UPDATED ON AUG 29, 2018

The Brutal History of Anti-Latino Discrimination in America

School segregation, lynchings and mass deportations of Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are
just some of the injustices Latinos have faced.

ERIN BLAKEMORE

Olvera Street is a Los Angeles icon—a thriving Mexican market filled with colorful
souvenirs, restaurants and remnants of the oldest buildings in Los Angeles. But
though the bright tourist destination teems with visitors, few realize it was once the
site of a terrifying raid.

In 1931, police officers grabbed Mexican-Americans in the area, many of them U.S.
citizens, and shoved them into waiting vans. Immigration agents blocke d exits and
arrested around 400 people, who were then deported to Mexico, regardless of their
citizenship or immigration status.

The raid was just one incident in a long history of discrimination against Latino people
in the United States. Since the 1840s, anti-Latino prejudice has led to illegal
deportations, school segregation and even lynching—often-forgotten events that echo
the civil-rights violations of African-Americans in the Jim Crow-era South.

The story of Latino-American discrimination largely begins in 1848, when the United
States won the Mexican-American War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which
marked the war’s end, granted 55 percent of Mexican territory to the United States.
With that land came new citizens. The Mexicans who decided to stay in what was now
U.S. territory were granted citizenship and the country gained a considerable
Mexican-American population.

As the 19th century wore on, political events in Mexico made emigration to the United
States popular. This was welcome news to American employers like the Southern
Pacific Railroad, which desperately needed cheap labor to help build new t racks. The
railroad and other companies flouted existing immigration laws that banned importing
contracted labor and sent recruiters into Mexico to convince Mexicans to emigrate.

Anti-Latino sentiment grew along with immigration. Latinos were barred entry into
Anglo establishments and segregated into urban barrios in poor areas. Though
Latinos were critical to the U.S. economy and often were American citizens,
everything from their language to the color of their skin to their countries of origin
could be used as a pretext for discrimination. Anglo-Americans treated them as a
foreign underclass and perpetuated stereotypes that those who spoke Spanish were
lazy, stupid and undeserving. In some cases, that prejudice turned fatal.

According to historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, mob violence against
Spanish-speaking people was common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They
estimate that the number of Latinos killed by mobs reach well into the thousands,
though definitive documentation only exists for 547 cases.

The violence began during California’s Gold Rush just after California became part of
the United States. At the time, white miners begrudged former Mexicans a share of
the wealth yielded by Californian mines—and sometimes enacted vigilante justice. In
1851, for example, a mob of vigilantes accused Josefa Segovia of murdering a white
man. After a fake trial, they marched her through the streets and lynched her. Over
2,000 men gathered to watch, shouting racial slurs. Others were attacked on
suspicion of fraternizing with white women or insulting white people.

Even children became the victims of this violence. In 1911, a mob of over 100 people
hanged a 14-year-old boy, Antonio Gómez, after he was arrested for murder. Rather
than let him serve time in jail, townspeople lynched him and dragged his body through
the streets of Thorndale, Texas.

These and other horrific acts of cruelty lasted until the 1920s, when the Mexican
government began pressuring the United States to stop the violence. But though mob
brutality eventually quelled, hatred of Spanish-speaking Americans did not.

In the late 1920s, anti-Mexican sentiment spiked as the Great Depressionbegan. As

the stock market tanked and unemployment grew, Anglo-Americans accused
Mexicans and other foreigners of stealing American jobs. Mexican -Americans were
discouraged and even forbidden from accepting charitable aid.

As fears about jobs and the economy spread, the United States forcibly removed up
to 2 million people of Mexican descent from the country—up to 60 percent of whom
were American citizens.

Euphemistically referred to as “repatriations,” the removals were anythin g but

voluntary. Sometimes, private employers drove their employees to the border and
kicked them out. In other cases, local governments cut off relief, raided gathering
places or offered free train fare to Mexico. Colorado even ordered all of its
“Mexicans”—in reality, anyone who spoke Spanish or seemed to be of Latin descent —
to leave the state in 1936 and blockaded its southern border to keep people from
leaving. Though no formal decree was ever issued by immigration authorities, INS
officials deported about 82,000 people during the period.

