Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas

Thomas A. Guglielmo

In the spring of 1943, the Texas state legislature unanimously passed and Gov. Coke R. Stevenson signed a peculiar civil rights resolution, the "Caucasian Race—Equal Privileges" resolution. It stated that "all nations of the North and South American continents are banded together in an effort to stamp out Nazism and preserve democracy"; that "our neighbors to the South are cooperating and aiding us in every way possible"; and that "the citizens of the great State of Texas are interested in doing all that is humanly possible to aid and assist the national policy of hemispheric solidarity." For all those reasons, the resolution declared, "all persons of the Caucasian Race within the jurisdiction of this State are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of all public places of business or amusement." Since the state of Texas had, at various points, officially accepted people of Latin American descent as white, or Caucasian, the resolution was aimed at them—"our neighbors to the South."1	1
This resolution and similar bills that failed to pass the legislature in 1941, 1943, and 1945 were important parts of the Mexican and Mexican American wartime civil rights struggle in Texas. The prominent League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) leader M. C. Gonzales apparently authored versions of the legislation, and other LULAC leaders and councils across Texas lobbied hard for it. So did the Mexican government—its foreign minister, Ezequiel Padilla, its embassy in Washington, and its many consuls throughout the state—and "Mexican" newspapers and civil rights and community organizations on both sides of the border. Those activists worked, sometimes in tandem, sometimes independently, toward a legal remedy for rampant discrimination against Mexicans and Mexican Americans. By examining the battle for this legislation and the legislation itself, we can learn much about a crucial strand of the modern Mexican American civil rights struggle.2	2
Manuel C. Gonzales is pictured in a February 1954 article from LULAC News, published by the League of United Latin American Citizens. Gonzales (whose name was sometimes spelled with a final z) led LULAC's fight for Mexican American rights in Texas. Courtesy League of United Latin American Citizens/Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin.
Drawing on State Department records (which offer a wealth of information on activities in Mexico and the United States) as well as other rich archival sources in Texas and Washington, D.C., I argue that this struggle was more transnational than many scholars have recognized. The transnational dimension suggests that some conventional wisdom about the so-called Mexican American generation, the cohort of largely United States–born community leaders active from the 1930s through the 1950s—especially the notion that it was always far more concerned with America and Americans than with Mexico and Mexicans—might need tweaking. I also suggest that the struggle's Caucasian calculation—the decision to fight for white rights for some, rather than equal rights for all—reflected not only what the activists deemed a pragmatic political strategy but also a form of self-identification that some Mexicans and Mexican Americans clutched firmly.	. . .