Mexican Cival Rights Essay Example for Free

Mexican Cival Rights EssayGeorge I. Sanchez, Ideology, and purity in the Making of the Mexican the severalizesn genteel Rights Movement, 1930-1960 By CARLOS K . BLANTON Let us keep in mind that the Mexican-American can easily become the front-line of defence reaction of the courteous liberties of hea accordinglyish minorities. The racial, cultural, and diachronic involvements in his case emb operate those of all of the other minority groups. Yet, matinee idol bless the jurisprudence, he is albumen So, the Mexican-American can be the wedge for the broadening of genteel liberties for others (who are non so fortunate as to be white and Christian). George L Sanchez (1958) By embracing ovalbumin, Mexican Americans have rein strained the color line that has denied people of African descent full participation in American democracy. In pursuing White rights, Mexican Americans combined Latin American racial discrimination with Anglo racialism, and in the process separated th emselves and their political agenda from the B escape elegant rights struggles of the forties and fifties. Neil Foley (1998) 1 HE story OF RACE AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE American SoUTH IS complex and exciting.The history of Mexican American civil rights is as well as promising, particularly so in regard to understanding the role of whiteness. Both selections above, the first from a Mexican American The epigraphs are drawn from George I. Sanchez to Roger N. Baldwin, August 27, 1958, cusp 8, box seat 31, George I. Sanchez Papers (Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, Austin) and Neil Foley, Becoming Hispanic Mexican Americans and the Faustian obligation with Whiteness, in Foley, ed.. Reflexi iodins 1997 youthful Directions In Mexican American Studies (Austin, 1998), 65.The author would like to thank the Journal of Southem accountings six anonymous reviewers and Texas AM Universitys Glasscock Center for liberal arts Research for their very h elpful reason guidance on this essay. MR. BLANTON is an assistant professor of history at Texas AM University. THE JOURNAL OF southerly accounting Volume LXXII, No. 3, August 2006 570 THE JOURNAL OF gray HISTORY adroit of the mid-twentieth century and the last a new-fashionedly published statement from a historian of race and identicalness, are nominally about whiteness. But the historical actor and the historian discuss whiteness differently.The computer address from the 1950s advocates exploiting profound whiteness to obtain civil rights for both Mexican Americans and other minority groups. The one from the 1990s views such(prenominal) a strategy as inherently racist. The historical figure writes of Mexican Americans and African Americans cooperating in the pursuit of shared civil rights goals the historian writes of the absence, the impossibility of cooperation due to Mexican American whiteness. This blood line is worth further consideration. This essay examines the Mex ican American civil rights movement by focusing on the work and ideas of George I.Sancheza prominent activist and professor of gentility at the University of Texasin the thirties, 1940s, and 1950s. Sanchez is the most portentous intellectual of what is commonly referred to as the Mexican American generation of activists during this period. As a subject area death chair of the major Mexican American civil rights organization of the era, however, Sanchezs political influence within the Mexican American community was just as important as his intellectual leadership. Sanchez pondered notions of whiteness and actively employed them, crack an excellent case study of the making of Mexican American civil rights. First, this work examines how Sanchezs civil rights efforts were vitally informed by an ideological perspective that supported gradual, integrationist, liberal rejuvenate, a stance that grew out of his activist research on African Americans in the South, Mexican Americans in the southwest ward, and Latin Americans in Mexico and Venezuela. This new-made messiness ideological inheritance shaped Sanchezs contention that Mexican Americans were one minority group among legion(predicate) needing political assistance. Second, this liberal ideology gave rise to a nettlesome citizenship dilemma.During the corking Depression and World War II, Mexican Americans strategic emphasis on American citizenship rhetorically placed them shoulder-to-shoulder with other U. S. minority groups. It also marginalized immigrant Mexicans. The significance of For more than than on Sanehez reassure Gladys R. Leff, George I. Sanchez Don Quixote of the Southwest (Ph. D. dissertation. North