{"id":52080,"date":"2017-03-06T01:33:43","date_gmt":"2017-03-06T01:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=52080"},"modified":"2017-03-06T01:33:43","modified_gmt":"2017-03-06T01:33:43","slug":"the-invention-of-hispanics-created-a-political-force-of-27-million-strong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=52080","title":{"rendered":"The invention of \u2018Hispanics\u2019 created a political force of 27 million\u00a0strong"},"content":{"rendered":"

The invention of \u2018Hispanics\u2019 created a political force of 27 million\u00a0strong<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Timeline<\/a>
\n2017-03-02<\/p>\n

Heather Gilligan<\/strong><\/a>, Senior Editor<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nCesar Chavez<\/a> (left), leader of the National Farm Workers Association<\/a>, stands with a group of striking workers in Delano, California<\/a>, in 1975. (Ted Streshinsky\/Getty Images)<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Before 1970, they were considered white by the government<\/em><\/p>\n

On a California<\/a> morning in 1969, as dawn outlined the nearby mountain ridges in purple, a pickup truck bounced down a dirt road in the Coachella Valley<\/a>, filled with activists urging farmhands still picking grapes to join a statewide strike for higher wages. \u201cThese workers are so afraid of their employers,\u201d labor organizer Dolores Huerta explained to The New York Times<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, on the East Coast, against a backdrop of overcrowded tenements in Spanish Harlem<\/a>, a radical group of 20-something Puerto Ricans protested unsanitary living conditions by blocking Third Avenue<\/a> with a garbage fire. The trash they burned had sat on the curb for days, creating a veritable rat-topia, as garbage trucks rumbled along, cleaning up regularly in richer, whiter neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

Puerto Ricans and Mexicans like these faced many of the same hardships\u2014including the high rates of poverty that went hand in hand with their experience employment discrimination, dilapidated housing, and substandard schools that were ill-equipped to deal with Spanish-speaking students\u2014but what they lacked was a cohesive political identity, an identifiable voting bloc…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before 1970, they were considered white by the government<\/p>\n

On a California morning in 1969, as dawn outlined the nearby mountain ridges in purple, a pickup truck bounced down a dirt road in the Coachella Valley, filled with activists urging farmhands still picking grapes to join a statewide strike for higher wages. \u201cThese workers are so afraid of their employers,\u201d labor organizer Dolores Huerta explained to The New York Times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,14646,8,26,20],"tags":[26329,26328],"class_list":["post-52080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-heather-gilligan","tag-timeline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52080"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52082,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52080\/revisions\/52082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}