Texas Originals

Alonso S. Perales

October 17, 1898–May 9, 1960

A South Texas lawyer with a keen sense of justice, Alonso Perales created one of the nation’s largest and most enduring Mexican American civil rights organizations.

Born in Alice in 1898, Perales grew up an orphan. After working in agriculture and on railroads, he pursued education in San Antonio and Washington, DC, and served in the army during World War I. He returned to Texas committed to fighting discrimination as one of the state’s earliest Mexican American lawyers.

In 1929 in Corpus Christi, Perales and his colleagues founded the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, an influential civil rights organization. Perales authored the group’s founding documents and served as one of its presidents. Through LULAC, Perales sought to achieve political equality and economic self-sufficiency for Mexican Americans in the Southwest.

Perales’s vision did not end there. He also served as a diplomat in Latin America and the West Indies, most notably as US consul to Nicaragua from 1937 to 1960. The hemispheric perspective he gained from these experiences informed his approach to civil rights in the United States.

Over a long career, Perales advocated for voting rights, immigration reform, and equality in public education, especially in his hometown of San Antonio. He died in 1960, but his efforts continued to bear fruit in the civil rights movements that flowered in the decades to come.

For More about Alonso Perales

University of Houston’s Special Collections houses the Alonso S. Perales Papers, which include manuscripts of Perales’s essays, speeches, and radio addresses, along with personal correspondence and organizational papers for LULAC.

Though Perales spent most of his career in the metropolis of San Antonio, his story owes much to his South Texas roots in the ranching crossroads town of Alice. Named for Alice Kleberg of the famed King Ranch, Alice has also produced such Texas history figures as folklorist J. Frank Dobie and writer Elena Zamora O’Shea and been a hub city in the stories of Mexican American civil rights as well as the notorious tale of LBJ’s 1948 Senate election and "Box 13." Perales’s final resting place is in Alice, accompanied by a state historical marker commemorating his life and achievements.

The League of United Latin American Citizens founded by Perales and his allies would become a preeminent advocacy organization with broad interests, still active today. Together with the American GI Forum founded after WWII by Hector Garcia of Corpus Christi, South Texans led the way for Mexican American civil rights in the United States.

Selected Bibliography

Garcia, Mario T. Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Garcia, Richard A. "Alonso S. Perales: The Voice and Visions of a Citizen Intellectual." In Leaders of the Mexican American Generation: Biographical Essays, edited by Anthony Quiroz, 85-117. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015.

Kaplowitz, Craig A. LULAC, Mexican Americans, and National Policy. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005.

Menchaca, Martha. The Mexican American Experience in Texas: Citizenship, Segregation, and the Struggle for Equality. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022.

Olivas, Michael A., ed. In Defense of My People: Alonso S. Perales and the Development of the Mexican-American Public Intellectuals. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2012.

Orozco, Cynthia E. No Mexicans, Women or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.

Orozco, Cynthia E. Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2020.

Perales, Alonso. Are We Good Neighbors? San Antonio: Artes Gráficas, 1948.

Sloss-Vento, Adela. Alonso S. Perales: His Struggle for the Rights of Mexican Americans. San Antonio: Artes Gráficas, 1977. 

Listen to the audio

Portrait of Alonso S. Perales. Courtesy of the Alonso S. Perales Collection at Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, University of Houston.

Alonso S. Perales and his wife, Marta, walking on Houston Street in San Antonio. Courtesy of the Alonso S. Perales Collection at Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, University of Houston.