Martha Cotera oral history

Q: I’m here with Martha Cotera in her Austin, Texas home. Today is October 25, 2017. And

we are starting the interview. So Martha, could you tell me a little bit about yourself,

some background information on you? A: Sure. I was born in 1938, in Nuevo Casa

Grandes, Chihuahua. My grandmother is from the Old Town, Paquimé, which is the old -- the

Anasazi name for the town, which is Casa Grandes. And there’s a Casa Grandes, Arizona, Casa

Grandes, New Mexico, and Casa Grandes, Chihuahua. So I don’t know our direct line, but I do

know that my grandmother was indigenous to the area of that community. So I grew up with

very strong roots in Native American culture, and very interesting history in terms of the

Mexican Revolution, and talking to my grandparents about what brought it on, social justice issues,

et cetera. So I grew up with a very strong background in social change, political change,

the need to -- my grandfather used to say -- to always be in revolution. To always be

looking to improve your community, yourself, et cetera. I was very lucky to be very, very

close to them. We immigrated to El Paso when I was nine years old, and I’ll never forget

the conversation with my grandfather, because I grew up thinking that Anglos were, like,

the devil because of the things that had happened in 1848, when his family had had to leave

Marathon, Texas area and go back to Zacatecas. That’s another story. And so he would say

that -- not to worry, for me as an immigrant. That as long as I moved within these continents,

American continents, that we were home. I mean, that this is our indigenous land, and

that we were not immigrants anywhere. That we were just migrating from one place to the

other. That we were not entering anybody’s -- others’ territory.

That really helped me develop a perspective on myself as an “immigrant,” quote, to

a different community. So he made me feel like I was just migrating to a different community,

but not necessarily immigrating to a different political situation or condition, place. That

was very important. Anyway, I noticed that one of the questions was -- or concerns was,

was I an activist before? I came to Austin in 1963, and I came to Austin from El Paso

after graduating from college and getting married. I graduated from UTEP, University

of Texas at El Paso -- at that time, it was known as Texas Western College -- with a BA

in English, Southwestern literature, and Spanish literature and history. So I have a very strong

background in literature and history. I got married to Juan Cortera, also a native from

El Paso and Juarez, Mexico. He was a student at the school of architecture here in Austin,

so we came to Austin in ’63, in August of 1963. Prior to that, I had been an activist

in -- elementary school, not so much, but in high school, because I suffered a great

deal of discrimination when I got to high school. The discrimination in high school

was addressed both on class and race issues. So there was a discrimination of class, as

we were all assumed to be, quote, “lower-class,” and we were discriminated -- the children

that showed indications of being lower-class were totally pushed out.

You know, pushed out, and teachers would brag -- the poorest students came from Smeltertown,

which is right outside of El Paso, families that worked in the refinery. So there were

working-class children. The teachers, I remember -- I was a teacher aide in the lounge one

time. I heard them brag about the fact that, out of all the Smeltertown kids, by the time

we were seniors, that only three remained. And that just hurt me so badly. And those

three were so up there that all three of them were top-10-percent graduates. So was I. But

one of them, Ramona Valenzuela, was valedictorian. That’s how amazing they were. And so I learned

a lesson. I had been an activist. I was editor of the school paper, and almost got expelled

for endorsing Adlai Stevenson against Eisenhower, because I learned from my mother that it would

be horrible if the Republicans took over. Because up to that point, it had been Democrats

under FDR, Truman, and very liberal, liberal administrations. And here come the Republicans,

and so we actually did an endorsement in the paper. I got talked into it by my co-editor,

Tissie Goodell. And we almost got expelled for doing that. But also, along with Tissie,

I learned a lot about advocacy in high school for students that were being discriminated

against, including myself.

I had to start with myself, because I suffered a great deal of discrimination. And even as

a senior graduating, I got a one-year scholarship, PTA scholarship, and I was talked into giving

it up, because -- it’s so stupid. My journalism -- no, my business teacher said that I was

never going to be able to go through college, because it was too expensive and I couldn’t

afford it, and why didn’t I give up the scholarship to a male Anglo student who would

be able to finish? And stupid me, I thought, well, she’s probably right. And then I went

and told my mentor at the public library, Elizabeth Kelly, what had happened, and she

was so angry. And so she got me a four-year scholarship, including books, tuition and

books, for four years, from the International Altrusa Club. It’s a women’s club in El

Paso. So I was very, very lucky, and, in a way, my bad decision turned into a better

break for me. So that’s how I went through the university with a four-year tuition and

book scholarship. I was an activist. I worked with the Viva Kennedy Clubs, because by that

time, by the late ’50s, for the 1960 election, we were getting to vote for a very good candidate.

We were getting to vote for a very liberal candidate, I felt, John Kennedy. And so we

started Viva Kennedy Clubs. We were in the midst of that, and we worked on that, and

then we -- of course, he got elected.

In ’62, I graduated, and I had worked for five years, full-time, at the El Paso Public

Library. But actually, I had been working since I was 12, retail, in a retail store,

downtown El Paso. Then when I graduated from high school, I went to work full-time at the

public library with my mentor, Elizabeth Kelly. I worked there full-time until I graduated

from college in ’62. Then in ’63, a year later, I got married and would move to Austin.

So when I came to Austin, I was pretty much politically involved, but not radical. Here

is where I became radicalized. Because in El Paso, it was -- a lot of the discrimination

was race, but because we were the majority, they didn’t get very far. I mean, we had

a lot of power, as we were the majority. Mexican Americans in El Paso were the majority. And

so we could always overcome. Economically, we had a lot of power. Politically, we had,

you know, not so much, but socially we had a lot of power. We had a lot of capital, social

capital. And as a majority population, we could pretty much -- we didn’t have any

things like housing discrimination. The schools -- yes, as always, the schools in the poorer

-- it was more of a class discrimination situation there than race.

The poorer schools, as in every place in this country, got the worst deals. But I got some

really wonderful lessons in social justice from my mom, for example. We were not -- my

mother had married, but then, within six months, she was widowed. Her husband died of a heart

attack, and she was widowed. So she had to get whatever job, minimum-wage job, she could

get to survive. So we were not doing nearly as well as our grandparents were back in Mexico,

and that happens a lot. Sometimes your family back in Mexico is actually better off than

you are, economically and socially. They have better standing, better position. So we had

never really -- oh, well the lesson I learned from my mom is that -- the school at one point

was having a school drive for used books, children to bring the books they no longer

wanted, to be donated to the school library. It was Douglass School, was a school for African

American kids. I mean, we only probably had two African American families, and they had

a school for African American kids. You know, separate school. So when I told my mom -- and

like I said, my mom was struggling -- but when I told my mom that we should gather up

the books that we no longer wanted so we could take them for donating, my mother was totally,

totally incensed.

I mean, she was so angry, and she said, “No, ma’am, you’re not taking used books.”

She said, “I just can’t understand. Your school doesn’t get used books for the library.

Why are they doing a book drive for used books for the African American kids?” You know,

“Porque? No es gusto.” She said, “No. You’re going to go out there, and we’re

going to buy new books, and you’re going to donate your books to be donated to the

school.” And that made such an impression on me. She was so generous with the very little

resources that we had. That taught me that, very often, the people that have the least

-- and I’ve learned that lesson in Austin over and over and over again -- are the most

generous. I think because, basically, there’s a lot of understanding that goes with the

necessity of struggle for everything you have, every bobby pin, every safety pin. But that

instead of making people bitter and possessive, it makes them, to me, more generous. I would

love, someday in the future, to kind of study that. I had a lesson of that here in Austin

once, when I was trying to raise funds to help this newly divorced immigrant woman whose

husband had abused her and then divorced her, and then never legalized her. How often that

happens. Never documented her, although he was a US citizen.

