Latino Americans

by Ray Suarez

  Congressman González wanted Mexican-Americans to succeed as Americans, as U.S. citizens, in a country that sometimes regarded them with condescension and scorn. Gutiérrez and other political organizers were in no mood to beg for acceptance from Americans they felt would not accept them even when they had, as Gutiérrez had, risked their lives for the country fighting in Vietnam.

  To the political establishment in Washington and back home in Texas, Henry B. González was “that Mexican.” To Gutiérrez, and Southwest Voter Registration Education Project founder Willie Velásquez and Corky Gonzáles, the congressman was the establishment.

  Henry B. gave as good as he got, calling the younger generation of more militant leaders “professional Mexicans” and demagogues, who were “attempting to stir up the people by appeals to emotion [and] prejudice in order to become leaders and achieve selfish ends. They represent the politics of hatred, a new racism [that] demands an allegiance to race above all.”

  The conflict made enemies of Americans who should have been allies, and were struggling to get their people a better life in the United States. The fiercely independent congressman who had fought to abolish the poll tax and improve access to small business loans and affordable housing was now dismissed as someone with “gringo tendencies” by Gutiérrez, who said, “The fighter for the underdog was now fighting those who fought for the underdog. . . . Henry B. made it safe for the gringo racist to be against us.”

  Four decades later it is easier to see how both approaches, working from inside established political institutions and pushing from outside them, were necessary ingredients of the fight. Ironically, one of the strongest validations of the inside game is the growing reach and power of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus that Henry B. González did not want to join. With almost two dozen members it is an important group inside the caucus, a go-to caucus for coalition building inside the House of Representatives.

  The organizational children (and grandchildren) of the vanguard generation of Latino civil rights organizing are now organizing, and suing, and registering voters, under the umbrella of such organizations as the National Council of La Raza, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the regional voter registration projects.

  What the young radicals in the Southwest appeared to underestimate was the strong and persistent conservatism of many Mexican-Americans.

  Then as now, turnout is a challenge for organizers urging Latinos to flex their political muscle. Getting numerically potent Latino communities to punch their weight politically has been a challenge since the first voter registration drives of the postwar period led by the likes of the American GI Forum. As the Latino civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s tried to mobilize Mexican-American towns in the border states, the first heavy lift was registration. The next was convincing the newly registered to appear at the polls on election day. In many communities what seemed an unassailable Anglo power structure and a reluctance to believe things could be otherwise made many Latinos partners in their own disempowerment. Then the idea of a Latino political movement roared out of Texas to other Southwestern states, but rarely had high impact outside of school boards and other local and county offices.

  The tug-of-war over models of assimilation would continue over the coming decades: Did Chicanos want to become fully vested Americans, acculturated and accepted in mainstream culture, or hold on to a distinct and separate yet very American way of life? It turned out Mexicans and Mexican-Americans did not have to make that stark choice. Willie Velásquez offered a third way.

  Velásquez was a Texan. Early in his career as an activist, he coordinated farmworker strikes in the Rio Grande Valley. He sought the support of his mentor Henry B. González as the UFW tried to move out of its Southern California base. González was wary. He kept his distance from the farmworkers, saying the strike “was out of my district.”

  Velásquez teamed with José Ángel Gutiérrez to found MAYO and La Raza Unida. If González’s careful calculation and arm’s-length distance from the UFW pushed Velásquez left, Gutiérrez’s hardening political stances and “kill the gringo” rhetorical bomb throwing pushed Velásquez to the right. He ended up splitting the difference politically, to conclude that Latinos would realize their full power and influence in society once they started to vote in greater numbers.

  For his success in registering millions of voters and inspiring regional voter education projects in other parts of the country, Willie Velásquez won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, in 1995. The honor was accepted by his widow, Janie. Velásquez died at just forty-four years old, of kidney disease, in 1988.

  • • •

  THE DEBATES ABOUT assimilation or separation took place in the multiplicity of environments that Latinos inhabited. Between the end of the Second World War and 1960, an estimated one million Puerto Ricans moved to the United States, most to the New York metropolitan area. The unique constitutional status of Puerto Ricans did not make their struggle for acceptance any less profound.

  Juan González was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, in 1947. His father had served in World War II with the 65th Infantry Regiment, the “Borinqueneers.” His family moved to New York in the early 1950s, where Juan attended New York City public schools in Spanish Harlem and East New York. From Franklin K. Lane High School, González headed to Columbia University. Assimilation was a goal: “. . . at one point the U.S. seems foreign; then it seems like home. Or you want it to be home, at least.”

  González was part of a big cohort of young Puerto Ricans in 1960s New York, born on the island, or born in New York of newly arrived parents, who wrestled with whether their new “home” really wanted them at all. González explains that time this way: “I think in the 1960s some Puerto Ricans suddenly realized who we were. We were not real Americans. We were economic refugees from the last major colony of the United States. We were different from European immigrants, who came from independent countries like Italy and Ireland.”

