In Defense of My People: Alonso S. Perales and the Development of Mexican-American Public Intellectuals

Contributors

Preface and Acknowledgements

Michael A. Olivas

If ever there were an enterprise that is a team effort involving the whole village, it is a scholarly conference and a book project as a result. The logistics of each are daunting, and in different ways, but when they work out they are very satisfying, especially when the whole is greater than the sum of its various parts. Each of the dozen scholars who worked together on this book had known of Alonso Perales, some quite well, but none knew him like we know him now. The papers and materials in the wonderful Perales Collection now housed at the M.D. Anderson Library at the University of Houston will allow many scholars to come to know him in all his manifestations. The Collection will soon become an acknowledged source of information about early Mexican and Mexican American organizations in the United States, political issues in the Southwestern U.S. and especially Texas during the period of 1925-1960.Evident in the papers is the role of various social influences that both served as accommodationist and restrictionist mediators for the rise of the Mexican-American community during this period, including the courts and legislatures, state and local governments, the Catholic Church, inter-American and diplomatic venues, newspapers and other media, and the many other discursive vehicles that Alonso Perales employed to improve the lot of his Raza.

My list of acknowledgements is as long as the list of Perales’ correspondents. I thank Brown Foundation Professor Nicolás Kanellos, who drew me into this project as a follow-up to our successful collaboration that led to the 2006 Arte Público Press volume, Colored Men and Hombres Aquí: Hernandez v. Texas and the Emergence of Mexican-American Lawyering, itself a wonderful resource with a different cohort of colleagues. He also provided substantive feedback on my pieces in this project, as did Texas A& M historian Carlos K. Blanton.

The Arte Público Press staff included Marina Tristán, Rebeca Reyes, Carmen Peña Abrego, Ashley Hess, Matthew Hall, and Nellie González, all of whom helped in one way or the other for the January, 2012 conference. Brown Foundation Director of Research for Recovering the US Hispanic Heritage program, Dr. Carolina Villarroel, guided us at every turn from start to finish of the project. Arte Público Press executive editor, Professor Gabriela Baeza Ventura, worked carefully and conscientiously with me and with the authors to edit the large and complex project. From the UH M.D. Anderson Library, Head of Special Collections Pat Bozeman and her many staff members collaborated on this project, and it was their exceptional archival and media skills that made the Collection and this book possible. They include: Valerie Prilop, Nelda Cervantes, Chinh Doan, Rachel Vacek, J. Fisher, Nam-Anh Vu, Michele Reilly, Nicole Westbrook, Dan Johnson, Justin Elbert, Katie Buehner, and Carolyn Meanley. All those who follow in this Collection will follow the archival and digitized paths they carved from the materials.

UH resources were made available by Provost John Antel, Library Dean Dana Rooks, CLASS Dean John W. Roberts, UHLC Dean Raymond T. Nimmer, and IHELG program director Deborah Y. Jones. Carrie A. Criado and John Kling assisted with the media and publicity for the conference. UH History Professors Raúl Ramos and Mónica Perales were active participants in the conference, helping coordinate the participation of the more than one hundred persons who attended.

In a class apart are the talented and generous authors who contributed original and creative work for this book. While I approached some of the obvious and usual suspects who had written about Alonso Perales earlier, based on other documentation and second-hand materials, and was delighted when each of them took me up on this offer, we also held a national call for papers that resulted in other scholars, including exceptionally-talented graduate students, applying to be part of this book project. The array of interests and approaches to the material and the man are wideranging and fresh, but all of us know we are only starting our work in this Collection, with more certain to come in the future. It will be fascinating to see how this Collection fills out our early knowledge of the events touched and shaped by Attorney Perales. We also hope that valuable materials will come forward from others, now that the Collection is established.

Finally, we all acknowledge the generosity of the Perales family, as represented by his two children, Martha Perales Carrizales and Raymond A. Perales, who made the resources available. By my imperfect count, there were more than two dozen of his immediate family and extended family in attendance at the conference, willing and able to add nuance and to share their memories. These were materials that simply had to make their way into the sunlight to inform and instruct us. It has been more than fifty years that he passed, but his lessons and efforts seem fresh and necessary to us today. One of the many canards applied to Mexican-Americans by those who do not know better, is that we have passively accepted our fate and did not work to resist the many depredations visited upon the community. If there is any single figure whose entire life did not conform to this stereotype, it was Alonso S. Perales, who worked tirelessly and effectively in defense of his Raza. This Collection reveals the many ways and the many places that this work was undertaken, and they reveal a remarkable if not perfect man, who himself was greater than the sum of his parts. Indeed, he should become a model for all of us, products of our times as he clearly was, but also willing to render extraordinary service, so that others might prosper.

Michael A. Olivas

Christmas, 2012, Santa Fe, NM

Introduction

Alonso S. Perales, The Rule of Law and the Development of

Mexican-American Public Intellectuals

Michael A. Olivas

In 2011, the University of Houston, Arte Público Press, through the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Program, the Special Collections Department of the M.D. Anderson Library, and the UH Law Center announced that the papers of early Tejano lawyer Alonso S. Perales had been acquired from his family and were available for scholarly examination. Alonso S. Perales (1898-1960) was among the most important organizational figures and public intellectuals of his time, and was instrumental in early and mid-twentieth-century Mexican-American political development in Texas. Perales graduated from George Washington University School of Law in 1925, making him one of the earliest Mexican-American attorneys to practice law in Texas. Over time, he not only had a successful law practice, but helped found the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), served his country in several diplomatic capacities and was a prolific writer and public figure, one who employed all the discursive avenues available to him.

