Tracking the Shifting Racial Identity of Mexican Americans

Extract

Ariela J. Gross is generous in praising research accomplished and helpful in suggesting routes for future investigation. In response to such a model of constructive criticism, I can only plead no contest to the main charge that, while examining changes in legal strategy and judicial rhetoric in school segregation litigation, I neglected to explore important aspects of Mexican Americans' own understanding and actual experiences of “other whiteness.” As a result, the “ordinary” people in my tale seem to lack agency even in their own cases. This is an unfortunate but frequent limitation of historical studies of litigation, not least because—despite the presence in the courtroom of a plaintiff or defendant—trial records most clearly reveal the professional concerns of lawyers and judges. Even transcribed testimony (which is not always available) may tell us more about the lawyer's strategy and the judge's mood than a witness's reality. Gross rightly asks the question directly that I (admittedly) avoided entirely: “did the legal regime of whiteness have any larger cultural significance?” Put another way, I understand this question to be: did the fine legal distinctions hammered out by Mexican American attorneys and Anglo American judges matter at all to the ordinary people—parents, workers, and defendants—whether Mexican or Anglo? I think that the answer is yes, gradations of whiteness mattered even to the lay public. Yet, it seems clear as well that whiteness was experienced differently by members of various economic and social classes of Mexican Texans.