Then he always threatened to, if she left him after his abuse, that he would take the

children away. So she finally got away, and I was called in to help interpret in her court

case. And so I started to raise money for her so that she would look -- because he threw

her out without clothes or anything, none of her clothes. So to get money for clothes

and to get money for furniture, start up an apartment, et cetera. I learned a hard lesson.

I went to people that were very resourceful here, and they offered nothing. And I’m

not going to tell a story about [Teresa Long?] because it would not be a nice story, but

I had an unfortunate situation with that. I learned that very wealthy people are sometimes

the least charitable to those in need. They are very charitable to institutions that will

be a legacy for them, that will put their name on buildings and everything, but not

charitable one-on-one. To me -- Jesus Christ. I mean, literally, literally, what lesson

is there? That was a very harsh lesson here in Austin, that all of her friends that were

in the same straits as she was -- house cleaning, and this and that and the other -- were the

ones that put the furniture and everything together.

Pam Reed, to her credit, Commissioner Pam Reed had a clothing store, and of all the

people with means that I reached out to, she was one that donated clothes, new clothes,

for Virginia to go to court in great-looking outfits, so that she would feel good about

herself. Anyway, here I sidetrack. But I was an activist before I came to Austin. But when

I came to Austin, I became a radical activist. I would say I was politically involved and

moderately activist when I was in El Paso, but when I came to Austin -- and it really

hurt me on a personal level, because the very first attempt that we made to rent a house

that wouldn't rent houses to us because we were Mexican. They would rent to us if we

said that we were foreign students, but not Mexican American. You know? And it just killed

me. I mean, it just killed me, because as a matter of fact, my husband had been raised

in a very privileged, wealthy situation in Mexico, but that did not make a difference.

The fact is that if people discriminate against one of you, they discriminate against all

of you. They have discriminated against you, regardless of your situation, and you cannot

say, well, I’m not part of that race or class system. So that made me an activist

of another sort. That made me an activist on race issues.

You know, the fact that I realized that Mexican American community in Austin was 10 percent

of the population. The African American community was 16 percent. I did the numbers. I was very

good at demography. I had been a librarian in public documents for five years, so I was

very experienced in demographic research. The first thing I did in Austin, once I suffered

that horrible -- I had brought with me a book that was called A Social Survey of Austin

that was done in 1910 -- about 1910, I think. It’s an amazing book about -- the way it

addresses the Mexican American community in Austin, and the way it discriminates against

-- the description of the Mexican American community in Austin. The research that I did

coming into Austin -- before I came to Austin and realized that the Mexican part of Austin,

Mexican sectors in Austin, had school achievement levels of second grade, and of course, other

parts of Austin had 16-plus, because it’s always been that way in Austin. That academics

has always been -- education gap has always been amazing. Income gaps were amazing. And

they haven’t closed. That’s the awful thing, that despite all the effort of 54 years

-- maybe it would be worse if we hadn’t acted out in 54 years I’ve been here.

But I came armed with these statistics, and I was really -- and then when -- I had these

statistics, but I didn’t realize, on a personal level, what it meant to me until I started

looking for a house, and I was told over and over and over again that they could not rent

housing to me in the university area because I was Mexican American. When I interviewed

in the public schools and they said they could not hire me because I had the wrong attitudes

about Mexican Americans, and I said, well -- and I thought to myself when I was being

interviewed and told this, I thought, well, did I not show enough empathy or knowledge

or competency or what? And the person that interviewed me was a vice principal of the

university junior high at that time -- that’s where I was interviewing -- said, “No, because

you think that these children can learn, and anybody that thinks that these children can

learn is not doing them any favor, because they can’t learn.” And I thought, geez,

I really don’t want to teach there in this school district. I want to get in there, and

I want to reform the school district, and I want to change those attitudes. And so from

the day that my husband and I came, and before we even had our first child, we started working

on school reform, because of that horrible interview. So I very, very quickly -- and

of course I got to -- immediately, within months, I knew the African American community,

and I met the leadership of the Austin Hispanic community, and I started working.

I mean, I started working really, really hard. Within the first year, we were actually -- my

husband and I -- helping with the first city council race that we encountered, and that

was B.T. Bonner, an African American, running very -- you know, very, very radical, but

very wonderful man running for city council. And we ran candidates every year, every year

since I’ve been here. Never have failed to run minority candidates. So it wasn’t

like the minority community wasn’t trying. And we were only 26 percent of the vote total,

potentially, but we did it anyway, because I always felt that every race -- and you know

this, Dalia, I have to address you, because you’ve been involved with the campaign leadership

training, and because you know politics. Every race is not a wasted race, whether you win

or lose, because every race trains people on the political system. I felt that way.

I felt that it was -- I never feel that a vote is wasted, that efforts are wasted, ever,

because every race is a learning situation. And so my focus -- and our focus, Juan’s

and mine -- and I have to say that my husband, Juan, had already been at UT for a couple

of years before we got married, and that he also -- he had been in the military, the Air

Force, so he knew the race dynamics in ways that I did not know it.

I knew about class in El Paso, but I didn’t know about race. So he was a race activist

before we got married. He had been involved as a student before we got married -- he had

already been at UT for two years -- in integrating the Texas Theater and integrating the -- there

was a five-and-ten-cent store downtown, and other places downtown. He had been involved

in that movement to integrate. But this was a black-and-white binary. I mean, it was a

binary kind of situation. But nevertheless, he was very much involved in that system.

He just laughed when I -- because I could not believe him. When he would tell me about

these things about Austin, I could not believe it. But when I encountered them myself, as

we were newly married, he just laughed. I mean, he laughed, and he would say, “Well,

you know, you got your work cut out for you, I guess.” And so we continued to do that.

So those -- that is a way I became an activist on race issues. As far as that was concerned,

a lot of the movements I described to you that I have been involved with throughout

all my life in Austin on race issues, we were involved in team -- very early on in the ’60s,

we were involved in political campaigns from the beginning. From the beginning.

We joined PASSO, Political Association of the Spanish-Speaking, which was very active

-- well, it was Political -- como? Political Association -- something like that, and then

it had -- oh, “Organization” I think was at the end. But anyway, so we joined PASSO,

which was a Hispanic political organization. We worked with the African American community

on politics. Then we established a local chapter of TEAMA, Texans for Education Advancement

of Mexican Americans, and through TEAMA, we did educational reform locally. But before

that, Juan and I -- actually, before our daughter was born -- we started working on AISD issues,

because of my experience having interviewed, and knowing what the attitudes were. So we

worked on TEAMA. We worked for many, many years on TEAMA, both at the local level and

at the statewide level on educational reform, and out of TEAMA was instituted an organization

still known -- an excellent organization known as IDRA. I think it’s called Intercultural

Research -- Intercultural Education Development and Research Association, I believe. It’s

in San Antonio. But that came out of TEAM. Dr. Jose. My goodness. We’ve got his archives

here at the university.

