From World War II to the War on Discrimination

Historian Arnoldo De Leon writes that when the United States entered World War II, "Texas Mexicans joined up with patriotic zeal. While in the service, Tejanos came to know a treatment by whites that was more tolerant than that prevalent in their hometowns."

World War II was very much a watershed in opening up new opportunities for Texas Mexicans, but civil rights between 1945 and the late 1950s did not come to Mexican Americans automatically. With the war's end, however, Anglo society once again regressed toward old attitudes.

Anglo neighborhoods, eating places, picture shows, swimming pools, and even hospitals were considered off-limits to Mexican-Americans. Police and other law enforcement agencies such as the Texas Rangers and the Border Patrol reminded Tejanos of their second-class citizenship through disparagement or intimidation. Employment opportunities diminished quickly.

Politically, Texas Mexicans had to pay the poll tax and cope with other voting and office-holding restrictions. Moreover, bossism still survived at mid-century. Businessmen and farmers possessed enough economic power to control the votes. The political condition of Texas Mexicans thus remained at a level only slightly improved since the 1920s.

This was the Texas that Dr. Hector Garcia returned to after World War II. Settling in Corpus Christi, he brought with him a Bronze Star, six Battle Stars, the rank of major, an Italian war bride, his first child, and enhanced pride as an American citizen.

He told his family: "War is bad, but we must do our duty, and no man who doesn't do his duty will ever have the force to face the world. These three long weary years of suffering and pain and hardships and heartaches have taught me how to be tolerant and how to be patient. I have seen poverty and have seen cruelty and I want to place myself above both of them. I do not seek to fight unless it's completely right." A combination of events convinced Dr. Garcia that a "completely right" fight existed in his own backyard.

1. Mexican American Farm laborers in a labor camp in nearby Mathis, Texas, enduring inhuman living conditions.
2. Disabled Mexican American veterans starving or sick when a dilatory Veteran's Administration failed to send financial and medical benefits.
3. Local school officials blithely admitting on the radio that Mexican American children were segregated.
4. Summoned by a slum-child to visit his sick mother, Dr. Garcia finds a dying woman lying in bed with her six children. They are covered in blood from her hemorrhaged tubercular lungs.

Like his classical namesake of the Trojan War, Dr. Hector Garcia charged the barricades of discrimination with a warrior's spirit. His "troops" were the members of the American GI Forum. Organized by Dr. Garcia in a Corpus Christi elementary school classroom one evening in March, 1948, this organization ultimately spread across the United States to open the locked gates of the "establishment."

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