Texas State University, 1976) James Nelson Mowry, A con of the educational Thought and Aetion of George I. Sanehez (Ph. D. dissertation. University of Texas, 1977) Amerieo Paredes, ed.. Humanidad Essays in Honor of George 1.Sanchez (Los Angeles, 1977) St however Sehlossman, Self-Evident R emedy? George I. Sanchez, Segregation, and Enduring Dilemmas in bilingual Education, Teachers College Record, 84 (Summer 1983), 871-907 and Mario T. Garcia, Mexican Americans Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, J930-1960 ( new(a) Haven, 1989), chap. 10. WHITENESS AND Mexican AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 571 citizenship was arguable within the Mexican American community and coincided with the emergence of an aggressive flesh of Mexican Americans civil rights litigation that implemented a legal strategy based on their whiteness.Third, Sanchezs correspondence with Thurgood marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored lot (NAACP) in the 1940s and 1950s reveals early, fragmentary companys between the Mexican American and African American civil rights movements. All these topics address important interpretive debates about the role of whiteness. This essay f affairs two historiographical streams traditional studies on Mexican American politics and identity and the new whiteness scholarships interpretation of Mexican American civil rights.In traditional works the Mexican American civil rights experience is often examined with little free burning comparison to other civil rights experiences. Conversely, the whiteness scholarship represents a serious attempt at relative civil rights history. Taking both approaches into account answers the recent call of one scholar for historians to muster even greater historical imagination in conceiving of new histories of civil rights from different perspectives. Traditional research on Mexican Americans in the twentieth century centers on generational lines.From the late nineteenth century to the Great Depression, a large wave of Mexican immigrants, spurred by dislocation in Mexico as well as by economic opportunity in the U. S. , provided low-wage agricultural and industrial labor throughout the Southwest. Their political identity was as Mexicans biography abroad, the Mexicanist Generation. They generally paid little heed to American politics and eschewed cultural assimilation, as had earlier Mexicans who forcibly became American citizens as a result of the expansionist wars of the 1830s and 1840s.However, mass violence presently before World War I, intensifying racial discrimination throughout the early twentieth century, and forced repatriations to Mexico during the Great Depression heralded the rise of a new political ethos. The community had come to look at that its members were endangered by the presumption of foreignness and disloyalty. By the late 1920s younger Charles W. Eagles, Toward in the buff Histories of the Civil Rights Era, Journal of Southern History, 66 (November 2000), 848. See Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (College Station, Tex., * 1993)George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York, 1993) Benjamin Heber tin canson, Revolution in Texas How a bury Rebellion and Its bloody(a) Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, 2003) and Amoldo De Leon, The Tejano Community, 1836-1900 (1982 new ed. , Dallas, 1997). 572 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY leadersthe Mexican American Generationurged adoption of a new strategy of emphasizing American citizenship at all times.They strove to speak face in earth and in private settings, stressed education, asked for the gradual reform of discriminatory practices, emulated middle-class life, and exuded nationalism as a loyal, progressive ethnic group. They also desired recognition as ethnic whites, not as racial others. The oldest organization expressing this identity was the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). This ethos of hyphenated Americanism and gradual reform held s commission until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Studies of whiteness contribute to historians understanding of the interplay of race, ethnicity, and class by passing game beyond a black-white binary to seek the subtleties and nuances of race. This new scholarship examines who is considered white and why, traces how the definition of white shifts, unearths how whiteness conditions acts of inclusion and exclusion and how it reinforces and subverts concepts of race, and investigates the psychological and material rewards to be gained by groups that successfully claim whiteness.Class tension, nativism, and