SYMHC Classics: Hernandez v. Texas

This 2017 episode covers Hernandez v. Texas, which addressed civil rights for Mexican Americans, was the first case to be argued before the Supreme Court by Mexican American attorneys, and set a new precedent in how the 14th Amendment was interpreted in terms of race and ethnicity.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, Everybody. Coming up soon on the show, we
have an episode that touches on the history of a
university that was originally established for white students only. At
the time, though, US society was largely conceived as having
two races, black and white, so students from other racial

(00:22):
and ethnic groups were included at least to some extent
earlier on, but we're classed as white while black students
were specifically excluded. We have talked about the expanding and
evolving definitions of racial and ethnic classification in the US,
including changes to how the fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution

(00:43):
has been interpreted a few times on the show, and
one of those is our episode on Hernandez versus Texas,
which originally came out on September. So we're bringing that
out as Today's Saturday Classic to give you some more
context for that forthcoming episode. And yes, something that comes
up in this episode. I do still hope at some

(01:04):
point to do an episode on the g I Bill
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. So

(01:26):
it's been a while since we've had a Supreme Court
case on the show as a guest as a guest, right, uh,
And that's become a theme sort of on on at
least in terms of yours and my time on the show, Holly.
We've had several Supreme Court episodes, and I think the
last one that we had was one of the goofier
ones because we talked about Butter versus Margarine. This one

(01:48):
is not a goofier one. Today we are talking about
Hernandez versus Texas, which got a brief mention in our
past episode on Marcario Garcia, and that was the first
Mexican immigrant to the United States to earn the Medal
of Honor. And in addition to tying directly to civil
rights for Mexican Americans, Hernandez versus Texas was also the

(02:08):
first case to be argued before the Supreme Court by
Mexican American attorneys, and it set off a whole new
precedent and how the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was
interpreted in terms of race and ethnicity. A lot of
the stuff that we're talking about today generally applied more
broadly to pretty much everybody of Hispanic or Latino descent,
but specifically the people that we were talking about, our

(02:30):
our Mexican Americans. So the other thing is this was
decided it right before Brown versus Board, like a week
or two before the decision came down in Brown versus Board.
So in a lot of ways, it was completely overshadowed
by that way more famous decision, although it was really
important in its own way. And Hernandez versus Texas began

(02:52):
with a murder, and the facts of that murder were
really not in dispute. On August four, nine, one Pedro Hernandez,
who by Pete, got into an argument with Gitano Espinoza,
who was known as Joe at Chinko Sanchez's tavern in Edna, Texas.
Edna is southwest of Houston and southeast of San Antonio,

(03:12):
and sits roughly between those two cities. It's not clear
exactly what started to this argument, but according to witnesses,
at some point Espinoza started making fun of Hernandez because
he had a club foot, and Hernando left the bar.
He walked home, got a rifle, came back and shot
Espinoza in the chest in front of witnesses. Espinoza died

(03:34):
not long after reaching the hospital in less than twenty
four hours after the crime. Hernandez was indicted for murder.
Four days later, he was denied bail. Hernandez his mother
went to Gustavo Garcia known as GUS, for help, and
Garcia was a prominent civil rights lawyer in San Antonio.
He served as a legal adviser to the League of

(03:55):
United Latin American Citizens or LULAC, which was the first
civil rights organization and for Mexican Americans in the United States,
and he served in that same capacity for the American
g I Forum, which was formed in the wake of
World War Two to help Mexican American veterans get access
to the benefits they were entitled to under the g
I Bill of Rights. I kind of want to do

(04:16):
an episode at some point about the g I Bill,
because the language in the bill didn't have anything related
to race or ethnicity in it, but the way it
was actually implemented it was a lot easier for white
returning veterans to get access to the benefits that were
involved and pretty much anyone else. So has a really

(04:38):
complicated history in terms of how and who it allowed
to get access to things like education and buying new
homes and things like that. So by the time he
agreed to represent Pete Hernandez, Garcia had been involved with
some of the biggest civil rights cases for Mexicans and
Mexican Americans in Texas. He had worked as a legal
advocate for migrant workers in the Brasil euro program, which