The University of Houston and Arte Público Press, through the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Program, acquired his papers and archives in 2009, and this treasure trove, which had not been widely cited in significant scholarship, was the source of a scholarly conference held at the University of Houston in January 12-13, 2012, by means of solicitations and a call for papers derived from this collection that have resulted in this book project. This conference was held in conjunction with an M.D. Anderson Library-curated exhibit of the papers, correspondence, and other materials from the Perales Collection. Conference sponsors invited proposals from historians, legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, literary scholars and others from the humanities and social sciences with an interest in early twentieth-century Texas political development concerning Mexicans, Mexican Americans and other groups in the state and region, drawn from the collection and other available materials. We invited doctoral students, scholars of all ranks and independent researchers with interests in this important period, particularly those with interests in the early Mexican-American social and political organizations, especially LULAC, Order Sons of America (OSA) and 100 Loyal Citizens. Work derived from access to these papers had suggested that Mexican-American political organizing and social consciousness arose much earlier than has been generally credited in the work of most historians, political scientists and other scholars. Whereas many scholars had placed these origins in the late 1920s, especially with the events leading up to the 1929 founding of LULAC, in Corpus Christi, Texas, the Perales papers and materials reveal roots to predecessor groups and to events from the end of the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the Mexican Revolution, and the early 1920s. These family-held papers, now available in the original and on microfilm at UH Special Collections, promise to fill out the record on the structured role of Mexican-American men and women in these mutual aid societies and civic organizations, as well as the behind-the-scenes role of lawyers—in this instance, not primarily as litigators, but as civic leaders and elected officials. Perales also carried on an extraordinary correspondence with many Latino and Latina and other political figures, revealing wide and deep contacts and affiliations. (Examples include Adela Sloss-Vento, George I. Sánchez, Archbishop Robert Lucey and Anastasio Somoza.) In addition, he carried on a remarkable correspondence with ordinary Mexican-American citizens and Mejicanos de afuera (Mexican nationals residing in the United States), on a variety of cultural and religious topics, ranging from marital counseling, Catholic pieties and other affirmations of the race, designed to share his views and expertise widely and deeply. There is virtually no other parallel to the significant and fascinating materials now archived and ripe for examination.

As every section of this book project reveals, Alonso S. Perales was a fascinating and complex man, one best-identified by his unstinting efforts on behalf of Mexican-origin people in the United States, especially in Texas, and his unceasing search for the best public or private venue in which to advance these interests. He was without equal either in his community or that of the larger community, finding extensive public involvement in his law practice, organizational involvement and leadership, the Catholic Church, efforts to gain elected office, diplomatic and international participation, lobbying and advocacy before governmental entities, private correspondence, writing op-eds and media venues, publishing books and recording public and private instances of discrimination and engagement in a number of other discourses that allowed him to seek equality and to improve the lot in life of his community, what he termed his raza. Unusual as it was for his time, approximately 1925 until his death in 1960, such a wide-ranging polity is rarely seen in his contemporaries or even in the present day. The cache of papers and materials has unlocked many unknown aspects of his long and distinguished career, and also fleshed out the more quotidian and personal aspects of his character.

The organization of this book

In his useful chapter where he explains the editorial approach and choices of which resources to utilize, the accomplished senior historian F. Arturo Rosales sets out in Writing a Biography of Alonso Sandoval Perales the decisions he is using to organize and write the full-length biography that will result from these archives. He notes the several options available to him, including chronological and thematic means, and he helpfully sets out his choices, weaving both published commentary already available on Perales and the letters and other materials he has selected to highlight. He writes:

This essay outlines the challenges which I will face in producing a biography of Alonso Sandoval Perales. Although he is one of the most important figures in Mexican-American civil rights history, his trajectory is relatively unknown, primarily because until recently his papers were unavailable . . . I agreed to produce the biography before reviewing the compilation of data, imagining the content would provide thematic avenues. But after a preliminary but thorough assessment of the papers, the task became more daunting because the repository supports almost infinite pathways to understanding Perales. I have also examined other primary sources, not in the collection, but related to Perales, in Mexico City, at the National Archives in Maryland, at the Benson Collection at the University of Texas and in other repositories. I then decided that the biography should explain political and ideological trends which influenced and motivated this San Antonio attorney in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

Besides appreciating and understanding the civil rights efforts Perales and his cohorts mustered, the biography should further demonstrate how important it is for academicians to transcend post-1960s points of reference which have guided much of our assessment of this generation. Activists of the Chicano Movement accused civil rights advocates of Perales’ generation of denying their Mexicanness and instead claimed whiteness. This era also influenced a foundation for more serious scholarly appraisals which to lesser degree also viewed the generation negatively. (Rosales, p. 267)

My aim in writing the Introduction to this edited conference volume is more modest and less-comprehensive than was Rosales’ task: I am attempting to sort the chapters that resulted from the UH conference into a framework, introduce the contributions, comment upon the themes that have emerged from this inter-disciplinary collection, add my own observations upon his legal practice (a topic that has not been examined before this project) and note the many promising avenues that can now be pursued, due to the availability of these materials in a collection far-too-rich for any one undertaking. The chapters fell into several thematic niches, ones that also roughly track the chronology of Perales’ life. Accordingly, I have situated them into five large domains: Organizing, Creating LULAC and Texas Politics; The Mexican-American Generation, Revisited; Religion and Race; Letters, Piety and Politics; Diplomacy, Law and Biography.

