Texas has a long history of anti-Mexican racism. My family lived it

Late in 1945, Frank Macias returned to El Paso, Texas, a hero of the second world war. He’d been in the US army’s 554th anti-aircraft artillery battalion, surviving the allied breakthrough of Operation Cobra and the Battle of the Bulge. He’d suffered the devastation of seeing his childhood friend die by a direct-hit air bomb. At one point, the California native even helped bring down a Nazi plane. But none of that mattered in some parts. Frank’s sister Isabel, who is also my grandmother, still remembers the dissonance when that autumn they walked past a diner display declaring “No Dogs or Mexicans Allowed.” They felt betrayed.

Many Mexican Americans believed life would change in Texas. They had put their lives in danger as a deposit on the long-term investment project known as the American dream. But that didn’t happen, explained Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, the journalism professor who runs the Voces Oral History Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

“That’s what made the 1950s suck [for them], because they came back expecting things were going to be so much better and their people were going to be treated with equality,” she said.