In the 1940 US census, "white" included anyone of Mexican descent.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted a Good Neighbor policy that sought better relations with Mexico. In 1935, a federal judge ruled that three Mexican immigrants were ineligible for citizenship because they were not white, as required by federal law.
Mexico protested, and Roosevelt decided to circumvent the decision and make sure the federal government treated Hispanics as white. The State Department, the Census Bureau, the Labor Department, and other government agencies therefore made sure to uniformly classify people of Mexican descent as white.
This policy encouraged the League of United Latin American Citizens in its quest to minimize discrimination by asserting their whiteness.
The race category of "Mexican" was eliminated in 1940, and the population of Mexican descent was counted with the white population.
Wasn’t being “white” legally required to vote in federal elections for most of US history? Were any of these groups ever prohibited from voting on the basis of not being “white”? I have never heard of that happening, have you? I think that would answer the question, since the government was actually in the business of determining “white”-ness at that time, and unless I’m mistaken, all of those groups were determined by the federal government to be “white”.
> Slavic peoples were considered to be people of an "inferior race" who were unable to assimilate into American society.[4] They were originally not considered to be "fully white" (and thus fully American), and Slavic peoples' "whiteness" continues to be a debate to this day, but most people consider them to be of Caucasian culture