  That realization—that a typical immigrant path led to an eventual emergence as a “100 percent melting pot American”—led many in González’s generation to reject that view. “I dropped out of school, and I thought, ‘We have to start something that will change the world.’”

  The something was the Young Lords.

  A Chicago street gang led by José “Cha-Cha” Jiménez morphed into a social movement in 1968, pushed by police brutality, urban renewal, and deplorable schools into challenging the government of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Led by González, Felipe Luciano, Pablo Guzmán, Denise Oliver, and others, a Young Lords chapter started in New York in 1970. Now Denise Oliver-Velez and a writer and college professor, then the Young Lords Party field marshal, Oliver said there was plenty of work to do. “I can tell you having lived in El Barrio and the South Bronx, it was like the armpit of humanity in terms of sanitation and all the issues we took on. Lead poisoning was widespread. The schools didn’t have breakfast programs at the time. They had a lot of hungry kids. So for Puerto Ricans particularly, as the new wave of urban poor, and the existing position of African-Americans, there was a perfect opportunity for a movement for social change. Particularly because there was also the influence of the civil rights movement.”

  There was also a strong identification with, and affinity for, the work of the Black Panther Party in urban ghettoes across America. “Our offices were located right in the heart of every community we organized. So we had access to regular folk in the community.” Oliver said the Young Lords were beloved by the people whose children got breakfast and new school outfits from clothing drives, by the renters whose complaints about poor garbage pickup had been ignored for years.

  “We occupied a church for eleven days,” said Juan González, “while we provided free breakfast and clothing programs, health services, a day-care center, and a liberation school, all inside the occupied church. We seized hospital equipment and took
it where it was needed. We did what we did because we felt our people should not have to live like that.”

  An important part of the Young Lords’ political program was the liberation of Puerto Rico from U.S. rule. Independence for the island was always asserted as a crucial goal right along with improving the lives of Puerto Ricans living on the mainland. The revolutionary fervor, the berets and fatigues, the combat boots and marching drills fused with increasingly assertive rhetoric about a free Puerto Rico.

  In time, the leadership got older. Puerto Rican populations were dispersing from New York City throughout the rest of the state, and into New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. A wing of the anticolonial movement turned to armed resistance and guerrilla action against the U.S. government. As an organization, the Young Lords Party waned. However, its legacy is strong. Juan González has won the most prestigious awards in American journalism for his work as a reporter, columnist, and author. Felipe Luciano and Pablo Guzmán have also made names for themselves in New York media.

  Celina Sotomayor’s daughter, Sonia was roughly a contemporary of the Young Lords, but she went a different way. She was born in New York in 1954 to parents who met after leaving Puerto Rico and settled in the Bronx. Sonia’s father, Juan, died when she was nine, leaving her young mother to raise two children on her own. Born in Lajas on Puerto Rico’s southwest coast, Celina had served in the Women’s Army Corps in World War II, worked in New York as a telephone operator, and earned credits for a nursing license at night school.

  Celina took her children out of their Bronxdale housing project as the complex fell into the grip of gangs and drugs. Like many aspirational families across America in those years, the Sotomayors bought a set of encyclopedias. Celina insisted her children work hard in school and assured them education would pave the way to a better life.

  When Sonia Sotomayor was in the academically selective Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx, the Young Lords were operating just a few miles away, blockading East Harlem streets with bags of trash and teaching Puerto Rican history. Juan González dropped out of Columbia University, but just a few years later Sonia Sotomayor headed to Princeton University on a full scholarship. “At Princeton I felt like a visitor landing in an alien country. I was too intimidated to ask any questions the first year. I felt there was a chasm between me and my classmates. I really only knew the Bronx and Puerto Rico, while my classmates spoke of European vacations and skiing.”

  Her mother’s struggle had given the young Ivy Leaguer options none of her ancestors, and only a few of her Puerto Rican peers in New York, could have imagined. She made choices that reflected insider and outsider status at the same time. Sonia Sotomayor was still every bit as Puerto Rican as the Young Lords working in the Bronx. She led a Puerto Rican students’ organization at Princeton, challenged the school’s pitiful record in minority hiring, and wrote her senior thesis on the island’s first elected government and the struggle for self-rule. Sotomayor closed her Princeton career by winning the highest academic honor conferred on undergraduates.

  Sonia would attract attention for her academic prowess, and find powerful mentors who helped her rise in the legal establishment. She was often the first and often the only Puerto Rican to hold the positions she gained as she climbed the legal ladder. At every step she remembered whom she came from, where she came from, and tried to use increasing clout to improve the lives of Puerto Ricans in New York.

  In the decades after World War II, Latinos found they could construct their American selves in a way not possible in early eras. The struggles for civil rights, school desegregation, and equal protection of the law manifested themselves differently across the United States. Some individuals plunged into the work of lifting up the poorest and most powerless of their people. Others took advantage of new opportunities for schooling and political access that would make power and influence possible in a whole new way.