Organizing, Creating LULAC and Texas Politics

Having grown up in Alice, and then Corpus Christi, Texas, Alonso S. Perales was orphaned when he was just twelve years old. He left Texas then went East to join the military, and to attend college and law school, which he completed in 1925 by graduating from the law school that later became George Washington University (GWU, 2012). He returned to Texas as the third Mexican-American lawyer, following the first two, J.T. Canales and M.C. Gonzales. Canales graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 1899 and likewise returned to Texas, where he practiced law and entered politics; Manuel C. Gonzales attended law school at St. Louis University and graduated from the University of Texas Law School in 1924. Not surprisingly, both interacted with the young Perales over the years. There was a small number of Mexican-American lawyers—even as late as the 1950s, there were only a few dozen in Texas, educated both out-of-state and at the premier public law school in the State, the University of Texas at Austin. As one history of the early half-century of the UT Law School, the site of Sweatt v. Painter, the 1950 SCOTUS case that struck down the makeshift parallel law school for Negroes, has noted, The University of Texas School of Law has long lived under a shadow of racial discrimination. For a period of over sixty years, the Law School had no African American law students and less than twenty Mexican-American law school graduates (Barrera, 1998, p. 108). That most of the Mexican-American lawyers went on to distinguished legal careers is evidence of how few they were and what remarkable careers they carved out, against all odds.

As a sidebar, this history of early Texas Mexican-American lawyers and other Latino and Latina lawyers is very sketchy and incomplete, and calls out for more historical work. (That I have personally met several of these pioneers since my 1982 arrival in Texas is left-handed acknowledgement of how small and recent the number was.) For some time, I had believed and written that the first Latinos to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court were the lawyers of the Hernandez v. Texas case, who did so in early 1954 (close to the time that the Brown v. Board lawyers re-argued their case). I have also recently written that the 2006 Voting Rights Act case Perry v. Texas was the first SCOTUS case where Latinos and Latinas were on both sides of the case (Nina Perales, Puerto Rican, on the MALDEF side, and Teodoro Cruz, Cuban, arguing on the side of the State). It turns out that I have been wrong in both instances. I am happy to correct this record, even at the risk of still getting it wrong.

There are likely some Puerto Rican lawyers who argued Puerto Rico cases that came to the U.S. Supreme court before 1950, and someone needs to examine these records. I have not done so, and will consult others about this. One Puerto Rican attorney who signed a number of the briefs on behalf of the Department of the Interior in cases involving Native American Tribes before the U.S. Supreme Court was Pedro Capó-Rodríguez. He was born on the Island, studied law in the States, and became a member of the Vermont bar. It is unclear whether he actually tried the cases. He published articles on the cases in the American Journal of International Law in the 1910s, a fairly unusual level of access to this publication for someone not an academic. There may be other Latinos/as who served as government lawyers during these years, and the identification of Latino ethnicity is, as always, problematic. This type of identification is an art, not a science. (Ramirez, 2011; Chavez, 2011; Olivas, 2006; 2012)

In 1951, Manuel Ruiz, Jr. (1905-1986), a Mexican-American lawyer and civil rights activist in the Los Angeles area, argued Buck v. California, 353 U.S. 99 (1952), before the Supreme Court. Of course, this predates the Hernandez arguments and decision in 1954. I have looked at the Manuel Ruiz, Jr. files, which are archived in the Stanford Special Collections—where the MALDEF collection is also housed, which I have used for several years to trace the Plyler case. (Olivas, 2005) The finding tool for the Manuel Ruiz, Jr. collection is online at: http://www.sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/xml/m0295.xml.

Interestingly, however, neither the Stanford collection headings nor the extensive introductory biography include mention of his having argued Buck, a case involving taxi licenses. (His clients lost the case, in a 5-4 decision.) While his civic involvement is well-known, and has been examined by several leading Latino scholars of the period (such as George J. Sánchez, 1993, p. 250; and Richard Griswold del Castillo, 2008, pp. 148-158, among others), his status as apparently the first Mexican American to argue before the SCOTUS is not mentioned. As a very minor footnote, he also appears in 1963 public records as the family law attorney to socialite Joan Tyler in a paternity suit involving actor George Jessel, suggesting that he was a well-connected and successful lawyer across several fields, certainly transcending civil rights and ethnic litigation. I spoke about the Hernandez case quite extensively with one of the four Mexican-American lawyers involved in the case, Judge James DeAnda, and he was of the impression that no Latino or Latina attorney had argued before SCOTUS prior to his case (Olivas, 2006). My recent discovery now leads me to believe he was mistaken, and it likely reflects the lack of a national Latino bar at the time, the non-civil rights nature of his practice, and the poor state of professional communications then, in contrast to the present day, where we are all so well-connected with thriving personal and professional networks and Google@ access to so many data sources. In contrast, I was recently involved in a complex conference call with nearly twenty participants—virtually all lawyers of color—plotting strategy to submit amicus briefs to the California State Supreme Court on behalf of an undocumented law graduate being certified to practice law (DeBenedictis, 2012; Sloan, 2012).

Harold R. Medina Sr., later federal Judge Medina, argued several SCOTUS cases, beginning with a 1922 case early in his long career: New York, N.H. & H.R. Co. v. Fruchter. Medina’s father, Joaquin Adolfo Medina, was born in Merida, Mexico (Medina, 1959, p. v) but the son never self-identified—and was not widely identified—as being Latino. Interestingly, Harold Sr.’s son, Harold Jr., also argued a case before SCOTUS, with Richard M. Nixon as opposing counsel (Time Inc. v. Hill, 1967). Some of this is, of course, very much an idiosyncratic matter of ethnic and racial self-identification, ascription, opportunity, politics at the time, etc.

