“If you don’t know your history, you don't know what’s rightfully your place.' At one last reunion, veterans of La Raza Unida political movement pass along their torch:
La Raza Unida memorabilia is on display Thursday during the 50th Anniversary Reunion of the party in San Antonio., our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
Now, reconvening decades later for the party’s 50-year reunion — and possibly for the last time — organization veterans were in search of inheritors. Some were coming of age after a lifetime in segregated schools. The social mobility education could offer was mired in everyday inequities. In Texas, racist teachers regularly insulted Mexican American students relegated to rundown schools that often lacked air conditioning. Students were shunned, or even abused, for speaking Spanish. Too many did not graduate high school. Too few made it to college, and the cycles repeated year after year.
As the civil rights movement swept the country, what was born in Texas — out of the Chicano movement — was La Raza Unida. Its mobilization began in 1967 through the Mexican American Youth Organization, founded by a group of five young Chicanos that included Compean, Gutiérrez and Willie C. Velásquez, who were students at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio’s West Side.
So La Raza Unida turned its attention to elections, zeroing in on the rural stretch of South Texas counties that make up the winter garden region where they hoped to rally migrant workers and other Mexican Americans behind Latino candidates. Martha Cotera, co-founder of La Raza Unida, works as a librarian at the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.Though they were nonpartisan contests, party-backed candidates quickly found support in local elections across the winter garden area, picking up seats on school boards, city councils and even a mayorship.
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.”
As votes were tallied in November 1972, it seemed the party’s expectations had been fueled more by hope than electoral reality. It failed to win over mainstream Mexican Americans and liberal factions of the Democratic Party. “The people … have experienced true democracy for the first time, a democracy they never experienced under the Republican or Democratic party,” Muñiz was quoted as saying at the time, according to the “United We Win” book.
While in control of local governments, its members helped bring affordable child care and health clinics to rural communities, some of which remain open to this day. In a 1972 meeting with Mexican President Luis Echeverría Álvarez, they secured scholarships for Mexican Americans to study in Mexican universities.
Some party veterans measure its accomplishments by the untold number of new voters who joined the electoral process and continued participating in elections. The reunion attendees included once-student organizers who, 50 years later, were still coordinating local get-out-the-vote campaigns. Others cite the room they made for future leaders, especially Latinas who made up a significant portion of party candidates.
“It was the awakening of the pueblo, of the community,” said Rosie Castro. “That if you did vote, if you did that, you might get a different outcome. [It was] a belief in people being able to make a difference.” “I think what they’re doing in so many different realms is to help us see ourselves,” Sendejo said. They are helping to show “students of this lineage that you’re part of something larger than you’ve been told. You have a longer legacy.”The state is home to an ever-growing population of
Occupying a majority of desks in Texas public schools, Latino children remain more likely to read below their grade level. Most are considered at risk of dropping out. They fill classrooms in which predominantly white lawmakers continue to regulate how racism and history can be taught. Despite the generations that separate them from Raza Unida activists, Latino students today graduate from high school on time at lower rates than their white peers.
Their persistence is also why Raza Unida veterans are searching for new activists to hand over the causes they attempted to champion. They’re hoping their reunion inspires younger Latinos to act, to be emboldened.
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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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