racism are connected to a larger whiteness discourse. In other words, this is a new, imaginative way to more broadly interrogate the category of race. Works on whiteness often share a conviction that thoughts or acts capitalizing on whiteness reflect racist power as well as contribute to that insidious powers making. They also generally maintain that notions of race, whether consciously employed or not, divide ethnic and racial minorities from each other and from workingclass whites, groups that would otherwise share class status and political goals. In recent reviews of the state of wh iteness history, Eric Amesen, See Mario Garcia, Mexican Americans George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the political relation of Ethnicity (Berkeley, 1995) Ignacio M. Garcia, Viva Kennedy Mexican Americans in Search of Camelot (College Station, Tex. , 2000) Carl Allsup, The American G. I. Forum Origins and Evolution (Austin, 1982) Richard A.Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class San Antonio, 19291941 (College Station, Tex. , 1991) David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin, 1987), chaps. 12 and 13 Julie Leininger Pyeior, LBJ and Mexican Americans The Paradox of Power (Austin, 1997) Juan Gomez-Quinones, Chicano government activity Reality and Promise, 1940-1990 (Albuquerque, 1990) and Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. , Brown, Not White School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston (College Station, Tex. , 2001). David R.Roediger, The Wages of Whi teness Race and the Making of the American work Class (1991 rev. ed.. New York, 1999) Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (New York, 1994) Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass. , 1998) George Lipsitz, The genitive Investment in Whiteness How White People Profit From Identity Politics (Philadelphia, 1998). WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS.573 Barbara J. Fields, Peter Kolchin, and Daniel Wickberg offer much criticism. These historians argue that scholars using whiteness as an uninflected tool are shoddy in their definitions, read too finely and semantically into documents and literary texts, and franchise discursive moments that have little or nothing to do with actual people or experiences. more than specifically, Kolchin and Amesen argue that many studies of whiteness incautiously caricature race as an unchanging, omnipresent, and overly deterministic category.In such works whiteness is portrayed as acting concretely and abstractly with or without historical actors and events. Ironically, studies of whiteness can obscure the exercise of power. Fields explains that studying race and racial identity is more attractive than studying racism because racism exposes the hoUowness of agency and identity . . . and it violates the two-sides-to-every-story expectation of symmetry that Americans are inquisitively attached to. Research that applies the idea of whiteness to Mexican American history is sparse and even more recent.Several of these studies focus upon the use of whiteness as a legal strategy while others follow a broader approach. Historian Neil Foley offers the most significant and ambitious arguments by moving beyond an analysis of how white people viewed Mexican Americans to look instead at the construction of whiteness in the Mexican American mind. He shifts the perspective from external whiteness to internal whiteness and argues that Mexican Americans entered into a Faustian Pact by embracing racism toward African Americans in the course of trying to avoid de jure discrimination.Foley claims that Mexican Americans consciously curried the favor of racist whites In pursuing White rights, Mexican Americans Peter Kolchin, Whiteness Studies The New History of Race in America, Journal of American History, 89 (June 2002), 154-73 Eric Arnesen, Whiteness and the Historians Imagination, International Labor and Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001), 3-32 Barbara J. Fields, Whiteness, Racism, and Identity, International Labor and Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001), 48-56 (quotations on p.48)Daniel Wickberg, Heterosexual White Male Some novel Inversions in American Cultural History, Journal of American History, 92 (June 2005), 136-57. *Ian F. Haney Lopez, White By Law The jural Construction of Race (New York, 1996) Neil Foley, The White Scourge Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Tex as Cotton Culture (Berkeley, 1997) Steven Harmon Wilson, The Rise of legal Management in the U. S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, 1955-2000 (Athens, Ga., 2002)Wilson, Brown over Other White Mexican Americans Legal Arguments and Litigation Strategy in School Desegregation Lawsuits, Law and History Review, 21 (Spring 2003), 145-94 Clare Sheridan, another(prenominal) White Race Mexican Americans and the Paradox of Whiteness in Jury Selection, Law and History Review, 21 (Spring 2003), 10914 Ariela J. Gross, Texas Mexicans and the Polities of Whiteness, Law and History Review, 21 (Spring 2003), 195-205 Carlos Kevin Blanton, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836-1981 (College Station, Tex., 2004)Patrick J. Carroll, Felix Longorias enkindle Bereavement, Racism, and the Rise of Mexican American Activism (Austin, 2003). 