Some are Born White, Some Achieve Whiteness, and Some Have Whiteness Thrust upon Them

This paper examines the problem of the racial and ethnic classification of Mexican Americans, and later, Hispanics, in terms of both self-and official identification, during the quartercentury after Hernandez v. Texas.The Hernandez case was the landmark 1954 decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court condemned the "systematic exclusion of persons of Mexican descent" from state jury pools. 1 Instead of reviewing the judicial rulings in civil rights cases, what follows focuses on efforts by federal judges in the Southern District of Texas to justify their jury selection practices to administrators charged with monitoring the application of various equal protection rules coming into force in the late 1970s.This topic arises from two curious coincidences.First, in the spring of 1979, James DeAndawho had helped prepare the Hernandez case, and who was plaintiffs' attorney in another landmark to be described below, Cisneros v. Corpus Christi Independent School Districtwas nominated to a judgeship in the Southern District of Texas.He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate twenty-five years and one-week after the Court issued its ruling in Hernandez.Progress had been slow, as DeAnda became only the nation's second Mexican American federal trial judge.He was sworn in by the first, Chief Judge Reynaldo Garza, who had served since 1961.Judge Garza would soon accept an appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where he would also be breaking new ground for Mexican Americans

Bureaucracy · Political science · Politics · Racial politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Law, Rights, and Freedoms · Legal Systems and Judicial Processes · Public Administration