White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

by Ruby Hamad

Muñoz Martinez estimates at least 232 Mexicans were lynched by vigilantes between 1848 and 1928 in Texas alone, with anywhere from 300 to a few thousand murdered by state-sanctioned forces, including the famed Texas Rangers, between 1910 and 1920. Such killings were justified on the basis the Rangers were protecting the innocent white landowners from the criminal Mexican “bandits.” Incredibly, even though far fewer Mexicans were lynched than blacks would be during the Segregation era, their smaller population meant they were even more likely to be targets of vigilante mob violence. The lynching of Mexicans was driven by the philosophy of manifest destiny: the belief that U.S. settlers were ordained by God to expand across the entire North American continent. To aid this expansion, Mexicans were depicted in newspapers and films as all-around uncouth people. The men were criminals, dim-witted, dirty, and untrustworthy, and the women were singled out—in shades of the Dragon Lady—as sexually manipulative, cunning, promiscuous, and without morals. The 1920s star Lupe Vélez, for example, was described in the American press as a “Mexican Spitfire” and “Just a wild Mexican kitten.” Her response: “I’m not wild! I am just Lupe.” By 1922, the Mexican government had so tired of this degradation they issued an embargo on Hollywood films that contained the crude depictions. That the Mexican government went to the extent of banning U.S. cultural products reveals that the old adage “It’s ...