574 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY combined Latin American racialism with Anglo racism, and in the process separated themselves and their p olitical agenda from the Black civil rights struggles of the forties and fifties. Missing from such interpretations of whitenesss meaning to Mexican Americans is George I. Sanchezs making of Mexican American civil rights.Analyzing Sanchezs views is an excellent test of Foleys interpretation because Sanchezs use of the category of whiteness was sophisticated, deliberate, reflective, and connected to issues and events. An internationalist, multiculturalist, and integrationist ideology shaped by New Deal experiences in the American Southwest, the American South, and Latin America informed George L Sanchezs civil rights activism and scholarship. Sanchez regarded Mexican Americans as one of many American minority groups suffering racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry.Though Sanchez regarded Mexican Americans racial status as white, he also held that they were a minority group that experienced systematic and racialized oppression. Sanchezs articulation of whiteness was qualified by an an ti-racist ideological worldview and supports Eric Amesens criticism of overreaching by whiteness scholars who appreciate neither ambiguity nor counter-discourses of race, the recognition of which would pose doubt on their bold claims. Sanchez was very much a New Deal operate intellectual who utilized academic research in an attempt to progressively transform society.The term function intellectual is an appropriate description of Sanchez, who propagated his civil rights activism through academic research with governmental agencies (the Texas State surgical incision of Education, the New Mexico State Department of Education, the U. S. Bureau of Indian affairs, and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs) and national kindly organizations (the General Education Board, the Julius Rosenwald Eund, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Marshall Civil Liberties Trust).The pinnacle of Sanchezs scholarly contribution as a service intellectual was his evocative 1940 enactment of rural New Mexican poverty and segregation in The Forgotten People A Study of New Mexicans. Foley, Becoming Hispanic, 53-70 (quotation on p. 65) Foley, partially Colored or Other White Mexican Americans and Their job with the Color Line, in Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker, eds. , Beyond Black and White Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U. S. South and Southwest (College Station, Tex. , 2004), 123-44.For an older whiteness study that discusses the external imposition of racial concepts on Mexican Americans and other groups, see Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, chap. 10. Amesen, Whiteness and the Historians Imagination, 24. Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 575 Sanchez particularly sought to transform society through the field of education. In the early 1930s he published blistering critiques of the shoddiness of IQ tests conducted on Mexican American children.Mexican Americans inquisitive just challenged separate schools in Texas and California and were told by the courts that because they were technically white, racial segregation was illegal however, the courts then claimed that pedagogical segregation based upon intellectual or linguistic deficiency was permissible. In challenging racist IQ science, Sanchez essentially advocated integration. A decade of service intellectual work came to pop offher for Sanchez in Forgotten People. He called for a comprehensive federal and state computer programme to uplift downtrodden Hispanic New Mexicans curative measures will not solve the problem piecemeal.Poverty, illiteracy, and ill-wellness are merely symptoms. If education is to get at the resolution of the problem schools must go beyond subject-matter instruction. . . . The curriculum of the educational agencies becomes, then, the