The Supreme Court issued its first decision on affirmative action in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978. Like most conflicts about civil rights in this era, the fight over affirmative action is presumed to involve primarily Black and White Americans. But Bakke cannot be understood without including Latino participants in the origin story. During the 1970s, Latinos’ rates of university enrollment increased more than those of any other group, especially in California, where the case originated. So when Bakke’s legal challenge threatened that access, Latino lawyers, students, and higher education advocates collaborated on a strategic defense of affirmative action. They drafted legal briefs, formed regional and national committees, and took to the streets. First in California and then in the East and Midwest, Latinos worked to shape the national discussion over the value of affirmative action and to protect their hard-won gains in higher education.

This article argues for the importance of reframing the history of school desegregation in the United States beyond Black and white and beyond the regional frames through which this history has been interpreted. In Western states, most Latino children attended schools segregated not by law but by custom starting in the early twentieth century; Latino students also encountered de facto segregation in the Eastern and Midwestern cities with large Puerto Rican populations by the 1950s. Parents, students, advocates, and activists protested the inequality of educational outcomes for Latino children over many decades, developing distinctive strategies to address the combination of racial and language-based discrimination faced by Latino students. Yet, because they were marginalized in political debates in the 1960s and 1970s and because most national-level historical scholarship on school desegregation focuses on Black and white participants, Latinos’ role in this aspect of our national civil rights history has remained obscured.

In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon referred to Aid to Families with Dependent Children as “the program we all normally think of when we think of ‘welfare.’” When President Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it” in the early 1990s, everyone knew that he meant AFDC. “Welfare” had become a code word for public assistance given mainly to unmarried mothers, mostly young women of color. Few terms evoked as much hostility among Americans as “welfare.” No other public benefits carried its stigma. The political left, right, and center all attacked it.