Here’s an article from the San Antonio Express-News on a film that documents a landmark Texas civil rights case that has usually gone unnoticed, Hernandez v. Texas. The documentary airs on Monday on PBS.
By Elaine Ayala – Express-News
It started as an open-and-shut, small-town Texas murder.Pete Hernández, a field hand in Edna, shot his employer Joe Espinosa after a heated argument. It was 1951.
Three years later, Hernández vs. Texas ended in the U.S. Supreme Court, where Hernández’s lawyers proved that his 14th Amendment rights were violated because he was denied a jury of his peers. It was the first case ever argued by Mexican American litigators before the high court, and experts call it one of the most important of the Mexican American civil rights movement.
“A Class Apart,” a new documentary by filmmakers Carlos Sandoval and Peter Miller, explores the compelling characters and legal issues involved in Hernández vs. Texas.
The story is told in the context of its time, when Jim Crow-style laws ruled every part of South Texas life.
The hourlong film airs at 9 p.m. Monday on PBS. Edward James Olmos narrates.
Sandoval, a former attorney who studied constitutional law, had never heard of the case before reading about it in the New York Times in 2004. As he rode the subway, he realized it was a chapter of U.S. history ripe for the telling.
Sandoval says he saw an opportunity to tell an important untold story. That was a key ingredient for Miller, as well.
“I never knew of the bigotry and discrimination meted out here against Mexican Americans,” Miller said. “It was not part of my education. The story had to be told.”
The story also had the benefit of fascinating characters, starting with the killer and his victim — both of whose descendants appear in the film — and Hernández’s lawyers.
They included a charismatic yet dark figure in attorney Gus Garcia, whose demise is foreshadowed in the film, and the bookish, scholarly Carlos Cadena, who would later sit on the bench himself and have a Bexar County courthouse named for him. Some of their relatives appear in the film, too.
‘White but not equal’
Though the case has remained little known or little taught, it left deep imprints, diversifying juries that had, until then, systematically excluded Latinos. It’s also credited for expanding coverage of the 14th Amendment to women.Filmmakers knew early that the case would allow for an examination of racism in South Texas, but even they were shocked by its severity.
“I grew up in the ’50s in Southern California and was exposed to the tail end of it,” Sandoval said, “I didn’t realize the deep extent of it.”
In Edna, — about 110 miles southeast of San Antonio — and throughout the Southwestern United States, Mexican Americans were labeled “white” by law.
But they were treated quite differently, as “A Class Apart” depicts.
In fact, they had to drink out of separate water fountains and sit in theater balconies. They couldn’t buy property in white neighborhoods and were buried in segregated cemeteries.
Mexican American children went to dilapidated “Mexican schools.” They were, in all areas, second-class citizens.
That extended to the judicial system.
Though Hernández’s guilt was never in doubt, attorneys Garcia and Cadena took the case as a constitutional challenge. A Mexican American had not served on a Jackson County jury for more than 25 years, or more than 6,000 trials, Sandoval said.
Along with other Mexican American lawyers from San Antonio and Houston, including James de Anda, Chris Alderete and John Jay Herrera, Garcia and Cadena argued their client was denied his right to a jury of his peers.
The film shows that many Mexican American attorneys at the time were looking for cases that would promote the cause of Mexican American rights.
In Hernández, the film says these attorneys had a willing guinea pig. But it also says theirs was a risky legal strategy. Hernández had received a life sentence but might get the death penalty on appeal.
While prosecutors argued Hernández was “white,” thus not subject to discrimination, his lawyers argued he was not “white,” but “a class apart.” In the film, they say Mexican Americans were categorized as white only when convenient for Anglo society.
The documentary includes archival photographs of restaurants openly displaying signs that read, “No Spanish or Mexicans” allowed.
“What was at question here was ultimately, ‘Were Mexican Americans white? What were we?’ ” Sandoval said.
To find out why Mexican Americans were labeled “white,” you have to go back to the Mexican American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, says Brigham Young University professor Ignacio M. Garcia. His new book “White But Not Equal: Mexican Americans, Jury Discrimination and the Supreme Court” also examines the Hernández case.
When half of Mexico became U.S. land, people who were Mexican citizens became U.S. citizens, seemingly overnight. That, Garcia says, posed a dilemma for U.S. law, which prohibited non-whites from lawfully immigrating and becoming naturalized citizens.
