 Hello, I'm Dr. Gene Preuss. In this lecture we're going to look at the transition for the Hispanic generation from 1970 to about 1990 as Mexican Americans and other Hispanics went from being minority in the United States to a majority. This lecture will explain how immigration expanded the Mexican American community, how we see continuing gaps in the educational differences between Hispanics and others and describe the increased political and social recognition of the Hispanic population in the late 20th century. During this period, the latter part of the 20th century, the Hispanic community continued to increase. Now at the beginning of this time period that we're talking about by the 1970s, Mexican Americans were 60 percent of the U.S. Latino population. However, we see an increase of about 60 percent between 1970 and 1980 and much of that happened in the latter part of the 20th century between 1980 and 1990 so that Mexican Americans and Latinos make up 9 percent of the U.S. population by 1990. Again, most of it's going to be in New Mexico, California and Texas. In some places, this means that Hispanics did become the majority of the population in some of those regions across the United States. A large part of this is due and what contributes to this change is a high birth rate. You also see therefore a younger population. The median age for the Hispanic community was about 26 years while the rest of the population in the United States averaged about 33 years old so relatively a young population but the Hispanic population was even younger. Most of these are urban dwellers as well. 90 percent of Mexicanos lived in urban areas so they go from being kind of seen as being a rural population to being an urban population in the large cities in the Southwest, Los Angeles and San Francisco but you also have Corpus, San Antonio, El Paso, Laredo. In Houston, they become half of the school population. Concomitant with the increase of presence, the increase of population comes an increase in political power. In the 1970s, it starts off with the development of a political group called La Raza Unida, the People United Party. It started in 1970 in Crystal City in South Texas for local city elections and for school board elections where they ran Mexican American candidates. One of the leaders of this group was a young man named Jose Angel Gutierrez. He became national chair of La Raza in 1972. The group, the political organization eventually spread into California and Colorado and in 1972 they ran governor positions and other candidates for other positions in statewide elections. The next year, 1973, the Texas House of Representatives organizes a Mexican American legislative caucus made up of House members who were Mexican American. The Senate organizes their Hispanic caucus in Texas in 1987. In 1974, Willy Velazquez of San Antonio begins a Southwest voter education project. This is an organization, nonprofit organization aimed at expanding the get out the vote message to the Mexican American community and other Hispanics living in the San Antonio and Texas area. In 1976, you have the development in the U.S. of the U.S. Hispanic caucus in Congress. And then in 78, National Association of Latino Democrat Officials changes to Naleo, the National Association of Latino Elected Officials. It's still active today, but this started in 1978 and the name changed in 1979. You see the picture on the right here of Willy Velazquez with this effort to get out the vote for Hispanics that became the Southwest voter education project. Likewise, you see changes in immigration laws at the federal level, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Heart Seller Act. This removed the longstanding national origin quotas that have been in place since the 1920s, 40 years earlier, which placed restrictions on non-Northern European immigrants and basically was seen by many as racist. President Jimmy Carter started a committee on immigration and refugee policies, SCRIP was the name, 1978. The report that the committee issued did two things. It did say that immigration was an important contribution to the United States, but that immigration should be regulated. One of the quotes is the first order of priority is bringing undocumented illegal immigration under control while setting up a rational system for legal immigration. You also do see however to the Hispanic community increasing and growing especially in the Florida region as a result of an increase in Cuban refugees fleeing the Cuban revolution and this continued migration out of Cuba as a result of the Castro brothers regime. You also see a tremendous increase in Latin American immigration in general between 1968 and 1980, over a 50% increase. In 1976, Congress begins capping Western immigration to about 20,000 per year. But at the same time, although there are caps on immigration, you do see a rise of illegal immigration, which just means that the immigration continued even if it wasn't done by federally approved processes. There's also a shift in attitudes about immigration in the Hispanic community itself. The National Chicano Latino Conference on Immigration and Public Policy held in 1977. It didn't like Carter administration's plans for undocumented workers. Fines for employers and amnesty for undocumented was seen as a change rather than punishing the immigrant, punish the employer. You also see that later on Republicans are likewise going to take a different view on immigration. This really starts in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan that while conservatives do want a law and order approach, there is a massive feeling among some Republicans, especially those more