With the caveat that I have not been able to review all the SCOTUS cases argued on Puerto Rican issues, the first-known Latina to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court appears to have been Miriam Naveira de Rodon, then the Solicitor General of Puerto Rico, who argued Examining Board v. Flores de Otero, 426 U.S. 572 (1976) in 1975. Naveira de Rodon argued against Max Ramirez de Arellano, and both parties were on the brief. I now believe this to be the first time two Latinos appeared on both sides of a Supreme Court matter. This revises my earlier assertion that Perry v. Texas was the first such case. Flores de Otero is an interesting immigration case, well-known to immigration teachers. To an extent, Puerto Rican lawyers arguing Puerto Rican cases in the U.S. Supreme Court are a special jurisdictional category, but are no less important to the history of Latino/Latina lawyering. Following Naveira de Rodon’s argument, Vilma S. Martinez, the first known Mexican-American woman to appear before the Supreme Court, argued East Texas Motor Freight Sys., v. Rodriguez, 431 U.S. 395 (1977). At the time, she was the President and General Counsel of MALDEF; at present, she is President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to Argentina. Recent research on Latinas to argue before the nation’s high court, from 1950 to 2009, reveals that only fifteen known Latinas have argued before the Supreme Court of the United States (Mendoza, 2011).

In sum, the total number of Latino and Latina lawyers at the peak of Supreme Court practice has been very small, even though several have had considerable professional success. Teodoro Cruz and Miguel Estrada have become members of the elite club who have argued several SCOTUS cases and also gained attention for their conservative politics (Goldstein, 2006; Batheja, 2012). I will also note, however, that the confusion also reflects the poor state of Mexican-American archives in this dimension, and the resulting gap in Chicano historiography concerning the important role of Latino and Latina lawyers, not all of them Mexican American. Similarly, we do not know the history of Anglo lawyers taking up cases for Mexican-American clients in important civil rights litigation (Carpio, 2012). Until recently, I had not put two and two together to connect the appearances of A.L. Wirin, who served as co-counsel in both the 1947 Mendez and the 1948 Delgado cases; for that matter, I had not known he had been involved in litigation following the earlier Sleepy Lagoon violence against Mexican Americans, or that afterward, he had gone on to do the Lord’s work in Arizona, or that he had later argued before the U.S. Supreme Court (Valencia, 2006, pp. 53-55 also missed this connection in his discussion of Gonzales v. Sheely, the 1951 Maricopa County, Arizona desegregation case). Through its journey to the Ninth Circuit, Mendez drew upon white, Jewish, Asian and African American lawyers, but not a single Latino or Mexican-American attorney.

In his smaller universe, Alonso S. Perales set out early in his career not only to establish his legal practice in San Antonio, and later elsewhere in the State, but to become active in community work and organization-building, most notably in his efforts to consolidate several fledgling Tejano mutual aid and advocacy organizations into LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens, in 1929; he served as the organization’s National President in 1930-31. As examined by historian Cynthia E. Orozco in "Alonso S. Perales and His Struggle for the Civil Rights of La Raza through the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in Texas in the 1930s: Incansable Soldado del Civismo Pro-Raza" and political scientist Benjamin Márquez, in In Defense of My People: Alonso S. Perales and the Moral Construction of Citizenship, this central role in LULAC dominated the early career of Perales, and accounts for most of the available scholarly commentary on him. Marquez is among the leading scholars who have systematically looked at LULAC over the years (Márquez, 1993, 2003), while Orozco’s 1992 PhD dissertation and 2009 book on the history of LULAC both drew from the Perales records. As she explains in the chapter, she had virtually unprecedented access to the family files, even before they were acquired and processed by the University of Houston. (This access also shows how prodigious talent and being in the right place at the right time can shape a scholar’s career.)

Orozco supplements our knowledge of the young Perales, who in 1933, joined the San Antonio law firm of Still, Wright, Davis, and Perales and also undertook work for the Bexar County Attorney’s office in 1934. She carefully documents his organizational work in steering the many competing groups that merged to form LULAC in 1929, and she notes his selflessness in assisting others to cultivate their leadership skills. The record makes it clear he could have been the symbolically significant first National President, but he encouraged Ben Garza to assume this position. The chapter contains new and fresh detailed information about the tenuousness of the first years of the group, especially its fragile finances, intermittent leadership and internecine politics. A reader also comes away with a sense of the incredible manner in which he threw himself into the development of the organization, traveling the state, exhorting its members, flogging its early activities and engaging in the politicking required for any nascent organization. After his presidential year ended in 1931, he remained a Board member until 1937, when he essentially withdrew from active membership and the politics over a second San Antonio council. Nonetheless, his vision took root, and LULAC remains a significant Latino organization to the present day.

Although she makes many original contributions in this chapter, especially as she re-assesses his work in light of all the materials now available to her, perhaps her most useful contribution will be the way she maps how these papers will require other senior historians who have written about Perales without the access she had to revise and reconsider their earlier work. I urge all the persons (named by her but omitted here) to take into account her generous questions and recommendations. She summarizes, citing chapter and verse, literally: This paper based on the Perales archives suggests several needed Chicano history revisions:

First, LULAC’s work (and that of Perales) was primarily motivated by collective interests not individual interests.

Second, LULAC did not abandon Mexican immigrants. LULAC was silent about deportations in the 1930s, but otherwise fought for immigrant rights, especially their rights to attend schools and LULAC promoted their efforts to obtain U.S. citizenship.

Third, Perales should be honored for helping to found the School Improvement League for which Eleuterio Escobar has received most of the attention but which came out of Council 16, which Perales founded. Perales, not Escobar, initiated the call for major school improvements.

Fourth, LULAC waged a multi-faceted activist agenda not just legal desegregation work in the 1930s, Extending the traditional Chicano movement bias against LULAC framework, [one historian] wrote that the Liga Defensa was more confrontational than LULAC and that Escobar challenged the San Antonio School Board directly. He suggested LULAC primarily addressed segregation through the courts. But LULAC 16 initiated that struggle, Escobar was a member of Council 16 and it is Perales who must truly be credited for that effort.

