Hernández v. Texas (1954)

Background of the Case

In 1950, Pete Hernández, a cotton picker in Edna, Texas, was accused and found guilty of murdering Joe Espinosa by an all-white jury who were not of his economic class. No one with a Spanish surname had served on a jury for 25 years in Jackson County, Texas, where the small town of Edna was located. The jury provided to Pete Hernández was no exception. When his client was found guilty, Hernández's attorney, Gustavo “Gus” García, brought the case to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which upheld the conviction, paving the way to the Supreme Court. The Texas court found that because Mexican Americans were “white,” there was no violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. García argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that the exclusion of Mexican Americans from juries in Texas was historic and institutional, and a matter of economic status or class, not just race. The court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, found that Hernández's rights were violated through the systematic exclusion of jurors of his class, and mere chance could not have produced this outcome. His case was remanded to the state to be retried by a jury selected without regard to race or class.

The ruling in Hernández was subsequently replaced by Cisneros v. Corpus Christi Independent School District in 1971, which found that Mexican Americans were an identifiable minority group in Texas. Hernández moved the court beyond the understanding of the equal protection clause as solely defining race in a white-black binary. It addressed the complicated, and as yet still unresolved, issue of whether Latinas/os are an ethnic or racial group. The U.S. Census considers race and ethnicity separately, with Hispanic origin being a unique identifier. The ability for Latinas/os to identify multiple racial origins beginning with the 2000 census clarified, yet simultaneously complicated, the simplistic binary definition of race prior to the Hernández case, particularly where Hispanic ancestry was involved.

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