In 1924 two businessmen, Fernando Salas and Frank Gibler, a former United States consul whose wife was Mexican, formed the Asamblea Mexicana in Houston. The organization aided Mexican immigrants unjustly incarcerated. Legal abuses experienced by Houston’s growing Mexican immigrant population prompted the group’s formation.
During the 1920s, Asamblea Mexicana succeeded in achieving several victories for Mexican immigrants in Houston. The group worked with the Mexican consul in Houston to ensure that the legal rights of Mexican immigrants were protected. The more notable outcomes included the group’s success in 1928 in pressuring the city to suspend a police sergeant for jailing a Mexican who was injured in an auto accident and not given medical attention. The organization also facilitated the early release of Mexicans from the Houston jail. Other actions included protesting the mistreatment of Mexicans in the Texas prison system to Governor Dan Moody.
Though active in the Houston area during the late 1920s, Asamblea Mexicana apparently diminished in the 1930s as other civil rights groups rose to prominence.
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Arnoldo De León, Ethnicity in the Sunbelt: Mexican Americans in Houston (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001). F. Arturo Rosales, Chicano!: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996). F. Arturo Rosales, ¡Pobre Raza!: Violence, Justice, and Mobilization among México Lindo Immigrants, 1900–1936 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).
Categories:
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Law, Law Enforcement, and Outlaws
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Associations and Movements
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Peoples
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Mexican Americans
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Organizations
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Associations
Places:
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Houston
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Upper Gulf Coast
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East Texas
The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
Wendy Thompson,
“Asamblea Mexicana,”
Handbook of Texas Online,
accessed May 16, 2022,
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/asamblea-mexicana.
Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
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Original Publication Date:
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January 31, 2020
This entry belongs to the following Handbook Special Projects:
