Elites relied on more than skin color, hair texture, or other physical qualities to define race. Employment, attitudes towards the black Civil Rights Movement and views of American capitalism often played a surprising role in any demographic group’s classification.  The resulting definitions of race proved contradictory and rarely convincing.   

White identity became particularly problematic for two Dallas groups: Jews and Mexican Americans.  Jews faced doubts concerning their white status because of their religious beliefs, their “Asian” origins and because of uncertainty over Jewish attitudes towards desegregation.  Mexican Americans found themselves outside of the ruling racial caste not just because of the longstanding Anglo hostility towards Mexico’s Spanish and Indian heritage.  The legacy of Anglo-Mexican warfare since the Texas War of Independence in 1835-1836, and the working class status of most of the city’s Mexican residents, placed Dallas’ Latinos in an uncomfortable racial twilight between white and black extremes.

Shortly after World War II, Jewish and Mexican American leaders fought a pitched battle to be considered white by ruling Gentile Anglos, but achieved uneven results.  The 1950s would mark one of the most anti-Semitic periods in Dallas history, as concerns over Jewish identity entangled with political battles over desegregation and McCarthyism.  Meanwhile, Mexican American elites in groups such as LULAC tried to win acceptance as part of the white community even as recurring waves of new, Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants made this task more difficult. 

This talk, drawn from Dr. Phillips’ book White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001 (published this January by the University of Texas Press), examines Jewish religious leaders and department store owners, Mexican American civil rights workers and journalists, as well as segregationists in both communities.  The stories of these individuals illustrate the multiple strategies Jews and Mexicans pursued to not just battle racism but to achieve a significant voice in politics.  Ultimately, Jews and Latinos would end in very different places in the city’s power structure, though the most influential members of either group encountered a glass ceiling in reaching for the top.