(05:00):
we've talked about on the show before. He had also
been part of the team in del got O versus
Bowlestrop Independent School District. They'll got O versus Bollstrop followed
the California case of Mendez versus Westminster, which we've also
talked about on the show, and it made segregation of
Mexican American school children illegal in the state of Texas,

(05:21):
with the exception of like first graders who genuinely needed
some more English language instruction before they joined classes that
were being taught in English. Garcia had also represented the
family of Felix Longoria, who was killed in action in
World War Two. When Longoria's body was returned home to Texas,
the only funeral home in his hometown of Three Rivers

(05:42):
refused to allow its chapel to be used for the
service because in the director's words quote the whites would
not like it after them, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson got involved.
Longoria was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Joining Garcia and
the defense team was Carlos can whose prior civil rights
work included challenging restrictive covenants that we're keeping Mexican Americans

(06:05):
from being able to buy land in San Antonio. Garcio
is known as an incredibly eloquent and charismatic speaker, and
Kindaa had a head for numbers and statistics, so when
they worked together as a legal team, typically Garcia would
be the one who argued the case in court, and
Kadeta meticulously assembled all the research and the information that

(06:25):
was needed to make that argument in court. Also on
the team were John Jay Herrera known as Johnny, and
James DeAnda, who practiced together in Houston, and Herrera and
Garcia already knew one another, and they had actually worked
together on Delgado versus Blastrop. So the reason this seemingly
straightforward small town murder trial required a team of four attorneys,

(06:48):
including some of the most well known civil rights lawyers
working in Texas at the time, is that it was
not just a simple criminal matter. While working out another
case together in Fort ben County, Johnny Herrera had ily
wondered to James Dandah why he had never seen a
Mexican person on a jury there, And then when they
looked into it further, they realized that there had been

(07:09):
no one of Mexican descent on a Fort Been County
jury in more than thirty five years. The same pattern
was true in Jackson County, where Hernandez was going to
be tried. Herrera was not the first person to make
this observation. All Anglo juries had come up at least
seven times in Texas court since nine There hadn't been

(07:29):
a Mexican person on a jury, or, to be more specific,
anyone who had a recognizable Mexican or Latin American surname
in twenty five years in at least seventy Texas counties.
Every attempt to address that disparity had been met with
the same legal response from the state. Indiana's words, quote, well,
Mexicans are Caucasians, and there were Caucasians on the jury,

(07:52):
so what are you fussing about? Herrera's Indiana's client and
Assito Sanchez had been found guilty of murder Carrera Indianda
had appealed the conviction on the grounds that Sanchez had
been discriminated against by the existence of this all white jury,
but the Texas Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, making
that same argument as a Mexican, Sanchez was white and

(08:14):
the jury was white, so there was no discrimination. And
at that point the team was out of funds. Sanchez
was really reluctant to pursue the case any further. As well,
he was afraid that he would get a harsher sentence
if his conviction was overturned and he had to be retried.
This Mexicans are white argument stretched back to the Treaty
of Guadalupe had all Goo, which ended the Mexican American

(08:36):
War in eighteen forty eight, and the war ended with
Mexico seating a huge amount of territory, much of it
inhabited by both Mexicans and indigenous people, to the United States.
In Article eight, the treaty gave Mexicans living in United
States territory a choice to quote the treaty quote, those
who shall prefer to remain in the said territories may

(08:58):
either retain the title and rights of Mexican citizens or
acquire those of citizens of the United States, but they
shall be under the obligation to make their election within
one year from the date of the exchange of ratifications
of this Treaty, And those who shall remain in the
said territories after the expiration of that year, without having
declared their intention to retain the character of Mexicans, shall

(09:21):
be considered to have elected to become citizens of the
United States. The treaty went on to recognize the property
rights of Mexicans and to state that those who became
American would be quote admitted at the proper time to
the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the
United States, according to the principles of the Constitution, and

(09:42):
in the meantime shall be maintained and protected in the
free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in
the free exercise of their religion without restriction. Of course,
this is just one aspect of this whole treaty, and
it's also important to note that Mexico had given its
indigenous population the rights of citizenship, but those rights were

