Mexican Americans’ fight for equality not over
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearings held in San Antonio in 1968 produced more than 1,300 pages of testimony about the status and struggles of Mexican Americans.
Some 75 people testified about discrimination in education, employment, voting, housing and the justice system. About 500 people attended the sessions at Our Lady of the Lake University.
The six days of hearings came at a critical juncture. War was raging in Vietnam. Young Chicano activists walked out of schools to protest inadequacies in education. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.
Among the most essential of all workers — farm workers — were on strike. César Chávez’s hunger strike had brought attention to their plight and inspired many to support their demands for social change.
The Civil Rights Commission hearing marked the first time the federal government had taken notice of Mexican Americans’ political grievances and made them a national concern.
The evidence collected created a baseline of information about Mexican Americans.
In 2018, 850 people gathered at Our Lady of the Lake for the 50th anniversary of the hearings.
That gathering came about in part because J. Richard Avena, former Southwest regional director of the Civil Rights Commission, brought together several scholars and activists to plan it. They and other 18 authors and academics pored over transcripts of the hearings, along with other documents and data.
From their efforts emerged a new book that documents a half-century of change for Mexican Americans. The editors are Avena and Robert Brischetto, a former sociology professor at Trinity University and former executive director of the Southwest Voter Research Institute.
The book’s matter of fact title — “Mexican American Civil Rights in Texas” — belies its importance.
Published by Michigan State University Press, it’s an interdisciplinary study of race relations and social change, focusing on a people who still face barriers at the ballot box despite (or perhaps because of ) their population growth, who still don’t graduate from college at the rate of Anglos, and who struggle to own homes and gain access to health care.
The book, rich in history, research and footnotes, is written for use in high schools, colleges and law schools and in graduate studies. It has much to offer policymakers and activists, too.
Though the authors see a long haul ahead, the book points to evidence of progress.
In the chapter on population growth, demographer Rogelio Sáenz of the University of Texas at San Antonio notes that in 1960, the poverty rate for Latinos was 62 percent overall and 69 percent for children.
By 2018, the Latino poverty rate had dropped to about 20 percent, demonstrating “that programs associated with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War Against Poverty were effective,” Sáenz writes.
The book includes critical assessments of the status of Mexican Americans, none as important, in my judgment, as the emergence of “a professional and academic voice” among Latinos and the rise of major institutions to advocate for Mexican Americans and defend their rights.
Many of those institutions were born in San Antonio, including the Intercultural Development Research Association, an educational policy think tank; Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which has won major lawsuits on behalf of Mexican Americans; the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, the nation’s largest nonpartisan Latino voter participation organization; and COPS Metro, which has trained generations of community activists. “Mexican American Civil Rights in Texas” makes clear that daunting obstacles lie ahead, such as continued attacks on voting rights and the persistence of economic policies that privilege the few at the expense of the many.
Each chapter makes policy recommendations for academics, policymakers and activists.
Avena and Brischetto wanted to inspire a new generation to continue fighting for equal opportunity for Mexican Americans.
That struggle couldn’t be more urgent, especially given the attacks on our democratic institutions and on our diversity.
Brischetto pointed to the 2019 mass shooting in an El Paso Walmart, in which 23 people were killed by a domestic terrorist who drove 10 hours from North Texas to “stop the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
This isn’t mere polarization, he said. It’s an extremist backlash against change in America.
It’s a backlash we see reflected in the banning of books and in efforts to delegitimize critical race theory as a field of study.
“Richard (Avena) and I are of a generation that has some knowledge of what took place,” said Brischetto, who has served as an expert witness in more than 40 voting rights cases.
They had no intention of taking that knowledge to their graves.