Barrio Tomás
| 👨🔧 | |
| Era | The Fifties |
|---|---|
| Age | 42-49 |
| Home | San Antonio, TX |
| Demographic | Mexican-American, working-class, laborer |
| Lean | labour_left |
| Race | hispanic |
Tomás is a labourer in San Antonio and a member of LULAC. He is the only Mexican-American in the cast and represents the Texas working class, which votes Democratic but is shut out of voting by the poll tax.
Who they stand for
Tomás stands for Mexican-Americans in Texas, who lived under a form of segregation that the law rarely acknowledged. They attended separate schools, were refused service at some restaurants, and were kept from voting by a poll tax. The 1950s were the decade their own organisations, including LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens, first won cases in court. The 1948 case Delgado v. Bastrop ordered Texas schools to stop segregating Mexican-American children. The American GI Forum became a political force in 1949 after a funeral home in Three Rivers, Texas, refused to hold a wake for a Mexican-American soldier killed in the war. The 1954 case Hernandez v. Texas, argued by LULAC's lawyers, won Mexican-Americans Fourteenth Amendment protection two weeks before Brown v. Board of Education. Against these gains stood the Bracero Program, which growers used to hold down wages, and Operation Wetback, the 1954 deportation drive that swept up American citizens with undocumented immigrants. Those who could pay the poll tax generally voted Democratic, and the Viva Kennedy clubs helped John F. Kennedy carry Texas in 1960, but the Texas Democratic Party was also the party of the poll tax and the growers.
Playing to them
Tomás responds to measures that specifically address Mexican-Americans. These include federal action against the poll tax, enforcement of school desegregation rulings in Texas, a minimum wage and union rights for cannery and field workers, and regulation of the Bracero Program so that it cannot be used to break a strike. He watches whether a president's civil rights statements include Mexican-Americans or stop at the Black-white colour line, and a president who treats the Southwest only as a source of cheap labour, rather than as a constituency, loses his support. Deportation sweeps that catch American citizens along with undocumented immigrants are unforgivable to him, as is a president who wins Texas by siding with the growers. His trust is provisional, so promises count for less with him than they do with Northern union members, who have a longer history with the party.
The measures that win Tomás's support also win the support of Delta Pearl and South Side Marcus, and they cost the support of Dixiecrat Dale and Minute Women Vivian outright. The labour protections cost the support of Texas Oil Tex. Enforcing school desegregation in Texas unsettles GI-Bill Buddy and Cannery Carl.
Where they live
The five states where Barrio Tomás makes up the largest share of the electorate in the fifties:
- New Mexico
- Arizona
- California
- Texas
- Nevada