Anyway. So out of that, we developed TEAMA, local and statewide, and I became very active

in that. We also, in the early ’60s, then, after the Civil Rights Acts were passed by

Johnson, after all that civil rights legislation -- you can have a federal law, but you have

to have local ordinances that reflect that law. So we made sure that, as a result of

that, we instituted bilingual education, we instituted Title I education, Title VII, Title

-- all the titles that were encompassed in the Civil Rights Act, both on race and gender

issues, we made sure that they were instituted in Austin. Because activists had to take that

federal law and implement it in the city. Otherwise -- that’s why a lot of cities

have laws in the South against race, but people still are racist, because those laws, you

never have local ordinances to make those laws a reality. I became an expert on local

policy and legislation, and making sure that the districts adopted these programs and these

policies that the federal government allowed and demanded and then mandated, and that the

city also did housing ordinance. I was so happy with the civil rights addressing public

transportation and housing issues, that we could have a local housing ordinance. So we

worked on that. We did that.

Policy -- if you’re not involved in policy, then you’re not involved. I mean, you have

to follow up, organizing with policy. And that’s what I love about the Workers Defense

Project, because the Workers Defense Project, they advocate and they’re activists, but

then they get to city council and they say, “You’ve got to have these policies mandated.

You’ve got to look out for security, safety of workers. You’ve got to make sure” -- yesterday,

this person that works with me as a personal assistant on Tuesdays was telling me that

she got a check that Workers Defense got for her because some employer tried to cheat her

out of her money, because she’s undocumented. Workers Defense implements policies and goes

after people legally, and that’s what you have to do as an activist. You can’t just

like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, protest. You’ve got to follow it up with policy initiatives,

and you’ve got to learn policy, and you’ve got to get involved in political campaigns.

Along with getting involved with political campaigns, I’ve also, all my life, been

involved in instituting policies and working with policies, and making sure that we have

policies in place that follow. I was involved in writing the first sanctuary resolutions

for the city of Austin, very early on, late ’70s -- in the ’70s. We’ve had them

reenacted in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s.

So I worked with TEAMA, and then I worked very closely, from the very beginning, with

the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party, on race issues, on making sure that the party

adhered to policies and had policies that were inclusive of race, and empowered people,

the party itself, of different races -- the problem with the Democratic Party is that

it was one party, but it had within it -- about 30 percent of the party, Democratic Party,

were Democrats, real Democrats. Out of that, maybe 20 percent were liberal. Thirty percent

were Democrats, 70 percent were Republicans, in the party. Because it was a Southern Democratic

Party, that had grown up opposed to abolition. It’s very complicated, and I hope that you

study political science, because it’s very complicated. Because the Republican Party,

liberal Republican Party, moderate in the Northeast, was an abolitionist party, in the

Midwest and Northeast, the ones that called for the Civil War. The Southern Democrats

-- the Democrats controlled the South. It’s very different from what it is today. But

the Southern Democratic Party was pro-slavery. And so that, then, after Reconstruction, became

-- well, until Raza Unida, in Texas, you had a Democratic Party that was actually what

the Republican Party is today.

Forget about the old Republican Party of the Midwest and Northeast. That was a liberal

party that called for abolition, and things [Spanish]. And so it was very horrible for

us as activists, and social justice activists and race activists, to be in a party in which

a very tiny minority, maybe 20 percent, were liberal, 30 percent were Democrat in values

and culture, and 70 percent were Republican, like the Republicans today. White supremacists.

To tell you, John Connally was in there. He was a Republican. Perry -- Perry -- was a

Democrat. Phil Gramm was a Democrat. Dick Armey, Tom DeLay -- all the most awful Republicans

in the state were in the Democratic Party. So we were not -- when we were looking for

a way out as minority activists, as Latino -- as Mexican American activists, on race

issues, we were looking for a way out. We were looking for a way out of a Democratic

Party that was, in fact, a Republican Party with a very tiny minority of Democrats in

it, and an even tinier minority of liberal Democrats. So you had liberal Democrats, you

had moderate Democrats, some conservative Democrats, and then 70 percent Republicans.

So it wasn’t a Democratic party. We left.

We were involved in Democratic Party, but even -- from the very beginning, and in El

Paso -- but even in the beginning, even the liberal Democrats were extremely -- like they

are today -- extremely closed to change, and extremely closed to being inclusive and to

sharing the power. And so, if you were there, you didn’t get involved in learning about

party structure or anything. All you did was you were handed leaflets, and you were just

man power, or woman power. You weren’t really empowered, and you were not -- and that power

was never shared with you. So we left. I mean, we started thinking about a way out. Well,

how is it that we can control the primaries and not just have these horrible people be

elected? Like they are today. I mean, today you have a party that allows Dawnna Dukes

-- that hasn’t told her, “Get the hell out. What you’re doing is not correct. Even

if the courts say you’re free to go home, it’s not correct. What you did is corrupt.”

And even today we have a party that will allow corruption. You cannot imagine what we had

to do to get rid of Sheriff Hamilton. We had to run a poor man against him. We had to get

half of the vote, half as much vote as he did, take those votes to Lloyd Doggett and

say, “Here’s how many votes we got for this opposition candidate. Now get rid of

this man. You’re the leader of the party in Travis County. We don’t want a man that’s

deporting and cutting apart families.”

So that’s how we got rid of the sheriff, because we finally got the party to understand

that we were focusing our attention on working here, where we could focus on other races,

and that they were causing losses for the party. Anyway, that’s the way the party

was, and still is to a large degree. Parties tend to be that way. People that have control

of political parties want to keep the control very close by. They don’t want to share.

So we were thinking about a way out, and that’s how thinking in the young people -- we were

a little older, about 10 years older, than the young people that were thinking of starting

a third party, Raza Unida. It was that situation that caused us, as a race, as a group, racial

group, to go to a third party. That’s how we came about, late ’60s, mid-’60s, late

’60s, started thinking, how can we reform things faster? How can we change policy and

government faster? By having a third party. By having -- well, we can talk about that.

So in the ’60s, race-wise, this is what we were talking about. And I think one of

the most important things that happened in the ’60s in Austin, and Texas, was establishing

the Raza Unida Party.

In the late ’60s, we also started thinking about, how can we change the university so

that -- and universities in general -- so that we can attract more students of color

in? So we started looking -- as early as ’68, we started looking at ways of organizing ethnic

studies. The reason -- the way we got the idea for ethnic studies was more because of

bilingual education. Bilingual education and bicultural education, the legislation on that,

federal legislation in local programs, made us think that, if you taught bilingual education,

well, then you have to teach topics that were relevant. You weren’t just going to teach

a white curriculum that continued to be meaningless for the kids, but you’re then teaching it

in Spanish. And I’m not talking about math content, or science. I’m talking about -- well,

even science, even STEM, can be multicultural, because people have STEM legacies and traditions

that are just as legitimate as calendar science, like astronomy, mathematics, that can be incorporated.

Because of bilingual education, I believe, is how we started thinking in terms of training

our teachers faster, or getting more teachers in the pipeline, and also about more content

that was culturally -- that would teach our children cultural competencies for their own

culture. That’s what got us started on looking at transforming higher education.

So we started -- oh, that, and also the fact that we had school walkouts in the ’60s.

Bilingual education, in a way, generated -- and civil rights -- a lot of interest in reforming

the school systems. And so, in Texas, California, Arizona, everywhere -- New Mexico -- we had

school walkouts. We had kids who were like, “I don’t like this. I don’t like being

discriminated. I don’t like the fact that I can’t speak Spanish.” Despite the fact

that we had bilingual education in place then, you can’t speak Spanish in schools. I, myself,

got fined 25 -- my school lunch money every time I was caught speaking Spanish, and I

was totally -- in high school. That was one of the ways they discriminated against us.

