1 gen 1948 anni - American GI FOrum and Community Services Organization founded

Descrizione:

American Gi Forum: A group founded by World War II veterans in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1948 to protest the poor treatment of Mexican American soldiers and veterans.
CSO:A Latino civil rights group founded in Los Angeles in 1948 that trained many Latino politicians and community activists, including Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.


African Americans were not the only group organizing against racial injustice in the 1940s. Across the Southwest, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans suffered under a “caste” system not unlike Jim Crow. In Texas, for instance, poll taxes kept most Mexican American citizens from voting. Employers had a constant supply of cheap labor across the border, which allowed them to suppress wages. A majority of Mexican Americans were trapped near poverty, and many lived in colonias or barrios, segregated neighborhoods that often lacked basic infrastructure, such as reliable water and electricity.

During the 1940s, labor activism, especially in Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions with large numbers of Mexican Americans, improved wages and working conditions in some industries and produced a new generation of leaders. More than 400,000 Mexican Americans also served in World War II. Many returned to the United States determined to challenge their second-class status. Additionally, a new Mexican American middle class began to take shape in major cities such as Los Angeles, San Antonio, El Paso, and Chicago, building leadership and leverage for the cause.

In Texas and California, Mexican Americans created new civil rights groups in the postwar years. In Corpus Christi, Texas, the American GI Forum organized in 1948 to protest the poor treatment of Mexican American soldiers and veterans. Activists in Los Angeles created the Community Services Organization (CSO) the same year. Both groups arose to address specific injustices (such as the segregation of military cemeteries) but quickly broadened in scope to seek political and economic justice for the larger community. Among the young activists who worked for the CSO, where they were trained in social justice organizing, were Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, who would later found the United Farm Workers (UFW) and inspire the Chicano movement of the 1960s.

Mexican American women affiliated with the American GI Forum, pictured in 1959. Founded by Mexican American veterans of World War II in Texas in 1948, the Forum was an early civil rights organization dedicated to the interests of Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest.


Mexican American activists also mounted a legal challenge to inequality. In 1947, five Mexican American fathers in California sued a local school district for placing their children in separate “Mexican” schools. The case, Mendez v. Westminster School District, never made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the Ninth Circuit Court ruled the segregation unconstitutional, laying the legal groundwork for broader challenges to racial inequality. Among those filing briefs in the case was the NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall, a key architect of the legal assault on southern segregation. In another significant legal victory, the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that Mexican Americans constituted a “distinct class” that could claim constitutional protection from discrimination.

Also on the West Coast, Japanese Americans mounted their own legal campaign against discrimination. Undeterred by rulings in the Hirabayashi (1943) and Korematsu (1944) cases upholding wartime imprisonment (see “Japanese Removal” in Chapter 23), the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) filed lawsuits in the late 1940s to regain property lost during the war. The JACL also challenged the constitutionality of California’s Alien Land Law, which prohibited Japanese immigrants from owning land, and successfully lobbied Congress to enable those same immigrants to become citizens — a right that had been denied for fifty years. The efforts of Mexican and Japanese American activists enlarged the sphere of civil rights and laid the foundation for a broader notion of racial equality in the postwar years.

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