‘An exemplary role model’
Biography explores the legacy of Mexican American civil rights pioneer Alonso S. Perales
He was a lawyer, a diplomat, a public intellectual, an author and, most notably, a civil rights activist. His name? Alonso S. Perales, though it may not trigger even a nod of recognition.
A recent, hefty, detailed biography of Perales shines a light on his manifold achievements. It is titled “Pioneer of MexicanAmerican Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales.” The author is historian Cynthia E. Orozco of Ruidoso.
For much of his adult life in San Antonio, Texas, Perales advocated laws to ensure Mexican Americans had equal rights, protested racial discrimination and fought for school desegregation.
His greatest legacy, Orozco said in a phone interview, is that he was the main mover and a co-founder of the League of United Latin American Citizens.
The organization was established in 1929 by a group of Mexican American men from south Texas. Perales was LULAC’s second president.
LULAC has become what is considered the largest, oldest and most important Hispanic civil rights organization in the United States.
“Perales, I equate him to being the Martin Luther King of the broader Mexican American community because of LULAC’s influence over the decades,” Orozco said in a phone interview. “Really, he was an exemplary role model.”
Born in 1898 in Alice, Texas, he was raised in the Lower Rio Grande Valley town, about 50 miles west of Corpus Christi.
Young Perales picked cotton and laid railroad ties. He and his brothers sold their mother’s tamales door to door.
Perales lost his father at the age of 6 and his mother at the age of 12. He was taken in by a local family.
He moved to San Antonio in 1915 and enrolled in a business college. His business classes prepared him when he was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War I; he was assigned stateside as an army field clerk.
Orozco provides cultural and sociopolitical contexts for the challenges Mexicans Americans faced in the early part of the 20th century.
She also explains the various self-descriptive terms that Mexican Americans in Texas used in the early part of the 20th century.
Though most Mexican Americans in Texas were U.S. citizens, they continued to call themselves Mexicans or Mexico Tejanos or members of La Raza, a phrase acknowledging their Spanish and Indigenous racial heritage. It’s an abbreviation of “La raza cósmica,” a 1925 essay by Mexican philosopher Jose Vasconcelos.
The term Mexican American did not gain wide usage until the 1960s, Orozco writes.
Perales, who died in 1960, deserves “a very prominent place in Mexican American or Chicano studies. However, when he died there were no such programs. Also, early Chicano studies had a bias. They wanted everyone to be a militant,” Orozco said.
Chicano leaders either did not view Perales as militant or they were unfamiliar with his activism, she added.
In her introduction, Orozco writes, “… he was also publicly criticized. He was attacked not only by white racists but also by Mexican journalists in Texas and Mexican American civic leaders and allies who disagreed with his ideas and methods.”
Orozco is professor of history and humanities at Eastern New Mexico University-Ruidoso. She has written two earlier books on other figures in the Mexican American
Civil Rights Movement.
The Perales biography is part of
Arte Público Press’ Hispanic Civil Rights Series. So is “In Defense of My People,” the English translation of essays, letters and speeches Perales had written in Spanish and published in the mid-1930s.
Orozco’s Perales biography, which has an academic bent, has a selected bibliography, a timeline of Perales’ life and more than 260 pages of footnote citations.
Orozco said she was invited by Arte Público Press, which is part of the University of Houston, to write the biography. Perales’ archive is housed at the university.