Fifth, LULAC addressed national policy/legislation in the 1930s not just local or state issues.

Sixth, Perales (and thus LULAC) was not a super-assimilationist organization demanding English-only. Perales should not be used as an example of internalized racism . . . Perales did not blame La Raza for its own oppression, but he did realize La Raza needed to take advantage of any educational opportunities available and needed to empower themselves.

Seven, scholars must also consider gender when writing about the League and La Raza’s empowerment. Perales (and other LULACers) missed opportunities to empower women of Mexican descent. LULAC was gendered and Perales’ mentoring of future leaders was too. This paper confirms activist Sloss-Vento’s account of Perales. Sloss-Vento’s portrayal is not simply a laudatory, biased tribute by a friend. She did not exaggerate his achievements or simply pay homage to a local man.

Eight, this paper confirms research by [an historian] who accurately portrayed Perales’ ideology. [He] was unable to document Perales’ actions in the 1930s because the Perales papers were not available. (Citations omitted, Orozco, pp. 24-25)

Benjamin Márquez, whose scholarship on the establishment of LULAC did not have access to these archives as Orozco had, has taken an opportunity to revisit his earlier work, and to resituate Perales as a complex transitional figure, particularly in his many efforts to thread the needle in a highly structured and racialized social hierarchy that was Jaime Crow Texas—the peculiar mix of social exclusion and de facto segregation that occurred in post-World War I Texas, the only jurisdiction in the South with substantial numbers of African Americans and Mexican Americans. He notes:

As a founding member of LULAC and a political activist with a career that spanned almost fifty years, Perales’ was a pivotal figure in these debates. He fought for equality before the law, equal employment opportunity, school desegregation and increased political representation. Perales argued Mexican Americans were Caucasian and rejected the option of a political alliance with African Americans. At first glance, these ideas place him solidly within the LULAC tradition of biculturalism and faith that Mexican Americans would soon be incorporated into American society. However, it will be demonstrated that he departed from his organization’s ideological foundation in significant respects, enough to warrant a reexamination of the relationships early activists had with one another and where they agreed or disagreed on these questions. Given the central role he played in the creation of LULAC, it is surprising how pessimistic he was about the prospects for social change. He doubted Anglo Americans could be trusted or were willing to apply the ideals of equality and justice to Mexican Americans. Perales endorsed the idea of individual responsibility for one’s social mobility in the abstract, but placed much of the blame for Mexican-American subordination on the Anglo Saxon. He accused them of using their numbers and political power to maintain a rigid racial hierarchy. Indeed, race so profoundly determined one’s life chances that Perales often argued group identity and individual interests were virtually the same thing. (Márquez, p. 30)

He carefully uses the new letters to extend our understanding of the extraordinary range of civic and political matters in which Perales was engaged, especially after he matter-of-factly exited from regular LULAC involvement. He cites dozens of letters, proceedings, opinion pieces, articles, testimonios, books, and other materials that constitute the Perales correspondence. He admiringly documents the many intersections Perales carved out, and the unusual public intellectual aspects of his mission. Even when the record reveals warts and all, especially Perales’ growing conservatism, antiunion animus and anti-Communism fervor, he generously notes: Scholars must take great care in generalizing about the political work of an individual, and in assessing the influence of an individual activist—particularly one who lived many years before (Márquez, p. 44). Thus, he deftly escapes the mistake of presentism so prevalent in a wide swath of Chicano history, where it is tempting to use present day pieties and paradigms to assess complex historical records, accomplishments and events that seem so obvious in hindsight. With the light of day and this extraordinary record to reevaluate, Márquez leaves his subject with an admiring view, but he is by no means unaware of the manner in which Perales’ attachment to these strong principles likely blinded him to other glaring inequalities and obscured his vision. He allows, Another issue that merits further study is the way civil liberties and constitutional protections were understood by early Mexican-American civil rights activists. Given the severity of racial exclusion Perales experienced and witnessed, it is paradoxical that he was so intolerant of groups and ideas he disliked (p. 47).

It is a remarkable event to note that these two scholars, whose important work has largely determined the scholarly trajectory concerning LULAC and how to understand that important time, are both absorbing the new materials and reconsidering their earlier work, in the service of all observers developing a more thorough and nuanced appreciation of this important organization. This process of reconsideration is likely to increase, given just how much material is now available, and how many talented scholars, more senior and more junior, are engaged in the reevaluation of Perales and his times.

The Mexican-American Generation, Revisited

These chapters, authored by two senior law professors and two history graduate students, all cover the terrain earlier labeled as The Mexican-American Generation by another author, historian Mario T. García. The term Mexican-American Generation is not just any generic reference, but a nuanced and significant trope by historians, particularly Mexican-American historians, who have mined its meaning for over two decades, since García named the period in his masterful 1989 work, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930-1960. In this important analytic book, García identified the salience of this period, before and after World War II:

Possessing a complex and heterogeneous history, Mexican Americans have evolved through several historical stages. This study concerns one of these— what I call the Mexican-American Era . . . Recruited and exploited as a cheap labor force, and indispensable to the important economic growth of the Southwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexican Americans remained rooted in the working class, although their intraclass positions shifted by the 1930s and 1940s to more urban industrial and service occupations. With urbanization came education. A rising although limited U.S.-born middle class likewise arose . . . The convulsions of the Great Depression combined with new economic and political opportunities during World War II and with the historic discrimination in the Southwest against Mexicans and rising expectations among Mexican Americans to give birth to a new leadership, cognizant of its rights as U.S. citizens and determined to address them. (M.T. Garcia, 1989, p. 2)

