Through the dedicated intervention of LULAC and other Mexican American activist groups, the understanding of civil rights in America was vastly expanded in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mexican Americans gained federal remedies for discrimination based not simply on racial but also on cultural and linguistic disadvantages.
Generally considered one of the more conservative ethnic political organizations, LULAC had traditionally espoused nonconfrontational tactics and had insisted on the identification of Mexican Americans as "white." But by 1966, the changing civil rights environment,...