The whiteness of LBJ’s rhetoric: The appointment of Vicente T. Ximenes to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

ABSTRACT

This article presents a racial rhetorical critique of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential rhetoric. Drawing from examinations of drafts, memos, and proclamations, I argue that LBJ in particular and the administration more generally utilized the appointment of Vicente T. Ximenes to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and his naming as the chair of the Inter-Agency Committee on Mexican American Affairs (IACMAA) on June 9, 1967 to reinforce the predominance of the white racial frame in U.S. political life. I highlight how LBJ’s administration relocated “Mexican Americans” politically within his Great Society according to the premises of the white racial frame as Chicana/o movement activism turned toward amplifying separatist, racially charged rhetoric(s). This racially tuned revision of prior rhetorical histories of LBJ’s rhetorics demonstrates how his administration participated in sustaining white supremacy, fashioned a whitened image of “Mexican American” communities capable of flourishing in his “Great Society,” and excluded alternative political forms that challenged the assimilationism typically expected of Latinx communities more generally. I conclude that fomenting the political status of the white racial frame was integral to LBJ’s Great Society rhetoric and to evolutions in Chicana/o activism in the late 1960s.

KEYWORDS:

• Lyndon Baines Johnson
• Mexican Americans
• white racial frame
• Vicente T. Ximenes
• racial rhetorical criticism

Notes

1 Lyndon B. Johnson, “Special Message to the Congress: The American Promise,” Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, March 15, 1965, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/242211.

2 Randall Bennett Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York: Free Press, 2006), 63; Lorena Oropeza, “Mexican Americans,” in A Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson, ed. Mitchell B. Lerner and Mitchell B. Lerner (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 133–34, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444347494.ch8; Robert Dallek, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1908–1960 (Oxford University Press, 1991), 77–80; Julie Leininger Pycior, LBJ & Mexican Americans: The Paradox of Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 3–4.

3 Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1991), 66. I appreciate Michael Steudeman’s help while pursuing this line of inquiry. It should be noted that Goodwin offers no substantial evidence for this conversation with LBJ other than her own personal notes (see note 1, p. 401), and there seems to be no other record of LBJ making reference to the “brown bodies” of Mexican Americans. I mention this not to question the veracity of the statement but to point out that, should this statement be accurate, it would have been exceedingly rare for LBJ.

4 Qtd. in Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1961–1973 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 91.

5 John M. Murphy, “Crafting the Kennedy Legacy,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 577–601, https://doi.org/10.1353/rap.2000.0011.

6 Kathleen J. Turner, Lyndon Johnson’s Dual War: Vietnam and the Press (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985).

7 David Zarefsky, “The Great Society as a Rhetorical Proposition,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1979): 364–78; David Zarefsky, “President Johnson’s War on Poverty: The Rhetoric of Three ‘Establishment’ Movements,” Communication Monographs 44, no. 4 (1977): 352–73; David Zarefsky, President Johnson’s War on Poverty: Rhetoric and History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1986).

8 Garth E. Pauley, LBJ’s American Promise: The 1965 Voting Rights Address (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006); Robert Asen, “Lyndon Baines Johnson and George W. Bush on Education Reform: Ascribing Agency and Responsibility through Key Policy Terms,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 15, no. 2 (2012): 289–317.

9 Michael J. Steudeman, “‘The Guardian Genius of Democracy:’ The Myth of the Heroic Teacher in Lyndon B. Johnson’s Education Policy Rhetoric, 1964–1966,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 17, no. 3 (2014): 481–82, https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.3.0477.

10 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 200–202.

11 Michael J. Steudeman, “Own Your Complicity, Then Fix It,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 9, no. 1 (March 1, 2020): 37, https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2020.9.1.33.

12 Hanes Walton et al., Remaking the Democratic Party: Lyndon B. Johnson As a Native-Son Presidential Candidate (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). For another example of recent work trying to see more “triumphs” with respect to racial discrimination during his presidency, see Jonathan Zasloff, “The Secret History of the Fair Housing Act,” Harvard Journal on Legislation 53, no. 1 (2016): 247–78.

13 Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I, vol. I (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), xix.

14 Ronnie Dugger, The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson, The Drive for Power from the Frontier to Master of the Senate (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), 12–13.

