League of United Latin American Citizens - Comparisons With The NAACP

Comparisons With The NAACP

With respect to organizational structure, the League of Latin American Citizens was similar to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). David G. Gutierrez claims, "considering themselves part of a progressive and enlightened leadership elite, LULAC's leaders set out implement general goals and a political strategy that were similar in form and content to those advocated early in the century by W.E.B. DuBois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: for an 'educated elite'".

Though the two civil rights groups may have possessed some institutional similarities, LULAC tried to distance itself from the African American struggle against discrimination and racism. LULAC believed that blacks were more oppressed; thus, joining forces with them would not strengthen its own struggle for equality. Probably due to its understanding of the already-existing race relations in American society, LULAC asserted the idea that Hispanics fell into the "white" category of the dichotomous black-white construction of race. In 1936 the league even "engaged in a series of lobbying activities as soon as it discovered that Mexican Americans would be categorized as part of a group of dark-skinned minorities" by the U.S. Bureau of the Census.