Emma Tenayuca and Homer Brooks, the state chairman and state secretary of the Communist Party in Texas, respectively, completed a report on the status of Mexican Americans inhabiting the southwestern United States in 1939, the year a second world war began in Europe, the result of aggression by fascist states. The report’s authors warned that the continued denial of political rights, access to education, and economic opportunity would potentially drive Mexican Americans living in the Southwest into the arms of a fledgling fascist movement developing in Mexico. Their report took stock of how the expanding United States took possession of a significant portion of Mexican territory during the 1840s and experienced a marked increase in Mexican immigration during the period of industrialization following the Civil War. Mexican labor proved vitally important to the construction of America’s railroads and the development of capitalist farming, but low wages and resistance to assimilation proved to be major obstacles the new arrivals. Tenayuca and Brooks also identified the violent seizure of ancestral lands belonging to established Mexican Americans as further evidence of rampant discrimination.