(Photo : blc.edu (Bethany Lutheran College))


The swelling victimhood politics, as well as the so-called "identitarian" division of America, did not appear naturally or unavoidably, as a lot of people believe. Neither are there practices that lead to minorities' uncontrollable demands for recognition, or past mistakes, as today's generation is repetitively told.

The pieces of information are myths which activists, philanthropists, and intellectuals spread. They deliberately set out, beginning in the middle of the century to redefine America.

The goal of these groups was mass recruitments for political ends, and among their earliest targets was the community of the Mexican-Americans. The activists attempted decisively to turn this community's Americans (most of them residing in the Southwestern states) contrary to their citizens, instilling in them to first consider themselves as a racial minority, then, as the center of the pan-cultural Hispanics group, an invented term without any basis in culture, race or ethnicity.

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Mexican-Americans Traditionally Seeing Themselves as White

This conversion took initiative as a lot of Mexican-Americans had customarily seen themselves as whites. When the Mexican-American was classified by the 1930 Census as a race, the community leaders strongly protested and changed the classification back to white immediately in the next census.

Meanwhile, the most prominent organization of the Mexican-Americans during that time, the pro-assimilationist, patriotic League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) protested that the Mexicans' declassifying as white, had been a try to discriminate between themselves as the Mexicans, and the other white race's members, when, in reality, the fact that we're not just part and parcel, but the sum and substance too.

In addition, tracking their descent partly, to the Spanish who colonized the Central and South America, they considered themselves as the white Europeans' offshoots.

After half-a-century, a lot of Mexican-Americans had been convinced of a pretty much different origin story. Among the major persuaders was the 50s and 60s head of the Public Affairs Program at the wealthy Ford Foundation, Paul Ylvisaker.

He may have not been known that much today, but Ylvisaker exerted grate influence and power during his time, to advance a specific social justice vision, partially inspired by socialism, as well as its resentment politics.

He hoped as he wrote in an essay in 1991, entitled The Future of Hispanic Nonprofits that the Mexican-Americans could be formed into one solid front. 

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Seeing Philanthropy as the Social Change's 'Passing Gear'

Ylvisaker, envisioned philanthropy as the Social Change's "passing gear," set off to discover if something akin was probable with the Mexican-Americans. In the late 60s, he spent over two million dollars in seed funding to back the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a nationwide advocacy conglomerate with a still-existing headquarters in Los Angeles.

Looking back, in 1964, Ylvisaker handed a then ample amount of $647,999 to UCLA researchers for a thorough survey of the Mexican-Americans in the southwest.

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And, among the things he wanted for the survey to discover was, "in what respect the experience of the Mexican-Americans was similar to the present time's Negroes."

Political scientist Peter Skerry from Boston College explained this particular movement in his book, Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority which was published in 1993.

In this book Skerry wrote, the idea was to persuade people, who like blacks Mexican-Americans are composed of a group of racial minorities.

The concept doesn't pose any problem for the "ideology-oriented Chicano protesters" who perceive the world around them, in such terms.