Carlos Kevin Blanton

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Carlos Kevin Blanton | The Citizenship Sacrifice: Mexican Americans, the Saunders-Leonard Report, and the Politics of Immigration, 1951–1952 | The Western Historical Quarterly, 40.3 | The History Cooperative

The Citizenship Sacrifice: Mexican Americans, the Saunders-Leonard Report, and the Politics of Immigration, 1951–1952

One fascinating aspect of Mexican American history is the community's tangled relationship with immigration. In the mid-twentieth century, the "Mexican American Generation" adopted restrictionism in pursuit of U. S. civic equality and economic justice. This essay examines the controversy of this position as illustrated by the response to an academic study of undocumented labor in the early 1950s.

Immigration has never been a romanticized, distant issue for Mexican Americans. It is a current matter, always meaningful and potentially controversial since Mexican immigrants, with few exceptions, have arrived in the United States constantly beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Mexican American attitudes on immigration, however, have not been constant. This essay examines a time when the dominant position of Mexican American leaders and organizations was to formally oppose bracero labor, the antecedent of today's guest-worker programs, and to vigorously oppose any kind of undocumented immigration. Mexican American leaders across the Southwest from the 1930s to the 1960s—The Mexican American Generation—sacrificed immigrant family, friends, and neighbors, as well as some part of themselves, in an effort to capitalize on their U. S. citizenship to secure basic civil and economic rights. This essay investigates how a 1951 academic report, "The Wetback in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas" by sociologists Lyle Saunders and Olen Leonard, divided the Mexican American community of Texas over the issue of undocumented immigration and highlighted the inherent controversy of that citizenship sacrifice.¹

Involving prominent twentieth-century Mexican American leaders, this loud, public spat over the Saunders-Leonard report demonstrates that the Mexican American Generation's ideological framework incorporating immigration restrictionism, what this essay refers to as the citizenship sacrifice, existed as much for its application to civil rights and economic justice as it did for cultural assimilation. The generation's struggle for civil rights and against undocumented immigration were inseparably connected, two sides of the same liberal ideological coin. Second, this controversy exposes differences between the older leadership of the Mexican American Generation and the emergence of a younger, post-World War II cohort. The two intra-generational camps, though seemingly identical, differed in their degree of commitment to Mexican American Generation ideology and the methods by which they practiced it.

Historians interpret twentieth-century Mexican Americans in terms of different, generationally bound worldviews. For example, the "Mexicanist Generation" in the first few decades of the twentieth century looked toward Mexico for cultural and political identity. Their primary organizational vehicles were mutual aid societies (mutalistas) emphasizing a cultural pride in Mexican-ness (Mexicanidad) that transcended political and class differences. Those of the Mexican American Generation succeeded this approach by the 1930s. Often the children of immigrants, they emphasized American citizenship, civic equality, and cultural pluralism while de-emphasizing Mexico-centered, cultural nationalism. Mexican American Generation adherents were active liberals in politics, whereas the Mexicanist Generation's U. S. political activism outside of border regions was slight. Unlike those in the Mexicanist Generation, who were ambivalent about giving up their home culture, the Mexican American Generation more fully embraced cultural assimilation and sacralized U. S. citizenship as a means of leveraging both civil rights and economic improvement. As representatives of a mostly immigrant community, however, this reverence for citizenship was not without the potential for controversy or contradiction.² Recent scholarship holds that the Mexican American quest for civil rights is inseparable from its quest for better wages and working conditions. In particular, scholars have focused on "Operation Wetback," a massive 1954 U. S. Government deportation infamous for its cruelty and for its Mexican American support.³

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