The forgotten history of how Latinos earned the right to vote
*The battles for equal educational rights for Latinos go back many, many generations. And many of those historic battles started in Texas. This is a good read for perspective, context, truth. VL
By Caitlin Cruz, Fusion (8.5 minute read)
So many of these stories start in Texas. Since the days of a shifting Southern border in 1845 and the oil boom and bust of the 1980s, Latinos have been the most populous minority group in the Lone Star state. (Nowadays, Texas has the second-largest Hispanic population in the country, about 39%.) As a result, white anxiety about Latinos, particularly Mexican Americans, rocketed upwards at the same time black Americans were being disenfranchised after slavery.
In 1923, Texas codified all-white primaries within the Democratic Party, treating them as a private entity. This meant that non-whites weren’t allowed to participate in the party’s primary elections, which effectively decided the general elections’ outcomes because of the Democratic Party’s dominance. While the law outright banned African Americans from voting, Mexican Americans in south Texas weren’t exactly welcomed into the voting booth. They weren’t black, but they certainly weren’t white. READ MORE
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