15 John M. Murphy, “Domesticating Dissent: The Kennedys and the Freedom Rides,” Communication Monographs 59, no. 1 (March 1992): 61–78; Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).

16 Zarefsky, “The Great Society as a Rhetorical Proposition,” 376; Pycior, LBJ & Mexican Americans, 146; Zarefsky, President Johnson’s War on Poverty, 1986, 43–44, 104–5; Steven R. Goldzwig, “LBJ, the Rhetoric of Transcendence, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 41, https://doi.org/10.1353/rap.2003.0029. Zarefsky notes how racial erasure was integral to passing LBJ’s legislative priorities and, at the same time, how white people seemingly rejected the measures associated with the War on Poverty because they perceived them to be focused on Black Americans. These are presented, however, circumstantial rather than products of LBJ’s rhetoric.

17 Gary Gerstle, “Race and the Myth of the Liberal Consensus,” The Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995): 579–86, https://doi.org/10.2307/2082187.

18 Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).

19 Lisa A. Flores, “Towards an Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (December 2018): 349–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1526387.

20 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, Third Ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 109. What I call racialization parallels Omi and Winant’s view of “racial formation,” namely, “the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed.” I would add to their definition, however, that rhetorical work as a critical piece of the ways in which racial identities are “created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed.”

21 Throughout the essay I have opted to use the term “Chicana/o” as my preferred label for identifying Mexican American movement activism in the late 1960s. Although this movement was historically called simply “Chicano,” I have made this change to highlight the prevalence and fervor of Chicana activists who were pivotal to the movement’s spread. Figures like Dolores Huerta, Elizabeth “Betita” Sutherland, and Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez, for example, whose popularity might have increased in the latter part of the 1960s, were nonetheless all active and instrumental to the diffusion of the “movement” across the Southwest even prior to their recognition. When referring broadly to communities, historical or contemporary, whose heritage is located within or stems from Latin America (including Mexican Americans), I use the label “Latinx.”

22 José A. Cobas, Jorge Duany, and Joe R. Feagin, “Racializing Latinos: Historical Background and Current Forms,” in How the United States Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences, ed. José A. Cobas, Jorge Duany, and Joe R. Feagin (London: Routledge, 2015), 7–8, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315634104.

23 Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono, “Introduction,” in Critical Rhetorics of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 1.

24 Meta G. Carstarphen et al., “Rhetoric, Race, and Resentment: Whiteness and the New Days of Rage,” Rhetoric Review 36, no. 4 (2017): 255–347; Paula Chakravartty et al., “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (April 2018): 254–66, https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy003; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/Ist) Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 465–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669068; John M. Murphy and Michael Lechuga, “The Role of the Critic,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 24, no. 1 (2021): 51–67.

25 Ersula J. Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019).

26 Jenna N. Hanchey, “All of Us Phantasmic Saviors,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 2 (April 3, 2018): 144–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1454969.

27 José M. Cortez, “On Disinvention: Dr. Ersula Ore and the Rhetorics of Race at the US–Mexico Border,” Journal for the History of Rhetoric 24, no. 1 (January 2, 2021): 87–103, https://doi.org/10.1080/26878003.2021.1881312.

28 Matthew Houdek, “In the Aftertimes, Breathe: Rhetorical Technologies of Suffocation and an Abolitionist Praxis of (Breathing in) Relation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, January 6, 2022, 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2021.2019301.

29 Tiara R. Na’puti, “Oceanic Possibilities for Communication Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (January 2, 2020): 95–103, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1723802.

30 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 17–18.

31 Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (August 1995): 291–309.

32 Cobas, Duany, and Feagin, “Racializing Latinos: Historical Background and Current Forms.”

33 Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 4 (2003): 362–87; D. Robert DeChaine, “Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Alienization, Fence Logic, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 1 (February 2009): 43–65, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630802621078; Josue David Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2014).

34 Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); G. Cristina Mora, Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); José G. Izaguirre III, “‘A Social Movement in Fact:’ La Raza and El Plan de Delano,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50, no. 1 (2020): 53–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2019.1685125.

