Historical and Social Contexts

Before Mexican Independence in 1821, the Spanish government had granted title to large tracts of land to both individual families and communal entities. These land grants provided a potential foundation for economic and hence, political power. However, in varying ways (including legal subterfuge and direct violence), and over the course of only a few decades, most of the land grant titles had passed into the hands of Anglo Americans. Even previously privileged Mexican/Spanish families were stripped of their economic foundations.
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Mexican Americans
First significant group of Latinos to be incorporated into the U.S. population was Mexican. The U.S. annexed Texas in 1845, although the Mexican government resisted, leading to war in 1846 and Mexico's humiliating defeat.
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The annexation of Texas led to the war in 1846 and Mexico's humiliating defeat. Mexico was forced to "sell" nearly one half of its territory (including not only Texas, but also the areas that became the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, most of Colorado, and small parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming), at a bargain price. The racialization of Mexicans began in the crucible of the conflict.
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The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the U.S. war with Mexico, which stipulated that those Mexicans who remained in the annexed territory would enjoy "all rights of citizens". However, this did not prevent Mexican Americans from being racialized in a variety of ways.
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In California a statute adopted in 1851 determined that any individual with at least one-quarter Indian ancestry would be excluded from the White category, thereby excluding them from many citizenship rights, including the right to vote. This law, which remained in effect into the twentieth century, racialized the vast majority of Mexican Californians as non-White, thereby limiting their U.S. citizenship rights. Similar laws were adopted in Texas and Arizona.
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Spain lost its remaining colonial territories in the Western Hemisphere, most importantly Puerto Rico & Cuba. AFter that Puerto Ricans were ruled as colonial subjects of the U.S. until 1917, when they were granted citizenship under the Jones Act (passed without the consent of the Puerto Rican people).
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When large-scale immigration from Mexico began in the early twentieth century, new "Mexicanos" came into a racially segmented and stratified socioeconomic and political system.
The "Colonial Labor System" made Chicanos important sources of wage labor, working in a system with racially segmented features such as "labor repression, the "dual wage system", "occupational stratification", and the use of Chicanos as "reserve labor force".
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Through the Platt Amendment of 1901 (which was incorporated into Cuba's Constitution), the U.S. placed Cuba under an American "protectorate," which "meant that Cuban politics and the Cuban economy were to be dominated by Americans. The U.S. would continue to have a dominant role until the 1959 revolution.
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The Jones–Shafroth Act, Pub.L. 64-368, 39 Stat. 951, enacted March 2, 1917, also known as the Jones Act of Puerto Rico or Jones Law of Puerto Rico, was an Act of the United States Congress, signed by President Woodrow Wilson on March 2, 1917. The act granted U.S. Citizenship to the people of Puerto Rico. It also created the Senate of Puerto Rico, established a bill of rights, and authorized the election of a Resident Commissioner (previously appointed by the President) to a four-year term.
(Wikipedia)

Puerto Rican cigar makers in NYC helped to lead a significant and successful strike as early as 1919.
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Hundreds of thousands of "Mexicans" (both U.S. citizens and non citizens) were forcibly removed to Mexico by public officials during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
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In 1937 the first Puerto Rican official from NYC was elected, to the New York State Assembly, yet through the 1940s and 1950s there was a "virtual absence of Puerto Ricans from NYC politics".
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Hundreds of thousands of "Mexicans" (both U.S. citizens and non citizens) were forcibly removed to Mexico by public officials during the federal government's Operation Wetback during the 1950s.
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Substantial Cuban migration to the U.S. did not begin until after Castro ousted the U.S. backed Batista regime. With assistance from the United States, tens of thousands of anti-Castro Cubans emigrated to the United States (primarily South Florida).
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The Chicano Movement of the 1960s, also called the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, also known as El Movimiento, is an extension of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement which began in the 1940s with the stated goal of achieving Mexican American empowerment.
(Wikipedia)

Puerto Rican political activism increased in the 1960s, due in part of the funding directed to minority communities through the War on Poverty programs of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
In the 1960s, Puerto Rican militancy could be seen in groups such as the Young Lords.
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Post- 1959 Cuban immigration came in three waves, including one in the 1960s following the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.
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Nationalist efforts spawned La Raza Unida Party, which briefly captured electoral control of city governments in Crystal City, Texas, and Parlier, California. While the movement's political organizational efforts were largely dissipated by the mid-1970s, it continues to have an effect on Mexican Americans through Chicano/Latino studies programs in higher education institutions and through the (mostly pluralist) political activities of these programs' alumni.
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1960s saw major electoral activity in regards to Puerto Ricans. Puerto Rican politicians emerged from the reform wing of the City's Democratic Party. Perhaps most important was Herman Badillo, "a moderate... working in relatively mainstream context," who later became a U.S. Congressman.
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The third post-1959 wave was the 1980 Marielitos. Totaling about 120,000, these Cubans were of lower socioeconomic status and darker-skinned, and included some who had been convicted of crimes in Cuba. They were more likely to experience discrimination and racialization.
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As early as 1852, the California legislature passed the Foreign Miners License tax. The tax required payment from all miners who did not wish to become citizens, which made Chinese miners an easy target, given that they were widely seen as part of the class of individuals ineligible for citizenship.

