The Role Of Discrimination In The United States During The 1960s

INTRO Did Hispanics face discrimination in the United States during the 1960s like African Americans? How did their lives improve with reforms? To begin, the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement is one of the least studied social movements of the 1960s, but is important for Chicano history because the campaign improved a vast amount of issues like farm workers rights, to enhanced education, as well as housing and immigration rights. The movement followed in the footsteps of the African American community which was making strides in the fifties to improve their civil rights. Americans of Mexican descent faced continuous racism and discrimination. Like African Americans in the south, Mexican Americans were met with hostility and violence,
Theresa Anne Case confirms, “Farmworkers labored long hours for wages far below the poverty line, lived in overcrowded makeshift housing, and often lacked access to toilets, running water, refrigeration, and preventative medicine.” This exemplifies the oppression faced by farm workers prior to unionization which proves how Hispanic Americans were treated as inferiors. They fought back at the system in hope of unionizing, obtaining economic stability, and ending inhumane practices used by their employers. César Chávez, a well known leader of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) as well as a farm worker himself since a child, worked to obtain human rights for farm workers in a nonviolent way similar to the black Civil Rights movement. The NFWA participated in boycotts and strikes, typically sacrificing the little they had to support their cause for unionization. “The union paid these workers little—at times, just a few dollars a week. They used their own savings, hitchhiked instead of taking planes or buses, and relied on friends and supporters to provide meals and a place to stay. In most of the cities, sympathetic unions permitted the farm workers to use their offices and telephones” ("To Suffer For Others"). A notable march would be the 300-mile strike from Delano to Sacramento in 1967 which amplified not only labor rights, but also civil rights of Mexican Americans. As a result of the fight of Chávez and the NFWA/UFW, California passed the 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act which was the first law to guarantee justice and protection of agricultural workers. The passing of this act allowed Chicanos to increase their wages through negotiation with employers, aided them with citizenship, and essentially presented them with an occupation which would liberate them and earn them a place in the United