Struggling against Jaime Crow

This chapter looks at how the Americanization agenda of LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) worked in tandem with a long-standing tradition of transborder gente decente politics to shape the organization’s civil rights project. Like the Idars and Munguias, LULACkers sought to eradicate racist practices to allow economic and political empowerment. Similarly, they followed the model of respectability by striving to socially and culturally uplift la raza. For LULAC, redeeming la raza initially meant focusing on the plight of US-born Mexicans whose claims to citizenship facilitated struggles for rights within the American political and judicial systems. But even as they worked within the nation’s institutions, these ethnic American leaders continued to strategically employ transnational approaches that dovetailed with the hemispheric geopolitics of the 1930s and 1940s.