Hernandez v. Texas

Hernandez v. Texas 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 (00:00):
Hey, listeners, we are soon to be appearing at New
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(00:22):
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(00:44):
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I
am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry. So. It's
been a while since we've had a Supreme Court case
on the show as a guest. As a guest, right uh,

(01:06):
and that's become a theme sort of on on at
least in terms of yours and my time on the
show HALLI 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 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

(01:28):
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, Hernande's versus Texas was
also the 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

(01:51):
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 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

(02:11):
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 with a murder, and the facts of that
murder were really not in dispute. On August four, Pedro Hernandez,
who went by Pete, got into an argument with Gitano Espinoza,

(02:34):
who was known as Joe, at Chinko Sanchez's tavern in Edna, Texas.
Edna is southwest of Houston and southeast of San Antonio,
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 Hernanda has left the bar.

(02:57):
He walked home, got a rifle, came back and shot
Espinosa in the chest in front of witnesses. Espinoza died
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 Hernande's mother went
to Gustavo Garcia, known as GUS, for help, and Garcia

(03:20):
was a prominent civil rights lawyer in San Antonio. He
served as a legal advisor to the League of United
Latin American Citizens or LULAC, which was the first civil
rights organization for Mexican Americans in the United States, and
he served in that same capacity for the American GI Forum,
which was formed in the wake of World War Two
to help Mexican American veterans get access to the benefits

(03:43):
they were entitled to under the g I Bill of Rights.
I kind of want to do 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 implement it,
it was a lot easier for white returning veterans to

(04:03):
get access to the benefits that were involved and pretty
much anyone else. So it has a really 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

(04:26):
in Texas. He had worked as a legal advocate for
migrant workers in the Briscero program, which we've talked about
on the show before. He had also been part of
the team and del got O versus bell Strap Independent
School District. They'll got O versus bell Strap followed the
California case of Mendez versus Westminster, which we've also talked
about on the show, and it made segregation of Mexican

(04:48):
American school children illegal in the state of Texas, with
the exception of like first graders who genuinely needed some
more English language instruction before they joined classes that were
being 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

(05:10):
funeral home in his hometown of Three Rivers 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 Kanena, whose prior civil rights work included

(05:33):
challenging restrictive covenants that were keeping Mexican Americans from being
able to buy land in San Antonio. Garcia is known
as an incredibly eloquent and charismatic speaker, and Kanana 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 Kandana meticulously

(05:54):
assembled all the research and the information that was needed
to make that argument in court. Also on a team
where 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

(06:15):
town murder trial required a team of four attorneys, 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 Bend County, Johnny Herrera had idly wondered
to James Dandah why he had never seen a Mexican
person on a jury there and then when they looked

(06:37):
into it further, they realized that there had been no
one of Mexican descent on a Fort Bend 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 a Mexican

(07:00):
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. Indianda's words, quote, well,
Mexicans are Caucasians, and there were Caucasians on the jury,

(07:23):
so what are you fussing about? Arera's Indanda's client and
Acito Sanchez had been found guilty of murder. Arera 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

(07:45):
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 retry.
This Mexicans are white argument stretched back to the Treaty
of Guadalupe hid Allgo, which ended the Mexican American War

(08:08):
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 the
United States territory a choice to quote the treaty quote,
those who shall prefer to remain in the said territories

(08:29):
may 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,

(08:52):
shall be considered to have elected to become citizens of
the United States. The treaty went on to recognize the
proper the 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,

(09:13):
and 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

(09:34):
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

(09:54):
up after the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe a Dago,
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

(10:22):
murder trial of Pete Hernandez, his legal team tried to
establish that the absence of Mexicans on the jury was discriminatory.
Their first effort in doing this was on October four,
ninety one, when Garcia and Kanana tried to quash the
original indictment because that indictment had been delivered by an
all Anglo grand jury. As expected, no one was surprised

