preview

The Latino Journey in the United States: Immigrants Essay

Better Essays

A diverse minority group of Latino and Spanish-speaking peoples has played an important part of what it means to be American and what it means to be a citizen in the United States today. Moving into the future, in order to analyze the trajectory that this group is in, we must first understand the group’s history in the United States and in territories that would become the United States. In addition, we must look at the origins of the most recent wave of Latino immigration in order to understand their current effect on American society and the intersection between both minority and majority groups. Finally, we get to the apex of this investigation: what lies in the future for Latino Americans in the United States? Although Latino …show more content…

The main difference was that LULAC relied on a strategy of “passing,” as white or European, because with lighter complexions and Americanization came better access to jobs and mainstream social acceptance (Ruiz 667). By 1939, activists like Blanca Rosa Rodriguez de Leon better known as Luisa Moreno (instead of Blanca Rosa, which means white rose, she changed her name to Luisa, perhaps in honor of Luisa Capetillo and “Moreno,” which is a term in Spanish used to refer to darker skin complexions), along with other activists like Josefina Fierro, Eduardo Quevedo and Bert Corona helped establish the first national Latino civil rights conference, El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española who worked to end segregation in public facilities, housing, education, and employment (Ruiz 667). They also worked with universities to create Latino studies departments in order to advocate the preservation of Latino cultures, rather than assimilation (Ruiz 668). These organizations helped some of the nearly five hundred thousand Latino-American veterans that returned from World War II. Later they worked to end segregation in various facets of life for Latino-Americans’ like in court cases Mendez v. Westminster (1947) and Perez v. Sharp (1948), which ended

Get Access