Gus C. Garcia

American lawyer

• Born: July 27, 1915
• Birthplace: Laredo, Texas
• Died: June 3, 1964
• Place of death: San Antonio, Texas

A brilliant legal mind who worked tirelessly to establish civil rights for Mexican Americans in Texas, Garcia is best known as part of the legal team that argued in the landmark Supreme Court case of Hernandez v. Texas (1954) that Hispanics in that state could not be excluded from jury service.

Early Life

Gustavo Charles Garcia (gew-STAH-voh gahr-SEE-ah) was born on July 27, 1915, in Laredo, Texas, along the Rio Grande. His parents were first-generation Mexican immigrants. Although the family struggled with economic hardships typical of the immigrant class, Garcia enjoyed a relatively happy childhood. Before he was ten years old, his parents relocated to San Antonio in search of more promising job opportunities.

Garcia excelled in school, graduating in 1932 from Thomas Jefferson High School as the school’s first valedictorian. With the country in the grip of an economic catastrophe that centered on the devastated farmlands of the Midwest and Southwest, Garcia understood that his best hope rested in education. He accepted a full scholarship to the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, where he completed his B.A. in 1936. During his undergraduate study, Garcia came to see the vitality of the judicial system and was determined to become a lawyer. He was accepted at UT’s School of Law and earned his law degree two years later in 1938. While at UT, Garcia captained the law school’s nationally recognized debate team and relished the dynamic of such a forum (in one memorable debate against the team from Harvard, Garcia got into a heated exchange with future president John F. Kennedy).

After graduation, Garcia remained in San Antonio and accepted a position in the county district attorney’s office and then worked for a time with the city attorney’s office. In 1941, he was drafted into the United States Army. He served in the judge advocate corps in Far Eastern theater of operations, headquartered in Japan. He served with distinction—indeed, after the war, he was given the chance to serve as part of the American legal contingent that helped establish the operating protocols for the United Nations. In 1947, Garcia returned to San Antonio.

Life’s Work

Garcia joined the law offices of the Mexican Consulate General, which worked to ensure the rights of Mexican American citizens as well as the considerable Mexican immigrant population. Almost immediately, he became involved in an effort to reform San Antonio’s public education system, in which Mexican Americans—who were not regarded as a separate racial minority but rather as part of the Caucasian majority—had been for decades segregated into their own schools, facilities that received minimal funding and were viewed largely as vocational schools. At the time that Garcia filed an inquiry with the state attorney general to challenge that system, Mexican Americans in Texas received on average four years of education, compared with nearly eleven years for whites.

Using as precedent a 1947 California ruling that had found such segregation illegal, Garcia, as lead counsel on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), filed suit in 1948 against the Bastrop Independent School District (along with three other schools), charging that the system denied equal opportunity for quality education to Mexican American children. The United States District Court agreed. Although it would be ten years before the Texas public school system was entirely desegregated, Garcia’s passionate representation of the Mexican American parents is cited as a landmark achievement.

Over the next several years, Garcia worked to promote fair treatment of Hispanics, most notably students, ex-soldiers, and migrant workers. In 1952, Garcia was contacted concerning an appeal of a murder conviction involving a Hispanic defendant, a twenty-one-year-old migrant cotton field worker named Pete Hernandez, who had been found guilty of murder in Edna, a small town in Jackson County, south of San Antonio. The case was considered open and shut: Hernandez had been beaten in a bar and had returned home (a two-mile walk) to get his rifle, walked back to the bar, and killed one of his assailants in front of more than thirty witnesses. And he had confessed. Because the town had no significant Hispanic citizenry, the jury had been all white. Garcia agreed to represent Hernandez for free, recognizing an opportunity to challenge Texas’s de facto exclusion of Hispanics from jury duty. When the Texas Supreme Court denied his appeal, Garcia and his legal team filed an appeal to the United States Supreme Court. Garcia, in turn, became the first Mexican American attorney to appear before the Court. The justices, under Chief JusticeEarl Warren, unanimously ruled in favor of Garcia’s appeal, citing the Texas system as inherently unreasonable, a clear separate-but-equal system, and hence a violation of the constitutional provision guaranteeing equal protection. Hernandez was ordered to be retried, this time with a jury in which no ethnic group was excluded. The ruling was hailed as a triumph in the long struggle of Mexican Americans to be recognized as an ethnic group with its own integrity.

The long and very public case took its toll on Garcia. Between 1955 and 1957, he was in and out of hospitals, and rumors circulated in the San Antonio legal community that Garcia was struggling with alcoholism. He worked briefly at a small law office in Kingsville but seldom represented clients in the courtroom. Even as his heroic efforts on behalf of Hispanics were being extended by the Warren Court, Garcia languished in increasing obscurity. After being cited for check fraud in 1960, an action was filed to have Garcia—once the most prominent voice in the Hispanic legal community—disbarred. Given Garcia’s reputation, however, the review board recommended a two-year suspension in the hopes that he could return to the law. Shortly after his law license was reinstated, however, Garcia died of a brain seizure in June, 1964. He was buried with full military honors at the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery outside San Antonio.

Significance

Although Garcia died largely forgotten, his contribution to the American civil rights movement is secure. By extending the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment to Hispanics, Garcia’s brilliant legal argument in Hernandez v. Texas paved the way for people of all ethnic groups to be explicitly granted the protection of the Constitution. In a career dedicated to challenging the entrenched system of exclusion directed against Hispanics in Texas amid the considerable pressures of such high profile legal work in a white-dominated cultural environment, Garcia persevered and, at enormous cost to his personal life, secured the basic rights of Hispanics in the classroom and in the courtroom.

Bibliography

Garcia, Ignacio M. White But Not Equal: Mexican Americans, Jury Discrimination, and the Supreme Court. Tempe: University of Arizona Press, 2008. Seminal study of the defining legal battle of Garcia’s career. Details the Texas system of exclusion and the legal underpinnings of Garcia’s landmark appeal.

Olivas, Michael A. Colored Men and Hombres Aquí: Hernandez v. Texas and the Emergence of Mexican American Lawyering. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 2006. A collection of essays commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the case that centered Garcia’s career. Centers on the role of juries in American jurisprudence.

San Miguel, Guadalupe, Jr. Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. Scholarly treatment of the public school system similar to the one that Garcia challenged in San Antonio. Includes a helpful discussion of Garcia’s role.

Strum, Phillippa. Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican-American Rights. Manhattan: Univ. of Kansas Press, 2010. A case study of the California ruling that Garcia used as precedence to challenge the separate-but-equal status of Hispanic children in San Antonio’s school system.

Valencia, Richard. Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality. New York: New York University Press, 2010. A wide-ranging history of more than six decades of legal proceedings centered on securing Hispanic students access to quality public education across the Southwest. Includes Garcia’s challenge to the San Antonio schools.