 Hi, I'm Dr. Gene Parois. In this lecture, we're going to focus on the experience Mexican Americans had during the World War I era. We want to address how the World War affected the Mexican American community, the rise of the Mexican American generation, and how experiences during World War II contributed to the Mexican American civil rights movement. As part of the background to war, we need to understand that the United States did not want to get involved in another European war following World War I. And so laws in the 1930s as legislators started seeing problems in Europe start to maybe foretell them that war was on the way, that they began to pass neutrality acts to keep us out of being involved in European conflicts. But in 1939 after the invasion of Poland, the United States President Franklin Roosevelt was able to get Congress to agree to a cash and carry policy, which would allow us to provide military munitions for our allies if they promised to pay for it up front. During the fall of France in June of 1940s, destroyers for bases was a new way of allowing us to provide military destroyers to the British Navy in exchange for the use of their territory to install American bases. Then there was a lend lease, which allowed us to lend material and then be paid at some point in the future. We later extended this to Russia. And finally on December 7, 1941, any attempt at remaining neutral was obviously over with the attack on Pearl Harbor. For Mexican Americans, the population during the Great Depression of the 1930s and repatriation efforts had led to a decline in overall Mexican American numbers in the United States Mexican and Mexican American numbers. But still when the draft occurred, young men were recruited and some drafted and we believe that between 300,000 to 750,000 of those draftees of those 34 million who registered were Hispanic, perhaps the majority of them Mexicans or Mexican Americans. And we have to realize too that Puerto Rican served the Tuskegee Airmen, others also served the Coast Guard in those numbers. And don't forget that women participated as well in military service. Mexican American women joined the Army Air Corps, the Army Reserves, the Waves, and they also served in Army and Navy Nurse Corps. Now why don't we have accurate numbers? Why are these guesses? Well, because we didn't really differentiate in military records on who was Mexican American and what country they were from and all this. So we don't have the real numbers we're guessing based upon last name. We do think that Mexican Americans were overrepresented and as your textbook points out, this may have been for one of three reasons to improve status, simple patriotism, right? It was our country, we wanted to fight it or was it machismo? For examples of distinguished service in the military, in Illinois, just west of Chicago is a town named Sylvus, there in a residential neighborhood about a block and a half long is a street called Hero Street, USA and this is an honor of the 84 men who volunteered or were drafted during World War II, Korea and Vietnam and served. We know that eight died from that little neighborhood property of about a block and a half long in World War II. So that was renamed Hero Street, USA. Mexican Americans also served in the Philippines, the New Mexico National Guard. For example, they were in at the Batan Death March in April of 1942. Guy Abaldon was a Mexican American from California who served on the Navy Cross and the Silver Star. In a Hollywood movie was not portrayed as Mexican American, was portrayed as Italian by a white actor and so this caused some disconcernment among Mexican Americans who felt they were being ignored. There were Medal of Honor winners as well in the military. Jose Martinez was the first Mexican American Medal of Honor winner in World War II and there were also Mexican nationals who were serving. Jose Lopez, for example, was from Mexico, was Mexican, but he did serve in the U.S. military, lived here in Texas as well. We talk about the Mexican American generation. This is just that World War II generation and they served in more areas than just the military, even at home. So they were building victory gardens, growing victory gardens along with other people in the United States. They worked, their women worked in the defense industry. So here is a photograph on the right hand side of a Mexican American woman in a Fort Worth airplane plant working as a machinist. Mexican Americans bought war bonds and contributed. They participated in USO. Now, Desi Arnaz, for an example, was a Cuban band leader and although he was Cuban American, he does represent the Hispanic participation in that. In 1947, Harry Truman's President's Commission on Civil Rights issued a report, however, called to secure these rights and in there they provided examples of discrimination that the Mexican American generation and other minorities faced. And what they did was they urged equality of opportunity in education, in housing or in jobs and they suggested that the government passed laws against lynching, passed laws against poll taxes. Established a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission and established a justice division, a civil rights division in the Department of Justice. Now, the discrimination that they found didn't just happen after the war, it was actually before the war, of course. And so, for example, on the home front in 1942 while the war was raging, the sleepy lagoon case outside of Los Angeles, California was started because of the murder of a young man named Jose Diaz in Los Angeles, 600 Mexican Americans were arrested, charged to be in a gang or just assumed to be in a gang and 20 of them were tried for murder on very flimsy, circumstantial evidence, in fact, there was very little evidence that police had. But because they were, except that they were Mexican American and so it was assumed that they were Mexican American, therefore they belonged in gangs or they were members of gangs and Mexican American gangs like to stab people and murder. That was really what the prosecution was going on. There was a sleepy lagoon defense committee which hired lawyers to help represent these young men to help them get off on these rather flimsy, racist, prejudicial statements made during the trial. There was also more famously, probably a year later, the zootsuit riots which happened in downtown Los Angeles and this is where naval men were competing for part-time jobs with African American and Mexican American young men and this became known as the zootsuit riots and the federal government had to send in the military police to help quell the violence and to return the servicemen to the bases. There were other federal efforts against discrimination, first of all a continuation of the good neighbor policy. This was Franklin Roosevelt's policy developed in the 30s to build better relationships with South