Minorities: Pocho's Progress

Americans are reminded almost daily of the Negro's checkered progress toward equality. Seldom, by contrast, are they apprised of the social and economic lag that afflicts the nation's second largest disadvantaged minority: the 4,677,000 Mexican-Americans of the U.S. Southwest—proud, poor and increasingly protest-minded. From the Rio Grande to the Russian River, in the bleak barrios of East Los Angeles and the tar-paper colonias of the San Joaquin Valley, the Mexican minority is struggling to articulate its anger.

Vague and inchoate, it is directed toward at least three targets: the "Anglo," for...