If the 1880s represented a period of massive cultural and economic change for Mexican Americans in the U.S. Southwest, the 1890s were marked by renewed racial conflict and social unrest. In El Paso, which experienced a massive influx of white American migrants to the region after the completion of the Southern Pacific railway line, there was a widespread retrenchment of racial animosity. Interracial marriage, which had theretofore been tacitly allowed in some parts of Texas, became a crime increasingly targeted by Texan officials. Throughout the state, a new code of racial relations and series of ordinances worked to create segregated racial neighborhoods. These laws targeted Native Americans, black Americans, Asians, and Mexican Americans. They have been described as Juan Crow, the rough equivalent to the Jim Crow laws emerging in the South. In El Paso, Mexicans Americans were demonized as ignorant, and therefore both ineligible and unworthy of the vote. White Texans also frequently characterized them as "foreigners", despite their U.S. citizenship. One El Paso newspaper claimed Mexicans were "foreigners who claim American citizenship but who are as ignorant of things American as the mule."
