That same year, as the anti-immigrant campaign was nearing its peak, the US Census announced that it was reclassifying “Mexicans” from the white category to a new “Mexican” category. The census would now enumerate race as: a. White, b. Negro, c. Mexican. Predictably, LULAC mounted a concerted effort to overturn that decision. In 1936 the city of El Paso announced that Mexicans would henceforth be categorized as colored. LULAC organized a successful campaign to reverse El Paso’s decision and, prompted by that victory, filed a court challenge to the US Census classification of Mexicans as, well, Mexicans.11
LULAC took up the objective of being white as a civil rights strategy. Being anything other than white placed the whole community in a legally precarious position. Unfortunately, in time being white became a single-minded strategy for destroying Mexican identity. Since its foundation, the “LULAC Code” had urged: “Be proud of your origin … respect your glorious past and help defend the rights of your people … learn how to master with purity the most essential languages—English and Spanish.” But historian David Gutiérrez tells us that in the early 1950s those provisions were stricken from the code. In fact, in LULAC’s “Aims and Purposes” published in 1954, all references to the Spanish language completely disappeared, replaced by a pledge to “foster the acquisition and facile use of the official language of our country that we may thereby equip ourselves and our families for the fullest enjoyment of our rights and privileges and the efficient discharge of our duties to this, our country.”12
At its ugliest, during the 1950s, LULAC’s obsession with being white was the handmaiden to the practices of humiliating children who spoke Spanish, of punishing anyone appearing too Mexican, and of supporting blatant discrimination against the recently arrived because they replenished the mexicanidad of the community. In time LULAC’s obsession appeared to the students of the Chicano Movement as self-loathing. Eventually, however, the abuses of the Bracero Program, the blatant racism in the execution of Operation Wetback, the troubling casualty rates in Vietnam, and finally the confrontation with the Chicano Movement caused LULAC to reconsider their fifty-year longing to be just like the Anglos … maybe even to be them.
In the 1950s, the American GI Forum was in the news even more than LULAC. I suspect that just about every Mexican American heard the story of Private Felix Longoria. He was killed by a sniper in the Philippines, his body was returned to his family in his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas, and the local Funeral Home owner refused to bury him, because “the whites won’t like it,” he reportedly told Longoria’s widow.13 The American GI Forum, founded only months earlier, immediately launched a protest and also formally asked Senator Lyndon Johnson to intervene. In the midst of the controversy, Mrs. Longoria and her children were refused lunch at the local diner, because they were Mexican. The case of Private Longoria became a national scandal, and the president of the GI Forum, Dr. Hector P. García—a charismatic, brilliant, articulate voice on behalf of Mexican-American veterans—quickly became the most recognizable Mexican-American civil rights leader of the decade. As a result of the Forum’s efforts, Pvt. Longoria became the first Mexican-American soldier buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
García articulated the plight of the Mexican American unlike anyone before him. He commanded media attention like no Mexican-American civil rights leader ever had. Forum members paraded at every opportunity and surrounded Dr. (former Major) García each time he spoke. In the 1950s the guys had yet to grow a paunch, they still wore their uniforms handsomely and executed parade orders crisply. García and the Forum loved the press, and the press loved them back. Unfortunately, García and the Forum suffered from the same schizophrenia as their counterparts at LULAC. García railed against the “wetback tide” and lobbied against illegal immigration. In 1954, the Forum published a propaganda booklet still ballyhooed by nativists: “What Price Wetbacks?” “Illegal immigration represents the fundamental problem facing the Spanish-speaking population of the southwest,” it read. It argued that poverty, sickness, and low educational achievement was a consequence of those Mexicans crossing without papers, but then went further than the other Mexican organizations. The Forum offered policy solutions that read as though they were manufactured in Bush or Obama’s Department of Homeland Security fifty years later: “enforceable penalties for harboring or aiding an alien … confiscation of vehicles used to transport aliens and … enforceable penalties for the employment of illegal aliens.”14 The Forum was composed of veterans of America’s wars; all were required to be citizens, and reeked of patriotism. This made them particularly credible when, in the midst of the Cold War and the Red Scare, they raised without a scintilla of evidence the specter of communist infiltration among their reasons to oppose the “wetback tide.”15 Until now, wetbacks had been merely filthy, disease-ridden, ignorant, and lazy—but after the Forum’s attack they were potentially a terrorist threat as well.
So imagine you are a kid in the 1950s, and what seems an unstoppable onslaught of messages from every front is telling you that you have to be like them, not like you, and even your own family is telling you that for your own good you have to be Alfred, not Alfredo, and that Alfred should be careful where he speaks Spanish and to whom and never ever even hint that his family had been deported and to proclaim loudly albeit untruthfully that everyone in the family including the dog was made in America. Even a kid wonders why the leaders of the Mexican-American community mostly attack Mexicans, even though they are careful to point out they only attack the wetback kind. In the 1940s and ’50s the border was not yet a war zone. Folks went back and forth with relative ease, the neighbors may have arrived without papers and stayed, heck, half the town may have arrived without papers. As a little kid I used to ask my father what a wetback was, and he would explain that the origin of the word referred to crossing the Rio Grande with no papers, but now it meant all Mexicans without papers. Mexicans without papers were wetbacks. I think that made sense when I was five or six. By the time I was twelve or so I began to wonder whether this Dr. García guy had his head screwed on right. And perhaps only years afterwards did I grasp that these so-called leaders of the Mexican-American community had, for doubtless the most selfless of reasons, adopted the rhetoric of the nativists in order to achieve ends opposed by the nativists. They were cowed, I thought, by the seeming power and popularity of hate, so they hoped to sound just like the racists in order to demonstrate that they and presumably the cleaned-up, round-sounding English-speaking Americans of Mexican descent whom they claimed to speak for weren’t really like those dirty Mexicans the racists hated. The logic was as convoluted as my attempt to explain it. The tactic was foolish, and ultimately discredited. Unfortunately, in the century to come, mainstream Washington-based Latino and immigrant rights groups would adopt the shameful tactic and suffer the same fate.
In the tough mining town of Miami, the anti-immigrant hysteria played out with a difference. In much of the southwest, perhaps the only voices Latinos heard speaking out on their behalf were those of the compromised, often servile LULAC and GI Forum. In Miami and in a few other places across the country there were alternative voices. Their message, because it was diametrically opposed to the prevailing dirge, was all the more startling. And to young Mexican Americans, uncomfortable with the constant pressure to conform, it would have sounded all the more intriguing and exciting. In Miami, it was the Union.
By 1950 the Miami Copper Company had opened a new open pit mine in the Sleeping Beauty mountain ridge, about twenty miles from the town. The company had reached a sweetheart deal