Transcription
The United States in the 1950s. Well, World War II had just ended. Many American soldiers would be returning home to their wives and families. Many of these soldiers were men of color. They had just spent the better part of the last eight years fighting for the rights and freedoms of others.
American soldiers of Mexican descent came home, however, to a land where they had few rights and limited farmers. A lot of the segregation they faced was de facto, meaning it was, at this point, just a part of society, even if there were no laws explicitly establishing it.
In a bar in Texas in the 1950s, a Mexican American named Joe Espinosa was shot in cold blood by another Mexican American named Pete Hernandez. Hernandez went to court in October 1951. He was convicted of murder in less than three hours by a jury composed only of white men and sentenced to life in jail.
Enter Gus García and Carlos Cadena, two of the Mexican American lawyers who took the Hernandez murder case into their own hands. They worked for the American GI Forum and for the League of United Latin American Citizens and were ready to take this trial as far as they needed to in order to establish their people's rights as Mexican American citizens.
See, the point of the trial didn't actually have anything to do with whether or not Hernandez was guilty, since he definitely was. The point was that the process of this trial, like many other trials in Jackson County and throughout the U.S., was conducted in an unjust way. And so the lawyers pleaded not guilty to have the chance to raise the objection that since the jury had no brown bodies present in it, this violated the Fourteenth Amendment.
The State of Texas countered that there was no difference between whites and Mexicans, so there was no discrimination present. You might be confused. In what world are Mexican and white people "quote unquote" the same group of people? But here's a little something to keep in mind. Mexicans were classified as white on paper, which is an agreement made by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo when the U.S. first took lands from Mexico. This meant Mexican voices were being silenced by the supposed white classification.
So García and Cadena had to prove that Mexicans were treated as an inferior, separate group of white people within the larger group of European American whites. García and Cadena brought examples of discrimination to the court. Restaurants and bars had signs saying "No Mexicans Served." Mexicans were prevented from sending their children to white schools. In Jackson County, which had a 15% Mexican population, no Mexican had served on a single jury in the past 25 years, or before that, from what many people could remember. Lastly, in this very courthouse, what the State of Texas was arguing that there was no discrimination, there were restrooms clearly marked "Colored Men" and "Hombres," and restrooms segregated for Mexican and colored people's use. This stumped the state's argument.
García and Cadena were able to take the case up to the Supreme Court. On May 3rd, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren revealed that the Supreme Court of the United States had voted in favor of the Mexican lawyers.
Then what? Well, a newspaper article by Darrell Garwood, printed the next day, shows that white Americans were scared and believed that this decision would have an impact on and foreshadow Brown v. Board of Education, which was about to be decided. Justice Warren made it known in a public statement that Hernandez v. Texas was not about race, but America could see its greater implications. Times were changing, and there wasn't much whites could do to stop them.
Since Mexicans kept their classification as white, Hernandez v. Texas showed that no one could be wronged or treated unfairly, as the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to everyone, not just people of a non-white race. All citizens, despite being discriminated against, were now guaranteed their judicial power and equality with whites. Garwood's article shows the understanding Americans had that the different treatment Mexicans were fighting to end was eerily similar to the unequal treatment blacks were not fighting against. The article highlights the first step Hernandez v. Texas made in the trail of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as García and Cadena had cracked the Supreme Court open to pave the way for future anti-segregation court decisions to be made.
[Music]