Valley Interfaith and School Reform: Organizing for Power in South Texas

Chaper One: FOUNDING VALLEY INTERFAITH: The Origins of a Grassroots Organization

  FOUNDING VALLEY INTERFAITH The Origins of a Grassroots Organization The Rio Grande Valley of Texas has an unusually rich and complex history as a region of the United States.Wrested from Mexico as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it has ever since been marked by alternating periods of contestation and accommodation with the dominant culture in the United States. For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in the Valley had to adjust to a dual labor market that had many similarities to the Jim Crow South. Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans attended segregated schools and were denied entrance to public facilities such as restaurants , hotels, swimming pools, and movie theaters. Their children suffered humiliating punishments when they spoke Spanish—even outside of formal instruction—while attending public schools.1 The cultural and political oppression experienced by Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants was not suffered in silence. Voluntary associations provided a cultural framework in which Hispanics could celebrate a common identity, and over the decades intermittent outbursts of trade union organizing, inspired by Mexicanist traditions of syndicalism, characterized social and political life in the Rio Grande Valley. Larger national groups such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the GI Forum made important gains in the years since World War II, and together with African American and Native American civic organizations slowly pushed the nation toward greater equality for minorities. In spite of their gains, however, it was not until the s that a real sea change in the direction of greater civic equality was truly achieved by Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley.2 The initial transformation of South Texas politics in the s began with John F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency. United States citizens of Mexican descent had traditionally been discounted by politicians because of low voter turnout, but this pattern changed through the power of the ‘‘Viva Kennedy’’ campaign, which rallied many citizens in South Texas to support the Democratic candidate and was central to the Kennedy victory in Texas. Building on that momentum, Hispanics founded a political coalition encompassing hitherto separate groups such as the GI Forum and LULAC into a powerful new entity called the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations (PASSO). Then, in , PASSO, working together with the Teamsters Union, organized the first electoral defeat of an Anglo-American elite in a South Texas city. The location was Crystal City, and the victory has since been characterized by historian David Montejano as the first major symbolic ‘‘overthrow of Jim Crow’’ in South Texas.3 PASSO’s achievement, however, came with a price, as moderates defected from the organization while militants, savoring their first electoral triumph, sought further opportunities to advance the political condition of Americans of Mexican descent. The next opportunity came in the form of a wildcat melon strike, which was hastily organized by the United Farm Workers (UFW) at the massive La Casita farms in Starr County in . The strike developed considerable momentum in its first weeks, and at one point UFW organizer Gil Padilla pulled off an organizing coup when he enlisted the support of the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos, one of Mexico’s strongest unions, on behalf of the strike. Padilla’s accomplishment was significant because one of the greatest challenges for union organizing in the borderlands traditionally had been the easy availability of strikebreakers from the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. For a variety of reasons, however, the strike collapsed , and the UFW subsequently decided to concentrate its efforts in California.4 The defeat of the UFW in Starr County hardly marked the end of political organizing in South Texas; on the contrary, it sparked a reconceptualization of organizing strategy. Frustrated by the outcome of the strike, youthful Chicano activists including José Angel Gutierrez and Willie Velasquez founded the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), which subsequently developed chapters in the Rio Grande Valley in Weslaco, San Juan, Pharr, Edcouch-Elsa, Harlingen, Alamo, and Brownsville. School walkouts by students in Pharr–San Juan–Alamo and Edcouch-Elsa in  served as crystallizing events that promoted dem-       onstrations and Chicano activism throughout the region. In  Gutierrez played the leadership role in organizing La Raza Unida, the first Mexican American political party, and won electoral victories in Crystal City, Cotulla, and Carrizo Springs during the same year. In February  Alfonso Laredo...