(10:44):
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 restaurants that

(11:08):
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

(11:29):
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

(11:49):
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

(12:10):
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. That 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,

(12:31):
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 that 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,
the charges against Hernandez were read at one fift pm

(12:52):
on October eleventh. 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, Indiana had already
tried to make a discrimination argument in their appeal of
Anacito Sanchez's murder conviction, so the team started with that

(13:13):
brief 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 Mexicans were treated quite differently from
people of other nationalities who really were considered to be white. Cardena,

(13:35):
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,

(13:56):
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 one,
with the team arguing that the lower court had aired

(14:16):
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, ninetifty two, and the appeals
Court's decision noted that the Fourteenth Amendments equal protection clause
applied to two classes only, quote, the white race comprising

(14:37):
one class and the Negro race comprising the 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 there for members of and within

(14:58):
the classification of the white race, as distinguished 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

(15:20):
an incredibly risky decision to try it. On a 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

(15:42):
Supreme Court carried other risks as well. If the court
did not find in Hernande'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

(16:04):
were white, there were plenty of imagined scenarios and consequences
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

(16:27):
playing out elsewhere in the United States as well. These
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,

(16:48):
like the Mildred and Richard Loving were sympathetic people because
they were a couple who loved each other and wanted
to live together in Virginia. And Rosa parks Uh was
simp athetic 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

(17:11):
Supreme Court. This was not the case with Pete Hernandez.
He had 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 writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court on

(17:31):
January twenty one, nineteen fifty three. This is the document
that formally asks 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,

(17:52):
it was scheduled for the next session. People were really
worried that the fact that they turned it in a
day late and typewritten is 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

(18:15):
requires sponsorship from people who have already been admitted to
the Supreme Court Bar. So, 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 were
already approved to sponsor them and then pay a fee
to apply. There are also filing fees for the case itself,

(18:36):
and the team arguing the case is responsible for paying
for all there the briefs to be printed, along with
travel to Washington, d c. And food and lodging while there,
and especially in the cases of attorneys who have private
practices the disruption of their business as and income while
they're gone. Hernand Is his team did not have a
lot of money. They were basically a collection of local

(18:58):
Texas lawyers whose own practices and incomes and stracy just
suggested we're going 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

(19:19):
and even individual people. There are interviews with some of
the folks that were 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

(19:40):
them would go to Washington. D C, Garcia, Kardenna, and
Herrera would all go to Washington, 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 t once they actually got to Washington. Garcia

(20:03):
was somewhat of a showman and had a flamboyant personality,
and he hired a publicist and 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

(20:24):
much better name recognition. Brown versus Board was national news,
and Garcia really wanted a similar 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

(20:44):
they were to argue, he vanished from the hotel and
finally returned very late and heavily intoxicated. 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. Hernandez

(21:08):
versus the State of Texas was argued before the United
States Supreme Court on January eleventh, nineteen fifty 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

(21:28):
or ancestry have been excluded from serving. The team's strategy
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 Peter Nandez.
And they would also establish that the exclusion from jury

(21:49):
service was part of an overall pattern of discrimination against
Mexican Americans, treating them as a class apart from white citizens.
Establishing that Mexican amerry kins were excluded from Jerry's was
easy enough. They had plenty of documentation that almost fifteen
percent of the county's population had Mexican or Latin American surnames,

(22:10):
including eleven percent of the man over aged twenty one,
about 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
in twenty five years. They also had polenty of evidence

(22:30):
of Mexican Americans in Jackson County not being treated as white.
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,

(22:51):
which meant exactly the same thing. But the most compelling
piece of evidence of discrimination again against Mexican Americans that
was present had 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

(23:13):
to the restroom and he had found that there were
two bathrooms. One of them was unmarked and the other
was labeled colored men and under that ombre zeki 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

(23:35):
Fourteenth Amendment did not apply. In other words, at the
courthouse where the Texas legal system was arguing that Mexicans
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

