Title: Hispanic/Latino Civil Rights | American Civil Liberties and Rights
Headings: Hispanic/Latino Civil Rights
Hispanic/Latino Civil Rights
Hispanic/Latino Civil Rights
East L.A. Student Walkouts

Content: When the United States entered World War II, however, Mexicans were invited to immigrate to the United States as farmworkers under the Bracero ( bracero meaning “manual laborer” in Spanish) Program to make it possible for these American men to enlist in the armed services. Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans did not passively accept discriminatory treatment, however. In 1903, Mexican farmworkers joined with Japanese farmworkers, who were also poorly paid, to form the first union to represent agricultural laborers. In 1929, Latino civil rights activists formed the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) to protest against discrimination and to fight for greater rights for Latinos. Just as in the case of African Americans, however, true civil rights advances for Hispanics and Latinos did not take place until the end of World War II. Hispanic and Latino activists targeted the same racist practices as did African Americans and used many of the same tactics to end them. In 1946, Mexican American parents in California, with the assistance of the NAACP, sued several California school districts that forced Mexican and Mexican American children to attend segregated schools. In the case of Mendez v. Westminster (1947), the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Court held that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students into separate schools was unconstitutional. Although Latinos made some civil rights advances in the decades following World War II, discrimination continued. Alarmed by the large number of undocumented Mexicans crossing the border into the United States in the 1950s, the United States government began Operation Wetback ( wetback is a derogatory term for Mexicans living unofficially in the United States).