We begin the third installment with the remainder of the war years and the beginnings of the modern Hispanic/Latino Civil Rights movement. We will conclude with the raw numbers in terms of the Hispanic/Latino populations; the politics and social realities up to and through the 1990's.
Postwar Hispanic/Latino American History
In 1943, prompted by the labor shortage of World War II, the U.S. government makes an agreement with the Mexican government to supply temporary workers, known as braceros, for American agricultural work.
In that same year, the so-called "Zoot Suit" riots take place in southern California. Some elements of the California press had been portraying Mexican Americans as unwelcome foreigners. Bands of hundreds of sailors, marines, and soldiers in southern California range the Hispanic neighborhoods, looking for Mexican American young men in zoot suits. When they find them, the soldiers beat them and tears their suits off of them.
In 1944 Fulgencio Batista retires as president of Cuba. Around this time, Operation Bootstrap, a program initiated by the Puerto Rican government to meet U.S. labor demands of World War II and encourage industrialization on the island, stimulated a major wave of migration of workers to the United States.
A couple of years later marked a rather profound event in Puerto Rico, when in 1946 President Harry Truman appointed Jesus T. Pinero as the first Puerto Rican governor of Puerto Rico.
Throughout the early 1950s, segregation is abolished in Texas, Arizona, and other regions, largely through the efforts of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the Alianza Hispano Americana.
Immigration from Mexico doubled from 5.9 percent to 11.9 percent and in the 1960s rises to 13.3 percent of the total number of immigrants to the United States.
Although in the 50's and 60's Black workers continued to be the most numerous migrants along the eastern seaboard states, Mexican and Mexican-American workers soon dominated the migrant paths between Texas and the Great Lakes, the Rocky Mountain region, and the area from California to the Pacific Northwest.
In the 50's and 60's we also see a number of events that helped to shape the future relations between the U.S. and our Hispanic/Latino neighbors. In 1951 the Bracero Program was formalized as the Mexican Farm Labor Supply Program and the Mexican Labor Agreement, and will bring an annual average of 350,000 Mexican workers to the United States until its end in 1964.
In 1952, Fulgencio Batista comes out of retirement to seize power of Cuba again, this time as dictator and with the backing of the U.S. --- taking Cuba to new lows of repression and corruption.
In the same year as the historic Brown vs. the Board of Education, there was another landmark case. In Hernandez v. Texas, the nation's highest court acknowledged that Hispanic Americans were not being treated as "whites." The Supreme Court recognized Hispanics as a separate class of people suffering profound discrimination, paving the way for Hispanic Americans to use legal means to attack all types of discrimination throughout the United States. It is also the first U.S. Supreme Court case to be argued and briefed by Mexican American attorneys.
In the early 1950s, Hispanic Americans had begun to buy time on local television stations for Spanish-language programs. New York, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and Harlingen, Texas, have extensive Hispanic programming. The first Spanish-language television station in the United States is San Antonio's KCOR-TV in San Antonio (it is now KWEX-TV)
Revolution & Civil Rights
The Cuban Revolution succeeded in overthrowing the repressive regime of Batista and Fidel Castro takes power. Cuban Americans immigration to the United States increased sharply after this date. Large-scale Cuban immigration to the United States occurs much more quickly than that from either Puerto Rico or Mexico, with more than one million Cubans entering the country since 1959.
Most of the 3.7 million Puerto Ricans who have trekked to the U.S. mainland are World War II or postwar-era entries. Unlike the immigrant experience of Mexicans, or Cubans before 1959, the majority of Puerto Rican immigrants entered the United States with little or no red tape.
In the 1960's, a third phase of labor migration to the United States began when the established patterns of movement from Mexico and Puerto Rico to the United States were modified, and migration from other countries increases. The Bracero Program ends in 1964, and, after a brief decline in immigration, workers from Mexico increasingly arrive to work under the auspices of the H-2 Program of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, as well as for family unification purposes, or as undocumented workers.
Young Mexican Americans throughout the United States become caught up in the struggle for civil rights and seek to create a new identity for themselves. These efforts become known as the Chicano Movement. The movement sparks a renaissance in the arts among Mexican Americans. Many Chicano artists call attention to inequalities faced by Mexican Americans, developing new styles of art that eventually gain acceptance in mainstream literary and art scenes.