In 1860, the U.S. passed a tax of $4 a month on Chinese fishermen, in an effort to discourage them.
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In 1873, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors enacted fees on laundries that charged for each horse used, but placed the heaviest charges on laundries that usually used no horses.
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The first judicial examination of the racial prerequisites for naturalization, In re Ah Yup, highlighted one of the central dilemmas facing judges: the lack of literal meaning of the term "white". The judge ruled that both scientific evidence and common knowledge agreed that Chinese were not white.
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The first broad immigration restriction law, it gave legal backing to the notion that Chinese were an undesirable and inferior subpopulation. It made it clear that domestic systems of racial subordination could be extended to newcomers as well.
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Japanese had been migrating to the U.S. in small numbers until 1884, when the Japanese government began allowing laborers to emigrate. The same year, the Japanese government and Hawaiian sugar plantation owners signed an agreement allowing the plantation owners to bring in Japanese laborers.
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The Geary Act extended the ban of immigration of Chinese laborers for another ten years after the Chinese Exclusion Act. It also made it easier to deport the Chinese that were already in the United States.
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Prejudice against the Japanese had mounted by then, and in 1906, the San Francisco board of education passed a resolution calling for the Japanese schoolchildren to attend segregated schools with the Chinese.
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Japanese immigrants had ended up on farms far more than the Chinese, and the former had enjoyed spectacular success in areas previously considered to be desert. California was once again the pioneer, passing the first legislation restricting alien land ownership in 1913. Over the next 15 years, several states followed with similar laws.
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In 1917, Congress passed the Barred Zone Act, which sought to ban all immigration from Asia.
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In this case, the court cited scientific classification to justify its finding that Asians were not White. The plaintiff, Takao Ozawa, argued that the color of his skin and his life history made him indisputably White. The Supreme Court rejected that argument, ruling that popular opinion clearly understood "White" to mean the "Caucasian" race, while scientists found that Japanese were members of the "Mongolian" race.

Only three months after Ozawa, the Court abandoned its reliance on scientific opinion, revealing how fully race was a social construction. Thind noted that he was classified by anthropologists as "Caucasian", not "Mongoloid". The Court now cited "familiar observation and knowledge" to rue against Thind.
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Also called the Johnson–Reed Act, provided for even more sweeping immigration restrictions, including banning the remaining Japanese immigration, although Filipinos remained beyond its provisions.

With immigration greatly restricted from the rest of Asia, employers turned to Filipinos for labor. In 1934, Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act, which made the Philippines a commonwealth, with full independence to come in 10 years, but with the immediate effect of classifying Filipinos as aliens, ending their status as American nationals and making them subject to the ban on immigration from Asia.
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Japanese-American internment was the relocation and internment by the United States government in 1942 of about 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese who lived along the Pacific coast of the United States to camps called "War Relocation Camps," in the wake of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. The internment of Japanese Americans was applied unequally throughout the United States. All who lived on the West Coast of the United States were interned, while in Hawaii, where the 150,000-plus Japanese Americans composed over one-third of the population, an estimated 1,200[4] to 1,800 were interned. Of those interned, 62% were American citizens.
(Wikipedia)

In 1943, Congress passed a bill that repealed Chinese exclusion and allowed Chinese immigrants to naturalize, but it allowed only 105 Chinese immigrants per year.
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Immigration was allowed from India and the Phillippines, and immigrants from those countries were also permitted to naturalize.
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Also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, lifted the prohibition against the immigration and naturalization of Asians, although it also made it easier to deport aliens for ideological or moral reasons.

The symbolic beginnings of the model minority image are usually dated to 1966, when articles lauding Japanese and Chinese Americans appeared in the New York Times Magazine and the U.S. News & World Report.
While it was a positive image, many proponents seemed interested in criticizing African Americans as in praising Asians. The U.S. News piece emphasized how Chinese Americans had succeeded without government assistance.
Further evidence of continued racialization can be found in continued perception of Asian Americans as foreign. Even third generation Asian Americans, who frequently spoke no language other than English, continued to have Whites ask them what country they were from.
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