http://diverseeducation.com/article/49806/
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Plessy v. Ferguson is the best treatment of how arbitrary racial classification can be,” he says, referring to the 1896 Supreme Court case that upheld state segregation laws. Homer Plessy was one-eighth Black, enough to be classified as Black under Louisiana law.
“As a matter of fact, [how to determine racial classification] came up in the
Fisher argument. The chief justice said, ‘Suppose you have someone who is one-eighth Hispanic. What is that person supposed to check?’ We are still living with the ambiguities of [racial definition] and it kind of confuses any investigation into the issue,” Lavergne says.
The point is particularly relevant to Mexican-Americans in Texas, who became White by virtue of citizenship, first when the Republic of Texas was founded in 1836 and later when Mexico lost a swath of its territory in a war with the U.S. in 1848.
“The Supreme Court ruled that non-Whites couldn’t be citizens, but by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, [Mexicans] were White,” Lavergne says, because they were granted citizenship under the peace agreement. At that time, citizenship was synonymous with being White.
The Mexicans who now found themselves under U.S. rule were told they could keep their property, but over time, historians say many lost their land because of discriminatory laws and legal challenges to ownership. The treaty stripped American Indians of the citizenship they had under Mexican law. Life for Blacks didn’t change much, though. More than a decade earlier, the 1836 Republic of Texas Constitution, written following independence from Mexico, repealed Mexico’s anti-slavery laws and enslaved once-free Blacks.
Although Mexican-Americans were considered White, they were subject to Jim Crow-style treatment. The state’s public education system was segregated, with Mexican-Americans attending schools, in most cases, with other Mexican-Americans. The state approved separate schools for Blacks.
One of the most important legal victories for Mexican-Americans in Texas was in 1954:
Hernandez v. Texas. The case was decided two weeks before
Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional. Hernandez successfully challenged practices that routinely excluded Mexican-Americans from state juries, preventing them from being tried by a jury of their peers. The argument hung on this line argument: Although they were legally considered White, Mexican-Americans were treated as “a class apart.” That is, they did not fit into a legal structure that was focused on Black and White. Therefore, the lawyers argued, Mexican-Americans should be protected by the 14th Amendment, as Blacks were.
The lawyers who brought the case to the Supreme Court were Mexican-American graduates of the UT law school: Carlos Cadena, Gus Garcia and James DeAnda. Cadena and DeAnda later were among the founders of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF).
Nationally, the
Hernandez decision was eclipsed by the
Brown decision. “Our Constitution, our institutions were designed to exclude Blacks. Mexicans weren’t part of the ballgame,” de la Garza says, explaining why
Brown was the more prominent case. “They were a tiny population [then].”
But in Texas, both legal cases mattered, and still matter today. They capture the distinct legacies of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans at UT.
for illegals( got the nerve to be calling them Dreamers when Black Americans educated or not are constistently the last hired , first fired) are the real super c00ns 
r u fukkin serious, college is not the reason. Especially as there is still more blacks in college than "Hispanics"