(10:03):
essentially ignored once the territory they had been living in
became part of the United States. So even though in theory,
if you had Mexican citizenship before, you were supposed to
have American citizenship now that citizenship was denied the indigenous
population that was living in former Mexican territory, and for
the Mexican citizens of Spanish descent once that year was

(10:23):
up after the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,
unless they had specifically said they were retaining Mexican citizenship,
they were to be considered American citizens. And all of
this together meant that from a legal perspective, they were white.
And we'll get to how the team built a legal
defense around all of this after we first pause and
have a little bit of a sponsor break. Throughout the

(10:53):
murder trial of pet Hernandez, his legal team tried to
establish that the absence of Mexicans on the jury was
discriminate Tory. Their first effort in doing this was on
October four, ninety one, when Garcia and Kindana tried to
quash the original indictment because that indictment had been delivered
by an all Anglo grand jury. As expected, no one

(11:14):
was surprised by this. The court refused and the trial
began as planned on October eight, and all Anglo jury
was selected, and once that was done, the legal team
filed a motion to quash. In the hearing that followed,
they spent a lot of time trying to establish that,
regardless of whether they were legally considered white, Mexicans were
treated as a class apart. The team noted things like

(11:38):
restaurants that posted no Mexicans signs and the recently ended
school segregation, and they asked a number of witnesses things like,
would you ever say a German Man and a white man?
How about an Englishman and a white man? How about
a Mexican and a white man? And even though the
resulting answers provided solid evidence that Mexican residents of Jackson

(12:00):
County were treated differently from Anglo residents, the motion was
ultimately denied. I learned two really fascinating things while reading
through all of this questioning during the hearing to quash
the jury, uh And one of them was that at
the time, a lot more people used the word Latin
American rather than Mexican. Because people, I mean a lot

(12:20):
of different reasons. The preferred language to talk about stuff
changes over time. And that's normal, Like that's expected. Part
of it was, uh that people were kind of concerned
that if you said Mexican, that you might actually mean
a Mexican national living in Mexico right now rather than
a person of Mexican descent living in the United States. Um.
And the other one was that apparently people still considered

(12:41):
Bohemian to be a recognizable like ethnic class, and so
some of the questions were like, would you say, oh, look,
there's a Bohemian and a white man, And people were like, no,
of course not, that's weird. I was like, that's never
a thing I've even thought of. Uh, but I mean
to be clear in case it's not obvious. People were like, no,

(13:02):
I wouldn't say a German Man and a white man.
Those are both white. And people would say, well, would
you say a Mexican and a white man? Oh? Yeah.
Like they built the case over a lot of questions,
but in spite of that, they did not quash the jury.
After the jury selection and all those pre trial motions
that charges against Hernandez were read at one pm on

(13:23):
October eleven, the jury went to deliberations at four thirty
in the afternoon, and by eight pm that same night,
they had reached a verdict, Hernandez was convicted and sentenced
to life in prison. Her Era Indianda had already tried
to make a discrimination argument in their appeal of Anacito
Sanchez's murder conviction, so the team started with that brief

(13:44):
as the foundation for their appeal of Hernandez's conviction. They
drew parallels to the systemic exclusion of black jurors, which
the Supreme Court had already found violated the constitutional rights
to do process in equal protection, and they also drew
parallels to how mex Kins were treated quite differently from
people of other nationalities who really were considered to be white. Cardena,

(14:06):
who crafted a lot of the brief, also made the
point that, in his words quote about the only time
that so called Mexicans, many of them Texans for seven generations,
are covered with the Caucasian cloak is when it serves
the ends of those who would shamelessly deny this large
segment of the Texas population their fundamental rights. So basically,

(14:27):
nobody's really calling us white until it suits them to
be like, well, you're not being discriminated against because you're white,
you're different, until we have to defend ourselves. And then
You're just like us. Hernandez's case was brought before the
Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on November twenty one, ye
with the team arguing that the lower court had aired