magna carta of social and economic rehabilitation the teacher, the profit agent of a new social order. Sanchez rega rded Mexican Americans as similar to Japanese Americans, Jewish Americans, and African Americans. To Sanchez these were all minority groups that endured varying levels of discrimination by white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America.Sanchez was uninterested in divining a pecking order of racial victimization instead, he spent considerable energy on pondering ways for these groups to get the federal government, in New Deal fashion, to help alleviate their plight. Even in the mid-1960s when many Mexican Americans had come to favor a separate racial identity over an ethnic one, Sanchez still conceived of Mexican Americans as a cultural group, ignoring concepts of race altogether unless discussing racial discrimination. Sanchez engaged the struggles of other minority groups and associate them to Mexican American activism.In 1948, for example, Sanchez (Columbia, Mo. , 1966), 1-6 George I. Sanchez, Forgotten People A Study of New Mexicans (1940 reprint, Albuquerque, 1996), xvi-xvii. Befitti ng the service intellectual ideal of freely diffusing knowledge, the Carnegie Foundation gave the book away. Carnegie provided four thousand dollars for Sanchezs research at the same time it supported work on a much larger study on African AmericansGunnar Myrdals classic An American Dilemma The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1944). Carlos Kevin Blanton, From Intellectual lack to Cultural Deficiency Mexican Americans, Testing, and Public School Policy in the American Southwest, 1920-1940, Pacific diachronic Review, 72 (February 2003), 56-61 (quotations on p. 60). Sanchez, Forgotten People, 86. George I. Sanchez, History, Culture, and Education, in Julian Samora, ed.. La Raza Forgotten Americans (Notre Dame, 1966), 1-26 Mario Garcia, Mexican Americans, 267-68. 576 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY published through the United States Indian Service a government study on Navajo problems called The People A Study of the Navajos. In 1937-1938 Sanchez transferred his New Deal, reformist ideology across borders as a Latin American education expert with a prestigious administrative post in Venezuelas national government. Writing to Edwin R. Embree, director of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, Sanchez described his work as the chief coordinator of the countrys teachertraining program in familiar New Deal terms the hardest task is breaking down social prejudices, traditional apathy, obstructive habits (political and personal) and in-bred aimlessness. His first program report was appropriately titled Release from Tyranny. During World War II Sanchez was appointed to the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs under Nelson A. Rockefeller, where he continued work on Latin American teacher-training programs as part of the war effort. Sanchez was deeply committed to progressive reform in Latin America that would lift educational and living standards. Sanchez also took on African American issues. From 1935 to 1937 he worked as a staff member with the Chicago-based Julius Rosenwald Eund.This philanthropic organization was concerned with African American rural education in the South, and in this capacity Sanchez collaborated with Eisk Universitys in store(predicate) chairwoman, the eminent sociologist Charles S. Johnson, on preparing the massive Compendium on Southem Rural Life. Sanchez was listed in the studys reckon as the grittyest-paid tec for the 1936-1937 academic year with a $4,500 salary and a $2,000 travel budget. Sanchezs work with the Rosenwald Eund also involved numerous activities beyond his role as the groups pedagogical expert.In November and December 1936 he lobbied the Louisiana State Department of Education on behalf of a Dr. Sanchez Seeks Fulfillment of U. S. Promise to Navajos, Austin Daily Texan, November 16, 1946, in George I. Sanchez Vertical shoot (Center for American History, Austin, Texas hereinafter this collection will be cited as Sanchez Vertical File and this repository as Center for American His tory) George I. Sanchez, The People A Study of the Navajos (Washington, D. C, 1948). G. I. Sanchez to Edwin R.Embree, October 17, 1937, Folder 4, stripe 127, Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives (Special Collections, John Hope and Aurelia Franklin Library, Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee hereinafter this collection will be cited as Rosenwald Fund Archives and this repository as Franklin Library) (quotation) Embree to Sanchez, October 29, 1937, ibid. Sanchezs