Segregation of Mexican-American children in the public schools of California and the Southwest was fairly well established by the mid-1920s, but it was done through the assignment of school districts rather than by state law, and it was not uniformly applied, as it was for blacks in the South. In California, some districts chose not to separate children of Mexican descent, and even in segregated districts some Mexican children were allowed to attend white schools.48 In Texas, where discrimination against Mexicans was the most severe of anyplace in the country, the vast majority of Mexican and Mexican-American children went to segregated schools, but not as a matter of law as was true for blacks.49 In Houston and other cities, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans sometimes created their own parochial schools, such as Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Houston, which, unlike the segregated black public schools everywhere, established high expectations for the students and made rigorous demands on them.50
The realities of informal or unofficial segregation were cruel: Mexican-American children were turned away from white swimming pools; Mexican-Americans were sometimes denied service at good Anglo restaurants; and Mexican-Americans were discouraged from moving into better neighborhoods. But when these established patterns of discrimination against Mexicans in Texas conflicted with American war goals in 1944, the Texas legislature passed the Caucasian Race Resolution, naming Mexicans and Mexican-Americans officially as Caucasians and indicating that all Caucasians, including Mexicans, should have equal rights in public places of business and amusement.51 Twenty-five years later, scholars would show that except for Puerto Ricans, the levels of Hispanic-Anglo segregation generally were much lower than for blacks and whites, and were reduced over time. Whereas a rise in socioeconomic status was associated with a weakening of residential segregation nationally for Mexican-Americans, it was not for blacks.52
The children of Asian immigrants were even less segregated in schools and neighborhoods than those of Mexicans. In Hawaii, extensive intermarriage between haoles and Hawaiians made virtually impossible any establishment of racially segregated public schools. With the introduction of a normal school to train teachers in Hawaii in the early twentieth century, many Chinese and Japanese parents urged their children to attend and become teachers. By the mid-1920s, Asian-American youngsters were attending schools in largely integrated settings, and almost 15 percent of schoolteachers in Hawaii were of Chinese origin, more than double the proportion of the Chinese population in the islands. They taught in non-segregated schools, in contrast, for example, to Chicago, where by 1934 only 2.5 percent of the public school teachers were African-American, although teaching in a city already 7 percent black.53 Efforts by whites to segregate the Japanese in California and other mainland states were remarkably unsuccessful, not only in schools but also by neighborhoods. As early as 1915, a national study reported that only one-third of the nisei respondents lived in predominantly Japanese-American neighborhoods. The proportion of nisei living in mixed neighborhoods or mainly non-Japanese neighborhoods subsequently increased in every subsequent decade without exception.54
Japanese, Chinese, and Filipinos even escaped the antimiscegenation statutes of several mainland states, probably because they were difficult to enforce, but also because they were not made to apply to them by the courts in every state. In Louisiana, for example, the state supreme court in 1938 decided that African ancestry was the only definition of color.55 In a subsequent decision, the court made it plain that to be a Filipino was not to be colored, but white. It made no difference that some Filipinos had much darker skin color than some African-Americans. That was, of course, the whole point of caste, to confine people by blood lines (not by color alone) in a subjugated status.56
The foreign national status of the sojourners also gave them a measure of protection native-born black Americans did not have. On several occasions Asian governments and Mexico intervened in order to help their nationals in the U.S. Even the earliest Chinese sojourners received some protection under the Burlingame Treaty between China and the U.S. (1868), which promised that Chinese subjects visiting or residing in the U.S. should “enjoy the same privileges, immunities and exemptions in respect to travel or residence, as may be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation.” The treaty did not prevent atrocities against the Chinese, such as the killing of twenty-one in Los Angeles in 1871 and the massacre of twenty-eight in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885. But it occasionally helped, as when the Chinese minister to the U.S. protested the lawless treatment of Chinese nationals in Seattle and the federal government responded by threatening to send federal troops to protect them,57 and when in 1905 communities in China organized to boycott American goods to force improvement in the treatment of Chinese in the U.S.58
Treaty rights were relied upon by a federal circuit court to strike down some of the most blatant anti-Chinese provisions in California’s constitution and in laws that had been passed in 1880. One such law authorized local authorities to prevent Chinese from obtaining licenses for business and occupational purposes; another barred them from commercial fishing. “To exclude the Chinamen from fishing in the waters of the state …” said the federal court, “while the Germans, Italians, Englishmen, and Irishmen, who otherwise stand upon the same footing, are permitted to fish … is to prevent him from enjoying the same privileges as are ‘enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation.’”59 In 1900, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Chinese merchants had treaty rights to bring wives and minor children into the country.
An agreement in 1885 for the importation of Japanese agricultural workers provided for the right of inspection by the Japanese government, and at least one inspector warned against the coercive methods of plantation managers.60 In 1906, the year when President Roosevelt intervened under pressure by the Japanese government to stop the segregation of Japanese and Japanese-American students in the San Francisco schools, he also dismissed an entire battalion of native-born black troops without honor and disqualified its members for service in either the military or the civil government merely because of some allegations made against certain of its members.
Mexican nationals could not depend upon a strong government to intervene on their behalf, but Mexico City did try to protect its emigrants in the years following the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Mexican consular officials often played an important role in the social, cultural, and, to some extent, political lives of the Mexican population in California. In 1918, a Mexican consul, after investigating the Spreckles Sugar Company and finding that the men in the camps worked open-ended hours for irregular pay, poor food, and unfit housing, pushed Spreckles, which badly needed the Mexican workers, to negotiate a new contract calling for increased pay.61 Other consuls took comparable action. When a road-building firm in Hayden, Arizona, went bankrupt in the course of a construction project, the Mexican consul in Tucson gained some of the wages owed to Mexican men by obtaining a lien on the employer’s property.62 In other cases, Mexican officials helped migrant workers and families receive unemployment compensation, severance pay, and death benefits.
The proximity of workers to their home country meant they could maintain an open and lively interest in homeland politics. Mexicans in the U.S. in 1928 flocked to hear Mexican presidential candidate José Vasconcelos speak out against the racism of American labor unions and the anti-Mexican activities of the Ku Klux Klan. Periodically, Mexican officials criticized the federal government’s deportation methods and intervened on behalf of Mexican citizens in the U.S. in cases involving racial school segregation; they even helped Mexican farm workers