Perales, whose professional life spanned the mid-1920s through his death in 1960 traced this arc of rising expectations, has historically been situated as among the most important and recognizable leaders of the Mexican-American Era. Now that the extensive archival materials can be employed to elaborate upon the existing record, it is likely that he will become even more identified with this period and his range of public obligations even better understood. Doctoral student Joseph Orbock Medina, in The trials of Unity: Rethinking the Mexican-American Generation in Texas, 1948-1960, perceptively notes:

Scholars have rightly acknowledged Alonso S. Perales as a leading crusader in the fight to defend the essential dignity of the Latin Race, particularly with his treatise En Defensa de mi Raza. Like many of his fellow activists of the Mexican-American Generation, he had a diverse set of ideas on how to best achieve the specific business of reform. Perales also had political commitments, loyalties, and grudges that tempered the character of his involvement with other activists and organizations.

Rather than view Alonso S. Perales and his legacy as part of a triumphal teleology of mid-twentieth-century Mexican-American social and political progress, [I place] him within the volatile partisan politics and grand ideological battles of the post-war era. With such a relatively small cadre of movement insiders, personal relationships, and individual philosophies held great sway in the paternalistic organizations of the Mexican-American Generation. Pointed internal divisions among these leaders mirrored and reinforced broader (pan-) American debates on labor, social class, and identity. Compromise and contestation from within would define the Movement. (Orbock Medina, p. 53)

With the deep resources now evident in these archives, scholars will be able to track and better analyze the details of his personal relationships and individual philosophies that held great sway, as have virtually all the authors in this preliminary project. Accordingly, law professor Lupe S. Salinas, who wrote earlier on the career and contributions of lawyer Gustavo (Gus) García, (Salinas, 2003, pp. 159-160) can locate many traces of Perales’ life as an ambitious young man in a hurry, and in "Legally White, Socially Brown: Alonso S. Perales and His Crusade for Justice for La Raza," he details the remarkable rise of this young lawyer who, within a few years of his membership in the Texas bar, had literally transformed the political and organizational landscape for Mexican Americans:

Fueled by his observations and experiences in Texas, Perales sought to create a strong organization to protect the best interests and welfare of our Race and to strive for their progress. However, due to his youth and lack of training, several years passed until the idea went beyond the discussion stage. Once he received his honorable discharge from the U.S. Army in January 1920, he proceeded to Washington, D.C. in order to pursue his studies and his training to be equipped to help solve the problems of our people in Texas. Perales and his two friends discussed the idea for a time and then communicated by mail to further the dream of establishing an organization that would become a bulwark for the protection of all our Racial brethren. (p. 78)

By tracing these activities, Professor Salinas helps clarify the many influences that later manifested themselves in Perales’ complex professional biography, most notably his high aspirations for group solidarity, organizational development and communication skills (Salinas, p. 78).

Aarón E. Sánchez, in "Mendigos de nacionalidad: Mexican-Americanism and Ideologies of Belonging in a New Era of Citizenship, Texas 1910-1967," has effectively used the archives to show how Perales and other colleagues were mythologizing Mexican Americans to inculcate their stories, including stories with their origins in Mexico, into the American narrative, such as J.T. Canales’ retelling of the Juan Cortina story (Juan N. Cortina: Bandit or Patriot?), stripping it of its bandido folk roots and the efforts of Ruben Rendon Lozano, a San Antonio lawyer and LULACer who published Viva Tejas: The Story of the Mexican-born Patriots of the Republic of Texas. These projects of literary reconstitution by Mexican-American lawyers attempted to reframe the story of the Republic of Texas to one more consonant with the mythic role of Tejanos as patriots and citizen soldiers, prepared to go to war for their country. Of course, after World War II, when it became clear that the American polity and Texas decision-makers had not traded unusual and fervent patriotism in exchange for improved civil rights in benefits, accommodations, and public acceptance, the Faustian bargain was cruelly revealed. Lawyer Perales then began his self-financed large-scale project of testimonios and notarized statements to document the gap between the rhetoric and the actual conditions, where even Tejano genuine soldier heroes with Congressional Medals of Honor could be excluded from restaurants, theaters, and other private spaces and public accommodations, such as veterans’ housing and the like. The nationally publicized dustup with the refusal to honor Private Felix Longoria in the U.S. Cemetery in Three Rivers, Texas, and the incident with Sgt. Macario García and the Oasis Café in the rural Houston area gave impetus to the American G.I. Forum, founded by Corpus Christi Dr. Hector P. García to channel attention to veteranos (Ramos 1998; Olivas, 2008; I. García, 2003, 2008).

In a fresh and compelling way, one that will likely draw the attention of Latino and Latina literary scholars, historians, and linguists, doctoral student Sánchez recounts the new way that these early Mexican-American lawyers used the tricks of the trade, even with skill sets not often found in lawyers: literary criticism and folklore. Their attempt to employ this discourse was one of the many organized efforts to employ available discursive folkways to reconstitute Mexican Americans away from foreign others to full and active and patriotic U.S. Citizens:

The intellectual project of reconceptualizing U.S.-Mexican belonging as an American ethnic was a departure from previous modes of imagining in U.S.-Mexican thought. This change required a reformulation of the position of U.S.-Mexicans in the region, nation, and world. Calling themselves Mexican American came with a direct intent and entailed an ideological shift. They were responding to the global change in citizenship and the evolving homeland politics in the Southwest in the years after the Mexican Revolution. Many U.S.-Mexicans found themselves outside of the mainstream American social imaginary and excluded from the imagined community of México de afuera. This forced many people on a search for belonging. For a group of U.S.-Mexicans, they were Americans—including the exclusive racial, class, and linguistic connotations the word carried with it. They emphasized whiteness and promoted a specific modernist worldview that underwrote racial and social hierarchies. Leaders like Alonso S. Perales and Andres de Luna, as well as organizations like the Order Sons of America and LULAC cooperated in ideas that, while not necessarily hegemonic, were definitely homogenizing.