This made us think, these walkouts that we -- I participated in walkouts by -- I was

working at the Southwest Lab, and we would go -- we would prepare curriculum for teachers

that would go into the walkouts as tutors, so that the kids wouldn't lose days of school

and wouldn’t get behind, and TEA could take into account that they were being tutored

while they walked out of school and stayed out of school. So there were school walkouts

in Del Rio and Crystal City, in Weslaco, Houston, here -- Del Valle had a walkout.

Everywhere. We helped with that, because I was working, at that time, with Southwest

Lab. The lab didn’t help. I almost got fired. But the people within the lab, like Dr. José

Cárdenas, and Bambi Cárdenas. José Cárdenas, Dr. Cárdenas, had been the leader in organizing

TEAMA. We were working in this educational lab, and I was the information person. So

there was a group of people throughout the state working on these issues. So these walkouts

then led to our questioning the preparation of teachers, questioning the fact that we

had no ethnic studies at the university. And so the university -- we started to agitate

with Dr. Sánchez and Dr. Américo Paredes. I was part of -- and my husband -- part of

a group that was agitating to get ethnic studies going in the late ’60s. Then we decided

-- well, because of the walkouts, we decided, well, it’s taking too long to train the

teachers, and it’s going to take years, so why don’t we start an independent college

and get Antioch to support the academic infrastructure and the ties to TEA, so TEA could accredit

it, or the Southern Association of College and Universities to accredit it? So we started

an independent college in the Valley.

My husband and I went down there to teach there, and from there, then we went to Crystal

City to work in the movement. So this independent college was called Colegio Jacinto Treviño.

There were other independent colleges in Oregon, in California, and Colorado, but I think ours

was the first, the Jacinto Treviño, here in Texas. Then later on it became Juarez Lincoln

University, and the archives for Juarez Lincoln University are at the Benson Collection if

you need to see them. So we go down there. My husband had graduated. So we go down there,

and along with -- we had about eight other people that had been involved in walkouts

in Colorado and Texas, and we got this college going. It was actually -- about a year after

that, it split, so some stayed in the Valley -- because of politics, politics that were

incorporated from California, and then the college became Juarez Lincoln University,

went to Fort Worth, and then came back to Austin. So it was instituted in Austin afterwards.

So anyway, that -- so all this, the race activism, had all kinds of strains, and people worked

in all kinds of ways. About the same time that we split, we left Austin to go work -- it

was always temporary. We always intended to return to Austin. But we left Austin to go

to Weslaco area, to Mercedes, Texas, to set up this college, my husband and I, to help

set up this college.

Dr. Paredes was one of our (inaudible) faculty members, so we maintained ties with what was

going on with the issue of setting up the Center for Mexican American Studies. We kept

the ties, because there were very close ties between the independent college and CMAS,

that eventually became CMAS. So we stayed in touch with Dr. José Limón, who was a

student there, and then Dr. Paredes. So we went to the Valley, and at the same time,

we were working, still working, with other activists to form Raza Unida Party. We always

had in the back of our minds, yes, we’ve got to have a party. We’ve got to have a

progressive party that will address progressive issues that the Democrats are not addressing.

Well, so what happened, we formed the party in 1970, and we were -- my husband and I were

members of the founding group, as were people like Linda del Toro, María Elena Martínez.

People that are still active here in Austin, activists here in Austin. By that time, when

the party was established, Juan and I had moved. We didn’t go to the college in Fort

Worth. We moved to Crystal City. So we moved to Crystal City. I took a librarian job there,

because I had always been a library and information person, and my husband took the job of urban

renewal director there. From that base, we worked with a statewide group to form the

party, Raza Unida Party.

Now, Raza Unida Party -- there’s a dissertation to be done there, and there’s so much work

to be done. But Raza Unida Party, the first election we had in ’72, statewide election

-- the focus of the party was to get local people -- was to break the hold of the Democratic

Party as it was, at the local level, so we could get more people elected to office at

the local level. It was always intended to be a local party. And to build the strength

of the party from the bottom up, from the local community, from sheriff and local commissioners

and stuff on the primaries, up. It was never to start at the state level. But the people

like Austin and Houston and Dallas and El Paso that were in an urban environment, they

wanted it to go statewide, because statewide is where they could add their votes and their

power. And I don’t blame them. My husband is very bitter about that. “If we hadn’t

got the statewide” -- and (inaudible) too. And I say, “You know, but you can’t blame

them, because at the statewide, they could add their vote to a statewide vote and make

an impact, but if it just remained local” -- in Austin, the population was so small.

It wasn’t like today. At that time, it was growing, but it was still around 16 percent.

There was very little impact they could have. They couldn’t even get on the ballot. But

in the big population hubs -- rural, primarily, in the Valley, South Texas Valley, and in

Winter Garden area, like Crystal City, where they were 80 percent of the population -- they

could get on the ballot. Both groups had a basis for wanting local -- the party to be

largely localized, or the party to be a statewide party. But having a statewide party did diffuse

a lot of the potential power that could have been put on the local level. I still think

that if we had been more sophisticated, we could have pulled it off okay, somehow. Perhaps

not by starting with and continuing to run for the governor’s position, but by running

for other positions. Anyway, that’s the way it happened. I like -- a lot of people

are disillusioned. To me, I am totally different. I am like, this is the best thing that’s

ever happened in my life. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to Texas. It

is going to be a while -- not even that long, maybe within five years -- we will have a

strong Democratic Party in Texas, but it will be a Democratic Party if we don’t let the

Republicans creep in. It will be -- if you people, you young people -- young people defend

the party and the values of the party, and don’t let the Republicans creep back in,

it will be a strong liberal -- it will be a strong progressive and moderate Democratic

Party.

But it will be strong. And it’s growing like that. Can you imagine -- political scientists

need to look at this, seriously look at this. The impact that Raza Unida had was extremely

important in the rise of the Republican Party, and that’s where the Democrats just hated

us. But Raza Unida did two things, and political scientists need to study the dynamics, and

explain the dynamics, and explain the numbers and everything. But Raza Unida did two very,

very important things. Number one, it flushed the Republicans out of the Democratic Party.

Flushed them out. You know, [makes sound effect]. Because I think, psychologically, it was important

for the Republicans to see that a third party could actually get 200,000 votes in the state,

which is what Raza Unida got. That they had actually bigger strength than the Mexican

American voting strength. I think they were able to see that. We showed them that. Okay?

Number two, I think that they saw that the Democratic Party could be split. We split

it, and that’s why the Democratic Party hated us. It took them 20 years to forgive

some of us for having left. When we came back, they called us born-again Democrats, after

the Raza Unida Party didn’t exist anymore. But we split the party, but I think we split

it in a good way.

We left the Democratic Party weakened, because even when we came back, we drifted back very,

very slowly. Very, very slowly, we drifted back, and they lost 70 percent. I think they

lost about 70 -- this is what I mean, that somebody has to do a dissertation on this.

I think they lost about 70 percent of their strength. But it wasn’t strength. It was

like -- if something looks big, and healthy to you because it’s big, but you have a

tumor in there, how does that benefit you and your body and your ability to be healthy?

And that’s what the Republican Party was to the Democrat. You had schizoid party. You

had a bipolar party. You had a party that was totally antithesis to Democratic values.

Seventy percent. And we cut it off. We cut it off. They could see that could happen.

It’s true that Raza Unida -- because Raza Unida came from the Democratic Party, so we

cut off that part of the party, the 20 percent that made up the liberal wing of the party,

the progressive party, and we left the moderates behind, and then 70 percent of the Republicans

split. They left. They left. To me, that gave the Democratic Party its health back, and

it gave it its vision back, and it gave it its values back.