(14:47):
in denying the motions to quash both the grand and
petit juries. The Texas Court of Appeals disagreed and affirmed
that conviction on June eighteenth, nineteen fifty two, and the
appeals courts to decision noted that the Fourteenth Amendments Equal
protection clause applied to two classes only, quote, the white
race comprising one class, and the Negro race comprising the

(15:11):
other class. The Appeals court also repeated part of the
decision that had had given in the Sanchez case, quote
Mexican people are not a separate race, but white people
of Spanish descent. That went on to specify quote in
contemplation of the Fourteenth Amendment, Mexicans are therefore members of
and within the classification of the white race, as distinguished

(15:32):
for members of the Negro race. The team tried to
bring the jury selection issue back to the Court of
Appeals on October two, but the court declined to hear it,
so from there their next step would be to take
this case to the United States Supreme Court, and although
this had always been their goal, they recognized that it
was an incredibly risky decision to try it. On a

(15:54):
personal level, it was risky for Pete Hernandez. He had
been found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison,
and if the Supreme Court overturned his conviction, he would
need to be retried. Like we said, it was clear
that he had committed this crime, and if he was retried,
he could potentially be sentenced to death. Going to the
Supreme Court carried other risks as well. If the court

(16:17):
did not find in Hernandez's favor, it would probably take
at least a generation for another similar case to be heard.
That meant that for a generation, Mexican Americans in many
Texas counties would continue to face juries composed only of anglos.
And since the whole issue was tied to whether Mexicans
were white, there were plenty of imagined scenarios and consequences

(16:40):
should the court decide that no, they were not. This
risk was compounded by the fact that Peter Nandez's case
was not particularly likely to elicit the court's sympathy. At
the same time, as Hernandez's and Sanchez's cases were being
heard in Texas. Civil rights cases involving black Americans were
playing out elsewhere in the United States as well. These

(17:01):
were often backed by national organizations like the n double
a CP with experienced civil rights lawyers who were carefully
selecting cases whose defendants were likely to be sympathetic and
regarded by white justices as respectable and worthy of compassion.
Like this has come up in a lot of past episodes,
like the Mildred and Richard Loving were sympathetic people because

(17:24):
they were a couple who loved each other and wanted
to live together in Virginia. And Rosa parks Uh was
sympathetic because she had a job and was like, I
had a reputation for being, you know, a kind person
who went to church. All of these things were part
of deciding whose case would be presented to the Supreme Court.
This was not the case with Pete Hernandez. He had

(17:46):
murdered someone after a fight in front of witnesses. At
the same time, a Supreme Court case seemed like an
opportunity to try to right some of the wrongs within
the court system, so the team filed their petition for
a written of sertiorari with the Supreme Court on January one,
nineteen fifty three. This is the document that formally asks

(18:07):
the higher court to review the lower court's decision. And
this was a day pass the deadline and typewritten when
the Supreme Court's rules stated that they must be professionally printed.
But the Court agreed to hear the case anyway, and
on October twelfth, nineteen fifties three, it was scheduled for
the next session. People were really worried that the fact

(18:28):
that they turned it in a day late and typewrittens
that have professionally printed was like an indicator of bad
things to come. Arguing a case before the Supreme Court
is expensive. To be allowed to do it at all,
attorneys have to apply for and be granted admission to
the Supreme Court Bar. This requires sponsorship from people who
have already been admitted to the Supreme Court Bar. So,

(18:51):
in addition to the application fee, the team, none of
whom had ever argued before the Supreme Court before, had
to find other attorneys who are already approved to sponsor them,
and then pay a fee to apply. There are also
filing fees for the case itself. And the team arguing
the case is responsible for paying for all the pre
the briefs to be printed, along with travel to Washington,

(19:13):
d C. And food and lodging while there, and especially
in the cases of attorneys who have private practices, the
disruption of their businesses and income while they're gone. Hernand
Is his team did not have a lot of money.
They were basically a collection of local Texas lawyers whose
own practices and incomes and stracy just suggested we're going

