Column - Gregory Rodriguez: Racial flexibility 'in the blood' of Mexican immigrants

Posted: Monday, September 10, 2007

LOS ANGELES - In Kansas, federal officials are investigating an Indian tribe for allegedly selling tribal memberships to illegal immigrants, along with the promise that the documents will protect them from deportation. By their spokesman's own admission, the Kaweah Indian Nation has sold more than 10,000 memberships for prices starting at $50 and, according to some reports, as much as $1,200.






This was most common on Mexico's northern frontier - the contemporary American Southwest - where government control was weak and most pioneers were mestizo. In California and Texas, settlers routinely reclassified themselves to improve their social standing. The first two census surveys of the pueblo of Los Angeles are full of instances of racial re-classification.


Sixty years later, after the U.S. annexed Texas and conquered the Southwest, stricter boundaries went back into effect. Biology, not culture, would determine caste and race. In general, the darker a person's skin color and the lower a person's status, the more vulnerable that individual's rights. To solidify the boundaries, U.S. authorities established anti-miscegenation ordinances to discourage racial mixing.

To the extent that Mexican-Americans did enjoy legal rights under the new regime, it was because the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and extended U.S. citizenship to Mexicans well before blacks, Asians and Native Americans were eligible. They weren't socially "white," but between 1850 and 1920, the U.S. Census counted ethnic Mexicans in the white column.

It makes sense, then, that for much of the 20th century, whenever Mexican-Americans were kept out of certain neighborhoods or schools, they employed the "other white race" strategy, asserting their rights by arguing that, as whites, they were being unfairly excluded.

U.S. nativists in the late 1920s and 1930s tried to put a halt to Mexican immigration by having Mexicans (and Mexican-Americans) declared non-white. They based their strategy on a 1924 law that barred entry to immigrants who were ineligible for citizenship, and at that point, only blacks and whites, and not Asians or Native Americans, could naturalize.

The test case came in December 1935, when a Buffalo, N.Y., judge rejected Timoteo Andrade's application for citizenship on the grounds that he was a "Mexican Indian." Had it not been for the intervention of the Mexican and American governments, this precedent could well have made most Mexicans, the majority of whom are mestizo, ineligible for citizenship.

At the first hearing, Andrade said he was 50 percent or 75 percent Indian. At the second hearing, he swore that he had since asked his mother, who assured him that it was probably less than 2 percent. His citizenship application was approved.

In the early 1970s, Chicano activists switched from the "other white race" to "the other minority" as a way to fight discrimination. Just as whiteness once offered the best prospect of protected civil rights, the emergence of race-based policies such as affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act created incentives for them to highlight the non-white side of their mixed heritage.



Gregory Rodriguez is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He may be contacted at


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