It would be impossible, and nearly foolhardy, to argue that citizenship did not provide U.S.-Mexicans with political and material benefits. Being recognized as citizens gave them power to access a legal system that offered avenues of protection and redress. By being citizens, U.S.-Mexicans could claim inclusion into an important imagined community. However, the change towards the emphasis on citizenship did indeed limit the intellectual and ideological possibilities of other human connections between people of the world. It is difficult to criticize Mexican Americans for the social distance they kept from African Americans during the period, but the ideology of Mexican-Americanism did not co-opt the racial regime of the twentieth century; it cooperated in its reproduction. For that reason and many others, Mexican-Americanism was a limited and, at time, limiting ideology. (Sánchez, p. 114)

Legal scholar George A. Martínez, whose most significant earlier work has been to examine closely the long and hidden history of Mexican-American litigation, especially in twentieth-century desegregation, public accommodations, and other areas where de facto discrimination was deeply imbedded, takes a different approach in Alonso S. Perales and the Effort to Establish the Civil Rights of Mexican Americans as Seen through the Lens of Contemporary Critical Legal Theory: Post-racialism, Reality Construction, Interest Convergence, and Other Critical Themes.

Here, he employs various postmodernist and critical theory frameworks to understand the complex web of exclusion, discrimination, and informal racism that permeated the Mexican-American existence in the Southwestern United States. He paints a convincing picture of Perales’ efforts to frame the issues and to engage in the discourse. His most convincing analysis is the dramatic explanation of why Perales, a lawyer and former court stenographer, used legal terminology and notarized formats in the 1948 Good Neighbors, an unusual volume for its sheer level of repeated detail of the lived and observed stories by WWII veteranos, which he then turns into testimony for governmental hearings and legislative purposes. Martínez deftly suggests that this rhetorical device anticipated the qualitative and normative framing devices of the twenty-first century, or at the least, critical theory of the late twentieth-century: Looking to the bottom—adopting the perspective of those who have seen and felt the falsity of the liberal promise—can assist critical scholars in the task of fathoming the phenomenology of law and defining the elements of justice. He specifies:

[W]e can observe that Perales has sought to invalidate and deconstruct the socially constructed reality of post-racialism—a worldview which holds that racism does not play a significant role in the lives of Mexican Americans. In its place, he substitutes a new more accurate reality based on the actual experiences of Mexican Americans in which they describe an alternative reality that is permeated with racism against Mexican Americans.

It is worth noting that Perales’ task of reality construction is a large one. In Perales’ day, most people were operating well within a black/white paradigm regarding civil rights—i.e., the conception that race in America consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only two constituent groups, the Black and the White. Accordingly, civil rights discourse focused primarily on black/white relations. Mexican Americans fell outside of this black/white paradigm. This point is highly significant. As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn has explained, phenomena that do not fit within the prevailing paradigm or normal science of the day are often not seen at all. Accordingly, the phenomena regarding Mexican Americans that Perales was seeking to publicize would generally be invisible or not seen because of the prevailing black/white paradigm. (Martínez, p. 127)

This is exhilarating work, seeing the spores of later critical theory in these earlier writings. Other new evidence on the origins of this 1948 Perales publishing project may have been the epistolary nature of a WWI diary published by Perales’ friend and collaborator José de la Luz Saenz, with who he had traveled the Rio Grande Valley early in his career. Saenz had published his diary in 1933 with the San Antonio Spanish-language publisher Artes Gráficas. This authentic work collected letters, editorials, souvenirs and wartime letters-from-the-front that appeared in La Prensa and elsewhere (Zamora, 2002, 2012). Inasmuch as many Chicano historians have, with some justification in the earlier and incomplete record, contested the Mexican-American generation as conservative and regressive—especially those who have projected more modern expectations upon older events—this may and likely will spur a complete reconsideration of the teleology and political economy of this important cohort.

Religion and Race

If there is any constant theme that permeates every corner of Alonso S. Perales’ life, even more than the advancement of his raza, it is the advancement of his raza’s religion, more specifically, Roman Catholicism. Not only was he a devout and practicing Catholic, but his entire ethos of raza advancement embraced a strict and conservative Catholicism that he urged as a feature of political action, personal behavior, organizational development and community spirituality. In his book Católicos: Resistance and Affirmation in Chicano Catholic History and in the co-edited Mexican-American Religions: Spirituality, Activism, and Culture (with Gastón Espinosa), historian Mario T. García has drawn the close connections between Mexican-American civic and political leaders (such as Perales’ close friend and compatriot Cleofas Calleros) and their spiritual and religious moorings. In his important analysis of Catholic social doctrine, García noted that the tenets of the doctrine recognize[d] the human dimension of people— the incarnational—and, as such, further recognize[d] the social and political in human beings (García, 2008, p. 55).

