Natalie Mendoza on Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson’s *The Other American Dilemma: Schools, Mexicans, and the Nature of Jim Crow, 1912-1953*

In The Other American Dilemma: Schools, Mexicans, and the Nature of Jim Crow, 1912-1953, scholars of education Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson contend that the discrimination Mexican-descent people[1] experienced in the United States ought to be defined as de jure rather than de facto. Scholars tend to make a distinction between de jure and de facto that highlights the differences and similarities in how racial and ethnic groups experienced (and continue to experience) racial meaning-making and systemic racism, as well as the various strategies they have adopted to challenge discrimination while navigating these complex dynamics. Historians often describe anti-Mexican discrimination in the United States as de facto because it was practiced as a matter of custom and was not codified into law (de jure), as was the case with African Americans and anti-Black legislation in the Jim Crow South. Donato and Hanson recognize that anti-Mexican discrimination was not sanctioned by law.[2] Nonetheless, they argue that the rationale behind (race and color prejudice) and the intended outcome (separation) in these practices sufficiently warrant a re-classification of anti-Mexican discrimination as de jure.[3] Through their examination of anti-Mexican school segregation across regions in the first part of the twentieth century, Donato and Hanson offer an expanded definition of de jure that includes “government action” at any level—and not just legislative action—that leads to the racial segregation of students. Significantly, prejudicial beliefs do not need to be stated explicitly. School officials, for instance, would often cite pedagogical reasons for building separate schools for Mexican-descent children (in lawsuits, though, they often told on themselves with testimony that revealed how prejudice motivated their actions). For Donato and Hanson, the actions of school authorities and officials, even if not sanctioned by law, are most significant because they ultimately led to separation by race.[4] Importantly, Donato and Hanson assert the present-day stakes in not reconsidering how we define de jure discrimination: prioritizing explicit prejudice tied to intentional actions as the primary way we understand school segregation is often done at the expense of identifying and dismantling the more stealthy and pervasive modalities of systemic racism, especially those that became more pronounced in the post-1965 period and later. The authors, for instance, point to a recent court decision that relied upon demonstrating intentionality over interrogating the social attitudes and practices that lead to school segregation.[5]

The Other American Dilemma makes two significant contributions to conversations taking place among scholars of Latinx and Mexican American studies and history and historians of American foreign relations. Donato and Hanson contribute to the growing scholarship on the experiences of Mexican-descent people outside of the Southwest, helping to put into relief the in-between status Mexicans and Mexican Americans held (and continue to hold) in the Black-white binary that dominates racial formation processes in the United States. Chapters 1 through 3, in particular, trace anti-Mexican segregation across six states between 1912 and 1953 to draw out regional differences in racial meaning-making and how this was used in place of legislation to segregate Mexican-descent people from white people. A central tension in how Mexican-descent people were racialized in social contexts was the fact that they were viewed as white under the law. The first chapter, co-authored with education scholar Gonzalo Guzmán, examines a 1914 lawsuit challenging school segregation brought forward by Mexican American families in southern Colorado, Francisco Maestas et al. v. George H. Shone et al. The authors assert that with Maestas, school officials used “language and fluid racialization” to justify the separate schooling of Mexican American children in Alamosa.[6] Donato and Hanson shift to Louisiana in chapter 2 to a school segregation incident that occurred within a year of Maestas. Cheneyville school officials took a different approach than their counterparts in Alamosa by excluding Mexican children from white schools because the former defined the latter as racially mixed. Though no lawsuit was filed, the Mexican consulate in New Orleans did become involved and advocated on behalf of the children. Chapter 3 similarly shows how school authorities and white community members in Kansas wrestled with how to racially classify Mexican-descent children within a Black-white racial hierarchy to serve their segregation goals. By the early 1920s, the increasing presence of Mexican-descent folks in Kansas City prompted the school district to create a triracial system that served white, Black, and Mexican-descent children, not unlike what existed in the Southwest. Scholars of Latinx and Mexican American studies will find these chapters insightful for bringing forward how local white communities outside of the Southwest defined the racial identity of Mexican-descent people.

