“How many Mexicans [is] a horse worth?” The League of United Latin American Citizens, Desegregation Cases, and Chicano Historiography
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why is Spain's role as a colonizing power in the Americas overlooked by scholars of white settler colonialism? If European ventures in such disparate places as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, the United States, Angola, and Algeria can all be viewed through the scholarly lens of white settler colonialism, why not Latin America? In this essay, I attempt to answer these questions through an analysis of the confrontation of racial ideologies that occurred between Mexicans and Anglos in the U.S. Southwest. Legally, Mexican Americans were considered part of the “white” race after 1897, but how did Mexican Americans understand this putative whiteness, especially given their racial inscription as mestizos under Spanish colonial and Mexican postcolonial law? I examine the desegregation cases brought on behalf of Mexican American plaintiffs between 1929 and 1954, in which Mexican American litigators argued that as Mexicans were racially white, schools and juries in the Southwest violated their due process rights by segregating them or discriminating against them in jury selection. Chicano historiography has derided this generation of civil rights activists as race traitors. However, I examine the court records, letters, and speeches of these legal activists, as well as Américo Paredes's George Washington Gómez, to see how these civil rights activists challenge the very meaning of “whiteness” when they claim it in the face of racial exclusion and violence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".