FORUM: RESPONSE

Tracking the Shifting Racial Identity
of Mexican Americans

Steven H. Wilson

Ariela J. Gross is generous in praising research accomplished and helpful in suggesting routes for future investigation.1 In response to such a model of constructive criticism, I can only plead no contest to the main charge that, while examining changes in legal strategy and judicial rhetoric in school segregation litigation, I neglected to explore important aspects of Mexican Americans' own understanding and actual experiences of "other whiteness." As a result, the "ordinary" people in my tale seem to lack agency even in their own cases. This is an unfortunate but frequent limitation of historical studies of litigation, not least because--despite the presence in the courtroom of a plaintiff or defendant--trial records most clearly reveal the professional concerns of lawyers and judges. Even transcribed testimony (which is not always available) may tell us more about the lawyer's strategy and the judge's mood than a witness's reality. Gross rightly asks the question directly that I (admittedly) avoided entirely: "did the legal regime of whiteness have any larger cultural significance?" Put another way, I understand this question to be: did the fine legal distinctions hammered out by Mexican American attorneys and Anglo American judges matter at all to the ordinary people--parents, workers, and defendants-whether Mexican or Anglo? I think that the answer is yes, gradations of whiteness mattered even to the lay public. Yet, it seems clear as well that whiteness was experienced differently by members of various economic and social classes of Mexican Texans.	1
As Gross notes, the authors of two recent histories of Texas discuss the phenomenon of Mexican whiteness, but neither describes the important role that laws and courts played in constructing and policing the inferior "other" whiteness. Both examine the role that class played in Texas culture, however, and they suggest how racial constructs were filtered through the lens of class. David Montejano, for example, argues that "elements of race and class were inextricably interwoven in the minds of Anglo residents [of Texas]."2 Neil Foley suggests that these were similarly wedded in the minds of Mexican Texans, since, well before they encountered Jim Crow's "black-white binary" in Texas, class-conscious Mexicans sought rhetorically to "whiten" themselves, in order to maintain or claim privileged status in a highly stratified society.3 Yet, no matter how interwoven, race and class were not interchangeable--because the legal regime mattered. The race distinctions in Texas were both immutable and enshrined in law, while class distinctions were neither.	2
Where Mexican Texans held property, ran businesses, and entered politics (if they joined the Democratic Party machine), they enjoyed local influence as well, and their children were far less likely to be excluded from Anglo schools and public accommodations. Middle-class Mexican Texans like James DeAnda were able to attend the best public law school in Texas years before it was "desegregated." The "other white" distinction provided a framework enabling Anglo Texans to justify (stressing "other"), and Mexican Texans to resist (emphasizing "white"), discriminatory behavior and attitudes that were based more in class rules than in racism. Even though the lawyers and judges had established that Texans of non-African, Hispanic descent were "white by law," ordinary Anglo Texans sought to differentiate themselves from poor Mexicans by references to the latter's use of an alien language, undesirable migrant worker status (later, illegal immigrant status), or even lack of hygiene. In Texas, these prejudices justified discriminatory results all but indistinguishable from the effects of "racism," yet they track class biases more closely than they do racial animus. Moreover, although "Mexican" was less a racialized identity for them than a cultural inheritance, even middle-class Mexican Americans nonetheless felt the sting of Anglo prejudices. Unlike the legally established and enforced racial apartheid of African Americans (regardless of their property or business holdings), biases against Mexicans concerned characteristics that could in theory be erased over time--which is why the founders of LULAC encouraged education, English usage, and early assimilation.	3
When the brunt of "unauthorized" discrimination affected low status Mexican Texans, why did the business class care enough to sue on the behalf of the working class? I believe that the lawyers and their businessmen sponsors stubbornly fought discrimination, especially in schools, because discrimination in education had the effect of transforming a low economic and social position from a temporary, externally imposed status into a permanent, apparently inherited characteristic. If left unchallenged, discrimination invited the Anglo public's identification of the Mexican "race" with the permanently and legally outcast black race--an identification that would harm the status even of middle-class Mexican Americans. Their challenges to the discrimination often took the form of LULAC- or AGIF-sponsored lawsuits, the analysis of which forms the core of my article. But why stress the legal technicality of "other white"? The lawyers and business leaders policed rather than attacked the black-white line out of pragmatic acceptance of racial distinctions that were perfectly legal and seemed unimpeachable. I argued that, as a legal strategy, this proved self-defeating once Jim Crow came under heavier fire in the aftermath of the Brown decision.	4
Gross asks whether these individuals privately self-identified as white during these years. I believe that they did, so long as whiteness mapped onto status. Also, I think it unlikely that during the heyday of Jim Crow they self-identified as "other colored." These were the only choices available so long as there was a "black-white binary." The shift away from "other whiteness," which demanded discounting the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, toward an embrace of both that ruling and a new "Brown" identity can be understood as an ethnic awakening among the professional class. But it was also a clear case of continued legal pragmatism. The lawyers' enlightenment finally came only when they realized that the old strategy had reached the point of diminishing returns. Perhaps it was only an accident of history that the Chicano movement emerged around the same time, but it is nevertheless significant that the younger generation of Mexican Americans repudiated both whiteness and middle-class values. For Chicanos--some from the working class, but many privileged with education and professional prospects--being white was no more attractive than being part of the old establishment. As before, race and class were interwoven, but the movement had turned the old arrangement on its head. This gave the new generation--and a few of the older lawyers willing to hear ita new legal and cultural vocabulary.	5
Notes 1. See Ariela J. Gross, "Texas Mexicans and the Politics of Whiteness," Law and History Review 21 (2003): 195-205. 2.2. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 222. 3. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 60-61.

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