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That probably wasn't the case in Texas in the 1950s. Mexicans were never considered "white" in Texas and some other parts of the Southwest at that time. They were maybe a rung up the ladder from blacks. Mexicans and Mexican Americans (Chicanos) were treated better in places like New Mexico and Colorado, and in the GP states but that's a lot like saying that blacks in NYC and LA were treated better than in the South. They still had it bad enough.
Both my parents grew up in different parts of Texas during the 1950s (and moved around). Both had Hispanics in virtually all of their classes from elementary through college (undergraduate). According to my parents, they were treated like whites. Asians were few in number, but also present at their schools.
Neither of my parents attended a school with African Americans until graduate school, out-of-state, in the early 70s.
I knew a guy (he's dead now) whose mother was Korean. His father was Irish-American. He grew up in the fifties, and occasionally they would get hate phone calls or anonymous threatening letters sent to the house, and once someone threw a rock through their living room window. This was in suburban New Jersey.
Mexican-Americans had to form their own veterans' organization called the "American G.I. Forum" after a funeral home in a small south Texas town in the 1940s refused to bury a Hispanic soldier who was killed during World War II.
I just watched the story of Dr. Hector Garcia, the founder of the American GI forum. It was so interesting. It was on PBS.
When I watch old tv shows of the 50/60's, all we really see is the lifestyles of mostly white families. Once in a blue moon, we see blacks and we hear how segregation and racism was bad and so forth for them. What I never see/read/ or hear about it how was it like for the other minorities specifically the Asians and Hispanics during that time? Were they facing the same problems as the blacks back then? How was life for them during that period?
The discrimination against Latinos in Texas and the Southwest was quite common and they were also lynched as well.
I remember hearing on a documentary that marijuana was prohibited largely due to the large numbers of Hispanics who smoked it. Perhaps that was a form of persecution.
The Mexicans (known specifically as Chicanos who started this movement), were fighting for equality. The Japanese were dealing with the aftermath of the Internment Camps, the Native Americans were dealing with the aftermath of the boarding schools they were sent to (a few were probably still being forced to go in the fifties).
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