  While the idealism and anger of the postwar decades mellowed in some activists, it was very present and carefully channeled in others. González became a leader in his profession and a mentor and guide to subsequent generations of Latino journalists.

  José Ángel Gutiérrez became a county judge, an administrative law judge for the state of Texas, and a law professor. When the other side changed, so did he. “A lot of gringos stopped being racist. Most people now are at least civil and polite. It’s not politically correct to be a bigot in public anymore. So I still maintain optimism. I think we can make it better.”

  Sonia Sotomayor became the first person of Latin American descent to sit on the United States Supreme Court. Her high court career is still young, but a wealth of experience in the rough-and-tumble world of New York law is serving her well. In her early terms of argument at the court, she is a persistent, and creative questioner. She is more than holding her own among the brightest minds in her profession.

  Henry B. González served in the U.S. House of Representatives for almost forty years, and was succeeded by his son Charles, who retired after seven terms. Father and son served the San Antonio region in Congress for more than half a century.

  His health broken, Cesar Chavez died young, at sixty-six, in 1993. He had watched as the American food industry went through decades of consolidation, mechanization, and heavy downward pressure on wages. Toward the end of his life he worried about the challenge of illegal immigrants to the UFW’s attempts to guarantee a fair wage to its members. He predicted—and was proven right about—the threat to the health of American farmworkers posed by the increasing use of herbicides and pesticides in American fields.

  Dolores Huerta carries on the fight into her eighties. She crisscrosses the country to lecture, rally, and organize. In 2012, President Obama gave Huerta the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. After everything she has seen over a long career, she said she is sure better times are ahead for American working people. “It’s in the wind. It’s almost like in the sixties and all these young people are out there. People know how to do the work and they can do it even more rapidly with the Internet, with things like MoveOn.”

  By the end of the 1970s the Vietnam War was over. The Young Lords were in decline. Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover were out of power or dead. The burst of organizing and demands for equality and freedom had succeeded in many places in many ways. A new sense of Latinos as a people would emerge from these struggles. A substandard school was not that different in Los Angeles and Chicago. Lousy housing in Brooklyn or in the Rio Grande Valley created a cause for new alliances, rather than an old debate about whether Mexicans and Puerto Ricans would, or could, make common cause.

  Mexican farmworkers in the California fields. CREDIT: © BETTMANN/CORBIS

  New citizens taking their oaths in Los Angeles. CREDIT: UIG VIA GETTY IMAGES

  WHERE ARE

  WE GOING?

  (¿ADÓNDE VAMOS?)

  LEO MANZANO was born in Mexico in 1984. He moved to the United States with his parents at four years old, and was raised in little Granite Shoals, in central Texas. What distinguishes Manzano from many other immigrants to the country is simple: He runs fast. At the 2012 London Olympics, wearing the uniform of his adopted country, he won the silver medal in the fifteen-hundred-meter race.

  Manzano draped the Stars and Stripes of the U.S. flag over his slim shoulders and smiled as the enormous crowd cheered. Then he was handed the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag, and held that aloft too. The Mexican tricolor definitely played second fiddle, held by a corner in his right hand as the American flag stretched across his shoulders.

  Many of his fellow Americans were not happy. Syndicated columnist Ruben Navarette, calling the gesture “misguided and ill-mannered,” concluded that Manzano put his ego above his U.S. team. “Manzano wasn’t there to compete for himself but to represent his country. All he had to do was decide which country that was. He chose not to choose.”

&n
bsp; The elite runner seemed perfectly at peace with his decision, and clear about why he did what he did. “Standing on the podium has been a dream of mine and I share it proudly with my family, friends, coaches, and all my supporters from Austin, Marble Falls, and Granite Shoals, Texas, as well as Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico.”

  Manzano was undocumented, living in the country illegally as a youngster. Today he is an American citizen, and a Mexican citizen. A dual national. For a few weeks after the summer games, it was an Internet sensation, bringing vitriolic criticism and tepid praise. At a time of severe economic distress and rising anxiety about America’s place in the world, Manzano’s flag-waving was treated very differently from exuberant displays of Irish pride at St. Patrick’s Day celebrations across the country, or the proud declarations of Polish identity by large civic organizations in Chicago. The difference is easy to understand: No one worries about Polish supplanting English as the language of commerce, or having to supply Gaelic-speaking teachers in local public schools.

  We Americans often forget history. That makes whatever happened today the best and the biggest and the worst . . . and the first. So, people on all sides of the argument acted as if Leonel Manzano were the first American to bring another flag onto the playing field. Just twenty years earlier Oscar De La Hoya, born in East L.A. to Mexican-born parents, was preparing for his Olympic moment, a gold medal fight against Marco Rudolph of Germany. He was getting ready to bound into the boxing ring, small American flag in his hand, when, “My aunt handed me a Mexican flag as well. ‘Hold this in memory of your mother.’ Of course I would do that. But a U.S. official blocked my path. He said, ‘If you take that up there, we’re gonna disqualify you.’ Still, I did it anyway.”