Title: Latino Social Movements | Encyclopedia.com
Headings: Latino Social Movements
Latino Social Movements
Latino Social Movements
LULAC, MENDEZ, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS
SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS
MEXICAN AMERICANS AND UNIONS
THE CHICANO MOVEMENT
WOMEN AND THE MOVIMIENTO
MARGINALIZED MOVEMENTS
LATINO MOVEMENTS IN THE 1990S AND BEYOND
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Content: Vigilante groups regularly hunted down Mexicans and lynched them without any legal proceedings. The legal system was largely based on “gringo justice,” and the implicit assumption was that Mexican Americans constituted a separate, inferior “race” that did not deserve equal treatment under the law. The United States used this same ideology during the U.S.-Mexico War, claiming it was their “Manifest Destiny” to take territory controlled by “uncivilized people” (Horsman 1981). LULAC believed that Mexicans-Americans were neither inferior nor uncivilized. They flatly stated that they were American citizens and should receive equal, fair, and just treatment. To achieve that goal, LULAC’s leaders pushed for incremental social change through legal reforms, but it distanced itself from more militant positions. LULAC implicitly assumed that Mexican Americans would become assimilated and accepted over time by becoming more Americanized. English, therefore, became LULAC’s official language. LULAC also called for stricter immigration controls and, unlike the Spanish-Speaking People’s Congress, a much more radical Mexican-American organization that maintained close ties with the Communist Party in the late 1930s, it did not play an active role in organizing the labor unions that included mostly Mexican-American workers. LULAC also did not challenge political repression (e.g., McCarthyism), and it supported an anti-immigrant program called Operation Wetback in the mid-1950s.