The experience of Mexican Americans during segregation

[Chicago-guy]

Originally Posted by Taiko

As was being treated as not white and being treated as colored, Negro or Black in Jim Crow America

Your point? It's exactly what I said.

[Tritone]

Listen to this:

Opinion: Latinos are getting out of the ‘other’ box on the U.S. census

The desire for a “Latino” option is rooted in current and historical realities. There is a long-standing history of racialization of Latinos in this country. In Texas, for example, Mexican Americans faced Jim Crow-style segregation; they were excluded from schools, public swimming pools, restaurants, movie theaters and even cemeteries.

We really need to get the historical record straight. This is out of control.

[SunGrins]

I'm not sure that Latino/Hispanic segregation (or Jim Crow) was as uniform or generally applied as we might think of segregation in the southern-state African American context. There were places where it was generally applied -- maybe a town or county practice. There were places where it was not. Even in some places it was not applied evenly to members of a single family if one child was lighter in skin color than the siblings. I know of one case where siblings were sent to different schools based on skin color.

Maybe segregation is gone but we still have the problem of profiling. A NM friend (Hispano) was stopped and questioned by police in a Midwestern state because he was traveling with a "white" woman. There was no reason to stop them regarding their general or traffic driving behavior. Eventually another officer stopped as back-up. After a lengthy situation in which the woman was taken to the police car for private questioning concerning her choice of traveling companions, they were given a warning about lane changing (totally irrelevant) and they were released. The officer simply chose to stop them based on profiling. This is not an isolated or rare occurrence.