“In our view, for as much work as we did — and we have half a century doing that work — we see it as an unfinished product,” said Mario Compean, a La Raza Unida founder. “An unfinished product that others have to complete.” Via TexasTribune
La Raza Unida memorabilia, including a photo of Rosie Castro when she was a 23-year-old candidate for San Antonio City Council in 1971, is on display during the 50th anniversary reunion of the party in San Antonio on Thursday.Just off the historic West Side, where many of this city’s Mexican American civil rights fights were waged, the old Texans walked past unknowing college students and filed into the Durango Building.
Assembled at round white tables in the sort of conference center typical on college campuses, more than 100 attendees listened intently as party veterans weaved their life experiences into lore, trying to pass on a story that’s been easily forgotten. From the past, they hope, springs the future for the next generations of community organizers and activists aspiring for a better and more equal Texas.
Politically, Latino Texans battled for even a sliver of power. It hadn’t been that long since Mexican Americans attempting to vote faced violence and brutality often carried out by the Texas Rangers or were shut out by “white primaries.” Hispanic veterans returning from the Vietnam War found the state’s white power structure marginalizing them by instituting poll taxes and banning interpreters who could help Spanish-speaking or illiterate voters cast ballots.
The group’s early efforts focused on organizing school walkouts throughout South Texas. In May 1968, an estimated 400 students marched out of class at Edgewood High School in protest of the discrimination in the classroom and the decrepit environment in which they were expected to learn. “It was an experiment to see if we could drum up support and political change,” said Luz Bazán Gutiérrez, who as a teacher had seen the unequal tracks on which poor Mexican American students and white students were often placed. She moved with her then-husband José Angel to his hometown of Crystal City.
In some communities, the wins ushered in not just long-sought reforms but transformative ones. In Crystal City, where a José Angel Gutiérrez-led ticket helped Mexican Americans reach a majority on the school board, a bilingual and bicultural curriculum was implemented, cafeteria food was updated and Mexican American school staff were hired, many replacing white educators who had quit in protest.Success! You're on the list.
At the city level, where the party had also won enough seats to form a majority with an incumbent, they hired party supporters who began seeking renewal and development funds to help pave streets, lay down sidewalks and fortify emergency services in long-neglected neighborhoods. In Crystal City, organizers gathered with voters in parks to walk them through the process of casting ballots. In English and Spanish, they helped voters inspect sample ballots so they could learn to measure the spaces between entries and know where candidates’ names should be written. Then, they helped them memorize how to write out the names.
Seeking to avoid county-by-county certification issues — and thinking ahead to the 1972 presidential elections when increased turnout would raise the threshold of signatures needed to get on the ballot — party organizers decided to go statewide.Despite the progress enumerated in landmark legislation like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the turn of the decade and the one-party rule of a southern Democratic party had left Mexican Americans like Rosie Castro feeling dejected by mainstream politics.
“All of those things convinced us that there was no way anybody was going to do it for us,” said Castro, who went on to serve as Bexar County chair for the Raza Unida Party ahead of the 1972 election. “You really had to be about self-determination, about creating structures that would help our people.”
“It was radical only because we were demanding it suddenly very openly and very vocally,” said Henry Flores, a retired law professor at St. Mary’s University who worked behind the scenes as a data cruncher for the party. “It was a term used by society in general to try to denigrate us, to make us look so extreme that people would turn their backs on us or be afraid of us.”
Texas politics had been recently rocked by a stock fraud scheme, known as the Sharpstown scandal, that reached the highest level of state government. Still, Raza Unida’s share of the vote — more than 200,000 votes — ensured Briscoe’s election marked the first time in the 20th century that a Texas governor was elected with less than a majority.
Though its electoral run was short-lived, the party served as a bridge to opportunity for many Mexican Americans. The spirit of the party also extends into education and the arts. Party activists went on to have long careers as teachers, professors and writers. Often shortchanged by their own educations, they helped bring Mexican American history courses to college campuses so their stories would not be lost.
Mostly, some of the party veterans say, they showed Texas Latinos what was possible when traditional power structures were reinterpreted to serve them.
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At one last reunion, veterans of La Raza Unida political movement pass along their torchBorn from the Chicano movement of the 1960s, La Raza Unida helped coalesce Texas Latino power and briefly formed the state’s third political party. Although the organization is long gone, its imprint on the state is unmistakable.
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