work for the Instituto Pedagogico occurred just after its creation in 1936 during a brief liberal phase of Venezuelan politics. For more on its creation, see Judith Ewell, Venezuela A Century of Change (Stanford, 1984), 75.Dave Cheavens, Soft-Spoken UT professor Loaned to Coordinator of Latin-American Affairs, Austin Statesman, December 3, 1943, in Sanchez Vertical File Texan Will Direct genteelness of Teachers, Dallas Morning News, November 3, 1943, ibid. George I. Sanchez, Mexican Education As It Looks Today, Nations Scho ols, 32 ( kinsfolk 1943), 23, ibid. George I. Sanchez, Mexico A Revolution by Education (New York, 1936). WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 511 Rosenwald teacher-training program and the broader issue of school equalization.Equalization had been the particular avenue of African American activism that culminated with the Gaines v. Canada decision of 1938, which mandated that the University of Missouri either admit a black law student or create a separate, equal law school for African Americans. Sanchez also lobbied in Washington, D. C. , in February 1937, consulting with the Progressive Education Association and various government agencies on Rosenwald projects. As one of his duties on the compendium project, Sanchez studied rote learning for rural African American children who lived in dwelling houses lacking in formal education.This study was inspired by Charles Johnsons mentor at the University of Chicago, Robert E. Park. Johnson, Sanchez, and other young researchers such as famed historian Horace Mann Bond were to look at ways to educate populations handicapped by the lack of books and a tradition of formal education in the home. This venture was affiliated with the Tennessee Valley Authority and principally concerned with raising the cultural level of poor, rural African Americans more effectively than standard textbooks and pedagogies demonstrable for privileged students in other parts of the country.The project aimed to equip teachers to integrate the knowledge which the school seeks to ingrain with the experiences of its pupils and with the tradition of the local community. Sanchezs comparable work with bilingual education in New Mexico and Latin America fit well within the scope of the new undertaking. Sanchezs biggest project with the Rosenwald Fund was creating a well-recognized teacher-training program at the Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute at Grambling.Charles S. Johnson later described this Grambling teacher-tra ining program as among the most progressive of the community-centered programs for the education of teachers in the country. He praised the Grambling endeavor for offering African American teachers opportunities for the festering of creativeness and inventiveness in recognizing and solving * Charles S. Johnson to Edwin R. Embree, October 16, 1936, Folder 1, Box 333, Rosenwald Fund ArchivesEmbree to Johnson, October 23, 1936, and enclosed budget manuscripts Supplementary figure on Rural Education Compendium and Rural School Exploration, Tentative Budget 1936-37, ibid. undated project time sheet October 7, 1936 to April 27, 1937, Folder 3, Box 127, ibid. Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945-1980 (Baton Rouge, 1995), 15 Compendium on Southern Rural Life with Reference to the Problems of the Common School (9 vols. Chicago? , 1936). Charles S. Johnson to Edwin R. Embree, January 21, February 25, 1937, Folder 5, Box 335, Rosenwald Fund Archives Johnson to Dorothy Elvidge, June 23, 1937, and study proposal by Robert E. Park, Memorandum on Rote Learning Studies, troop 3, 1937, pp.2 (first and second quotations), 3 (third quotation), ibid. Sanchez left shortly after the project began. 578 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY the problems to be found in rural communities, homes, and schools . . . . Sanchez oversaw this project from its inception in September 1936 until he left for Venezuela in the middle of 1937. He set up the curriculum, the budgets, the specialized staff (nurses, agricultural instructors, home economists, and rural school supervisors), and equipment (the laboratory school and a bus for inspections).These duties involved close coordination with Grambling administrators, Louisiana health officials, and state education and agriculture bureaucrats. Difficulties arose due to Sanchezs departure. One Rosenwald employee summarized the programs problems, As long as George Sanchez was here he was the individual who translated that philosophy to the people at Grambling, and I am sure that you agree with me that he could do it far more effectively than the rest of us.But now that Sanchez