“The Explosive Ingredients Are Here” Mexican American Municipal Electoral Challenges in South Texas, 1963–1965

Abstract This article examines the unsettled landscape of racial and political relations between and among Mexican Americans and Anglos in South Texas from 1963 to 1965, as liberal Mexican American civil rights activists organized to challenge longstanding Anglo power, driving fear, anger, and backlash among Anglos and exacerbating divisions among Mexican Americans across lines of class and ideology. In three sections, the work investigates a series of threatened, attempted, and successful municipal electoral challenges by Mexican American voters beyond the well-known and widely publicized such event in Crystal City in 1963. In the first section, the study details the embryonic municipal electoral challenges that erupted before and after Crystal City between 1963 and 1965, showing that Mexican American South Texans supported the overthrow of Anglo political domination. In the second, it sketches the responses of Anglos to what they termed “Latin take-overs,” reflecting the erosion of Anglo dominance. In the third, it examines how the electoral challenges mounted by Mexican Americans revealed internecine ideological and class divisions amongst themselves over the most effective ways to challenge racism, demonstrating the conflicts that undermined their efforts and strengthened those of the Anglos. In so doing, the study challenges and revises the historiography of the Crystal City ‘revolt’ and its legacies.