From Chapter 1 In the early 1950s, the esteemed University of Texas at Austin social scientist George I. Sánchez wrote to a young scholar to warn him that a pan-ethnic identity group for Americans with Latin American roots made no sense. The professor did not mince words: "For gosh sakes, don''t characterize the Spanish-American with what is obviously true of the human race, and then imply, by commission or omission, that his characteristics are peculiarly his and, of course, radically different from those of the ''Anglos''!" He enumerated further objections: "We insist that ''Latin American'' (''Spanish-American,'' ''MexicanAmerican,'' etc.) has no precise meaning nor does the term connote generalized cultural attributes. We say that, for convenience, all non-Latins are to be called ''Anglos'' (Germans, Italians, Jews, Catholics, Baptists, hill-billies, Bostonians, poor whites, Texans, Minnesotans, ad infinitum) have a precisely defined common culture whose features can be correlated with the non-existent (or, at best, undefined) features of the Latin ''culture.''!!!!" The recipient of this letter was Julian Samora. What had occasioned Sánchez''s letter was a paper by Samora on a Colorado health-care program for "Spanish Americans." As quoted by Benjamin Francis-Fallon, Sánchez went on: "The time orientation of a ''poor white'' is no different from that of a poor Negro or of a poor Spanish.

Neither can provide for the future; each has to live for the present; after laboring for 14 hours a day, none of them has the energy or interest or curiosity to go to PTA''s or to Association meetings. You wouldn''t either, nor would I--nor would Abraham Lincoln!" Sánchez belonged to that generation of Mexican Americans that still believed that individual effort would lead to prosperity and assimilation. As Francis-Fallon puts it: "Material improvements in jobs, housing, and schools would not only allow them to live better but would reveal their fundamental similarity with other Americans." Sánchez''s concerns were with obstacles to individual improvement. Sánchez criticized the notion that Mexicans were a race and even more vehemently rejected the attempt to create a pan-ethnic group out of people with origins in various Spanish-speaking countries. Not only did this not make sense to him, but it stood in the way of the emphasis on individual agency. In an earlier letter to Samora, Sánchez urged him to consider that "the characteristics that distinguish the Spanish-speaking group in any part of the United States are much less ethnic than they are socio-economic." He also sent Samora a review he had written of a book about Spanish-speaking Americans, in which, as Francis-Fallon notes, "Sánchez cast doubt on the entire concept of such a book.

It ''takes a veritable shotgun wedding to make Puerto Ricans, Spanish-Mexicans, and Filipinos appear to be culturally homogeneous,'' he wrote." Sánchez remained constant in this view. A decade later, in 1963, after the influx of Cubans escaping Fidel Castro''s communist takeover of the island nation, he wrote, Spanish-speaking Americans "are just too many different peoples to be adequately covered under one umbrella. While they could be called, loosely, ''Americans who speak Spanish'' they would have to be treated in separate categories--for, by way of illustration, though a Cuban in Florida and a Mexican in Laredo both speak Spanish, they really have little else in common (even though both may be aliens or citizens, or a combination)." Historical Fault Line Samora, however, persisted in his belief that a collectivity was needed. Both men are towering figures in the history of the Mexican American evolution in the twentieth century, and this early clash of views represents an ideological divide of historic proportions. In Sánchez, we see the emphasis on individual agency and the strong belief in the goal of becoming part of the American mainstream; in Samora, we see the emerging rejection of this view in favor of a collectivist, ethnic identity-based category to lift a "subjugated" people out of their plight. This category would need official and legal recognition by the federal government.

