Our History

 On a cold and rainy Sunday in February 1929, a group of Latino men in dapper suits and boater hats gathered in a convention hall in Corpus Christi, Texas, to forge a new Latino civil rights group. Most of the men, about 175 in total, were Mexican American veterans of World War I. They had returned home a decade earlier to a small but thriving Hispanic middle class in South Texas, where they had helped form three of the most prominent civil rights organizations in the region. Now the men were merging their groups to form the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, in hopes of better leveraging their resources to combat racism and to elect political leaders who represented their families and interests. These were radical notions. At the time, Jim Crow laws were in effect, poll taxes kept many Black and Mexican American voters from the ballot box and some restaurants hung signs outside their doors barring the entrance of dogs and Mexicans.

Benjamin Márquez, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wrote a book tracing LULAC’s history, said that while our members had never rejected their Mexican or Latino heritage, we had remained consistent in our American loyalty, regardless of whether the LULAC National President was a Republican or a Democrat. LULAC still marks its reverence for the United States in its emblem, a three-point crest with red and white stripes and 13 stars representing each of the original colonies. Our councils recite a prayer by George Washington to open all of their meetings, asking God to protect the United States and bless it “with honorable industry, sound learning and pure manners.”