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ChAPTER 4 The Quiet Revolution Albert Peña, who helped organize PASO and La Raza Unida, thought that the Democratic Party would only change with sustained outside pressure . He threatened party leaders with fragmentation, third-party revolts, and losses at the polls if they did not take the Democrats “to the people” (Peña 1972b). Peña never wavered in this belief, but when the Democratic Party began incorporating more Mexican Americans into its governance structure PASO and La Raza Unida were effectively neutralized. Moreover , Governor Briscoe only began reaching out to liberals and minorities when subjected to intense internal pressure and the threat of legal action for violating national party rules. From this perspective, Albert Peña was a more effective agent of change as a Democratic Party activist than as the leader of an ethnic insurgency. In 1968 he was part of a group that challenged the Texas State Credentials Committee at the national party convention for its lack of adequate racial representation. Peña was also part of a national movement that eliminated the winner-take-all method of delegate selection, which had the effect of virtually eliminating minority representation in Democratic Party conventions (Maverick ca. 1968b). In 1971 he headed a group that used the national party mandate for greater racial and gender representation to file formal complaints against the State Democratic Party (Peña 1971). Peña charged that the state party was in contempt of these mandates “under the guise of vague, undefined, and arbitrary party rules” (Peña 1972b). Mexican Americans now possessed more effective tools to leverage influence in their party. The national rules effectively bound the party to increase the number of women and minorities at all levels of administration. It was a sharp departure from the time when Anglo politicians quickly forgot their political debts to Mexican Americans after an election or re- 96 Democratizing Texas Politics sponded cynically to grassroots pressure with symbolic administrative appointments . The challenge to the party’s method of selecting its delegates prompted a detailed fifteen-page response from the Texas party’s legal council and a speech by the party chair to the State Democratic Party Executive Committee (Texas Democratic Party 1974a; J. White 1974). Chandler Davidson found that the new rules “blew open the clogged access routes to Democratic Party power both nationally and in Texas. In Texas, the ‘flexible quota’ provision provided a battering ram for the rankand -file participants—women, minorities, and Anglo liberals—who for so long had been knocking futilely on the door of the party’s inner sanctum ” (Davidson 1990: 172). Mexican American Democrats now had the resources to challenge racial exclusion, which Albert Peña swiftly did after the new rules were adopted (Mexican American Democrats 1974). One immediate result was a more representative party: in 1972 twenty-seven Mexican Americans attended the national Democratic convention as delegates and alternates (Office of the Spanish Speaking 1972). Longtime Democratic Party activist Sylvia Rodriguez saw firsthand how changes in party rules created new opportunities for minorities. She argued that the nationally mandated changes forced accountability upon conservative party leaders.Talking about appointments to the party’s governing structure, she asked: “[C]an you imagine Governor Connally picking a young, Mexican American activist from South Texas? Or Governor Preston Smith naming a flamboyant Black state representative from Houston? Of course not!” (S. Rodriguez ca. 1978: 2). When the Democratic Party’s system for selecting officials and representatives changed, new voices were heard (Schneider 2008). Activist Blandina Cardenas concurred with Rodriguez’s assessment and called the change a breakthrough : “suddenly you had Mexicanas coming from areas of the country where they had always been in the background . . . and they began to appear in many different roles” (B. Cardenas 2004). Liberals and minorities were now at the center of a movement with real prospects to change everything from delegate selection to party conventions , racial representation, and the governing structure of their party (B. Carr ca. 1976). The new openness was celebrated by Anglo activists like Billie Carr: “in 1972, Texas had written rules for the first time in the history of the Democratic Party of Texas. We had rules written in a book for everyone to read. What a miracle!” Another first was the more equitable working relationship between Anglo and minority liberals. As Carr observed, “that is the way it should be between blacks, Chicanos, labor and Anglo liberals.When they divide us is when they conquer us” (B. Carr n...

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