North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States, 3rd Edition by McWilliams Carey; Meier Matt S.; García Alma

Author:McWilliams, Carey; Meier, Matt S.; García, Alma
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4471699
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

5. The Counterpoint of Migration

One of the conspicuous advantages of the farm-labor importation agreement of 1942 was that it gave the Mexican government a firm basis on which to protest acts of discrimination against Mexicans in the borderlands and also provided a means by which these protests could be backed up. After the Farm Security Administration had been relieved of responsibility for enforcing the agreement, complaints began to multiply and repeated charges were made that the growers were chiseling on guaranteed wages and working conditions. On July 30, 1945, Ernesto Galarza prepared a fourteen-page memorandum setting forth in detail the various ways by which American employers in the Southwest were undermining the agreement. More important than any specific violations of the agreement, however, were the incidents of discrimination involving both Mexican nationals and Mexican-Americans, particularly in Texas.

In Snyder, Texas, an Anglo-American dentist refused to treat an American soldier of Mexican descent and in Melvin permission was refused a Mexican-American PTA group to use a community center built by the National Youth Administration. On October 15, 1943, the Mexican government formally protested against the segregation of children of Mexican descent in certain Texas schools. This protest was filed after a large number of Mexican-American families in Bolling and Goose Creek, Texas, had refused to send their children to the jim crow school. Visiting New Gulf, Texas, to participate in the celebration of the Sixteenth of September, Adolfo G. Gominguez, Mexican consul at Houston, was denied service in the Blue Moon Café. Alejandro Carillo, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, immediately brought the facts of this incident to the attention of President Ávila Camacho. Three days before Governor Coke Stevenson proclaimed the Sixteenth of September an official holiday in Texas, Sergeant Macario García had been arrested in Sugarland.

In October 1943, a Mexican boy, seventeen years of age, entered a café in Levelland, Texas, to buy a package of cigarettes. The usual altercation developed in the course of which the owner of the café hit the boy over the head with a coke bottle. Within a few moments, a thousand or more Mexicans gathered outside the café and the sheriff arrived just in time to prevent a riot. In December 1944, some three hundred AFL members went on strike at Huron, South Dakota, against the employment of Mexican braceros. A storm of protest immediately appeared in the Mexican press and the State Department received a call from the Mexican ambassador. Incidents of this sort had been occurring for a hundred years but never, prior to the war, had such significance attached to them.

Conditions reached such a point in Texas that Roberto Medellin of the Mexican Ministry of Labor announced in 1943 that no more braceros would be sent to work in the state “because of the number of cases of extreme, intolerable racial discrimination.” In an effort to induce the Mexican government to lift this ban, Governor Stevenson made a “goodwill” tour of Mexico and on his return appointed a Good Neighbor Commission.

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