American Experience

Narrator: It happened in the small town of Edna Texas, the distraught woman told lawyer Gus García. Her son, Pete Hernández had been charged with murder.

“I accepted because I could not resist her tearful pleadings,” Garcia recalled, “and because I decided that we had an excellent opportunity to make this a test case.”

García knew the law, and he knew East Texas. He knew that the defendant’s fate would ultimately rest in the hands of an all-Anglo jury – a jury from which Mexican Americans would be systematically excluded.

The case, Hernandez v. Texas, would make an unlikely journey, all the way to the nation’s highest court.

Michael Olivas: It was an unusual ambition to take a case to the US Supreme Court. No Mexican Americans had ever tried a case in the US Supreme Court. They had no reason to believe that they would win.

Narrator: Garcia and his colleagues had a client who was by all accounts guilty — and a risky strategy that dared to put a crucial element of Mexican American identity on trial.

Lisa Ramos: I think many Mexican Americans were afraid, “What would happen if we weren’t considered white?

Narrator: What the Hernandez legal team was attempting was unprecedented – and had the potential to transform the lives of millions of Americans.

Ian Haney-Lopez: Hernandez v. Texas belongs in the pantheon of great civil rights cases. But even more important, it belongs in the pantheon of great moments in American history.

Wanda García: Life in the 1950’s was very difficult for Hispanics. We were considered second rate, we were not considered intelligent. We were considered invisible.

Bob Sánchez: It was overt discrimination, and not just, “You can’t belong to my country club” type, you know, but the … the real rough type. In theaters, in swimming pools, even in some public parks, we were segregated, something … something awful really.

Carlos Guerra: It got to the point where a restaurant association, put out a sign that said “No Mexicans, Niggers or Dogs Allowed.”

Narrator: Discrimination had become a harsh fact of Mexican American life over the one hundred years since the end of the Mexican War.

In 1848, the victorious United States acquired huge swaths of Mexican territory, and along with it, tens of thousands of residents who were offered American citizenship as part of the treaty ending the war.
Legal citizenship for Mexican Americans was one thing; equal treatment turned out to be quite another.
Many would lose their land to unfamiliar American laws, or to swindlers. With the loss of land came the loss of status.

Carlos, Guerra: Over two-three generations, the people who had owned vast ranches were suddenly farm workers.

After the Civil War, ever-larger numbers of Southern whites came into south Texas. All of a sudden you start seeing allegations that are cloned from the attitudes that they had in the Deep South about black people and see these values being applied to Mexicans … to Mexican Americans. “They’re shiftless. They’re lazy. They’re dumb. They don’t like to work,” and, you know, “They’re tryin’ to get your daughter.”

Narrator: Of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry, Mexican Americans did not fit neatly into America’s ironclad racial categories, black or white. By the early 20th Century, they were considered white by law, largely owing to the treaty’s grant of American citizenship – but inz everyday life their status as citizens meant little.

Benny Martínez: A lotta Mexicans were killed for no reason at all! A lot of 'em were lynched, and a lot of 'em were just shot. Anybody with a cowboy hat then could be a ranger or a vigilante or a regulator.

Narrator: Segregation was widespread, enforced not by written laws – as was the case for African Americans – but by a rigid social code.

Michael Olivas: It was very clear that the social isolation was a perfectly symmetrical system, one that hermetically sealed Mexicans and blacks away from whites in all the daily aspects of life.

Wanda García: When we moved in the neighbors started getting upset. The kids would come on their bicycles and call us ‘dirty Mexicans, you eat toilets’. One time I said something really nasty to one of them and the father of this kid came up and asked me to step off the sidewalk so he could hit me.

Narrator: Discrimination followed to the grave. Cemeteries were segregated. Many funeral parlors even refused to prepare Mexican American bodies for burial.

Victor Rodríguez: So for the most part if you died, and if you were Hispanic, you had to be buried pretty quickly after you died so that you wouldn’t create a smell.

Narrator: In education, as in many other spheres, separate and unequal treatment was commonplace.

Benny Martínez: Our school were old schools. They were dilapidated. We had no toilet facilities inside. We had an outhouse. The Anglo children had a nice school, a modern school with indoor plumbin’ and heating so there was quite a difference. Quite a difference.

Narrator: Second-class treatment exacted a heavy toll.

Benny Martínez: They were always referring to us as “dirty Mexicans.” They called us “pepper belly.” They called us “greasers.” They called us “wet back.” They made us feel ashamed to be a Mexican American.

Ignacio García: And as long as Mexican Americans believed that they couldn’t do anything about that, then they in a sense reinforce the system, the social stratification that occurred in their lives.

Narrator: Then came World War Two. Three hundred thousand Mexican Americans served their country. They suffered casualties and earned honors disproportionate to their numbers. They returned home with dramatically raised expectations, believing they had earned the right to first class citizenship.

Dr Ramiro Casso: We went to fight to give people liberty and to give them their civil rights, and then we come back home and we find that it is the same way as we left it!

Carlos Guerra: A great many people, came home expecting that they had won their full citizenship rights. When they come home and they’re decorated war heroes and they’re turned away from restaurants or told to go to the balconies of theaters, it created a building resentment. When their kids were not allowed to go to the good schools, it created a great deal of resentment.

Narrator: The treatment of Private Felix Longoria, a war hero killed in the Philippines, became a flashpoint. When his body was returned to his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas, in early 1949, the town’s only funeral parlor refused to hold a memorial service – because, they told Longoria’s widow, “the whites wouldn’t like it.”