(19:34):
to suffer while they were away. So the Robert Marshall
Civil Liberties Trust contributed five thousand dollars to the cost
of the proceedings, and local LULAC chapters made donations as well,
and the rest of their budget was filled in by
small donations from other civic organizations and even individual people.
There are interviews with some of the folks that were

(19:55):
involved in all of this who would talk about people
who just really did not have any money coming up
to them on the street and like handing them a
dollar and being like, please use this to help pay
for the case. Because their budget was so tight, they
eventually decided that not all of them would go to Washington,
d C. GARCIA Karenna, and Herrera would all go to Washington,

(20:16):
while Danda stayed behind in Texas, both to try to
save money on all of their costs and also to
try to keep all of their law businesses functioning while
the rest of them were away. Money became one of
the sources of tension for the team once they actually
got to Washington. Garcia was somewhat of a showman and
had a flamboyant personality, and he hired a publicist and

(20:40):
reserved a hotel suite that the rest of the team
thought was beyond their budget. It wasn't just about luxury, though.
At that point, the Double A CP and other organizations
fighting for equal rights for Black Americans were national organizations
with better funding and much better name recognition. Brown versus
Board was national news, and Garca really wanted a similar

(21:01):
national structure and recognition for Mexican Americans. Leading up to
their arguments before the Supreme Court, Garcia himself also became
a source of tension as well. He struggled with alcoholism,
and the day before they were to argue, he vanished
from the hotel and finally returned very late and heavily intoxicated.

(21:22):
The rest of the team, while trying to sober him up,
started to worry that the whole thing was going to
fall apart. And after we take another quick break, we
will talk about the Supreme Court argument and what happened afterward.
Fernandez versus the State of Texas was argued before the

(21:43):
United States Supreme Court on January eleventh, ninety four. The
question before the court was is the equal protection of
the law claws of the Fourteenth Amendment violated when a
state tries a person of a particular race or ancestry
before a jury in which all persons of that race
or ancestry have been excluded from serving. The team's strategy

(22:06):
was twofold. They would establish that Mexican jurors, specifically those
with Spanish surnames, were being systematically intentionally excluded from juries
in Jackson County, Texas, including in the trial of PETERR. Nandez.
And they would also establish that the exclusion from jury
service was part of an overall pattern of discrimination against

(22:26):
Mexican Americans, treating them as a class apart from white citizens.
Establishing that Mexican Americans were excluded from jury's was easy enough.
They had plenty of documentation that almost fifteen percent of
the county's population had Mexican or Latin American surnames, including
eleven percent of the man over aged twenty one. About

(22:47):
six or seven percent of the freeholders and the tax
roles were of Mexican descent as well. Yet, in spite
of all of that, zero people with Mexican or Latin
American surnames had served on a Jackson County jury and
twenty five years. They also had polenty of evidence of
Mexican Americans in Jackson County not being treated as white.

(23:07):
Until the decision in del got O versus blast Trop
in September, Mexican children in Texas had not been allowed
to attend school with white children. There was at least
one restaurant with a posted sign that Mexicans would not
be served, along with signs that said quote no chili,
which meant exactly the same thing. But the most compelling

(23:29):
piece of evidence of discrimination again against Mexican Americans that
was presented before the Supreme Court came from Johnny Herrera's
own experience, and it had also been part of that
first motion to quash the jury in Hernandez's original trial.
During that original trial in Jackson County. Herrera had gone
to the restroom and he had found that there were
two bathrooms. One of them was unmarked and the other

(23:52):
was labeled colored men and under that ombre Zaki or
men here. Meanwhile, the state of Texas argued that the
lack of Mexican and Latin American surnames among jurors was
just a coincidence, and that Mexicans were white, so the
fourteenth Amendment did not apply. In other words, at the
courthouse where the Texas legal system was arguing that Mexicans

(24:15):
were white, there were segregated restrooms, one unmarked and only
for white men, and the other marked for black and
Mexican men. Garcia, who as we said, had come back
to the hotel really late and heavily intoxicated, was pretty
quiet during the earlier parts of the oral arguments, But
after some of the justices asked a series of questions