So, over and over, throughout the early part of the 20th century, courts deemed Mexican Americans “white,” says Garcia, who graduated from Lanier High School in San Antonio.
“They become white by law,” he says. “They weren’t perceived or treated as white, but the law said they were white.”
The road to Washington
Post-World War II groups such as LULAC and the American G.I. Forum and their lawyers were at work fighting discrimination and looking for cases that would challenge law, set precedent and bring change to millions of Mexican Americans.
“The issue of jury discrimination was a big issue among Mexican American lawyers at the time,” Garcia said. “It was in the air.”
Attorney Gus Garcia, with his movie-star good looks and ability to hold an audience, was the case’s spokesman. Though he is described as brilliant, the film also depicts how his alcoholism endangered the case right up until its court date.
The film also offers a glimpse at how his life would spiral out of control in the years ahead.
In Washington, Cadena took charge, but Garcia was sobered by questions the justices had for the legal team.
Among them were, “Do Mexican Americans speak English?” and “Are Mexican Americans citizens?” One justice referred to Mexican Americans as “greasers.”
The filmmakers said they were astonished that even highly educated Supreme Court justices asked such ignorant questions. But that proved one of their premises.
“So much of the way the country’s history has been written is in terms of north-south, and as a result of that, black-white,” Sandoval said. “Stories from outside that axis, or the power center, just have not been recognized. They aren’t part of the nation’s consciousness.”
In Earl Warren — a Californian and the court’s new chief justice — lawyers had someone who was more knowledgeable about people of color.
Warren even allowed Hernández’s legal team to speak 16 minutes past the court’s infamous red light, which signals when time is up.
Filmmakers say a witness noted that no other lawyer had been afforded extra time, including renowned NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown vs. Board of Education days before and would later sit on the high court.
In the end, the ambitious, underfunded legal team won Pete Hernández a new day in court and changed U.S. jury selection.
A few days after the Hernández ruling was announced, the court also decided Brown vs. Board of Education.
“A Class Apart” argues that its timing forever overshadowed Hernández, keeping history from better recognizing an important civil rights case.
Brigham Young professor Garcia says even the Supreme Court didn’t view the case as important as Brown.
“They didn’t quite believe that Mexican Americans were going to be around as a significant ethnic group,” he said. Latinos “were seen as a group that would fade from a strong identity.”
This is definitely a moment in history that must be taught. Not just because it is part of our judicial history, it’s American history!
Here’s a link to a blog post in the Austin Statesman which features noted political strategist James Aldrete. Here’s a snippet to remember.
At a recent preview screening of the film in Austin, perhaps the most rousing reaction came in a recounting of a line of questioning by the Supreme Court justices, who asked if Mexican Americans could speak English and if they were U.S. citizens.
Indignant, Garcia responded with a terse history lesson: “My people were in Texas a hundred years before Sam Houston, that wetback from Tennessee.”
Finally, here’s the Chron’s Op-Ed by former National Council of La Raza chief Raul Yzaguirre. He gives us some much needed perspective.
The Supreme Court bought that argument, and on May 3, 1954, only two weeks before ruling on Brown v. Board, the justices overturned the lower court rulings and ordered a new trial for Hernandez.
Hernandez was later convicted by a jury of his peers — one that included Mexican-Americans — but the justices’ decision also set a precedent that led to a countless number of successful challenges of employment and housing discrimination, school segregation and voting rights barriers against Mexican- Americans. The case literally helped improve the lives of millions of Latinos nationwide.
On the downside, Hernandez v. Texas established another precedent of sorts: Most court challenges against injustice by Latinos would have to happen without the support of philanthropic foundations, prestigious law schools and law firms, or civic-minded donors. Hernandez v. Texas, for its part, was largely financed by tamale and bake sales and the grass-roots contributions out of pocket from poor field workers and other laborers.
Furthermore, despite its enormous legal significance, Hernandez v. Texas was not meaningfully enforced by the federal government or given much exposure at the time by the news media. Gus Garcia, the brilliant Latino lawyer who argued the case, died…in San Antonio — broke, homeless and forgotten, until now.
In the end, Hernandez v. Texas was about trying to bring justice to a distinct class of multiracial Americans who did not fit neatly into our traditional and rigid black/white paradigm — a people who were and still are “A Class Apart.”