libertarians, who oppose federal intervention and spending. You also see congressional Republicans, many of whom are elected by agricultural communities, where the agricultural interests want to be more supportive of allowing cheaper workers to come into the field. Therefore, they're more friendly towards immigrants, both illegal and legal immigration benefits them because they can pay lower wages. In 1980, under the Reagan administration, there's the Refugee Act of 1980. This expands the definition of what it means to be a refugee, which means allowing people in broader reasons. But it did set an annual limit of about 50,000 refugees for the next two years. One of the things that many people believe this contributed to was an increase in gangs, especially Latin American and Mexican gangs, in places like Los Angeles in the 1990s. There was a growing concern over gang-related violence and the growth of gangs in general. There was also a concern that showed up in the Southwest over protests, and some of this was over police brutality. Now, there were also protests that continued on the Vietnam conflict, and one of these in August of 1970, the Chicano Anti-War Moratorium against the Vietnam War, Los Angeles reporter Ruben Salazar is killed by police who are firing tear gas into a coffee shop or a restaurant that he was in, and he was hit by shrapnel and by the canister, and it killed him. Some others died as well. But this was seen as maybe being an orchestrated murder by police. That's how many perceived it. There were also incidents in Texas and other areas of the Southwest over murders by police. One was in Bikes Santos Rodriguez, who was a 13-year-old boy the police brought him and his brother in for questioning and in the squad car. They decided to play Russian roulette with these children, and the gun went off. The police officer who killed Santos said, well, he was an accident. He didn't realize his own gun was loaded. This led to a lot of protests, and you see the picture here on the left of that. In Castroville in Southwest of San Antonio, the murder of a worker named Richard Morales by the local sheriff. And then in Houston, the murder of Jose Campos Torres in 1977, which occurred in Buffalo Bayou. Campos Torres was arrested down a navigation boulevard at a bar for being disruptive. The police beat him up through him in the Bayou where he drowned, and he was found a few days later on Mother's Day in 1977. This caused a lot of unrest and protests among the Mexican-American community, and one of those was a uprising that took place in Moody Park. And this was later on kind of tied to the Campos Torres murder and the charges against the policemen, which ended up being very light. The courts basically find them a dollar for their role, and this just caused outrage, sparked outrage, and then protests. Also in Odessa in West Texas, another inmate was killed while in police custody, Larry Lozano. And so the Justice Department came in to investigate these murders in Texas, in New Mexico, but did very little about it. And so Carter, who was president at the time, Jimmy Carter, he creates an office of Hispanic Affairs that tries to be more responsive to the growing concerns among the Mexican-American and other Hispanic community. There is a U.S. commission on civil rights that identifies police brutality as a major cause for concern in some major U.S. cities, including Houston, but also in other places where you have growing Hispanic populations. Miami, Philadelphia, New York, which had a large, not only Cuban, but Puerto Rican community. Concerns that Mexican-Americans and Hispanics were not achieving their full potential educationally also led to some court cases and other protests. The most important of which here I'm going to discuss, one of those is Cisneros versus Corpus Christie in 1970. This basically argued that Brown versus Board of Education not just be limited to African-American children, but be expanded to Mexican-American children and the U.S. Supreme Court concurred and extended Brown to include Mexican-American children as well. In the 1970s, one way of evading integrating schools in reality, HISD, Houston Independent School District, tried to say that, look, Mexican-American children are legally white. And so what we'll do is we'll integrate the Mexican-American children and the African-American children. And this went along with a lot of white flight that was going on within the city where white residents were moving to the suburbs in an effort to avoid integration. And as these suburb communities were predominantly white communities, this left minority students inside Houston's inner-city schools. And there was a protest about this and how it was basically a way of trying to work around integration without actually really integrating. So students launched walkouts in the 1970-71 school year. And this led to the development of what were known as wellga schools, wellga, meaning strike. The strike schools were schools that were set up to educate the students who were participating in the walkouts. And you had the Bilingual Education and Training Act that the Texas legislature passed in 1973. And this said that schools with 20 or more students with limited English proficiency must provide bilingual instruction, which previously had not really been done. It had kind of been on the students' burden since the 1950s and 60s and even before that, that they must learn English. And so you have the development of the little schools of the 400, which sought to teach children how to speak English. Now the attitude is that schools must provide bilingual instruction. In 1973, you had a Supreme Court case out of