The impact on Spanish-speaking communities was devastating. Some light-skinned

Mexican-Americans attempted to pass themselves off as Spanish, not Mexican, in an
attempt to evade enforcement. People with disabilities and active illnesses were
removed from hospitals and dumped at the border. As one victim of “repatriation” told
Raymond Rodriguez, who wrote a history of the period, Decade of Betrayal, “They
might as well have sent us to Mars.”

Others, like Rodriguez’s father, did not wait for raids or enforcement and returned to
Mexico independently to escape discrimination and the fear of removal. His wife
refused to accompany him and the family never saw him again.
When deportations finally ended around 1936, up to 2 million Mexican-Americans had
been “repatriated.” (Because many of the repatriation attempts were informal or
conducted by private companies, it is nearly impossible to quantify the exact number
of people who were deported.) Around one third of Los Angeles’ Mex ican population
left the country, as did a third of Texas’ Mexican-born population. Though both the
state of California and the city of Los Angeles apologized for repatriation in the early
2000s, the deportations have largely faded from public memory.

Another little-remembered facet of anti-Latino discrimination in the United States is

school segregation. Unlike the South, which had explicit laws barring African -
American children from white schools, segregation was not enshrined in the laws of
the southwestern United States. Nevertheless, Latino people were excluded from
restaurants, movie theaters and schools.

Latino students were expected to attend separate “Mexican schools” throughout the
southwest beginning in the 1870s. At first, the schools were set up to serve the
children of Spanish-speaking laborers at rural ranches. Soon, they spread into cities,
too.

By the 1940s, as many as 80 percent of Latino children in places like Orange County,
California attended separate schools. Among them was Sylvia Mendez, a young girl
who was turned away from an all-white school in the county. Instead of going to the
pristine, well-appointed 17th Street Elementary, she was told to attend Hoover
Elementary—a dilapidated, two-room shack.

The bare-bones facilities offered to students like Mendez lacked basic supplies and
sufficient teachers. Many only provided vocational classes or did not offer a full 12
years of instruction. Children were arbitrarily forced to attend based on factors like
their complexion and last name.

Then Mendez’s parents fought back. In 1945, along with four other families, they filed
a class action lawsuit against four Orange County school districts. Their goal: Ensure
that all children could attend California schools regardless of race.

The case culminated in a two-week-long trial. In court, school officials claimed that
Latino students were dirty and infected with diseases that put white students at risk.
Besides, they argued, Mexican-American students didn’t speak English and were thus
not entitled to attend English-speaking schools. (When asked, officials conceded that
they never gave students proficiency tests.) “Mexicans are inferior in personal
hygiene, ability and in their economic outlook,” said one official.

Mendez’s attorney countered with testimony from experts in social science. He argued
that the policy trampled on Latino children’s Constitutional rights. When Carol Torres,
a 14-year-old Latino girl, took the stand, she immediately proved that Mexican -
American students in the district could and did speak English.
It took seven months for Judge Paul J. McCormick to render a decision. On February
18, 1946, he ruled that the school districts discriminated against Mexican -American
students and violated their Constitutional rights. Though the school districts
challenged the ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with McCormick.
Thanks to Mendez v. Westminster School District, California officially ended all
segregation in its schools.
Mendez, who was eight when the lawsuits began, later told reporters that she thought
her parents were fighting for her right to attend a school with a nice playground. But
the case accomplished much more than that. Soon, parents in Texas and Arizona
successfully challenged school segregation. In 1954, a decade after Mendez was
turned away from the whites-only elementary school, the United States Supreme
Court ruled that all school segregation based on race was unconstitutional in Brown v.
Board of Education.

Though the case was a victory for the Mendez family, Sylvia was harassed and
heckled by her fellow students when she attended the white school. Nonetheless, she
pushed to succeed and became a nurse and civil-rights activist. She was awarded a
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010—and now, two Los Angeles-area schools are
named after her parents.

Today, an estimated 54 million Latinos live in the U.S. and around 43 million people
speak Spanish. But though Latinos are the country’s largest minority, anti -Latino
prejudice is still common. In 2016, 52 percent of Latinos surveyed by Pew said they
had experienced discrimination. Lynchings, “repatriation” programs and school
segregation may be in the past, but anti-Latino discrimination in the U.S. is far from
over.