35 J. David Cisneros, “Marco Rubio’s Prospective Presidentiality: Latinx Politics, Race/Ethnicity, and the Presidency,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 1/2 (February 2017): 90–116, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2016.1234063.

36 Cortez, “On Disinvention,” 96.

37 Lisa A. Flores, Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the Illegal Immigrant (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), 10.

38 Karrieann Soto Vega and Karma R. Chávez, “Latinx Rhetoric and Intersectionality in Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (October 2018): 319–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1533642.

39 Joe R. Feagin, The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing, Third Ed. (New York: Routledge, 2020), 2–4, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429353246.

40 Feagin, 11.

41 Feagin, 22.

42 Feagin, 22.

43 Ore, Lynching; William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, “Repression and Resistance: The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origins in the United States, 1848–1928,” in How the United States Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences, ed. José A. Cobas, Jorge Duany, and Joe R. Feagin (London: Routledge, 2015), 68–86, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315634104.

44 Feagin, The White Racial Frame, 27–28.

45 Joe R. Feagin and Kimberley Ducey, Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 19–27, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315143460.

46 Feagin, The White Racial Frame, 19; Joe R. Feagin and José A. Cobas, Latinos Facing Racism: Discrimination, Resistance, and Endurance (New York: Routledge, 2015), 14, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315633749.

47 Cobas, Duany, and Feagin, “Racializing Latinos: Historical Background and Current Forms.”

48 Feagin and Cobas, Latinos Facing Racism, 15.

49 Feagin, The White Racial Frame, 19.

50 Feagin, 19.

51 Feagin, 48.

52 Linda M. Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015).

53 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David R. Dietrich, “The Latin Americanization of U.S. Race Relations: A New Pigmentocracy,” in Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009), 40–59.

54 Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15, no. 1 (March 1, 1998): 21–40.

55 Feagin, The White Racial Frame, 49.

56 Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).

57 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970), 44.

58 Barry Brummett, A Rhetoric of Style (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).

59 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 18.

60 Mary E. Stuckey, “‘The Power of the Presidency to Hurt:’ The Indecorous Rhetoric of Donald J. Trump and the Rhetorical Norms of Democracy,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 50, no. 2 (2020): 366–91, https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12641.

61 Robert E. Terrill, Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship (University of South Carolina Press, 2015).

62 Brian L. Ott and Greg Dickinson, The Twitter Presidency: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of White Rage (New York: Routledge, 2019), 98, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429054259.

63 Feagin and Cobas, Latinos Facing Racism.

64 Feagin and Cobas, 13.

65 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017).

66 Qtd. in Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1961–1973, 111–12.

67 Dallek, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1908–1960, 78.

68 Dugger, The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson, The Drive for Power from the Frontier to Master of the Senate, 71; Feagin and Ducey, Racist America. Dugger notes how LBJ did not grow up around Black and Mexican Americans because they had been violently driven out of his home town.

69 Joan W. Moore and Ralph Guzman, “New Wind from the Southwest,” The Nation, May 30, 1966, 645.

70 Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Mexican-Americans Feel ‘Great Society’ Passing Them,” The Austin Statesman, April 1, 1966; Paul Beck, “Mexican-American Walkout Mars U.S. Job Conference,” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 1966, sec. Part One; “Mexicans Charge Discrimination,” The Washington Post, Times Herald (1959–1973), March 29, 1966.

71 Ignacio M. García, Viva Kennedy: Mexican Americans in Search of Camelot (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000); Pycior, LBJ & Mexican Americans, 147–50.

72 Pycior, LBJ & Mexican Americans, 164.

73 Oropeza, “Mexican Americans,” 140.

74 Pycior, LBJ & Mexican Americans, 169–73.

75 Pycior, 170, 180–84. LBJ hosted a conference in Washington for Black Americans in June 1966 and backpedaled on hosting a conference at the White House for Mexican Americans. This decision reinforced the prevailing common sense that Black Americans were being accommodated while Mexican Americans were not.

76 Pycior, 195–96.

77 Michelle Hall Kells, “Vicente Ximenes and LBJ’s Great Society: The Rhetorical Imagination of the American GI Forum,” in Leaders of the Mexican American Generation: Biographical Essays, ed. Anthony Quiroz (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2015), 252–75; Mario T. García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

78 Qtd. in Michelle Hall Kells, “What’s Writing Got to Do with It?: Citizen Wisdom, Civil Rights Activism, and 21st Century Community Literacy,” Community Literacy Journal 7, no. 1 (2012): 97, https://doi.org/10.1353/clj.2012.0038.