(23:57):
quiet during the earlier parts of the arguments, but after
some of the justices asked a series of questions 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

(24:18):
of the families who were being affected by this systemic
jury exclusion had been in Texas for generations before 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

(24:39):
and allowed him to talk for twelve more minutes. The
Supreme Court issued its unanimous decision on May third, nineteen
fifty four. By being denied a jury of his peers,
including Mexican Americans, Pete Hernandez had been denied Fourteenth Amendment
protections and this denial was unconstitutional. As part of Earl

(24:59):
lawren majority opinion, he wrote, quote throughout our history, differences
in race and color have defined easily identifiable groups 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

(25:22):
same protection. Whether such a group exists within a community
is a question of fact. When this existence 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

(25:44):
Amendment is not directed solely against discrimination due to a
two class theory that is based on differences 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.

(26:06):
The result bespeaks discrimination, whether or not it was a
conscious decision on the part of any individual 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, and
that was four days after the decision was announced. He

(26:26):
was re indicted on September nineteen fifty four, and the
trial was moved to another county after a successful petition
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

(26:47):
recommended for parole on June seventh, nineteen sixty and Governor
Price Daniel ordered his release on the next day. This
was in part due to advocacy by Garcia, who recognized
that Hernandez had knowingly risk 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,

(27:10):
he was knowingly risking a death sentence. Her Nanda's versus
Texas was notable and influential in a lot of ways,
since it's 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

(27:33):
was not just related to a two class idea of
race was also a huge deal. Before her name is
versus Texas. Most 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

(27:53):
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 said at the top of the show. Hernandez
versus Texas was also hugely important because it was the
first Supreme Court case related to civil rights for Mexican Americans,

(28:13):
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 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

(28:37):
in Texas at the time, so this was a groundbreaking
first from a lot of different directions. Hernandez versus Texas
continued to be the main president in civil rights cases
for Mexican Americans until nineteen seventy one, when cy Naro's
versus Corpus Christie Independent School Districts recognized Hispanics as a
distinct minority group, with all the constitutional protections that apply

(29:00):
to other minority groups applying to Hispanics as well. However,
the core issue that started this whole case, which was
the under representation 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

(29:23):
the county's population where he lived with Mexican American, but
over an eleven year period, only thirty nine percent of
those summoned 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
Saint Mary's School of Law and became the nation's first

(29:45):
Mexican American law professor. He was later appointed to the
Fourth Court of Appeals 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 became its first national president. He died of
lung cancer in two thousand eleven. Johnny Herrera continued with

(30:07):
his civil rights work for the rest of his career,
eventually becoming the 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

(30:27):
alcohol abuse for the rest of his life, which was
later compounded by depression. He was in and out of hospitals,
and he was disbarred after passing bad checks. He stopped
attending meetings of LULAC in 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

(30:49):
that Hernando's versus Texas broadened the applicability of the Fourteenth
Amendment's protections, but 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,

(31:10):
and at least for a time, it's set the precedent
that people who were protected under the Fourteenth Amendment were
really only 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

(31:31):
Americans deserved equal rights, but whether Mexican Americans were white.
It's actually one of the most interesting things to me
on a 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

(31:52):
It's a social construct. And if you look at the
history of race in the United States, there's a whole
negotiation of who is and is not allowed to be white.
Uh and a lot of it is fascinating and sometimes disturbing,
And if you want a way more condensed look into

(32:12):
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
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

(32:32):
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
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

(32:52):
clear exactly what happened to him after that. And regardless
of all that other stuff that we just said, Branda's
were since Texas is UH an important and groundbreaking Supreme
Court 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

(33:16):
pictures from Brown versus Board and basically none from this UM.
It just did it did not get the kind of
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

(33:38):
like any other civil rights issue that directly pertains to
a person, people will wait for to find out what
the Supreme Court is going to announce on it, and
that's definitely what happened in Texas with this particular case.
Do you have a little bit of listener mail to
finish this one off? This is from Jonathan uh and
Jonathan wrote a note called Iman Pasha's ethnicity, and Jonathan says,