During this same decade, 1961 to be exact, anti-Communist Cuban exiles who were trained and armed by the United States, attempt a incursion into Cuba that is doomed from the beginning. The failure of the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion embitters thousands of exiled Cubans, while strengthening Castro's position at home. Many observers throughout the world criticize President John F. Kennedy's administration for this attempt.
The United Farm Workers Organizing Committee in California (around 1962), began as an independent organization, was led by Cesar Chavez. In 1965 it organizes its successful Delano grape strike and first national boycott. It becomes part of the AFL-CIO in 1966. Today the union is known as the United Farmworkers of America.
The Organization of American States (OAS) met in Washington, D.C., in 1964, voting to cut diplomatic and commercial relations with Cuba and to impose restrictions on travel there. The following year, the end of the bracero program forces many Mexicans to return to Mexico. They settle near the U.S. border.
To provide jobs for them, the Mexican and U.S. governments began border industrialization programs, allowing foreign corporations to build and operate assembly plants on the border. These plants, known as maquiladoras, multiplied rapidly, transforming the border region. The maquiladors attract companies because they provide cheap labor close to American markets. They employed hundreds of thousands of Mexicans in assembly work, but often in poor working conditions.
For the first time, the United States enacted a law placing a cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, becoming effective in 1968.
Also in 1965, Fidel Castro announced that Cubans can leave the island nation if they have relatives in the United States. He stipulates, however, that Cubans already in Florida have to come and get their relatives. Nautical crafts of all types systematically leave Miami, returning laden with anxious Cubans eager to rejoin their families on the mainland.
A major revision of immigration law results when Congress amended the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The national origin quota system was abolished.
As we enter the 1970's, 82 percent of the Hispanic population of the nation lives in nine states (that number rose to 86 percent in 1990). The largest Hispanic populations are in California, Texas, and New York, and to a lesser degree Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey.
A Chicano Moratorium is announced in a protest against the Vietnam War organized in Los Angeles. More than 20,000 Chicanos and supporters draw attention to the disproportionately high number of Chicano casualties in that war. Conflicts erupt between police and demonstrators. Journalist Ruben Salazar, not involved in the struggle, is accidentally killed by police.
An employment discrimination case, Espinoza v. Farah Manufacturing Company, argues discrimination toward an employee, Espinoza, on the basis of his citizenship status under the Civil Rights Act. However, the Supreme Court holds that there is nothing in Title VII, the equal employment opportunities provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of citizenship or alienage.
Congress passes the Equal Educational Opportunity Act, in 1974, to create equality in public schools by making bilingual education available to Hispanic youth. According to the framers of the act, equal education means more than equal facilities and equal access to teachers. Students who have trouble with the English language must be given programs to help them learn English.
The 80's saw Japanese industrialists take advantage of the maquiladoras by sending greater amounts of raw materials to Mexico where they are finished and shipped duty-free to the United States.
The rates of immigration approach the levels of the early 1900s: legal immigration during the first decade of the century reached 8.8 million, while during the 1980s, 6.3 million immigrants are granted permanent residence. The immigrants are overwhelmingly young and in search of employment, and Hispanic immigrants continue to account for more than 40 percent of the total.
In 1980, Fidel Castro, reacting to negative worldwide press, announces that anyone who wants to leave Cuba should go to the Peruvian embassy there. Ten thousand Cubans descend upon the embassy grounds and receive exit visas. Cuban Americans in Florida organize a fleet of boats to pick up the Cuban exiles at Mariel Harbor. The Mariel Boatlift continues from April through September. By year end, more than 125,000 "Marielitos" migrate to the United States.
The Refugee Act of 1980 removes the ideological definition of refugee as one who flees from a Communist regime, thus allowing thousands to enter the United States as refugees.
In the decade, the number of Hispanics in the work force increases by 48 percent, representing 20 percent of U.S. employment growth. In 1986, after more than a decade of debate, Congress enacts The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), creating a process through which illegal aliens could become legal immigrants by giving legal status to applicants who had been in the United States illegally since January 1, 1982.