sic is not here it is the job of the president of the institution to do both this interpretation and this stimulation. . . . I do not believe President Jones knows them. Fisks Charles S. Johnson was elite lodge for Sanchez. Johnsons devastating attacks on southem sharecropping influenced public policy and garnered praise from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He and others spurred the creation of Roosevelts Black Cabinet. Sanchez just a similar combination of academic research and social activism.When he began his work at Grambling he had recently lost his position in the New Mexico State Department of Education due to his pointed advocacy of reform as well as his penchant for hard-hitting, publicly funded academic research on controversial topics such as the segregation of Mexican Americans in schools. He had long sparked controversy with his resear ch on racial issues. What especially limited Charles S. Johnson, Section 8The Negro Public Schools, in Louisiana Educational Survey (7 vols, in 8 Baton Rouge, 1942), IV, 216 (first quotation), 185 (second quotation).A copy of this volume is in Folder 5, Box 182, Charles Spurgeon Johnson Papers (Franklin Library). A. C. Lewis to G. I. Sanchez, October 14, 1936, Folder 13, Box 207, Rosenwald Fund Archives Sanchez to Dr. R. W. Todd, September 28, 1936, ibid. Sanchez to Miss Clyde Mobley, September 28, 1936, ibid. Sanchez to J. W. Bateman, September 28, 1936, ibid. Sanchez to Lewis, September 28, 1936, ibid. Edwin R. Embree to Lewis, September 29, 1936, ibid. Sanchez to Lewis, September 30, 1936, ibid. Dorothy A. Elvidge to Lewis, November 27, 1936, ibid. Lewis to Sanchez, July 9, 1937, Folder 14, Box 207, ibid. i. C.Dixon to Lewis, March 17, 1938, Folder 15, Box 207, ibid, (quotation on p. 2) Sanchez, The Rural Normal Schools TeacherEducation Program Involves . . . , September 17, 1936, Folder 16, Box 207, ibid. Sanchez, Suggested BudgetGrambling, April 9, 1937, ibid. Sanchez, Recommendations, December 9, 1936, ibid. John Egerton, Speak at present Against the Day The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York, 1994), 91-92 George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, ? 913-1945 (Baton Rouge, 1967), 543, 544 (quotation) Matthew William Dunne, Next Steps Charles S.Johnson and Southem Liberalism, Journal of Negro History, 83 (Winter 1998), 10-11. WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 579 Sanchezs coming(prenominal) in New Mexico was a 1933 furor over his distribution of another scholars Thurstone scale (a psychometric proficiency developed in the 1920s) on racial attitudes to pupils in New Mexicos public schools. Governor Arthur Seligman publicly demanded that Sanchez be ousted and that the General Education Board (GEB) cancel the grant funding his position in the state bureaucracy.Partly due to the influence of N ew Mexicos U. S. senator Bronson Cutting, a progressive Republican champion of Mexican Americans, Sanchez survived an ugly public hearing that resulted in the resignation of the University of New Mexico faculty member who devised the scale. Nevertheless, the incident severely constrained Sanchezs approaching in the New Mexican educational and political arena. But Sanchez was not pushed into African American education simply out of desperation for employment. He appreciated the opportunities that the Rosenwald Fund provided to broaden his activism as a service intellectual beyond the Southwest. He was direct about this to his most ardent supporter.President James F. Zimmerman of the University of New Mexico Im sorry the Rosenwald Fund is virtually prohibited from extending its interests and experiments into the Southwest. This is the only disappointment I feel in connection with my present work. I feel it keenly, however, as you know how deeply I am bound up with that area and its peoples. At the same time, though, being here has given me a wider viewpoint and experience that whitethorn well be directed at my first love sometime. Zimmerman was disappointed he had groomed Sanchez for a faculty and administrative future at the University of New Mexico.Despite the uproar in 1933 Sanchezs talents were in high demand, however, as GEB agent Leo Favrot and Rosenwald director Edwin Embree coordinated which agency would carry Sanchezs salary with the New Mexico State Department of Education in early 1935 (GEB) and during a yearlong research project on Mexican higher education from 1935 to the middle of 1936 (Rosenwald Fund) until he joined the staff of the Rosenwald Fund on a regular basis for his work at Grambling. * G. I. Sanchez to Leo M. Favrot, April 27 and May 11, 1933, Folder 900, Box 100, G.