Donato and Hanson also help expand the scholarship on the relationship between diplomacy and domestic civil rights issues. Their focus on how ordinary people (of color) empowered themselves through diplomatic channels in the early decades of the twentieth century is a welcome shift in research that tends to feature high-level policymaking from the perspectives of governmental elites in the Cold War period and later. Chapter 4 relies upon Mexican government sources—those of former Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, Genaro Estrada (1887-1937)—to examine how Mexican citizens contacted Mexican Consul officials because they sought government advocacy against anti-Mexican segregation in the Southwest, but also in places like Oklahoma and Mississippi. Historians working at the intersection of foreign relations and civil rights movements will find this overview useful for generating further research in this bourgeoning field.

The first four chapters in The Other American Dilemma are meant to establish the complex nature of anti-Mexican discrimination in service of advancing the book’s core argument about reconsidering the distinctions academics make between de facto and de jure discrimination and the present-day implications of these definitions—the subject of the fifth and final chapter. Here, Donato and Hanson examine lawsuits familiar to specialists—Independent School District v. Salvatierra, Alvarez v. Lemon Grove, and Mendez v. Westminster—to support their assertion that anti-Mexican segregation “should retroactively be considered de jure segregation.”[7] This claim warrants a broader scholarly conversation beyond the scope of this review, but the following are questions that can serve as points of departure for facilitating that discussion. Do we risk, for instance, minimizing the significant role that a legal white status played in the strategies both defendants and plaintiffs adopted in the courtroom, and how this was not something African Americans could use in their own legal battles? The 1946 case Mendez v. Westminster demonstrates the saliency of this question. The Mexican-descent families in Mendez were successful in challenging the de facto segregation of their children in southern California schools, but the legal question driving the case was not about demonstrating racial prejudice as a motivating factor for separate schooling. Both the defendants (the school districts) and the plaintiffs (the families) stipulated that the children were legally white, despite it being clear to the families that their children had been racially discriminated against. Because there was no state law allowing for the separation of white students from one another, the trial instead addressed the pedagogical justification (separate instruction to meet language needs) provided by the defense.

Donato and Hanson discuss Mendez to reinforce their criticism about relying solely on legislation to challenge segregation that is clearly driven by racism.[8] This is certainly an important point, but historians of civil rights activism and race and racism will want to return their attention to the role of the legal white status of Mexican-descent people and the implications of an expanded definition of de jure discrimination as proposed by Donato and Hanson. Minimizing the role of the law in defining race obscures the intricacies of how racism operates. In the legal challenge against anti-Black statutes on school segregation, for instance, attorneys for African American plaintiffs were not able to cite segregation cases involving Mexican-descent students since the legal questions for the latter rested on their whiteness under the law—even as African Americans and Mexican-descent folks understood that racial prejudice was at the root of school segregation. The question Donato and Hanson rightly want us to consider rests on their concern about the danger in relying upon explicit evidence of racial prejudice to prove that segregation has taken place. We should take this caution seriously, and it is, in fact, one that scholars already consider. In the specific experiences of African Americans, the distinction between de facto and de jure discrimination is one that historians have explored to show how anti-Black racism operated and persisted not just in the South, but in the rest of the United States, with or without legislation (respectively).

In moving this discussion forward, then, we should ask: Is it necessary to redefine de jure discrimination so that it is equally applied across racial groups, or would it be more fruitful to prioritize our examination of the experiences of in-between groups—like Mexican-descent people—for what they can reveal further about the complex relationship between race, racism, and the law in the United States? In generating these important questions, The Other American Dilemma reminds us that we need to be attentive to the nuances in race formation taking place in our multi-racial and -ethnic society if we hope to be successful in our efforts to dismantle systemic racism.

[1] I use “Mexican-descent” as a modifier to describe folks of Mexican ancestry regardless of citizenship in the US or Mexico (i.e., it is another way of saying “Mexicans and Mexican Americans”) and/or when said citizenship status is not clear to me. Similarly, I use terms like “Mexican,” “Mexican citizen,” and “Mexican American” to indicate such distinction.

[2] Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson, The Other American Dilemma: Schools, Mexicans, and the Nature of Jim Crow, 1912-1953 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2021), 72-73, 98, 103, 121.

[3] Donato and Hanson, The Other American Dilemma, 3, 104, 133.

[4] Donato and Hanson, The Other American Dilemma, 104.

[5] Donato and Hanson, The Other American Dilemma, 121-123, 133-134.

[6] Donato and Hanson, The Other American Dilemma, 11, 23.

[7] Donato and Hanson, The Other American Dilemma, 104.

[8] Donato and Hanson, The Other American Dilemma, 116-118.