Protest, repression, and race: legal violence and the Chicano movement.

University of Pennsylvania Law Review, November, 2001 by Lopez, Ian F. Haney

INTRODUCTION

Until the late 1960s, the Mexican community in the United States thought of itself as racially White. (1) That is not how Anglos thought of Mexicans, of course. Largely beginning with the nineteenth-century period of intense Anglo-Mexican conflict in the Southwest, Anglo society perceived Mexicans as racially separate and inferior. (2) By the 1920s, the Mexican community responded to this negative racialization by insisting that they were White. (3) Leaders of the community claimed that Mexicans were Caucasian and thus White biologically, deserving the same social status and civic position as the White group. (4) This belief in a White identity predominated among those who came to call themselves Mexican Americans. (5) To some extent, members of...

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