Long before the Chicano Movement of the 1960s, Mexican American families were already fighting for their place in America.
Roots of Resistance, the first book of the Chicano Civil Rights series, follows them from the 1920s through World War II. Mexican workers were recruited to build the railroads and harvest the crops of the Southwest. Then, when the Great Depression struck, they were blamed and sent away. In the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of people were pressured or forced to leave for Mexico, and many of them were U.S. citizens, most of them children. Banks and federal housing rules kept families out of homes, and schools trained their children for the fields and factories instead of for college.
When war came, hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans served their country. At home, their younger brothers were targeted. On a single night in August 1942, after a young man's death near a reservoir called Sleepy Lagoon, police rounded up about 600 young Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. Henry "Hank" Leyvas and his friends were convicted in a mass trial marked by prejudice. A coalition of families, lawyers, labor activists, and artists fought back, and in 1944 an appeals court threw out the convictions. In June 1943, servicemen attacked young Mexican Americans across Los Angeles in what became known as the Zoot Suit Riots.
Inside you'll find:
- The 1931 raid at La Placita and the repatriation trains out of Los Angeles
- The authors' own family story of repatriation
- The Lemon Grove case, one of the first successful school desegregation lawsuits in the U.S.
- Redlining, restrictive covenants, and the bank lending rules that kept families from owning homes
- The great strikes of the 1930s, from the El Monte berry fields and the San Joaquin cotton strike to Emma Tenayuca's pecan shellers and the Flint sit-down strike
- Mexican American service in World War II, the Bracero Program, and the incarceration of Japanese Americans
- The Sleepy Lagoon case, the Defense Committee, and the 1944 appeal
- The Zoot Suit Riots and the returning veterans who launched the next fight for equal citizenship
Carefully researched and clearly written, Roots of Resistance shows how a generation that endured depression, deportation, war, and prejudice laid the foundation for the Chicano Movement.