I teach US history at a predominately Hispanic high school in Chicago. Whenever I discuss legal segregation in the South (Jim Crow), my students inevitably ask me whether or not the Jim Crow laws applied to Hispanics as well as African-Americans. In all my reading on this subject, I have never really seen this question addressed. I usually reply that the laws were clearly intended to segregate African-Americans from whites. I also mention that in most Southern states (except for Texas and Florida), the number of Latinos was so small as to be insignificant to those whites in power. However, these responses really do not answer their question. So I ask all of you: did Jim Crow laws also apply to Latinos? Thank you in advance for your responses.
I’ve lived in New Mexico for most of my life, and I’ve always heard about de facto, if not de jure, segregation of Mexican-Americans here and in Texas. I’ve read numerous offhand references in books by Latino authors about how they couldn’t swim in community pools, couldn’t be served in some stores, and attended segregated schools. I had thought that finding documentation of this history would be simple, and I’m shocked to find that it’s not. I’m beginning to get a deeper understanding of the motivations behind organizations like La Raza.
I did find some information in the Handbook of Texas Online, and there’s a little bit of oral history in Four Years Behind the Veil. This site also has references to segregation of Hispanic people. Five Views: A History of Mexican Americans in California has a good overview of California history. Sadly, the most comprehensive overview I found was on a free term-paper site, and it contains no references at all (predictably).
I also found a reference to a something called “Chicago Education in the Era of Segregation” by G. G. Gonzalez (1990 Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press), but I wasn’t able to find any more information about it online. That might be an interesting approach to the subject for your students, if you can track it down. Good luck, and as a parent I’d like to thank you for caring enough about your students’ history education to do this kind of research.
The Jim Crow laws did not apply to Hispanics. As noted above, there were rather few in the Jim Crow states outside Texas, anyway, so it was not really an issue. In Texas, most “control” of Latinos was handled the same way that blacks were “controlled” in the Northern states that never enacted Jim Crow laws, with redlining, deed restrictions, social pressures that “we don’t want your kind around here” and similar forces. There may have been some specific anti-Mexican laws in Texas, but they would not have been considred part of the Jim Crow collection.
Too bad that the history of the United States taught in Americans schools is primarily the history of the Eastern United States. It would be nice to teach about the history of discrimination against Mexicans and Chinese. Not only is it an important part of American history, but it might feel more relevant to your students.
There was a Supreme Court case dealing with the effects of segregated schools on Chinese-Americans, I think. I forget what it was called, where and when it took place, or even what the court decided, but basically, a man tried to enroll his children in the city’s public school system, but the White school wouldn’t accept them because they weren’t white, and the Negro school wouldn’t accept them because they weren’t black.
I would rephrase that slightly–the laws applied to Hispanics, but did not recognize them as a distinct racial or cultural group, so that a Hispanic would have been considered black or white, depending on their ancestry, just like anyone else. Persons of mixed race, of course, were considered black under the Jim Crow laws.
I checked, and I got some of the facts wrong. The case was Gong Lum v. Rice, and it was decided in 1927. The incident took place in Mississippi. A Chinese girl was placed in the city’s colored school, which was 15 miles away, instead of the white school, near her house, and her father sued, arguing that the colored school was intended for blacks, and that it was discrimination to make her attend it. The court ruled with the state, that white schools only provide for the education of the “white, Caucasian race”, and that Lum’s rights weren’t violated.
Here’s the decision:
So, I guess it depends to what extent Hispanics were considered white, legally.
This site, from the University of Texas, suggests that Mexicans had the worst of both worlds. They were mainly in segregated schools, but because legally they were considered “white”, the schools weren’t entitled to money from the state under the provisions that required the state to fund black schools.
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/SS/pks1.html
Might help to distinguish de jure segregation (government mandates based on race) from informal racial groupings/concentrations brought about by positive reasons (affinity, common language, safety in numbers) and negative (shunning, dislike) and neutral (economic disparity, cultural dissimilarity).
No one (other than federal judges and their fan clubs) ought to think that a federal judge saying something makes it so, but FYI, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals disapproved of U. Texas’s affirmative action/quota program (Hopwood v. Texas, http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/94/94-50569-cv0.htm), as to Hispanic students, based on the finding that even UT’s submissions (in defense of the a.a. program) did not establish any history of de jure segregation of Mexicans by the State of Texas (such history being a prerequisite to blessing one form of remedial race-conscious remedy) (Texas pretty clearly did have de jure segregation as to blacks at one point, which no one in Hopwood disputed).
The Jim Crow laws themselves may not have applied specifically to Hispanics, but there definitely were, as Tom notes, some segregative practices against them. My father recalls travelling through Texas during the Jim Crow era and seeing public restrooms labelled “Black”, “White” and “Mexican”. I’m sure there are other examples.
Jim Crow laws in the Democrat controlled South probably had very little effect upon “Latino” people, being that “Latinos” were a very small minority in this country at the time the laws were in effect. Few “Latinos” lived in the South anyway, outside of Texas. By the time the immigration floodgates were opened in 1965, Jim Crow laws had pretty much been phased out.
For what it’s worth, some anecdotal evidence of de facto fiscrimination:
My father (who was white) was stationed for a time in Colorado when he served in the army in World War II. He was from St. Louis, and he recalled that black soldiers from there thought it was cool to get sent to Colorado: they could be served in restaurants, sit where they wanted on busses, etc.
The reason? “Everybody was too busy hating Mexicans” he said. In Denver, he recalled, “Mexicans” (that is, Americans of Hispanic derivation), had to sit in the last balcony in movie theaters, a custom which was enforced with respect to black people back in St. Louis.
You can’t possibly mean what you said here. If you’re subject to discrimination, those laws have large impact on your life, no matter if you’re one sole latino or one of 100 million.
I don’t have a cite, but I remember hearing not too long ago about a Texas High School that, until recently, had a rule that the only students eligible for Homecoming King and Queen were the ones where both their parents had High School degrees. This rule – surprise, surprise – made most of the Hispanic students ineligible.
There was a documentary about Chinese-American performers on THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE a few years ago…aha, ‘Forbidden City, USA’
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/films/amx214.html
One story was about a female singer from the North who went on tour through the South in the forties and would wonder which bathroom she should go to. She laughed as she recounted it but acknowledged it was pretty sad to have to worry about. (As she was well-dressed and had no Asian accent, she usually didn’t get any guff when she went to the ‘white’ facilities. Sometimes she went to the black ones to see what would happen–people would stare but leave her alone.)
My (white) Dad was stationed in Fort Drum, GA, during the early sixties and witnessed the last gasps of Jim Crow–I’ll ask him what the Latino soldiers did. He’s from NYC and was really freaked out by it. Mom went to a Catholic girl’s school that had some black students, but she doesn’t remember them being treated particularly differently when they went on a field trip to segregated DC, as long as they stayed with the school group.
I’m glad people are asking about the details of this stuff, because we may have far to go but people are forgetting how far we’ve come in forty years. I mean, my Dad met a fellow teacher from Chicago in basic and they couldn’t grab a beer together off-base! 
My family lived in Alabama off and on during the late 50’s and early 60’s (We are Mexican Americans from Texas). My mother said that they were allowed to sit in the “white” sections of restaurants, trains, and other public places without anyone really questioning them. She said that there were few Hispanics in Alabama at the time and that they were often mistaken for Italians. She recalls one instance when they were eating in a diner when some white guys came in and beat up and dragged out a young black guy, saying that he was not allowed to be there. My parents just kept on eating and no one said anything to them. This experience scared them, and they soon moved back to Texas.