From California to the Nation: Rethinking the History of 20th Century U.S. Civil Rights Struggles through a Mexican-American, and Multiracial, Lens

Abstract

This paper discusses Mexican American civil rights struggles in Los Angeles during the early Cold War era and its significance for Mexican Americans' quest for full citizenship. It explains the ways in which these mid-century campaigns were fundamentally cooperative. Significant beyond their local and regional communities, the struggles of the largest concentration of Mexican Americans in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century force a rethinking of the roots of national civil rights reform. Scholars of Mexican American civil rights history mostly have overlooked the decade following World War II because its constricted early Cold War political culture supposedly stifled any serious reform attempts. But this time period is crucial for understanding the origins of Mexican American struggles for citizenship and equality. Well before the Chicano movement, and even before the African American civil rights movement of the mid 1950s and 1960s, Mexican Americans fought for fair housing and improved street lighting, and against police brutality and the segregation of public facilities like swimming pools, theaters, and schools. Even beyond this forgotten political activism, Mexican Americans' quest for citizenship during the mid-twentieth century was more multiracial than scholars recognize. Archival research into the kind of "behind the scenes" activism that does not appear in published legal or political documents reveals that many endeavors previously seen in mono-racial terms were in fact multiracial. As evidenced by the archival records of various minority groups' civil rights organizations, mid-century citizenship campaigns involved coalitions among minority groups. In one important example, Jewish, African, Mexican, Japanese, and progressive "Anglo" Americans came together to elect Edward Roybal to the Los Angeles City Council in 1949. Roybal became the first Mexican American L.A. city council member since 1881-and the council's only non-white member-in a