Barrio America by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz

Author:A. K. Sandoval-Strausz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2019-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

IN DALLAS, EFFORTS to build a multiracial political coalition faced even greater obstacles and took longer to come to fruition. Mexican American political influence in Big D was limited by the same means that had long operated to exclude African Americans from the levers of power in the city. The at-large system, together with the all-white Citizens Charter Association (CCA) having effective control of city council nominations, endorsements, and funding, had kept blacks and Hispanics off the council during the first one hundred years of city history, even though there had been black Dallasites since the nineteenth century and a significant ethnic Mexican colony since the 1910s. One might have expected these shared circumstances to lead to durable political alliances between African Americans and Mexican Americans, but sustained cooperation was elusive. Black and Hispanic Dallasites wrestled with these divisions at the same time they were fighting against a recalcitrant white Anglo majority backed by a system designed to be undemocratic.

It was African Americans who first tested the impermeability of Dallas’s political system. The first black candidates for city council ran in the 1959 municipal elections and then again in each election through 1965. In every case, despite overwhelming support among African American voters, all lost to white opponents. Whites dominated the electorate, and the great majority refused to vote for black candidates. This simply overwhelmed the smaller population of African American voters, leaving them without representation.31

Black Dallasites largely fought these battles alone. Throughout Texas, Mexican Americans had long claimed rights by insisting that they were legally white and therefore entitled to the same treatment as Anglos. After the successful Viva Kennedy campaign of 1960, it made a kind of sense that Mexican Americans would continue to cast themselves as white ethnics, since this would prevent their being grouped with blacks as people of color. This stance often led Hispanic leaders to deny that they were making the same kinds of claims as African Americans; they also frequently felt compelled to disavow the public demonstrations that were a key strategy of the black civil rights movement. One Mexican American activist from Dallas remembered that, among leading Hispanic advocacy groups, “when you tried to say, ‘Start demanding or picketing or marching,’ they say, ‘No. We are above that.… We have more pride or education than that. You leave this to the Negroes.’” Shocking as it may seem now, the Texas-based League of United Latin American Citizens reflected the sentiments of many Hispanic politicos when it officially denounced Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington, at which he would deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech.32

The mid-1960s saw rising efforts among Mexican Americans to join forces with African Americans, especially after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 rendered the whiteness strategy increasingly untenable. Essential to this shift was the work of Francisco “Pancho” Medrano. Born in Dallas to immigrants from Guanajuato, Medrano was a lifelong organizer for the United Auto Workers and a regular participant in campaigns for the civil rights of both blacks and Hispanics.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.