Samora became a leader for members of the new generation. The Census Bureau in 2018 put the number of Mexican Americans at close to thirty-seven million, or just over 11 percent of the US population. Mexican Americans, as the earliest sizable group of Spanish speaking people to live in the United States, form the nucleus of the group that came to be called Hispanic, and any analysis of this group must therefore start with them. The creation of "Hispanics," moreover, was an early cornerstone of the identity politics edifice, which is all the more reason to begin at the beginning. The Hispanic collective was created, to put it simply, to give the leaders of then-emerging Mexican American-identity organizations a measure of political clout and federal funding. Many of the activists and elites who conjured up the collective were, indeed, transparent about this. Before Antonio Gramsci made his observations about the inability of the proletariat to overthrow an existing system, Marxists had thought that the members of the working class would rise up. Their analysis was color-blind; the proletariat was an economic class made up of all races.

The problem, as Gramsci, and later Herbert Marcuse, came to see it, was that too many proletarians reasoned like Sánchez and believed in their ability to improve their individual lot; they believed that personal striving would allow them in time to overcome barriers and join the mainstream. Samora was deaf to Sánchez but attuned to Gramsci and Marcuse. Recognized today as the founder of Hispanic ethnic studies, Samora in 1967 cofounded an ethnic identity organization, the Southwest Council of La Raza, which went national in 1973, changing its name to the National Council of La Raza. La Raza was devoted to that "shotgun wedding" that Sánchez had warned about, and for the past half century it has been at the forefront of the effort to implant identity politics in the educational system, corporate America, and government. It continues this work under its new name, UnidosUS. Its original goal was precisely to eliminate the "false consciousness" that Gramsci had derided: the belief in individual agency. To the followers of Gramsci, assimilation was the height of false consciousness. Samora used key positions he held to make Mexican Americans a racial group apart from the mainstream.

He and his colleagues in this project then did the same with the larger group, Hispanics. They persuaded wealthy donors and federal officials to regard Hispanics, whether individuals whose ancestors had arrived in the United States a century ago or had themselves arrived one year earlier, as an oppressed group that could succeed only by acting as a racial collective. In the process, they altered the American social order, perhaps permanently. In addition to his role as La Raza leader, he was also appointed to the Census Bureau''s first Advisory Committee on the Spanish Origin Population for the 1980 Census, the first census to include the panethnic categories, and held top positions in universities. From these lofty perches in nonprofit advocacy, the academy, and the federal bureaucracy, he wielded great authority. Samora''s personal experience with discrimination had a great impact on his thinking, something with which we can''t help but empathize. "I tried to be equal to, and as good as, the Anglos. I wanted to make as much money, speak as well, and have all the goodies as the dominant society.

But no matter what I did, I was always a ''Mexican,''" he once said, as quoted by his daughter, Carmen Samora. He had struggled with abject poverty, fatherlessness, and intense discrimination while growing up in Colorado. An episode that must have particularly stung occurred while he was in college, when he ran for class president. His own roommate voted against him, telling Samora he could not bring himself to vote for a Mexican. Seen another way, however, his personal story also proves that Mexican Americans could indeed surmount barriers through individual striving. Samora earned a PhD in sociology and anthropology at a major university, Washington University in St. Louis. He later founded the Mexican American Graduate Studies program at the University of Notre Dame.

This last achievement came courtesy of a grant from the Ford Foundation, which in the late 1960s was already in the midst of a spending spree aimed at bolstering what the foundation was calling "group identity." Chapter 6 delves further into this endeavor, but suffice it to say here that Samora''s founding of the program at Notre Dame represents a personal victory over adversity by a man who grew up in poverty and suffered from discrimination. It is worth noting that George Sánchez also faced discrimination. After lobbying to improve the education of New Mexico''s rural, poor, Spanish-speaking population, which put him at odds with the governor, he and his family required police protection, and Sánchez started carrying a gun. At one point he found a pipe bomb outside their home. Sánchez and Samora may have had the experience of discrimination in common, but they took sharply different approaches to how to overcome it and to questions of ethnicity. Samora drank deeply from the well of German philosophies brought over during and after World War II. The language of "dominant" and "subservient," or "subordinate," groups, integral to critical theory and the Frankfurt School (covered in more detail in chapter 5) pervades Samora''s academic work.

His dissertation, titled "Minority Leadership in a Bi-Cultural Community," quotes the German-born American s.