(24:37):
along the lines of whether Mexican Americans or citizens and
whether they could speak English, he kind of revived. He
started an incredibly eloquent legal argument that combined the histories
of Mexico and the United States, including the fact that
many of the families who were being affected by this
systemic jury exclusion had been in Texas for generations before

(24:58):
Sam Houston even showed up there. It was Unfortunately the
transcript of this does not seem to exist anywhere anymore.
But it was such a compelling listen that when his
time was up, Chief Justice Earl Warren told him to
continue and allowed him to talk for twelve more minutes.
The Supreme Court issued its unanimous decision on May third,

(25:19):
ninety four. By being denied a jury of his peers,
including Mexican Americans, Pete her Nandez, had been denied Fourteenth
Amendment protections and this denial was unconstitutional. As part of
Earl lawrence majority opinion, he wrote, quote throughout our history,
differences in race and color have defined easily identifiable groups

(25:41):
which have at times required the aid of the courts
in securing equal treatment under the laws. But community prejudices
are not static, and from time to time, other differences
from the community norm may define other groups which need
the same protection. Whether such a group exists within a
community is a question and a fact. When this existence

(26:02):
of a distinct class is demonstrated, and it is further
shown that the laws as written or as applied single
out that class for different treatment not based on some
reasonable classification, the guarantees of the Constitution have been violated.
The fourteenth Amendment is not directed solely against discrimination due
to a two class theory that is based on differences

(26:24):
between white and Negro. He also went on to say, quote,
but it taxes our credulity to say that mere chance
resulted in there being no members of this class among
the over six thousand jurors called in the past twenty
five years. The result bespeaks discrimination, whether or not it
was a conscious decision on the part of any individual

(26:45):
jury commissioner. With the Supreme Court having issued its decision,
the Texas Department of Corrections was notified that Hernandez would
be remanded for a retrial on May seventh, nineteen fifty four.
That was four days after the decision was announced. He
was re indicted on September nineteen fifty four, and the
trial was moved to another county after a successful petition

(27:07):
for a change of venue. Garcia argued. The new trial,
which was held on November fifteen and included two Mexican
Americans among the jury. Hernandez was again found guilty, and
this time sentenced to twenty years in prison. He was
recommended for parole on June seventh, nineteen sixty, and Governor
Price Daniel ordered his release on the next day. This

(27:28):
was in part due to advocacy by Garcia, who recognized
that Hernandez had knowingly risked his own life in pursuit
of this civil rights school. As we said earlier, the
facts of the case were clear and that he had
committed murder, so by allowing this case to be appealed,
he was knowingly risking a death sentence. Hernandez versus Texas
was notable and influential in a lot of ways, since

(27:52):
it set the precedent that the Fourteenth Amendments protections applied
to Mexican Americans that laid the ground work for fighting
other forms of discrimination against them, including things like housing
and employment discrimination. The idea that the Fourteenth Amendment was
not just related to a two class idea of race
was also a huge deal. Before Hernando's versus Texas, most

(28:14):
Fourteenth Amendment arguments were about black and white, not about
any other race or ethnic group. But the application of
those same rights and protections to Mexican Americans meant that
in the United States. Race was not just a two
class system. There were other classes as well, some of
them not related to race in any way, who could
be the targets of unconstitutional discrimination. To recap what we

(28:37):
said at the top of the show, Hernando's versus Texas
was also hugely important because it was the first Supreme
Court case related to civil rights for Mexican Americans, particularly
after the World War two era, and it was the
first to be argued by Mexican Americans. People doing it
weren't being backed by any kind of nationwide legal organization

(28:57):
or a strategy. They were just a handful of local
lawyers who were also Mexican American, of which there were
not that many practicing in Texas. The four of them
represented roughly of the Mexican American lawyers practicing anywhere in
Texas at the time, So this was a groundbreaking first
from a lot of different directions. Hernandez versus Texas continued

(29:18):
to be the main precedent in civil rights cases for
Mexican Americans until nineteen seventy one, when ces Naro's versus
Corpus Christie Independent School Districts recognized Hispanics as a distinct
minority group. With all the constitutional protections that apply to
other minority groups applying to Hispanics as well. However, the