American countries who many of whom felt the United States intervened in their politics too often. There was the Fair Employment Practices Commission, Executive Order 8802 of 1941. Carlos Castaneda, a Texas Mexican American working at University of Texas was appointed to oversee Latin American issues. And finally there was the Office of Inter-American Affairs, the Spanish-speaking People's Division, Kerry McWilliams, a California journalist who had written about Mexican and Mexican American immigration was placed in charge of helping to reduce discrimination Mexican Americans faced in the Southwest. And here are two examples of signs that were not uncommon in Texas. One was a weasel of whites only, this was in Demet in West Texas and then in East Texas newspaper ran this ad which was very common that they advertising the patrons that they were only white people that they hired to work there. Agriculture also faced serious setbacks during the war because many young men were in the military and away from the farms and so who was going to help when harvest time came around but the federal government instituted the Bracero program in an agreement with Mexico to allow Mexican farm laborers to come in temporarily to help with growing season and harvest season. Now Texas was excluded from that because of numerous cases of discrimination and so the governor of Texas, Coke Stevens established the Texas Good Neighbor Commission to help eliminate discrimination, identify places where it was happening and work with the businesses or the towns and the areas to help reduce that discrimination. The state legislature also passed the Caucasian race resolution in 1943. This was basically to say that in accordance with the laws of the Treaty of Guadalupe de Algo, Mexican Americans were considered Caucasian and therefore should not be discriminated against. But in 1944, this was challenged with the Terrell Wells case. This was a private swimming pool in San Antonio that refused service to Mexican Americans and the judge said in the case that the Caucasian race resolution was just a resolution and it did not carry the full weight of the law. So segregation was allowed to continue. There was also efforts at promoting union benefits during the agricultural workers in World War II, during World War II and this was the National Farm Labor Union in California, formerly the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Ernesto Galarza was one of the Californian union organizers working with him and he helped organize over 20 strikes in the years. Now this was mostly after the war. The United States government had passed the Servicemen's Readjustment Act or the GI Bill of Rights in 1944 to provide returning service personnel with opportunities, education with financial loans to help start businesses, buy homes or complete school. And Hector Garcia, a doctor, you see his photo on the top left-hand side there from Corpus Christi, established an organization called American GI Forum and what he wanted to do was to make sure that Mexican Americans were able to receive the benefits that the Servicemen's Bill of Rights provided. They received a lot of attention in 1948 when the young man pictured on the right-hand side, soldier Private Felix Longoria, was killed in the Philippines in 1945. In 1948, they removed his remains back to his hometown near Corpus Christi of Three Rivers, Texas. The funeral home, white-owned funeral home in Three Rivers, agreed to prepare the remains for burial, but they did not want to hold awake for the family because they feared that it would drive off other white customers from the funeral home. The whites wouldn't like it. So Hector Garcia, an American GI Forum, enlisted the services of Senator Lyndon Johnson to help. Johnson sent members of his staff to investigate, found out that, yes, there was what they considered discriminatory practices, and so in the end of the story, the Longoria Fair, Longoria's remains were buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Johnson continued, however. You had restaurants who refused to serve servicemen, like Jose Lopez, a Medal of Honors. Winner in Brownsville, a restaurant refused him service. Macario Garcia, a Medal of Honor recipient in Sugarland, was denied service, and so you did have discrimination that continued long after the war. Finally in 1950, Operation Wetback, almost a half-million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, too, were deported because of Cold War fears and isolationism that they were creating a nuisance within the country. Additionally, there were educational challenges. Now, while Texas did try to educate teachers that Mexican-American and other minority students were capable of learning, there was a widespread belief that minority students, Mexican-Americans, African-Americans simply could not learn like white children could. And so the Texas Supervisory Committee on Inter-American Education was aimed at helping teachers learn that Mexican and Mexican-American students did not have impediments to education that they could learn just like everybody else. In 1946, a case before California's Federal District Court, Mendez versus Westminster, challenged educational practices of segregating Mexican-American and other students from white students. So what the federal judge in Mendez issued their order that they could not be because the Treaty of Guadalajara in 1948 said that Mexican and Mexican-Americans were considered Caucasian and therefore could not be segregated. In 1948, a couple of years later, lawyers out of Austin and San Antonio and Houston got together to enact a similar decision here in Texas called Delgado versus Bastrop. This overturns another Texas court ruling, the Del Rio decision of 1930, which had said that you could segregate Mexican-American kids. So Delgado versus Bastrop, the federal district judge Ben Wright said you could not. So this was a victory by Lulac, who had hired many of the attorneys working on the case. So in this lecture, we've looked at how World War II affected the Mexican-American community. It brought increased opportunity for advancement socially and economically. It provided an opportunity for military service and recognition and therefore pride to the Mexican-American community. The Mexican-American generation is this group that was of age during World War II. Those who benefited from the war took advantage of the educational opportunities and struggled for increased civil rights and political participation. And finally, the war contributed to the Mexican-American civil rights movement because with the increased recognition of Mexican-American contributions, this gave more opportunities for Mexican-Americans to challenge prevailing segregation practices. It provided them additional economic and educational opportunities and therefore more political influence. So thank you very much for watching this video.