You had to start from scratch, because then the Democratic Party had to start growing

on its own values and on its own strength, and not on the false strength of this tumor

that they had growing in there that didn’t represent Democratic values. That’s when

the Republican Party -- there was no Republican Party to speak of in Texas before Raza Unida.

None. They had flushed it out, flushed it out when it became a Southern Democratic Party.

Anyway, so that’s one thing that we did for the Democratic Party. The other thing

that we did, that has to do with race issues, because it’s still all about race -- the

other thing that we did for the Democratic Party that was very useful is that the Raza

Unida Party was very radical. It was very radical in its international politics, it

was very radical in immigration, it was very radical in women’s rights, and I will explain

to you why, because something that developed on gender issues with the party. It was very,

very radical in social issues. It was very radical on economic equity. It was radical

in everything -- and if you want to study a good platform, look at the Raza Unida platform.

It was ours, and we could put down every wish list that we wanted for our community, and

we could do it freely. There was nobody, no stupid racist, to vote us down.

The whole world was open to us. This is a large group of voters that we tore away from

the Democratic Party, and that’s why they were so bitter. They were bitter because they

don’t understand the ultimate benefit to the party. That if they ever grow a party

that will be predominant in Texas, they owe it to the Raza Unida Party. The thing that

Raza Unida Party did on race, social, and gender issues was pushing the remaining Democratic

Party to the left, so that it impacted the moderate wing of the party to make the Democratic

Party more progressive, and it gave strength to the liberal wing to make it more progressive.

The party became -- and we hope that, based on the work that you all do with the party

in the future -- the party became a real Democratic Party. A very, very progressive party, as

parties go in Texas. Still not as progressive as Raza Unida was, but Raza Unida -- I mean,

looking at that platform, people like Gonzalo Barrientos, who was an activist with us but

split -- so a lot of us went this way. Moya, Barrientos, Margaret Gomez -- all of them

stayed, just locally, stayed with the Democratic Party, while the more radical activists in

Austin went with Raza Unida Party. Nevertheless, the impact was to make the Democratic Party

more progressive, because they were in competition with us.

The Republicans were not in competition with us. The Democrats were, for voters. We offered

support for the ERA, Equal Rights Amendment. Well, then, the Democratic Party had to follow

suit. If we offered this, the Democratic Party had to follow suit, because otherwise they

would look like the Republicans. You know what I mean? So, to me, that was a real -- to

me, I just think the Raza Unida Party was the best thing that ever happened to Texas.

Plus, it really gave us a legacy of children and grandchildren that could grow up unafraid

of their values -- political values, social values, Democratic values -- like the Castro

brothers, because their mother was one of the founders of Raza Unida, like us. You knew

that? Q: Yeah.

A: Right. You knew that Rosie was one of the founders of Raza Unida, from San Antonio.

There were founders from here, founders from Houston. Anyway, on race, politics, this is

like super, super, super, super, super, super important. After Raza Unida, then we -- that’s

the impact it had. Then we went back to the Democratic Party of -- we went back of sorts.

Almost everybody now that was Raza Unida is supportive, because we came from the Democratic

Party. So we kind of went back to the Democratic Party, but as more radical politicians, always

more radical. [Roberto Rodriguez?]. There are people in the legislature, the caucus,

the legislature -- the Latino caucus was all Raza Unida. Can you believe that? And they

have held strong. If they weren’t -- I would say all Raza Unida. I’m saying a big proportion

of them were Raza Unida legacies, either actual participants or children of Raza Unida people.

People like Paul Moreno were some of those -- and the remaining Democrats, or the Democrats

that remained in the Democratic Party, became freer to express radical positions, like Paul

Moreno -- he just died -- (inaudible) and others -- Sylvia -- Sylvia, who’s a senator

-- many of them were then freer to express more radical positions, and to be elected

within the Democrat -- than they had been before, or would have been -- they were young

adults -- would have been as adults running for office. They were freer to be more radical.

Because the party became more radical because of us. So then other race issues that have

continued to plague Austin have been -- and continue to plague Austin -- have been the

issues of segregation in schools and housing. We worked on segregation issues in 1967, when

Austin’s solution to integration was to integrate blacks and Mexican Americans.

And that’s Austin. Austin is very racist, and continues to be. Their solution to integration

by law, when they were forced to, was, okay, we’ll integrate blacks and Latinos. We were

already integrated. So we said, no, let’s have a city-wide integration plan. It didn’t

work very well. Never has worked. Because Austin is very entrenched in its racism. Even

today, the CodeNEXT thing, that whole CodeNEXT, changing the codes and all of that, the whole

gentrification of Austin, the potential gentrification of South Austin, Northeast Austin, is the

failure of the city to recognize that it’s not only a class issue, but it’s a race

issue, and that the privileged white community is empowered to act in its own interest, and

everybody else can go to hell. All they do is -- we don’t care where you live, as long

as you come and clean our caca. That’s all they care about. Until we raise incomes in

Austin, people -- it’s not affordable housing we need. It’s living wage that we need,

so people can afford housing in the city. You know? Then we need to find housing solutions

that will be -- so housing will be available not just to working-class people, but to teachers,

social workers, nurses, and other people that have to live on regular middle-class incomes.

We have to figure out affordability in Austin that will enable people to be part of the

middle class. My mother worked a minimum-wage job, but we never failed to be middle-class.

We were always part of the middle class, and that’s because, on that wage that she got,

we were able to live in a middle-class neighborhood. Right now, working-class people cannot afford

to live in a middle-class neighborhood. That’s what I keep telling the mayor, you know, it’s

not affordable housing that you need; it’s a living wage that you need in the city. Once

you have living wages, then people will find a way to develop affordable housing for themselves,

or to be able to live in an apartment downtown, or close to town, and not to lose. Because

right now, you don’t make enough money to be able to pay your local taxes, so you lose

your house. For example, the Garden Terrace neighborhood -- and that’s a race and class

issue. I mean, yeah. That has to do with race, trying to cleanse the inner city of people

that are not white, and also a class issue, because through the economic inequalities,

you get rid of them. It’s not that they’re not producing, because God darn it, you see

the man that’s producing that wall for us. I mean, they are producing, and they work

hard, and they should be paid more than people sitting up in those office towers, pushing

paper around.

The people in Garden Terrace -- which is probably the next neighborhood to go -- and those are

people around Memorial High School, east, east, past airport, kind of against 183. Not

quite the other side of 183. Okay, the income there is less than 15,000 dollars a year.

Okay? That much. They’re making that much, they’re doing well. The house ownership

in there is about 70 percent, which is very high for a poor neighborhood, minority neighborhood,

mostly Mexican American. Okay, but if you make that amount, and you’re making about

a thousand a month, and your taxes on the home that you own, 300 dollars a month or

more -- and that is more than that -- I can assure you it’s more than that -- you can’t

live. You’re in affordable housing, but the tax is making it --

Q: Not affordable. A: Not affordable. Our own house, if we didn’t

have the income to pay the 700-dollar taxes, and the 300-dollar insurance, and the 200-300-dollar

maintenance as retirees -- we’re not retired. The reason we can afford it is because we’re

going to be 80 and we’re not retired. We’re still working full-time. To be able to live

in the house that you already own, you end up paying, minimum, 1,500 dollars a month,

and you’re not making that in Social Security, and you don’t have other retirement, then

you own your home, but it’s not affordable housing anymore. That’s why so many retirees

have to leave the city and go to the suburbs, or to other towns where housing is affordable

now. God knows what’s going to happen in the future. Anyway, that’s Austin. I mean,

they’re always plagued -- the class and income inequality in Austin, and race, has

always served to colonize and to discriminate against poor people from the day I got here

to now. I mean, every day, it’s an issue. In fact, I posted the other day, I want to

wake up one day with peace in my heart, knowing that on that day, somebody, some government

entity or somebody, isn’t going to do something to hurt the community. Just one day. I’ve

yet to see that day in 54 years. That’s how bad it is in Austin. It’s this combination

of race discrimination that still prevails, and class discrimination that empowers the

privileged, that drives local politics and policies, and that make it -- just today,

just right now, I’m working on two horrendous issues. One, closing up all of these Austin

schools. Eventually they want to close 23 schools, and that would be 23 schools in the

inner city.

