Before Heman Sweatt, an African-American from Houston, won his lawsuit to attend the University of Texas School of Law, Carlos Cadena, a Mexican-American from San Antonio, was among its brightest students. Cadena graduated summa cum laude from the law school in 1940, a decade before Sweatt’s lawsuit forced UT to open its graduate and professional programs to Blacks.
Unlike African-Americans, Mexican-Americans have been able to attend the university since it was founded in 1883. Though they were treated like second-class citizens in Texas, they were considered White under state law.
The different legacies of Blacks and Latinos at UT provide a window into Texas’ complex racial history as the U.S. Supreme Court considers the Fisher v. the University of Texas affirmative action case. The court will decide whether the university’s admission policy discriminates against Whites. But more than a century ago, when the Texas Constitution of 1876 created UT (“a university of the first class”), only Whites could attend the university. A separate university was to be created for “coloreds.”
It’s important to understand the different histories of Blacks and Mexican-Americans at the state’s flagship university, says Dr. Rodolfo O. de la Garza, a political science professor at Columbia University and former professor at UT.
“What it really illustrates is the most powerful difference between being Black and Mexican in Texas,” de la Garza says. “The Black experience was uniform. It didn’t matter what you were if you were Black. That isn’t true for Mexicans. If you were affluent, you were treated differently, you thought of yourself differently.”
“Within a year of it opening, there were Mexican-American students from Laredo at UT,” says de la Garza. “But they were essentially from Laredo’s elite families. … There was a section of South Texas that survived [with land and wealth] during the worst days of Mexican discrimination.”
Dr. Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, the Ellen Clayton Garwood Professor of Creative Writing at UT and an acclaimed novelist, received his bachelor’s degree from the university in 1953 — a year before Brown v. Board of Education desegregated undergraduate programs at the university. Theophilus Painter, the defendant in Sweatt v. Painter, was the president of UT.