79 Michelle Hall Kells, Vicente Ximenes, LBJ’s Great Society, and Mexican American Civil Rights Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 162–72.

80 “Carta Editorial: Carta Editorial” 2, no. 18 (March 18, 1965): 5, https://jstor.org/stable/community.28034692.

81 Kells, Vicente Ximenes, LBJ’s Great Society, and Mexican American Civil Rights Rhetoric, 198.

82 Kells, 199; Pycior, LBJ & Mexican Americans, 195–99.

83 Kika De La Garza, “Appointment of Vicente T. Ximenes to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” Congressional Record 113 (April 3, 1967): 8113; Roybal Edward, “Extension of Remarks,” Congressional Record 113 (April 27, 1967): 11150; Ralph Yarbrough, “President Johnson Appoints Vicente T. Ximenes to Equal Employment Opportunity Comimssion,” Congressional Record 113 (April 6, 1967): 8553.

84 “I Am Joaquin,” La Raza, September 16, 1967, 4. Editors of La Raza described the poem as a “poem to independence. Independence of the soul and expression of a determination to fight to the end for Freedom and Justice.”

85 Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us, 76.

86 Lee Bebout, “Hero Making in El Movimiento: Reies López Tijerina and the Chicano Nationalist Imaginary,” Aztlán 32, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 93–121; David Correia, “‘Rousers of the Rabble’ in the New Mexico Land Grant War: La Alianza Federal De Mercedes and the Violence of the State,” Antipode 40, no. 4 (September 2008): 561–83, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00624.x; Lorena Oropeza, “Becoming Indo-Hispano: Reies López Tijerina and the New Mexican Land Grant Movement,” in Formations of United States Colonialism, ed. Alyosha Goldstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 180–206.

87 Qtd. in Julie Leininger Pycior, “From Hope to Frustration: Mexican Americans and Lyndon Johnson in 1967,” The Western Historical Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1993): 478.

88 Pycior, LBJ & Mexican Americans, 166–67.

89 Memo, Joe Califano to the President, 5/11/1967, “Remarks of the President at the Swearing In Ceremony for Vicente T. Ximenes as a Member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” Statements of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Box 240, LBJ Library.

90 Thomas B. Farrell, “The Weight of Rhetoric: Studies in Cultural Delirium,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 41, no. 4 (2008): 470.

91 “The Mexican American: A New Focus on Opportunity,” Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 3, no. 23 (June 12, 1967): 825–55.

92 Kells, Vicente Ximenes, LBJ’s Great Society, and Mexican American Civil Rights Rhetoric, 203.

93 Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at the Swearing in of Vicente T. Ximenes as a Member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Wooley, The American Presidency Project, June 9, 1967, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-swearing-vicente-t-ximenes-member-the-equal-employment-opportunity-commission.

94 Feagin and Cobas, Latinos Facing Racism, 15.

95 Feagin and Cobas, 14.

96 Kells, “Vicente Ximenes and LBJ’s Great Society: The Rhetorical Imagination of the American GI Forum,” 202–3.

97 “Memorandum Establishing the Inter-Agency Committee on Mexican American Affairs,” Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, accessed January 22, 2021, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/memorandum-establishing-the-inter-agency-committee-mexican-american-affairs.

98 “Memorandum Establishing the Inter-Agency Committee on Mexican American Affairs.”

99 Ernesto Galarza, Economic Development by Mexican-Americans: An Analysis and a Proposal (Berkeley: Social Science Research & Development, 1966); George Isidore Sánchez, Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Henry Sioux Johnson and William J. Hernández, eds., Educating the Mexican American (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1970).

100 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (September 2000): 546–47.

101 Memo, Robert E. Kintner to the President, 6/8/1967, “Remarks of the President at the Swearing-In Ceremony for Vicente T. Ximenes as a Member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” Statements of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Box 240, LBJ Library.

