to seem more upwardly mobile.
Chicano organizations appeared during the mid-1960s, often in reaction to the integrationist stance of established groups. These nascent groups were not well funded or well established, but they attracted much attention because they used militant tactics and described Mexican American communities as internal colonies that needed to shed the yoke of assimilation. Chicano organizations, with names like La Raza and the Crusade for Justice, grew quickly in the late 1960s and used protests and walkouts to galvanize a youthful, working-class constituency that had become inspired by, on the one hand, the efforts of César Chávez and the United Farm Workers and, on the other hand, the protests of black cultural nationalists. Chicano organizations tackled not only traditional issues like bilingual education and poverty but also ones that were seemingly more radical. For example, some Chicano organizations lobbied for the formal return of southwestern lands to Mexican American ownership, contending that the US government had stolen these lands by not honoring the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had given Mexican citizens the right to retain their property.
The Chicano movement differed from the integrationist movement in language and perspective. While groups often shared some goals—such as the desire for bilingual education—they differed in their interpretation of what the goals meant for Mexican Americans. Integrationist groups saw the goals as opportunities to enter the middle class, whereas Chicano organizations saw them as steps toward self-determination.
Amid these political factions lay César Chávez's farmworkers' movement. Like King, Chávez preached nonviolence and collective action. He used this message to publicize the dire, and sometimes deadly, working conditions of Mexican immigrant farmworkers. Yet, unlike King, Chávez did not have many direct ties to powerful policy makers and did not receive direct phone calls from the president about congressional legislation.
Despite the flush of activity in the Southwest, however, a variety of factors kept Mexican American organizing efforts from garnering national attention. Among the most important was the fact that Mexican American communities and their organizations were concentrated in the Southwest, far from East Coast policy makers, foundations, and academics. As a result, policy makers often found it easy to dismiss Mexican American claims as "regional" issues that were subject to state-level attention, not federal intervention. In addition, government officials also pointed to the issue of immigrant assimilation to justify their inaction vis-à-vis Mexican Americans. They claimed that Mexican American concerns were ordinary immigration issues that would be resolved over time; like European American immigrants before them, Mexican Americans simply needed time to assimilate.
The African American civil rights movement also overshadowed Mexican American organizing efforts. Put simply, African American groups were larger and better organized than Mexican American ones, and as such, their issues received much more media and government attention. Indeed, in 1968 the US Commission on Civil Rights reported that the "high drama and nationwide visibility of the [African American] civil rights movement" had "obscure[d] the more localized protests of Mexican Americans." This, the report contended, had led national policy makers, including those in the Office of Civil Rights, a division of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), to overlook the fact that the conditions of Mexican American communities were deteriorating despite the recent implementation of various civil rights and social welfare programs. These sentiments were further reinforced as professional associations and the press commented on the issue and began using monikers like "the Invisible Minority" and "the Minority Nobody Knows" in reference to Mexican Americans.
If federal policy makers gave Mexican Americans only marginal attention, they virtually ignored Puerto Ricans, even though they also faced documented conditions of poverty and discrimination. In 1960 about 36 percent of Puerto Rican families in the United States lived under the poverty line, compared to 15 percent of white families. Puerto Ricans also had lower levels of educational attainment than did whites, and Puerto Rican children were often relegated to segregated schools. And like other minority groups, Puerto Ricans were subject to blatant racism, often correlated with skin color, that excluded them from employment and housing opportunities.
Like the Mexican American organizations, Puerto Rican groups varied in their orientation and focus. In the 1960s, Puerto Rican leaders founded several civil rights organizations, such as ASPIRA, which empowered young Puerto Ricans by encouraging them to engage in public service and obtain a higher education. ASPIRA clubs opened throughout New York in the 1960s and slowly spread to nearby states. During this time, the upsurge in student activism gave new life to the decades-old issue of Puerto Rican independence. Student activists, for example, formed the Puerto Rican Student Forum in New York high schools and colleges and held teach-ins on the colonized status of Puerto Rico.
The Young Lords, which emerged in the late 1960s, had perhaps the highest profile of these groups. Inspired by the Black Power movement, they protested the impoverished conditions of Puerto Rican communities by staging large-scale marches and taking over public and private buildings. While mainly focused on domestic poverty, the group also mobilized Puerto Ricans around issues of sovereignty, arguing that because Puerto Rico was an oppressed colony of the United States, self-determination was elusive for mainland and island-born Puerto Ricans alike.
For the most part, however, Puerto Rican groups directed their claims to local government officials rather than to those in Washington, DC. In a context in which most civil rights discourse was centered on African Americans, Puerto Rican leaders likely felt that it was best to focus their lobbying efforts on locally elected officials and to request resources from city and perhaps state governments. The relatively small and concentrated size of Puerto Rican organizations also likely kept them out of the national civil rights spotlight.
In effect, the African American struggle for civil rights had created a situation in which the efforts of black leaders inspired Mexican American and Puerto Rican activists but also overshadowed them. Mexican Americans particularly felt outnumbered and outorganized, and as the 1970s approached, they searched for new ways to attract national attention to their issues.
The Mexican American Push for National Recognition
By the mid-1960s Mexican American organizational leaders had become restless and displeased with the Johnson administration. The leaders of integrationist groups felt that, even though they had led efforts to mobilize Mexican American voters through the Viva Kennedy and Viva Johnson Clubs, their communities were being ignored when it came time to apportion the community grants and resources built into Great Society programs. LULAC, AGIF, and other integrationist groups even stepped out of their more conservative stances and planned a protest in Washington to call attention to Mexican American issues.
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Excerpted from Making Hispanics by G. CRISTINA MORA. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
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