San Antonio, Rodriguez versus Texas. And here the Supreme Court said that unequal funding does not violate the 14th Amendment. Now this was, it did say that Mexican American children were not being treated equally, but they said that that unequal funding providing enough funding for the schools, that's not a violation of the 14th Amendment. Well, this was challenged in the state courts. And another case went to the Supreme Court, Edward versus Kirby, also out of San Antonio, some of the same school districts in 1989. And this argued, the Supreme Court decided that school funding on property tax alone was inherently unequal, where you had white students in more prosperous communities that would pay more in school tax. And so their school districts in those areas could afford more educational opportunities for the students while students living in poor areas didn't have that ability. And they said that this violated the Texas State Constitution, which said that all students would be educated equally. And so what happens as a result of this is that the Texas Supreme Court mandates what becomes known as the Robin Hood Plan. This is where they take tax money from wealthier districts and distribute it to lower income districts. And this has caused problems even up to the present time. And in fact, in more recent years, you see that Houston ISD, which traditionally had been considered an inner city school district and a minority heavy school district, and was the recipient of Robin Hood redistribution funds. Now it's considered a wealthy school district, and now it's having to pay out to other poor districts. And there have been efforts in Dallas, which also faced similar issues. Houston, of course, and others who are now fighting the Robin Hood Plan. So the tables kind of turned on that as you have gentrification and you have more economic development in those inner city areas. In 1974, the Equal Education Opportunities Act. This was also addressed at overcoming language barriers, put the emphasis on the schools. And then in Lowe versus Nichols, 1974, this was a case brought about by Chinese immigrants and the Los Angeles Commuter in California anyway. This also was about schools providing language assistance to students who didn't necessarily speak English, at least and even continues in 1990 to the Bush administration, besides the Reagan administration, to be more accepting and more welcoming to people who were immigrating. On the other side of the immigration question is what are we going to do about English language? Now we discussed some of the educational changes and you see this political cartoon that is critical of this official English language only laws that were attempted to be passed by various states. You see it in Dade County, Florida and it passes, but then it's later on repealed. The Texas House several times tries to introduce English only laws only to fail. Then you have Arizona, which passed a law in 1988, but then it is found to violate free speech. In 1981, however, a Supreme Court case affected the schools. Filer versus Doe, this comes out of Tyler, Texas, and this challenged and successfully overturned a 1975 law in Texas that prohibited funds for undocumented children. They said this is unconstitutional, you have to educate them going back to what the Texas Constitutionist says that they would educate everybody equally. And so you set up your constitution and then you seek to not provide this law equally to everybody. As you said you were going to, the Supreme Court said, well, that's unconstitutional. So, Filer versus Doe was a turning point in Texas education and people with limited English proficiency. The education is also seen at crisis is also seen at the federal level in 1984 report called a nation at risk, which basically said that if any other nation were doing to the United States, what we were doing to ourselves educationally, we would consider it an act of war. And so this called for a sea change in America's schools policy. And in Texas, you see a reaction to this in what was called House Bill 82, the Texas House. This became known as the no pass, no play legislation that passed that same year, which said that if you were failing as a student, you couldn't participate in sports or other types of UIL competition. And this was very unwelcome among parents and students because they wanted their students to play and get awards. And oftentimes those children weren't allowed or weren't encouraged to focus on their academics. It was also changed in the mid 1980s, 1988, when Ronald Reagan appointed Loro Covasos from South Texas to be the US Secretary of Education. And Covasos began issuing reports and doing studies on how minority students were faring in America's schools. I found out that they were in the schools, but the schools that they were in got little funding. And Covasos came to Texas and was talking about this and said, you know, it's not just about how much money school districts get, but it's how the districts allocate those funds. But many representatives, in fact, several Hispanic representatives felt that Covasos was kind of underselling the problem they were facing. And so they walked out of a speech that he was giving. The growing Hispanic population was also evident in the United States as well. And in 1980, the US Census Bureau coined the term Hispanic to be used as a federal description of Mexican American and other members of Latin American descent. And there was criticism of undercounts, right? And in the 1980s, they were aware of this. And so for the 1980 census, they did assemble a team of 19 members, most of whom were Mexican American, to advise the census. So these