Central American Immigration in the 80's & 90's
Significant legal and illegal immigration to the United States began in the 1980s when civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, combined with already weak economies, created an exodus to the United States. Other periods of increased immigration have followed natural disasters, such as Hurricane Mitch in 1998, two earthquakes in El Salvador in 2001, and Hurricane Stan in 2005.
Also in the 1980s, decisions on asylum applications from Nicaragua and El Salvador were influenced by US foreign policy toward the home country. From 1984 to 1990, the United States granted asylum to 25 percent of the 48,000 asylum applicants from Nicaragua, compared with only 2.6 percent of the 45,000 claims from Salvador and 1.8 percent of the 9,500 claims from Guatemalans.
Most observers attribute this discrepancy to the US policy of supporting anti-communist activity. In the late 1980s, Nicaraguans were fleeing communist oppression, while the United States was supporting the Salvadoran government against a Marxist insurgency.
In 1991, the US government and attorneys settled the American Baptist Churches (ABC) v. Thornburgh class-action suit, which alleged that the government engaged in discriminatory treatment of asylum claims made by Guatemalans and Salvadorans. As a result, Guatemalans and Salvadorans physically present in the United States before October 1, 1990 and September 19, 1990, respectively, were granted a new interview and asylum decision, irrespective of any prior decisions on the asylum claim.
In 1997, President Clinton signed the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA), which provides various forms of immigration benefits and relief from deportation to certain Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans, as well as certain Cubans and nationals of former Soviet bloc countries and their dependents. Instead of having to prove 10-year residency and hardship to US citizen or legal permanent resident family members as a result of their deportation, as was stipulated under new legislation in 1996 (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act or IIRAIRA), citizens of these countries only have to have seven years of residency and prove hardship to themselves.
NACARA also grants legal permanent resident (LPR) status to Nicaraguans continually present in the United States since 1995 who applied before March 31, 2000. Salvadorans and Guatemalans who applied for benefits under the ABC case (prior to October 31, 1991 and October 1, 1991, respectively) are eligible for LPR status adjustment under the more lenient qualifications.
We will pick-up Hispanic/Latino-American History in the 21st century in the next installment. Yes, yes, I know I said this would be the last installment in the series (okay, originally I said two), but I think number four will be the last. Stay tuned.
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Thanks Bro! I will, probably, be wrapping this series up with number four and beginning a couple more for November --- it being Native-American & Jewish history month. I ALWAYS appreciate your comments Ken.
Great coverage of those years Edward, I served in the army with 3 Mexican-American boys who were first class. One guy, I remembered when I read the name above, Jesus P. Acosta, was a fanatically neat person. His hair was so black, it actually appeared blue tinged, and he was always selected for the neatest and best shoe shine and perfectly fitted and pressed clothing. Brings back fond memories. Thanks for sharing this with us.
Thanks for the comment and the compliment Connor. I have spent a great deal of my adult life teaching history --- I caught the bug early in my life. Thanks again Connor for taking the time to read and comment.
Hi Dr. Rhymes. Thank you so much for writing this very informative, well-written article. I was very interested in the Bracero Program which lasted for 25 years. The two-year guest worker program which peaked in 1956 allowing 445,000 braceros were provided protection by Public Law 78. Will illegal immigration from Mexico be considerably reduced today if the Bracero Program be resurrected? As always, very enjoyable read and an excellent article. Best regards, ~Nenita~
Thanks Nenita and I always enjoy your comments. In regard to the Bracero Program making a dent in undocumented workers, I can't fully answer. It might work if the Mexican government did more to create opportunity for its citizens as well --- I believe that it is too beholden to foreign interests.
The Missing Link's piece: You Don't Understand, offers some great insights into our immigration issues with Mexico (if you haven't read it already) --- the comments are worth a read as well.
» left by Anonymous (15 hours 29 minutes ago.) New Comment!
This was packed with a lot of information and was quite interesting. Good writing; however, it would have been easier to read it you kept some format with the past and present tenses. I found that confusing because I couldn't always tell if it was or is.
Thanks for commenting Anon. I find sometimes that if I write in the present tense --- talking about the events as if they were occurring now --- that it would allow the reader to feel the history so to speak. I do realize that there were times that I was "in and out" in regard to my "tenses." I will remember that the next go-around.
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