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: 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. The organization also largely excluded women from leadership positions, even though some, such as Alice Dickerson Montemayor, fought for greater inclusion (Orozco 1997). Most Chicano scholars and activists in the 1960s criticized LULAC for taking these fairly conservative positions, asserting that the organization was too tepid and
mainstream. Some even called LULAC members “vendidos,” or “sell-outs.” This assessment was probably too harsh, however, because LULAC helped dismantle school segregation and racially based jury discrimination, though it did very little to transform the harsh lives of working-class Mexican Americans who faced sweatshop conditions in factories and fields all over the United States. MEXICAN AMERICANS AND UNIONS
Between the 1930s and 1950s, two organizations—the Spanish-Speaking People’s Congress (also known as El Congreso) and the Asociacion Nacional Mexico-Americana (National Association of Mexican-Americans [ANMA])— focused on organizing and supporting union campaigns that primarily involved Mexican Americans.