(34:01):
I was listening to your two episodes on I Mean
Pasha and was surprised when you mentioned in part two
that he would have wanted to know about one of
the German African companies because he was ethnically German. In
part one you say he was a German Jew, which
would make him ethnically Ashkenazi, not German. Given the history
of anti Semitic persecution, even mentioned that he may have

(34:21):
faced anti Semitism in his education, It's not obvious to
me that he would be proud of his German nationality
and want to know about its African endeavors. Although I
realized he may have assimilated into German Christian society after
his mother remarried. Best Jonathan, So thank you very much
Jonathan for writing this note. Um. It is one a

(34:43):
mystery to me how I Mean Pasha conceived of his
own like ethnic and national identity. UM from like. I
read a lot of his UH papers and notes and
things like that in the context of biographies that were
compiled about him in the nineteenth century. UM. And when
he does talk about it, it's usually in the context

(35:05):
of letters to his mom or his sister, where he's like, Oh,
don't worry, I know I changed my name, but I'm
still German. Like That's that's pretty much the only time
he references it at all, UH, at least that I found.
He doesn't seem to really think on it a lot,
at least not in a way that he wrote down
in his own UH journals. And then when it comes

(35:28):
to other people's writing of him, most of the people
who were writing about him during or shortly after his
UM his lifetime definitely had a motive. Like when German
people were writing about him, they wrote about him as
a German and really tried to to diminish the idea
that he might have converted to Islam UH. And then

(35:50):
people who were Jewish, like Jewish people writing about him
tended to more emphasize the fact that Um, he had
been Jewish from birtha but then had can verted. Like it,
it really seems like it's it's hard to get a
sense of both how he conceived of himself and how
other people conceived of him, because a lot of the

(36:13):
people who wrote down things about him clearly wanted to
establish that he was one thing or another. Um, when
we really don't have, uh, a good sense of how
he thought of himself. The family did convert when he
was five, and he was baptized at five, So from
that point on, um, at least from a like, from

(36:34):
a practicing religion standpoint, it's it seems like they were Lutheran.
So uh, it was definitely not my intent to diminish
the fact um that the family had been Jewish. But
I also feel like in a lot of ways he
is a chameleon in terms of his ethnicity and his religion.
And it's it's really fuzzy how he thought about all

(36:56):
those things related to his own self, which is usually
how you and I try to focus how people framed
their own identity, and in this case, it's, I mean,
it's it's a little unclear. Well, it is unique in
that he seemed to not be terribly attached to any
of those concepts anyway. Um, you know the fact that

(37:17):
he like up and left half of his life to
start over again, and didn't seem to have like any
concerns about I'm leaving behind all of the life I
have built. It's like, okay, now now it's a different life.
Like he didn't his his sense of identity seemed to
not be uh attached to much of any cultural concept

(37:37):
if he kind of kind of a morphous and to
shift a lot depending on where he was and what
he was doing at the time, and people who encountered
him at various points would have vastly different descriptions of
how he came across them on basically everything, aside from
the fact that he was very clean and meticulous and
thoughtful when it came to things about how he presented

(38:00):
himself in terms of religion or or his nationality or
or anything like that like that, that really shifts a
lot depending on when people encountered him aware. So that's that.
Thank you again for sending us that note. If you
would like to write to us about this or anither podcast,
we're at history Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
And then we're all across social media under the name

(38:21):
missed in History. That is where you will find our Facebook, Pinterest, Tumbler, Twitter, Instagram,
all of that. Uh, And then at our website, which
is missed in history dot com, you will find a
searchable archive of all the episodes that we have ever done.
There are show notes for all of the episodes Holly
and I have ever done where you can see where
our research came from and all of that, so you

(38:42):
can do it with all that and a whole lot
more at miss in history dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, is how stuff Works
dot com.