That means 23 schools that will not be public education, not provide public education to

the community that works downtown, and even the ones that live downtown, and that will

be privatized. Because eventually, there will be schools, but they’ll be charter and public

schools. [phone rings] Okay, she’s sending me a -- I love this woman. [Spanish] She’s

sending me something I need. The other issue is that they’re trying to put a big monster

thing on our land in the Mexican American Cultural Center, that we won after 40 years

of advocacy and activism for ourselves, out of tax dollars. And now they want to put a

convention center thing on the land. Okay, those are big issues. We let these policies

go through, and we let them do this, they’re going to continue to do this all our lives.

We’re not -- they look at us as -- they disenfranchise us, and they steal our money,

because we are taxpayers, but they don’t treat us like taxpayers. Do you ever feel

like a taxpayer? They don’t make you feel like a taxpayer.

Q: No, I don’t. A: Right. And yet property owners don’t

pay the taxes. The people that rent the properties pay the taxes. And then the people that own

their properties and live in them, like me and my residents, I pay my taxes. Nobody pays

them for me. So you live in your residence, you pay your taxes. You live in somebody’s

rented property, because you rent from them, you pay their taxes. So either way, we pay

our taxes. We don’t avoid our taxes. So why do they avoid giving us quality services?

That’s avoidance on their part. But anyway, so we did Raza Unida for those reasons. Then,

other things that we did for civil rights -- write minority ordinances for -- well,

develop a Spanish Chamber of Commerce in 1973. My husband and I were founders of that. That

was to gain some kind of economic equity in the city. People don’t ever understand economic

equity. It’s really hard to understand, because that’s something that policymakers

and politicians keep hidden. Because behind all the racism, basically, is economics. Because

from the very beginning, if you read a book called Unequal Freedoms, [Spanish] Unequal

Freedoms, there’s a wonderful explanation of how race, in the colonial period, was put

as a boogeyman, boogeywoman, in front of class, so that people would think of race to discriminate

against and forget about class discrimination against themselves. That’s still happening

today, with the current election that happened. That’s always been the case, that race is

used as a way to hide economic inequality and the things that are done to us economically.

So we’ve always fought race. We go -- income inequality.

So we developed a chamber to gain some income equality. I wrote -- I was a founder of the

chamber, along with my husband and many, many other local businesspeople, when we came back

to Austin in ’73. We came back in ’73, and that was the year that we participated

in establishing the Chamber of Commerce. In ’74, I established Mexican American Business

Professional Women for a reason dealing with gender. But continuing on the race activism,

we developed the Chamber of Commerce, and then within about -- I was secretary of the

Chamber of Commerce, and we developed the Spanish Chamber of Commerce to give us economic

equity, to demand -- not to demand, but to take advantage of our own market. To develop

a union of businesspeople that would buy from each other and use each other’s services

to give us economic strength, and to confront the city on economic issues. So about 10 years

later, or maybe even less, after the founding, I developed the first MBWB ordinance, and

boy, I got in so much trouble over that. I developed a database of businesses, local

businesses, that were really, really big. Identified all the local businesses, had a

computerized database, and then, through the chamber, in a chamber committee, went after

tourism dollars, and then we went after -- we established a minority purchasing council,

and we established and wrote -- I wrote the ordinance -- MBWB ordinance.

Then that ordinance was also picked up by CapMetro and by the school district, and that

ordinance was about equity in contracting for services out of tax dollars that the city

was collecting from us. So it’s only fair that if we’re going to pay taxes on bonds

and everything, that our businesses get contracting opportunities, and that’s what it was about.

I wrote that ordinance. So I want to get out there that -- because it’s not about recognition

or anything. It’s about awareness in children and students that read this, and empowerment,

to say, if something is not there, you can create it. You don’t have to sit around

and be a statistic. If you don’t have a housing ordinance, you write the damn ordinance.

If you don’t have an ordinance that addresses economic taxation issues, you write the ordinance.

You can do it. That’s why I say that, that I did it. It came from here. Of course, it

came from also studying, researching. We get down to that, why did you become a writer

or researcher? Because I can.

But I wrote the ordinance, and then through the Chamber of Commerce, and then we instituted

-- so now we have a department of MBWBs, what we call a minority business enterprise, women-owned

business enterprises, because we also brought in the women. So there was a good marriage

between race and gender, equity issues. I always did that. From my very first work,

I’ve always incorporated gender into all my activism, and we’ll talk about that.

So we did the chamber. We did MABPWA, which was race-oriented, because it was Mexican

American Business Professional Women -- was to bring equity, to bring women to the forefront,

minority women, and the needs of minority women. So it was race, and then gender. So

we’ll talk about that organization on the gender issue. What other organizations, so

that I don’t forget? Women -- Mexican American Business. Oh, and we also did -- okay. At

the same time that we were doing all of this, that we were doing our economic -- trying

to build a strong economic foundation for ourselves in the city after I came back and

joined the group that was moving to establish the chamber, we also were working on the cultural

arts. Juan and I have always been very, very, very interested in the arts, being an architect

and being very interested in art. If you look around my office and my house -- this is Santa

Barraza, Amado Pena, Montoya -- very famous artists, photographers.

We have a massive arts collection of originals. So we’ve always been very interested in

the cultural arts. From 1974 -- we came back in ’73. Seventy-four, Juarez Lincoln University

had come back here, and I had written a proposal for them to establish a migrant information

clearinghouse. So my condition on writing the proposal had been, when I come back to

Austin, you give me a job with it. I want to direct it, or at least be assistant director,

which I was. So I got a job as assistant director of that. That, Juarez Lincoln University,

was a hub for creative cultural arts community. From Juarez Lincoln University, we supported

the -- oh, and all this period that I was away from Austin, I was attending meetings

and I was on the advisory committee for the Center for Mexican American Studies. Because

having been a founder of Colegio Jacinto Trevino, and being a librarian now for, then, like

15 years, almost 18 years by then, I had the background to help with the advisory, and

I had been very close to the students and the professors at UT -- Dr. Paredes, he continued

to collaborate with us, Dr. Sanchez. So when we came back, we continued to activate for

getting the center built, even as we had Juarez Lincoln University already here in Austin.

They collaborated very closely.

In fact, we had people that worked at Juarez Lincoln University, and also worked at UT,

and that provided -- so we would do a function at Juarez Lincoln University, and then maybe

UT would publish the proceedings. So we had a very collaborative system. Also, that enabled

us to continue -- I was working at Juarez Lincoln, which was established, actually,

at that time, in the beginning, at St. Edward’s University, and I was working on the migrant

information clearinghouse project, but collaborating with UT. So it’s all going on very dynamic,

very organic system. We continued to activate for that. CMAS, at UT, was established, I

guess around ’72 -- was it ’72 or ’74? We just celebrated some big anniversary. But

we hosted Floricanto events that were national in scope, that were kind of like NACCS now,

Chicano Studies Association. They were literature and arts. They brought in scholars from all

over. It was the forerunner to NACCS, the Association of -- National Chicano Studies

Association. So we had these events, and we had a couple of them here, one in ’74 and

one in ’76 -- ’75, I believe. I forget the years. We had those events at Juarez Lincoln,

and sometimes at UT, and we decided that we needed a big cultural arts center in Austin

to host these events, and to bring the community in.

