Texas Mexican Americans & Postwar Civil Rights

Download or read book Texas Mexican Americans & Postwar Civil Rights written by Maggie Rivas-Rodríuez and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume recounts three Civil Rights victories that typify the work done by Mexican American veterans of WWII led the struggle across Texas. After World War II, Mexican American veterans returned home to lead the civil rights struggles of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Many of their stories have been recorded by the Voces Oral History Project, founded and directed by Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism. In this volume, Rivas-Rodriguez draws upon the vast resources of the Voces Project, as well as other archives, to tell the stories of three little-known advancements in Mexican American civil rights. The first story recounts the successful effort led by parents to integrate the Alpine, Texas, public schools in 1969, fifteen years after the US Supreme Court ruled that separate schools were inherently unconstitutional. The second describes how El Paso’s first Mexican American mayor, Raymond Telles, quietly challenged institutionalized racism to integrate the city’s police and fire departments, thus opening civil service employment to Mexican Americans. The final account details the early days of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) from its incorporation in San Antonio in 1968 until its move to San Francisco in 1972.