Trump’s gains among Latinos push a Civil Rights group to reflect on its past

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.

Nearly a century later, as President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the White House, LULAC is preparing to stand on the front lines of clashes with the incoming administration over proposed mass deportations, voting access and issues involving education and the social safety net.

The group’s CEO, Juan Proaño, said in an interview that its mission — protecting the rights of Latinos — was more crucial than ever. But he said LULAC was also contending with election results in which many Latino voters, especially Latino men, gravitated toward Trump, suggesting they might no longer see themselves as part of the group’s fight.

“We’re going to have to decide where to build bridges,” Proaño said, calling Republicans’ potential capture of all three branches of government “worse than my worst-case scenario.” He acknowledged that Trump had outperformed past Republican presidents with Latino voters: “I will give Trump credit where credit is due,” he said.

Over the coming weeks, Proaño said, his group will sift through voter data to understand what led working-class Latinos to shift to the right. Their march toward Trump came despite his organization’s political action committee throwing its support behind Vice President Kamala Harris in August, the first formal endorsement of a presidential ticket it had ever made.

Although the PAC’s leadership voted unanimously to endorse Harris, the group’s broader membership of nearly 325,000 people across 535 councils runs the spectrum of party affiliations and ideological beliefs. One of the councils, in the Houston area, objected to the endorsement. Now, the group’s bipartisan board will need to weigh how to engage the next administration in a way that reflects not only the broader Latino electorate, but also its own diverse membership.

Proaño said the stakes were higher than ever: Trump and his allies have drawn more support from Latino voters, while at the same time, he said, Republicans have tried to restrain Latino voting power in recent years, in part by spreading conspiracy theories about noncitizens illegally casting ballots. Those falsehoods, Proaño said, laid the groundwork for an investigation into voter fraud by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that led to raids of some LULAC volunteers’ homes in the state over the summer.

Seeing the sweeps as part of far-reaching efforts by Republicans to limit activities of voting rights activists across the country, Proaño began cultivating relationships with leaders of Black and Latino civil rights organizations months before the election. LULAC said this month that it was teaming up with a pro-democracy group to challenge the conspiracy theories about voter fraud and Paxton’s inquiry.

“LULAC cannot go at this alone,” Proaño said.

An American Promise

Proaño’s forceful stance in the face of conflicting dynamics is in keeping with his organization’s nearly century-long history. It has often been cast as one of the most conservative Latino civil rights groups, even as it has been part of some of the fiercest legal battles waged by liberals to desegregate schools and expand voting rights for Mexican Americans and other Latinos.

Some of its former presidents and lifetime members said they could not help but note the irony of the position it now finds itself in.

Ruben Bonilla, 78, who led the organization as president from 1979-81, lamented that the raids in August were meant to attack the group as “being un-American,” though it was founded on the ideal of American virtue.

“It is absolutely hideous and demonstrates the ignorance of public officials who do not understand our history,” he said of the voter fraud investigation.

When the three civil rights groups — the Order of the Sons of America, the Knights of America and the League of Latin American Citizens — united to form LULAC in 1929, the migration of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans after the Mexican Revolution was stirring fears among the Anglo American population of South Texas. To build political power and counter racism, the group encouraged Texans of Mexican descent to adopt an American way of life, become naturalized citizens and learn English.

With time, its members came to be seen as more interested in reforming rather than remaking American society, according to interviews with historians and some of its former leaders.

In those early decades, members tended to be doctors, lawyers and small-business owners; pragmatists and capitalists. They expressed unwavering loyalty to the United States, though some hailed from families that had been in the region long before the southern border was drawn through their land. Some had endured years of racist terror. Through the 1910s, Texas Rangers raided the homes of Mexican Americans with impunity and lynch mobs killed Latinos across the West.

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. Its 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.”

Benjamin Márquez, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wrote a book tracing the group’s history, said that while its members had never rejected their Mexican or Latino heritage, they had remained consistent in their American loyalty, regardless of whether the group’s president was a Republican or a Democrat.

“They were out to remove racist bias in American society, and beyond that to get out the vote, serve in the military, participate in elections and run for election themselves,” he said.

An Unwritten Past

Some historians argue that the group’s work has been incorrectly characterized as conservative as it has been compared to that of Chicano organizations that emerged during the civil rights movements decades later and were more left-wing and confrontational.

“The history of LULAC is mostly unwritten, and people are not familiar with its liberal strengths,” said Cynthia E. Orozco, a historian and author of “No Mexicans, Women or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.”

Bonilla and his brothers, William and Tony, recalled that the group became more aggressively political as Mexican Americans joined “Viva Kennedy” clubs to boost John F. Kennedy in 1960, and as the Civil Rights Movement heated up. William Bonilla, 94, who served as president in 1964, remembers the earliest registration efforts focused on persuading Latino voters to pay their poll taxes. LULAC members drove through neighborhoods with loudspeakers to remind people to vote and to take them to the polls.

“It was from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., all day long during Election Day,” said William Bonilla, who drove a blue Lincoln convertible for such missions.

Proaño is now looking to draw from LULAC’s grassroots strengths and confront the uglier parts of its past. Through the 1950s, fierce wage competition and divisions between Mexican migrants and Mexican American laborers initially led the group to support President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s mass deportations. (That stance was reversed after Mexican American neighborhoods and border regions were devastated.) Tensions sometimes arose between Black and Latino civil rights groups as they competed for limited resources.

Ruben Bonilla said in an interview that the 2024 election left him with mixed emotions as he recalled the group’s struggles. He understood that Republicans made a persuasive argument on the economy, but he said he was disappointed that so many people had voted for Trump, who made bigotry a central feature of his campaign and promised to revive Eisenhower’s mass deportations.

Bonilla also saw the reflection of another flaw in LULAC’s history: its failure to integrate women into its ranks from the start.

“Hispanic men were reluctant to vote for a woman — it is almost a throwback,” he said.

The Next Battle

Still, Proaño said he did see a slow awakening. In the five days after Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York at which a comedian described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” LULAC’s membership increased by more than 53,000 people.

Proaño said he remained focused on the Texas voter fraud investigation that targeted LULAC members, and on conspiracy theories that he said Republican-led states were using to keep not only Latinos from voter rolls, but Black and Asian voters as well.

The inquiry is taking place under a restrictive voting law that Paxton helped pass in 2021, as Trump and his allies spread false claims that noncitizens were wrongfully voting in massive numbers. Republicans pushing similar restrictions nationwide have said they are trying to ensure that the voting rights of citizens are not diluted.

Proaño cast the efforts as the latest volley in a yearslong conflict in Texas — where the Latino population has helped transform the state’s demographics — between Republicans, who dominate state government, and Democrats, who control most of the largest urban areas.

“We are still fighting the same fight, and that is tough,” Proaño said.