102 Kells, Vicente Ximenes, LBJ’s Great Society, and Mexican American Civil Rights Rhetoric, 203.

103 Eric King Watts, Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 16.

104 Michele H. Kells, email message to the author, November 6, 2022. Kells describes Ximenes as “witty” and “loquacious” and, for this reason, it might be expected that he said something at the event. Even so, public records appear to be consistent on this point: Ximenes said nothing at the swearing-in and did not contribute to the composition of the address LBJ delivered. The public record’s lack of his “voice” might not prove that his “voice” did not matter, but it certainly suggests that Ximenes’s voice mattered less than portrayals of LBJ and his Great Society.

105 Martin J. Medhurst, “LBJ, Reagan, and the American Dream: Competing Visions of Liberty,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 46, no. 1 (2016): 101, https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12253; Zarefsky, “The Great Society as a Rhetorical Proposition,” 367–68; Asen, “Lyndon Baines Johnson and George W. Bush on Education Reform,” 291.

106 Johnson, “Remarks at the Swearing in of Vicente T. Ximenes.”

107 Feagin, The White Racial Frame, 21.

108 Kells, Vicente Ximenes, LBJ’s Great Society, and Mexican American Civil Rights Rhetoric, 260.

109 Speech draft, 6/2/1967, “Remarks of the President at the Swearing In Ceremony for Vicente T. Ximenes as a Member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” Statements of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Box 240, LBJ Library.

110 Johnson, “Special Message to the Congress: The American Promise.”

111 Speech draft.

112 Swearing-In Vicente T. Ximenes Speech Draft, “Remarks of the President at the Swearing In Ceremony for Vicente T. Ximenes as a Member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” Statements of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Box 240, LBJ Library.

113 Feagin, The White Racial Frame, 28.

114 Alianza Federal, “Spanish Land Grant Question Examined” (Alianza Federal, 1966).

115 Ronnie Dugger, The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson, the Drive for Power, from the Frontier to Master of the Senate (New York: Norton, 1982), 130–33.

116 Johnson, “Remarks at the Swearing in of Vicente T. Ximenes.”

117 Johnson.

118 Johnson.

119 “The Mexican American: A New Focus on Opportunity,” 845–46.

120 Johnson, “Remarks at the Swearing in of Vicente T. Ximenes.”

121 Timothy Laurie and Rimi Khan, “The Concept of Minority for the Study of Culture,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 31, no. 1 (2017): 92–103, https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1264110.

122 Derrick A. Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93, no. 3 (1980): 523, https://doi.org/10.2307/1340546; Feagin, The White Racial Frame, 169.

123 Benjamin Márquez, LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization (Austin: The University of Texas, 1993); García, Mexican Americans; Carlos Muñoz Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Identity, Revised and Expanded (London: Verso, 2007); Mario T. García, The Chicano Generation (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015); Rodolfo A. Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 8th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2015). Prior to the 1960s, some Mexican American organizations did view assimilation into Anglo culture as a way to achieve prosperity. In the 1960s there was a decisive shift away from this, however, as activists turned toward amplifying an anti-white stance.

124 Karma Chávez, “Border Interventions: The Need to Shift from a Rhetoric of Security to a Rhetoric of Militarization,” in Border Rhetorics, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2012), 48–62; Julie A. Dowling and Jonathan Xavier Inda, “Introduction: Governing Migrant Illegality,” in Governing Immigration Through Crime: A Reader, ed. Julie A. Dowling and Jonathan Xavier Inda (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 1–36.

125 Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at the Signing of the Immigration Bill, Liberty Island, New York,” Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, October 3, 1965, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/241316.

126 Ruben Salazar, “Humphrey Asks Action by Mexican-Americans: Vice President Addresses El Paso Parley, Tells Latins to ‘Speak Up’ About Problems,” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1967, sec. Part One.

127 “Plan De La Raza Unida,” La Raza, November 15, 1967.

128 Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009); Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System,” International Social Science Journal 44, no. 134 (November 1992): 549–57.

129 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

130 Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (May 2007): 449–514.

131 Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/Ist) Problems,” 471–472.

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José G. Izaguirre

José G. Izaguirre III is an assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He completed his PhD in Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and his general research interests span rhetorical history, rhetorical theory, and public rhetorics.