IB History Economic Factors Notes

School Segregation and Mendez v. Westminster

1. Across Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, Mexican American children attended separate, inferior schools.
   1. These were not formal Jim Crow institutions in every case, but the effect was the same.
   2. Schools designated for Mexican American students had less experienced teachers, older textbooks, worse facilities, and a curriculum designed to train students for agricultural or domestic labour rather than academic advancement.
2. English-only rules were enforced by punishing students physically for speaking Spanish.
3. In 1947, a federal district court ruled in Mendez v. Westminster that the segregation of Mexican American students in Orange County, California was unconstitutional.
   1. This was the first federal ruling against school segregation in American history, seven years before Brown v. Board.
4. The NAACP filed an amicus brief in the case.
   1. Thurgood Marshall later cited it as precedent for the Brown arguments.
   2. But Mendez applied only to California.
   3. Texas continued to segregate Mexican American students under a different legal fiction for years afterward.

Discrimination, Police Brutality, and WWII Veterans

1. Residential segregation confined Mexican American families to specific barrios.
   1. Restrictive covenants, enforced by real estate agents and homeowners' associations, prevented Mexican Americans from buying homes outside these areas in many California and Texas cities.
2. East Los Angeles became a de facto segregated enclave not through law but through market discrimination backed by social pressure.
3. Police violence was a constant in these communities.
4. The most visible prewar incident was the Zoot Suit Riots (1943) in Los Angeles: US Navy sailors attacked Mexican American youth for ten days while police arrested the victims rather than their attackers.
   1. The Los Angeles press celebrated the sailors.
   2. The federal government's response was to ban zoot suits as a waste of war materials.
   3. The riots showed the depth of anti-Mexican prejudice even in a city with a large Mexican American population.
5. Despite all of this, approximately 500,000 Mexican Americans served in the US armed forces in the Second World War.
   1. They served in disproportionately front-line roles.
6. Twelve Mexican Americans received the Medal of Honour during the war.
7. When they returned home, many found that the GI Bill was locally administered and subject to the same discrimination as everything else.
   1. Veterans were denied loans, refused admittance to hospitals, and turned away from schools.
8. The gap between military sacrifice and civilian treatment created the generation that built the Chicano movement.

Further evidence: labour control and unequal assets drove economic activism

1. Land loss created long-term economic displacement. After 1848, legal costs, taxes, fraud, violence, and unfamiliar property rules transferred farms and ranches from many Mexican families.
2. Railroad and mining growth drew wage labour. Southwestern development created jobs while concentrating ownership and exposing workers to dangerous conditions and employer control.
3. Agriculture depended on a segmented labour force. Growers used Mexican and Mexican American workers for planting and harvesting while keeping wages low through recruitment and immigration policy.
4. Seasonal employment produced chronic insecurity. Workers moved with crops, lacked stable housing, and faced periods without income or access to services.
5. Company stores and labour contractors extracted earnings. Fees, transport, inflated prices, and wage deductions reduced the value of already low pay.
6. The Bracero Program institutionalized temporary labour. Contracts promised wages, housing, food, and return transport but placed workers' legal status under employer influence.
7. The ten-percent savings deduction became a major injustice. Funds withheld from bracero wages for return to Mexico were often inaccessible, producing decades of claims.
8. Bracero labour affected domestic workers. Growers could use a controlled temporary workforce to weaken bargaining by Mexican American and other farm labourers.
9. The programme's end changed organizing conditions. After 1964, union campaigns faced less competition from a large federally managed labour stream, though unauthorized recruitment continued.
10. The Delano strike began among Filipino workers. Members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee walked out in 1965 before the National Farm Workers Association joined.
11. Mexican and Filipino solidarity strengthened the strike. Cross-ethnic cooperation prevented growers from replacing one workforce with another.
12. César Chávez emphasized disciplined organization. The farmworkers movement combined strikes, marches, fasting, boycotts, union contracts, and moral appeals.
13. Dolores Huerta led negotiation and mobilization. Her work in organising, contracts, lobbying, and the grape boycott was central to union strategy.
14. The national grape boycott shifted pressure to consumers. Urban supporters, churches, students, and unions made local labour conditions a national economic issue.
15. The 1966 march to Sacramento built visibility. Workers linked Delano with the state capital through pilgrimage, religious symbolism, and public demands.
16. Union contracts delivered concrete gains. Selected agreements improved wages, toilets, water, pesticide protections, hiring arrangements, and grievance procedures.
17. California's 1975 labour law created elections. The Agricultural Labor Relations Act established collective-bargaining rights and a board for farmworkers.
18. Mechanization altered bargaining power. Machinery reduced demand for some crops and tasks, while hand-harvested sectors still relied on large seasonal workforces.
19. Pesticide exposure became a health issue. Workers and families faced chemicals in fields, air, water, clothing, and housing with limited employer accountability.
20. Urban Mexican Americans faced job segregation. They were concentrated in lower-paid manufacturing, service, construction, and public-sector positions despite wartime and postwar growth.
21. Defence industries opened and closed opportunities. World War II created jobs, while postwar layoffs and seniority rules could displace workers who had entered recently.
22. Unions offered mixed protection. Industrial organization improved wages for some, but craft exclusions, discrimination, and weak attention to Spanish-speaking workers persisted.
23. Educational inequality restricted earnings. Segregated schools, tracking, dropout pressure, and limited college access reproduced occupational disadvantage.
24. The East Los Angeles walkouts targeted economic futures. Students understood that low expectations and vocational channeling would limit employment, income, and political influence.
25. The GI Bill offered uneven mobility. Veterans used education and housing benefits, but discrimination by institutions and local administrators reduced access.
26. Housing segregation constrained wealth. Covenants, redlining, lending discrimination, and unequal services limited home ownership and appreciation.
27. Urban renewal displaced barrios. Highways, civic projects, and redevelopment removed homes and businesses while compensation and replacement were often inadequate.
28. Small businesses supported community autonomy. Grocers, restaurants, newspapers, legal offices, and service firms created employment and financed political activity.
29. Access to capital remained unequal. Banks and investors treated Latino neighbourhoods as higher risk, limiting mortgages, business credit, and expansion.
30. Operation Wetback protected employer flexibility more than workers. Enforcement removed migrants while continuing labour demand encouraged new recruitment, producing insecurity rather than a stable legal market.
31. The Chicano movement demanded institutional hiring. Campaigns targeted schools, government, universities, media, and companies for representation and promotion.
32. Affirmative action widened selected opportunities. Public employment and higher education created a larger professional class while generating legal and political backlash.
33. The oil and construction economies affected regional mobility. Booms created better-paid work in Texas and the Southwest, but downturns and subcontracting preserved volatility.
34. Immigration status shaped bargaining power. Fear of dismissal or deportation made workers less able to report wage theft, unsafe conditions, or harassment.
35. Economic factors linked labour with civil rights. Farmwork, education, housing, migration, credit, and public employment showed that cultural recognition without material power would remain incomplete.

