Gustavo “Gus” C. Garcia was a Mexican-American civil rights attorney and the first Mexican-American to try and win a case before the Supreme Court.
Garcia worked with fellow attorney Carlos Cadena in the landmark case Hernández v. Texas (1954), arguing before the US Supreme Court for the end of a practice of systematic exclusion of Hispanics from jury service in Jackson County, Texas.
Even though Mexican-Americans composed more than 10% of the county’s population, no person of Mexican ancestry had served on a jury there and in 70 other Texas counties in over 25 years. The high court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, ruled that United States citizens could not be excluded from jury duty based on national origin, because such exclusion denied the accused a jury of his peers.
The pioneering legal team was comprised entirely of Tejanos, but Garcia was the star. His audacity and oratory gifts saved the day when Supreme Court justices bombarded the lawyers with the ignorant questions that plague us to this day.
The Justices asked: “Can Mexican Americans speak English?’ and “Are they citizens?”
It was Gus Garcia who set the tone of the proceedings with his now famous reply, “My people were in Texas a hundred years before Sam Houston, that wetback from Tennessee.”
This case was risky because it could have resulted in Mexican-Americans losing their “white” status. The legal challenge also threatened social norms, because it raised the possibility of Mexican-Americans on juries passing judgment on whites – a radical notion at the time.
