of the 1950s and early 1960s and the
numerous progressive and radical left
movements of the late 1960s and early
1970s. But the Mexican-American civil
rights movement took its own distinctive
shape. Behind all the activism lay a grow-
ing sense of ethnic identity as Chicanos,
and a dawning awareness of the ties that
bound Chicanos to all other Latinos, or
Hispanic Americans.HERNANDEZ V. TEXAS
In 1954, the same year in which the land-
mark case Brown v. Board of Education
overturned educational segregation
directed against African Americans, the
Supreme Court rendered a similarly sig-
nificant ruling for Hispanic Americans.
Pete Hernandez was a Mexican American
convicted of murder in Texas, a state that
had long segregated people of Mexican
descent just as it did people of African
descent. Signs in restaurants and other
public places stated this prejudice in so
many words, with phrases like “No Dogs,
Negroes, Mexicans.” Local juries, includ-
ing the one in Jackson County, Texas,
that tried Hernandez, typically contained
no Hispanics even when Hispanics were a
substantial part of the population. In fact,
at the time of Hernandez’s trial, Jackson
County had not had a single Hispanic
serve on a jury for more than 25 years.
In Hernandez v. Texas, Hernandez’s
lawyers, Carlos C. Cadena and Gus C.
Garcia (the first Hispanic Americans toargue in front of the U.S. Supreme
Court), were faced with a challenge. In
order to reverse Hernandez’s conviction,
they needed to establish that people of
Mexican descent constituted a separate
class of people in Jackson County, distinct
from “whites.” To do that, Cadena and
Garcia called attention to the very public
attitudes of the Anglo majority—as evi-
denced by signs that segregated Mexicans
from Anglos in public places.
To buttress their case, Cadena and
Garcia elicited admissions from county
officials and business leaders that they
themselves viewed Mexican Americans as
distinct from “whites” and that very few
Mexicans were asked to participate in
local business and community groups.
Additionally, Cadena and Garcia demon-
strated that Mexican-American children
were required to attend a segregated
school through fourth grade. Finally, they
observed that right on the county court-
house grounds at the time of the case’s ini-
tial hearing, there were two men’s toilets,
one unmarked, and the other marked
“Colored Men” and “Hombres Aqui”
(“Men Here”).
Having established Mexican
Americans as an identifiable class of peo-
ple in Texas, Cadena and Garcia had to
prove that Mexicans as a group had been
discriminated against. To do so, they
relied on the precedent set in Norris v.
Alabama, which showed that although
many African Americans in Alabama were
qualified to serve on juries, a consistent
pattern of exclusion over a long period of190 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY
The mural above in an El Paso park
displays the thunderbird, a symbol
of pride in La Raza Unida. (National
Archives)The poster above promotes the United Farm Workers’ strike and boycott against
California grape growers. (Private collection)