Evidence and analytical judgement

1. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 transferred territory to the United States while promising rights that Mexican residents often struggled to enforce.
2. Segregated schools and facilities treated Mexican Americans as a subordinate racial group despite formal citizenship.
3. Mendez v. Westminster in 1947 exposed educational segregation in California and helped build a legal tradition of resistance.
4. The Community Service Organization founded in 1947 trained local organizers and used voter registration to build civic power.
5. The American G.I. Forum founded in 1948 challenged discrimination against Mexican American veterans and their families.
6. The Bracero Program from 1942 to 1964 supplied employers with temporary labour while weakening farmworkers' bargaining power.
7. Operation Wetback in 1954 used mass deportation and coercive enforcement against Mexican communities.
8. Low farm wages, poor housing, pesticide exposure, and insecure employment created shared economic grievances.
9. The end of the Bracero Program in 1964 reduced one barrier to farmworker organization.
10. The Black freedom struggle supplied tactical examples in boycotts, litigation, direct action, and cultural pride.
11. The Delano grape strike beginning in 1965 connected workplace grievances with a wider movement for dignity.
    1. This establishes the legal baseline for the article's judgement.
12. Mexican American soldiers suffered disproportionate casualties in Vietnam, strengthening anti-war mobilization.
    1. The evidence links local pressure to a broader institutional response.
13. East Los Angeles schools had overcrowding, high dropout rates, limited counselling, and curricula that marginalized Mexican American history.
    1. Its significance lies in the gap between formal change and implementation.
14. Reies López Tijerina connected New Mexico land-grant disputes to older claims of dispossession.
    1. This example shows how organization converted grievance into public leverage.
15. The Plan Espiritual de Aztlán in 1969 linked cultural nationalism with self-determination and community control.
    1. The result reveals both an achievement and a limit of the movement.
16. Activists reclaimed the term Chicano as a political identity that rejected pressure to assimilate.
    1. The case connects leadership choices with structural conditions.
17. Urban growth created large Mexican American communities able to sustain student, electoral, and cultural organizations.
    1. This development changed the available methods of political action.
18. Police violence and discriminatory law enforcement made state power a direct movement grievance.
    1. The evidence helps separate immediate impact from long-term transformation.
19. Spanish-language and bilingual newspapers circulated information that mainstream media often ignored.
    1. Its effects differed by class, gender, location, and access to institutions.
20. A large young population helped make high schools and universities centres of movement recruitment.
    1. The example tests whether national reform altered everyday experience.