undercounts wouldn't occur as frequently. That was the hope. Reagan also, Ronald Reagan, also expanded what was then called Hispanic Heritage Week to Hispanic Heritage Month in 1988. This was going to be September the 15th through October the 14th. And it coincided with many independence days that took place in that month throughout Latin America. By the late 1980s, it was becoming apparent in the Census Bureau was was talking about this that Anglo-Saxons, whites in the United States would not be the majority going forward by the 21st century. And the exact date changed and evolved as immigration increased. But you see this reflected in the cover of Time Magazine in April of 1990 that what's the US going to be at ask when the whites are no longer the majority? And so there is a whole section in this and several articles that covered this forecast that minorities would become the majority in the United States. And this caused a lot of concern among a lot of white Americans. You also see in the 70s through the 90s the the growth of cultural icons in the Hispanic community. In 1979, maybe one of the biggest indications that Mattel created the Hispanic Barbie doll in 1979. You had the play Zoot Suit, which was about the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943. This is a play and it turns into a movie. You also had actors like Cheech Marin, as many people called him from the Cheech and Chong movies, who became very popular. And today he is well known for his collection of Chicano art actors like Edward James Olmos, who had appeared in Zoot Suit in the play and then went on to star for several years in a popular TV show called Miami Vice. Musicians and recording artists like Selena. Selena, who when she was quite young in her 20s was murdered by the president of her fan club, but she was known as the queen of Tejano music. And her album in 1990, Bien Conmigo, was the first Tejano album to go gold on the Billboard chart. So it was seen as this crossover music was seen as being very important and kind of a notice of things to come. He had movies like La Bamba, where Richie Valens, he died in a plane crash with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper in 1959 and only recorded a few songs, but he was seen as a cultural icon for many in the Hispanic community. And in 1983, also you see the power of the Mexican American purse as Coors beer begins a decade of Hispanic advertising in the 1990s. In fairness, this had been prompted by a boycott, a threatened boycott that said, look, there's a lot of Hispanics who buy Coors and Coors products and yet very little Hispanic employment in this area. And so Coors donates or promises $300 million to help Hispanic businesses. As many members of the Hispanic community or members of the Catholic Church changes within the church and its structure and its appointments also are reflective of the changes in the population. So Hispanic Bishop Pat Flores of San Antonio, you see his picture here on the right, is the first Hispanic Bishop in the United States. He's active in other causes. One is the development of Padres, which are priests association for social education, religious rights. He is also behind the development of Catholic television in San Antonio. Another Catholic priest, Robert Sanchez in Santa Fe, New Mexico is named the first Hispanic Archbishop in the mid 1970s. And then you also see the church working within the community and an organization like San Antonio's cops community organized for public service. And no relation to the police. It was just a public service organization and likewise a similar organization called Uno United Neighborhood Organization in Los Angeles. While Laurel Cavazos, who's pictured here standing on the right, was the first Hispanic cabinet member, Ronald Reagan appointed him. Reagan's vice president who becomes president, George H. W. Bush, appoints the second Hispanic cabinet member. And this is Manuel Lujan, who you see on the left, who was Secretary of the Interior. And here both Lujan and Cavazos were present when George H. W. Bush signed the White House initiative on educational excellence for Hispanics. And he did this on September 24, 1990 Hispanic Heritage Month. And this was aimed at promoting better educational opportunities for the Hispanic community. The initiative was renewed under successive administrations Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama administrations. And in 2020, under President Trump, the initiative was expanded and renamed the White House Hispanic Prosperity Initiative to also include business besides educational opportunities. So in this lecture, we looked at how immigration expanded the Mexican American community. And we see that political repression and economic limitations, along with relaxed immigration laws, led to increased immigration from Latin American countries. In examining the educational gaps, we see that increased immigration often belied and set back gains that Mexican Americans had made other Hispanics as well and increased attention to state and federal level for educational equity. This is a giving to each educational group, group within education, minorities, what they needed, not just trying to say that they were providing equal opportunity, but equitable opportunity. And it also, we see that as in the political and social recognition for the increasing Hispanic population in the late 20th century, more efforts to mobilize Hispanic voters, which led to increased repression in political office and increased recognition of Mexican American and other Hispanics for their cultural contributions as well. And I think a lot of this is tied to economic power as well.