Open Letter to Mexican-American Cardinals
by Anonymous
Dear Mexican-American Readers,
We, for multiple centuries, have been forced into a contradictory racial position, not fully fitting into the black-white binary so often pushed in American history. Legally classified as white when it served state power, while being treated as second-class citizens at best and disposable labor at worst. The American government excluded our community from the legal progress extended to African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement, nor was it granted the protection guaranteed to white Americans. Our existence has been tolerated only to the extent that American industries could exploit us. Legal racial ambiguity functions as an intentional policy, not an accident. This form of racism, deliberate, targeted, and hypocritical, is not the footnote in American history or culture, especially the history of the Southwest, that it has been relegated to. It is central to it. We have been the go-to scapegoats for economic issues for too long. The collapse of unified Latino civil rights leadership, through assimilationist failures, state repression, and internal contradictions, has left Mexican American communities politically vulnerable today. The only way to protect our community is by creating renewed, organized resistance rooted in community power that refuses to bend the knee to fascist power that threatens our safety and very existence.
In order to fully understand this vulnerability, one must begin with the land. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the U.S.-Mexico War, the Mexican citizens residing in the newly annexed territories (California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Kansas, and southern Texas) were promised that their property rights would be respected. In reality, however, millions of acres were stripped through legal manipulation, judicial rulings, and racialized reinterpretations of ownership. Community land grants protected by Mexican law were reclassified and privatized. The message was crystal clear: our belonging in the United States was conditional, and laws could (and would be) reshaped to dispossess us. Our racial ambiguity extended beyond the land. Mexican Americans were segregated into separate schools, only designed to prepare us for manual labor, not leadership. Housing discrimination confined our communities to barrios, while agricultural systems (specifically, migrant workers) extracted generational labor. The 1974 case of Mendez v. Westminster proved that school segregation targeting Mexican children was a deliberate policy, not a coincidence. James Kent was a superintendent of one of the defending school districts, in this case. He stated, “People of Mexican descent were intellectually, culturally, and morally inferior to European Americans.” This case ended with a ruling that segregation of Mexican American students in California public schools is unconstitutional. Yet, even victories like this did not translate into full inclusion. We remained legally white, but socially subordinate.
Different leaders responded in different ways. Organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) pursued legal reform with a message that emphasized patriotism and assimilation. Their work secured crucial gains for our community, and those efforts should not be dismissed. However, respectability politics has its limits. Legal wins did not dismantle the economic systems that depended on our labor, nor did they eliminate racial profiling or political marginalization.
By the late 1960s, a younger generation rejected assimilation as the primary strategy. Groups like the Brown Berets organized free clinics, monitored police brutality, and embraced our indigenous roots as a source of strength while working in tandem with the Black Panthers. In 1970, the Chicano Moratorium demonstrated mass opposition to the disproportionate drafting of Mexican American youth into the Vietnam War. Electoral efforts, such as those of the Raza Unida Party, sought to build independent political power. The state responded to this militancy the same way it did to all similar groups and movements, with surveillance, infiltration, and repression. They created and/or capitalized on internal divisions over gender dynamics, ideology, and strategy to fracture unity. Eventually, electoral gains were reversed, organizations dissolved, and only fragmentation remained.
Today, that fragmentation continues to shape our political vulnerability. Immigration debates paint our families and friends as criminals. Deportation threats destabilize our communities. Educational inequalities and over-policing persist. The language has changed, but the underlying structure has not. We are still positioned as only necessary labor and optional citizens. We must learn from both past strategies. Assimilation without power not only leaves us dependent on institutions that can retract protection but also erases or minimizes the Mexican part of our Mexican American identity. Militancy without long-term infrastructure leaves movements vulnerable to repression. Protests and actions without a clear message (simple enough for the average middle American to understand) are vilified, no matter how justified we are in doing so. The path forward requires a disciplined, community-rooted organization. We, as a Mexican American community, need to build legal defense networks, mutual aid systems, political education, and decentralized leadership that cannot be easily dismantled. Militancy does not mean chaos; it means clarity. It means refusing to confuse symbolic inclusion with structural security. It means understanding that our safety will not come from proximity to whiteness, but from our own collective power.
Mexican American history is not peripheral to American history. We are the foundation of the Southwest and this nation’s economy. If fragmentation has left us vulnerable, then unity (intentional, strategic, and community-centered) must be our response. Our freedom and equality will not be granted. It must be built, defended, and sustained.
Sincerely,
Hija de Aztlán