Because these events were never -- and that’s one thing that we fought against a couple

of years ago, protested, the cutting off of the community from programming at UT. Because

all of a sudden, the community -- and they’re still not going to events at UT. So we need

to do -- because they were cut off by very bad people there that have stepped down since.

So we need to do some more outreach now to bring the community back in. At that time,

it was very fluid. The community would attend things at Juarez Lincoln University, and they

would attend things at CMAS, and back and forth. So Floricanto grew out of that collaboration

between UT and the community, and we decided that we needed to build a cultural arts center

that would be big and funded by the city. That would be the city’s contribution. That’s

when we started working -- about ’74. There was an organization called Lucha that was

formed. We were not integral members of Lucha, because they were the artists, but we were

the supporters. That’s how we came to build the Mexican American Cultural Center. There

was a lot of activism along race issues and cultural issues in the arts from ’73 on.

We supported building the cultural center. We supported Mexic-Arte Museum, that Sylvia

-- a movement person established on Second Street, in a warehouse. We supported her.

We supported La Peña, Cynthia Peréz’s building, La Peña, and then the Indigenous

Women’s Network. We supported the rec centers having -- the libraries in Austin being more

-- having more local libraries in the East Austin community, and having them more engaged

in programs, and the rec centers being more involved in cultural events as well. So all

of this race activism was all about -- I think it’s all been about community building.

Political power, perhaps we have not been as -- we have not paid as much attention as

we should to it, although we did, from the very beginning that they started Mexican American

Democrats, those of us -- they started that because of Raza Unida. They started Mexican

American Democrats, which was good. Then when we came back to the party, we worked on those

efforts politically, but they have never been -- I don’t think that our political activity

in Austin on race issues, or identifying our race, minorities, has been as strong as activism

on social issues, economic equity, and cultural arts. That’s just my impression. Because

we’ve always been so -- oh, and on health issues.

Through the Mexican American Business and Professional Women, that I’ll talk to about

gender in a little bit, we developed a strong infrastructure for supporting -- providing

health services to not only the minority community, but the low-income community and the working-class

community in Austin. That was something that was both race and class-oriented. But the

cultural arts is something that, all along that we were supporting economic equity and

race equity and housing and social services and health services, we were also supporting

the cultural arts. We were supporting all these organizations that are now very big

institutions, hopefully thriving. It’s very hard to keep institutions -- well, the two

institutions that are really strong are thriving because they’ve got very strong leaders.

Cynthia Peréz, her sister, Lidia, and then Sylvia Orozco at the helm. They both happen

to be run by women. The cultural arts center has always been -- Mexican American Center

-- has always been a lot more difficult, because it’s involved a more diverse community of

leadership, and it has involved more men. They’ve created a lot of problems, all the

time. Continue to create it. Today, I’m working on a presentation to protect the MAC,

again, from incursions that would destroy it, that would tend to transform it or destroy

it, because they want to bring -- they’re saying continuing funding to finish out the

campus would have to rely on funding from the convention center, which then could potentially

take over.

So we have to say no, there’s no conditions, because this is our center. It’s not the

convention center’s center. Anyway, because it’s on six acres of very valuable lakefront

property. That’s why. The big issue today, in terms of race, that continues to plague

us, and that we’re still working on every day, is education, with the potential closure

of the inner-city schools, which I think they’re doing it to hurt minority children deliberately.

I mean, I say that without equivocation. But we’re trying to save the schools and the

city from themselves, because if they do this, they will hurt the inner city, period. They

will destroy public education in the inner city. A lot of times, in order to protect

our community, we actually are protecting the institutions themselves. That’s our

job. Maybe I’ll go to a different time when I die, and I’ll go to a different job, and

I hope I have an easier job. But my job in this lifetime, in Austin, has been just amazing.

I mean, I lost a son to race. My son was murdered by -- kidnapped and murdered by two young

black people.

Every summer -- this happened in 1997. Every summer, at the end of the school year, I would

cry and pray for something positive for black children and brown children to have to do

that would not involve violence, because every summer you saw a spike in violence and crime,

because they took away the work programs for the kids, the employment programs for the

kids, in summer, because black children everywhere, and brown children of a certain class everywhere,

have no hope and have no future, and have nothing even today. I always saw it as a cancer.

Very selfishly, I always thought, well, I hope I’m never victimized by this cancer.

You know? But cancer is not forgiving. Cancer can invade anything and everybody. That’s

what it is. Racism and economic inequity is a cancer. One evening a month after my son

graduated from high school -- he was a gorgeous boy. Handsome, smart, politically involved.

He worked in Kirk Watson’s campaign. He was a campaign worker for Kirk Watson in his

run for mayor. One month after graduation, he was kidnapped downtown, a block from the

police station -- couple of blocks -- on Fifth Street, and murdered. Kidnapped. They took

him around to get money from the banks. They kidnapped another boy, who was a student of

architecture at UT. They put him in the trunk of the car, and they threw him in the lake

to drown.

You know, I blame the city. I don’t blame the boys. We went after -- we got the other

family to agree to try to -- to express our opinion. We can’t convince the DA, but to

express our opinion that they should not get the death penalty, because they were both

slated. That was a capital crime. They could have gotten the death penalty. And the other

family agreed, after a year of waiting and researching, and they’re looking into all

the facts and all of that. The youths were a 17- and a 16-year-old black youth. No hope.

Well, the 16-year-old came from a reasonably -- a very stable family, and didn’t have

any antecedents [Spanish]. But he was in bad company, and very young. Both of them, very

young, and we all know that youth, up until the age of 25, do not have the frontal lobe

developed, that they don’t have any critical judgment to speak of, and that they do stupid

things. And these boys were on drugs. And it’s a very, very stupid thing that, when

they were doing it until when they caught them, they finally realized what they had

done, and it was really horrible. Thanks to that, the DA decided not to press charges

-- not to ask for the death penalty in their case. So they were not given the death penalty,

but they were given horrible prison sentences, like 80 years.

Give me a break. I mean, you know. They were 16 and 17, so they’re in prison for life,

without a chance of parole. Which is very tragic. It’s like four lives lost. That

got us started, my husband and I started, on working against the death penalty, and

especially for youth. Eventually -- so we’d go to the legislature and testify and testify

and testify. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled against the death penalty for youth.

Minor victory there, but horribly long, long, long sentences for the youth. Which brings

me to, racism that brings social and economic inequality, and patriarchy that is entrenched,

kill. I think that that’s a good ending right there to our race discussion, because

racism kills. If we think that we’re safe because we live in a moderate or high-income

neighborhood, or that we’re safe because we are the privileged class that has professional

jobs and good incomes -- nobody is safe. When you allow this cancer to exist in a community

like Austin or anywhere in the world, nobody is safe from the cancer that gets back at

you. I’m not saying my husband and I should have been exempt, since we have worked all

our lives against inequity and racism, but nobody is safe.