Even by these historical standards, the integration of Perales’ personal piety and his general theory of Mexican-American advancement were notable. In Alonso S. Perales and the Catholic Imaginary: Religion and the Mexican-American Mind, García notes that this religious-politic doctrinal blend stressed human dignity, truth, justice, charity, freedom, and civil and political as well as social and economic human rights. In their many writings in both Spanish- and English-language newspaper columns, in their correspondence, and in their praxis as civil rights leaders, Perales and Calleros identified with the principles of Catholic social doctrine. . . . [Y]ou cannot fully understand Perales without understanding the central role that his faith, Catholicism, played in his personal, social, and political formation and mindset. It is his Catholic imaginary—his imagining his world and the new world he sought for Mexican Americans through his Catholic faith—that envelops his life and career (p. 52). After reviewing the dozens of letters, advice columns, and essays by Perales, he summarizes:

But if Catholic social doctrine represented the more public face of Perales’ Catholicism, his foreign policy if you will, there is another and more personal side to his Catholicism that represents his domestic policy aimed not at an outside non-Mexican-American audience but at Mexican Americans themselves. That is, Perales employed Catholic social doctrine as a way of influencing Anglos, especially policy-makers about the civil rights concerns of Mexican Americans in a way that gave his views more credibility because they coincided with those of the Catholic Church itself. At the same time, he employed his more personal Catholicism and faith to socialize or attempt to socialize Mexican Americans in Texas or his part of Texas to observe, respect, and practice their Catholic faith not only for their own redemption, but to show the outside world that Mexican Americans represented a strong and observant religious American people who as such should be fully accepted and integrated by other God-fearing Americans. In order for Perales to convincingly argue for integration and equal opportunities for Mexican Americans, he needed to also display that Mexican Americans were worthy of such inclusion by showing that they constituted a strong Christian community based, as with other Americans, on solid Christian family values. This domestic side of Perales’ Catholicism is especially observed in his many personal advice columns and other writing in the San Antonio Spanish-language Catholic newspaper La Voz during the 1950s. (García, pp. 152-153)

While his religious advice and public piety may strain credulity in today’s more secular discourse, it is a noteworthy aspect of Perales’ constant search for dialogic space: to be good citizens and community members, Mexican Americans must be chaste, pious, (Roman Catholic) God-fearing and on best behavior, to be accepted as good and Christian participants in the polity and in community advancement. Virtually no secular political figure occupied this niche, in either English or in Spanish; thus, Perales played all four corners of the court, as almost no Mexican-American leader before or since. As García notes, UFW leader and iconic political figure César Chávez came closest in his blend of activism and invocation of religious values, even though they were not as strident or as singularly Catholic as those of Perales.

Even allowing for the value of hindsight, it is clear that Perales lay down with dogs and woke up with fleas. This disturbing corner of Perales’ life, where his virulent anti-Communism and conservative Catholicism led him to make political alliances with a wide range of troubling and contested figures, whose intersection with him was all the more ironic and remarkable for their own conservatism and lack of solidarity on the overarching feature of Perales’ entire life, the advancement of Mexican Americans, has not been widely known or analyzed. In a remarkable study, Faithful Dissident: Alonso S. Perales, Discrimination, and the Catholic Church, Virginia Marie Raymond has carefully filled out these interstices, drawing upon the newly available archival materials. He carried on correspondence and became politically involved with Latin American dictator Anastacio Somoza, segregationist Texas Governor Allan Shivers, and others whose own work clearly impeded the progress of Mexican Americans. She notes:

Perales was an outsider both in the secular and religious worlds in which he circulated. Both as a Mexican American and layperson, he found himself at the margins of the Catholic Church. He was also outside some secular political circles as a Mexican American, a Catholic, or a social conservative.

From one point of view, Perales’ religious and political commitments might seem complicated: sometimes overlapping or identical and at other times tense. Even to assign religion and politics to separate categories, however, might betray and mislead us. This paper will focus on the dual political aspects of Mr. Perales’ Catholicism. I mean political in the broadest sense, that is, having to do with power relations between and among people . . .

Our protagonist was a sometime ally of the both the highest-ranking secular executive and the highest-ranking member of the Catholic hierarchy in Texas. To be a Mexican-American civil rights advocate politically positioned uncomfortably between Governor Allan Shivers and Archbishop Robert E. Lucey is the essence of the Perales paradox. The trajectories of Perales’ anti-communism, and the relationship of his anti-communism to his Catholicism, warrant close attention. (Raymond, pp. 171-172)

Raymond’s close attention brings sunlight to the many progressive struggles waged by Perales; in this instance, against the segregation of Catholic parish creation and ethnic siting for congregations, against segregated Catholic schooling and against the exclusion of pious Mexican Americans from the Church’s lay leadership. Some of these examples are staggering, such as the clear racial separation among the races by Catholic policy and practice, especially in Texas, where she shows embarrassing details about the history of the Church, especially affecting the predominantly Catholic Mexican-American population. As an observer of the longstanding segregatory practices in Texas schooling, I was reminded more than once of that sad history in her reading of Catholic education and parish-formation.

But as tragic as that rendering is (San Miguel, 2000; Valencia, 2008), I confess that I was squirming as I read in her chapter of Perales’ cozying up to Texas Governor Allan Shivers, who was characterized in Yellow Dogs And Republicans: Allan Shivers And Texas Two-party Politics (Dobbs, 2005) as being the significant transitional figure who transformed Texas in the 1940s and 1950s from essentially a one-party conservative Dixiecrat state to one that has become thoroughly Republican since. By 2012, not a single Democrat had held statewide office at any level for a decade (Dunham and Wilkins, 2012). Shivers accomplished the beginnings of this transformation in a variety of racialized ways, from inveighing against Brown v. Board to supporting segregation efforts in schooling, in voting districts, and in dispensing political favors. Surely, dealing with the various secular and political leaders in Texas meant that anyone such as Perales would have had to deal regularly with unsavory persons, but he used this proximity and influence to bait in a way reminiscent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy at the national and international level, as when he wrote a private letter to Shivers in 1954, several months after the Hernandez and Brown cases: "Shivers also accused his challenger, former Judge Ralph Yarborough, of both being a Communist and an