(29:39):
core issue that started this whole case, which was the
underrepresentation of Mexican Americans on juries, continues to be an issue.
In nineteen seventy seven, the Supreme Court heard Costanata versus Pardita,
which found that a defendant had been discriminated against in
part because seventy nine percent of the county's population where
he lived with Mexican American, but over an eleven year period,

(30:02):
only thirty nine percent of those summons to be on
the grand jury were Mexican American. Carlos Cadena served as
the City Attorney of San Antonio until nineteen sixty one,
when he joined the faculty at St. Mary's School of
Law and became the nation's first Mexican American law professor.
He was later appointed to the Fourth Court of Appeals

(30:23):
and eventually became its Chief Justice, making him the first
Mexican American to hold that position. He helped co found
the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and became
its first national president. He died of lung cancer in
two thousand eleven. Johnny Herrera continued with his civil rights
work for the rest of his career, eventually becoming the

(30:43):
national LULAC president and working as its national legal advisor.
He died after a stroke in nineteen eighty six. James
DeAnda was appointed to serve as a federal judge under
President Jimmy Carter. He died of prostate cancer in two
thousand six. Gus Garcia sadly struggled with alcohol abuse for
the rest of his life, which was later compounded by depression.

(31:05):
He was in and out of hospitals, and he was
disbarred after passing bad checks. He stopped attending meetings of
LULAC and the g I Forum, and his behavior became
increasingly erratic. He died on June third, nineteen sixty four,
and he was forty eight. It's clear that Hernando's versus
Texas broadened the applicability of the Fourteenth Amendment's protections, but

(31:27):
there continues to be some debate about how much it
actually helped Mexican Americans. Most of its arguments had to
do with surnames, which excluded people who had changed their
last names or who, for example, were Mexican on their
mother's side but had their father's Anglo surname, and at
least for a time, it's set the precedent that people
who were protected under the fourteenth Amendment were really only

(31:50):
entitled to those protections when it was clear that their
whole community was operating under a systemic state of discrimination,
although that was later refined by other court cases and
the whole thing wasn't framed as whether Mexican Americans deserved
equal rights, but whether Mexican Americans were white. It's actually
one of the most interesting things to me on a

(32:14):
sort of intellectual level about this whole case. Um. A
lot of people think of race as having some kind
of inherently biological component, but it really is a it's
a social construct. And if you look at the history
of race in the United States, there's this whole negotiation
of who is and is not allowed to be white,

(32:34):
uh and a lot of it is fascinating and sometimes disturbing,
And if you want a way more condensed look into
how that has worked throughout the United States history. I
strongly recommend the series Seeing White from the podcast Seen
on Radio, which goes through the whole thing. Uh we

(32:55):
It touches on a lot of things we've talked about
on the show before, but in a lot more compressed
time frame, like we have some of the same things
we have talked about on the show, like some exact
episodes that we have had on the show. They have
talked about as well, but it's condensed over I think
thirteen or fourteen episodes of their podcast. UM. I also

(33:15):
didn't say, but Pete Hernandez sort of disappears from the
historical record after he was paroled and at some point
he clearly died, but it's it's not it's not otherwise
clear exactly what happened to him after that, and regardless
of all that other stuff that we just said, Bernando's
versus Texas is UH an important and groundbreaking Supreme Court

(33:37):
case that is just buried by Brown versus Board coming
UH immediately after it. Basically like when I was looking
for artwork related to this, there are so many pictures
from Brown versus Board and basically none from this UM.
It just did it did not get the kind of

(33:58):
UH national attention and coverage that Brown versus Board did,
although people at home in Texas were waiting by the
radio to find out what the Supreme Court had decided.
Like that people were as attached to finding out as
like any other civil rights issues that directly pertains to
a person, people will wait for to find out what
the Supreme Court is going to announce on it. And

(34:19):
that's definitely what happened in Texas with this particular case.
Heay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since
this episode is out of the archive. If you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar over the course of the show, that could
be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast

(34:43):
at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff
works email address no longer works, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History and
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a

(35:06):
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
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