MEXICAN AMERICANS AS A LEGAL MINORITY

On August 2, 1972, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in Cisneros v. Corpus Christi, a school segregation case involving, among other things, the question whether Mexican Americans constitute an identifiable ethnic group in desegregation proceedings. The affirmative answer is embodied in the following extracts from the decision. For ease of reading, footnotes and most legal citations have been omitted. The opinion was written by Judge David W. Dyer.