No matter how hard you work, you are not safe, because you’re part of that system, and

because that system exists, and because that system is going to bring bad actors that have

-- bad victims, I should say -- victims are going to strike back. If these kids don’t

have an income, don’t have jobs, don’t have opportunities for getting decent jobs,

don’t have summer programs, don’t have anything meaningful in their lives, they’re

going to get it somehow. They’re going to steal your son or your daughter, they’re

going to throw them in the trunk of the car, they’re going to use their credit card to

get money from the ATMs, and they’re going to get caught, and they’re going to get

killed as well, even as they kill other youth. Racism and patriarchy kills. That’s all

there is. It’s deadly. And it should not exist, in a world of civilized being and societies.

But we’re not very civilized in terms of race and class. We’re not there. So now,

if we could spend a few minutes maybe -- I hate to say on gender issues, because a lot

of these -- that we’re going to spend a little bit of time on gender issues. But a

lot of these same activities have a gender kind of component.

Q: They all very intersect. A: Exactly, because you cannot -- should we

check and make sure we’re recording? Q: Yes.

A: I think we are. Q: Yes, we’re still recording.

A: Okay, very good. Q: Let me check the battery. Yeah, battery’s

-- A: And it’s running?

Q: Yes, it’s running. Perfect. A: Along with -- even as early -- okay, along

with fighting the race battles, most of us, like Cynthia Peréz, for example, and Sylvia,

and some of the leadership that I’ve mentioned -- María Elena Martínez, Linda del Toro

-- that were founders of Raza Unida and founders of La Peña and founders of the Indigenous

Women’s Network, and of all these wonderful -- and the MAC -- all these wonderful institutions,

we were also active on gender issues. With Raza Unida, for example, we always said, well,

if we’re looking for liberation, if we’re looking for Chicano liberation, it’s not

for liberating Chicanos. It’s for liberating Chicano Chicanas. It’s for liberating families.

It’s for liberating children. Liberation, if you’re talking about liberation for a

group of people, does not divide itself. It’s liberation for all. When man started talking

about, no, wait a minute, I get liberated -- in fact, in one case, I was told, “You

go do the dishes and take care of the children like you’re supposed to.”

We had to explain to men that liberation is -- that culture and liberation, because -- according

to our culture. They were always saying, well, our culture -- we can be liberated, but our

culture says that you should be doing the dishes, that you should be doing this, that

we have gender-assigned roles. We’re saying, no, liberation cuts across culture, and culture

itself cannot be defined as logistics. You are confusing logistics, activities, with

culture. Culture is a certain point of view about communities, families, and liberation,

and equality, that is not defined by who does what jobs -- does not assign jobs to people

either. So we had to -- even as we were working on issues of liberation in the movement, in

all aspects of the movement -- the arts movement, the political movement, Raza Unida, the social

justice movement within the overall umbrella of the Chicano movement -- we had to -- women

more than men, because men already were -- they considered themselves liberated within our

community, not under the colonialist system. But as they worked on liberation under the

colonialist system that we live, they thought it was just for themselves, literally, and

that women would kind of keep their place, and that women would not step up and demand

equal rights, because we were liberating them, not us.

We had to explain. In the process of explaining, not only to men but to women as well -- because

we wanted women to step up and run for office and to be leaders within the movement and

in the communities, and that’s why we were educating everybody to be participants. I’m

not saying just leaders, because we never were about -- that’s our problem in a way.

We weren’t about leaders, but as participants in this movement, equal participants, we had

to explain. That entailed bringing forth -- you asked about how do you put your skills to

work. That entailed using my skills as a researcher, as an archivist, as a bibliographer, as a

librarian, and as somebody that had abilities to write, to take to the pen, and to research

these issues, and to write books like Diosa y Hembra, that would explain how this was

not new. That we were acting out in accordance to our culture. That we had a legacy of participation

in economic, social, political lives of our communities and work, and that we intended

to act on this legacy of participation. That’s how I wrote Diosa y Hembra, and then the essays

in Chicana Feminist. They’re all essays on talks that I gave on the issue of liberation

for women.

The other ways in which we were activists on gender issues was

even with a bilingual program. Because when bilingual education came to be, and we started,

through bilingual education, getting into cultural studies, and then we started promoting

teacher training with cultural competencies -- which is why we established Colegio Jacinto

Trevino before university-instituted Chicano studies, because they were so slow. In instituting

Chicano studies, under cultural competencies, we had to also start looking at gender roles,

and we had to start looking at gender history and gender participation. Because when you

look at culture -- this is why I’m so excited about ethnic studies, because as you look

at ethnic studies, and you look at how people have acted and played out their historic participation,

you can’t help but look at women. If you just look at an Anglo white man, it’s a

long stretch to looking at Chicanos, and then looking at women. But if you’re looking

at cultural studies, you’re closer to the source, and closer to looking at women’s

participation. We started -- because of bilingual education -- thank God for civil rights. Civil

rights gave rise to the movements, and also to bilingual education that gave rise to me.

There’s a strong relationship between bilingual education and ethnic studies, and our centers

-- Chicano studies at the universities. We started looking at gender roles, too, and

we started looking at -- and women, because under Civil Rights they got Title IX, so they

got women’s studies, they also started looking at that. In the early ’60s, as early as

the early ’60s, we were beginning to look at gender participation within the cultura

and how it was expressed in language and bilingual education. A lot of bilingual teachers -- again,

I mentioned Modesto, I mentioned María Elena Martínez -- who became chair of the Raza

Unida Party. She was an elementary school teacher. Started looking at gender roles because

of teaching bilingual education and cultural studies. You can’t avoid cultural studies.

That’s why they fight bilingual education, because it brings cultural and ethnic studies

in. That gave us an in. Academically, we started looking at gender issues because of our trajectory

in promoting bilingual education and multicultural education. We started looking at gender issues

when we started looking at CMAS and establishing ethnic studies at UT. We thought, well, you

can’t have ethnic studies without women’s studies.

I herded up and did a lot of research on women’s studies, so that when we started to teach

Chicano studies, there was, at least in the beginning, a component on history of women.

That gave rise to the first Chicana studies courses that were taught at UT in the early

’70s. A lot of the input into those courses were the materials that I prepared and the

materials that I collected and got into those courses. That’s how gender studies crept

into ethnic studies and Chicano studies at UT. I’m sure that -- and I know for a fact,

in California, kind of the same trajectory was followed. California and Texas, I think,

have been leaders, pretty much leaders, in Chicano studies, until very current times.

I also thought, okay, with Raza Unida Party, Raza Unida was about social justice and was

about changing policies and politics at the local, state, and national level, but more

so, changing politics so we could change policies. You need to change the battery?

Q: No, I was just checking because it was blinking, but it’s still recording.

A: Okay. Policies -- and so, in the process -- everybody thinks Raza Unida was all about

political power. Actually, I’m very proud of Raza Unida, because Raza Unida was developed

-- at least half of the reason -- 50 percent or more of the reason for developing the Raza

Unida Party was to institute policies that were good for working-class people. For people

of all classes, but for protection of the working-class community, the agricultural

migrants, immigrants, and working-class people, all working-class people. So Raza Unida attracted

a lot of Anglos, because it was a very progressive party. It was very strongly based on instituting

policies through progressive politics. So the difference between politics and policies.

We supported a political party, but the condition was that we would institute policies. So when

we challenged the party -- because the guys were young, and to them it was just so much

fun. They could have the girls -- like Trump -- all the girls they wanted. Some of them.

Some of them were quite serious. But a lot of them, it was really a way to amass a lot

of power. A lot of them, like my husband, who had been involved in racial politics and

activism, and integrating societies, and building low-income housing -- because he had led a