Anaya Named to Replace Fired Leader of Latino Rights Group

Former New Mexico Gov. Toney Anaya was named head of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a leading Latino civil rights group, amid charges Monday by the group’s former top executive that she was illegally fired.

Anaya’s appointment, abruptly ending the 17-month tenure of Antonia Hernandez, 38, as MALDEF’s president and general counsel, was announced at a Los Angeles news conference by Eric P. Serna, chairman of MALDEF’s board of directors.

Serna praised Anaya, 45, who left office Dec. 31, as a person who could speak on equal footing with “presidents, senators and congressmen” on MALDEF’s behalf.

“We are truly excited to appoint an individual . . . like Gov. Anaya,” said Serna, who is chairman of New Mexico’s Corporations Commission. “He’ll give us stronger leadership.”

Anaya told reporters that the job offer was unexpected, but that he was happy to accept it.

“It’s an American institution,” he said. “It’s a recognized civil rights group, and it provides a forum for me to speak out on issues that I care about.”

Leading Advocate

MALDEF, with a staff of 60 attorneys, has been a leading advocate for Latino rights since its founding as a nonprofit advocacy organization in 1967. The group, which moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Los Angeles last summer, operates regional offices in Chicago, Denver, San Antonio, San Francisco and Washington on an annual budget of $2.5 million.

Anaya, who will be paid about $90,000 to head MALDEF, said he will split his time between his Santa Fe, N.M., home and Los Angeles. He said he plans to open a MALDEF office in Santa Fe and to hire an executive director to oversee the group’s daily activities.

Anaya and Serna would not publicly talk about Hernandez’s firing. Serna would only say that the governing board’s executive committee believed that it was time to make a change.

Hernandez joined MALDEF in 1981 as an associate counsel in the group’s Washington office, where she was working when she was named general counsel and president.

Reached by telephone, Hernandez said she was hastily summoned Friday night to a meeting of MALDEF’s 10-member executive committee in Dallas on Saturday, when she was fired, a move she said was illegal.

“Only at a meeting of the full board of directors can I be removed,” she said, adding that she has the support of 18 of MALDEF’s 34 board members to call a meeting to discuss her firing.

Tearfully, she vowed to fight to keep her job.

“I believe that I’m still president of the group,” she said. “If I go to court, I believe my rights will be vindicated. My staff supports me . . . and my record in civil rights speaks for itself.”

But Serna disputed Hernandez’s contention that the firing was illegal, explaining that the governing board’s executive committee is empowered to make such personnel decisions.

While most people declined to publicly discuss the situation, several sources familiar with MALDEF told The Times that the firing was the culmination of a series of disputes between Hernandez and several board members, including Serna, that started when she was hired in August, 1985.

Some board members, for example, took issue with some of Hernandez’s promotions on the MALDEF staff. Particularly irritating to them, the sources said, was the appointment of Linda J. Wong, an Asian, over qualified Latinos to the post of associate counsel.

Hernandez acknowledged that some board members were unhappy over the Wong appointment, but she said that it was within her prerogative to make staff adjustments and appointments without board approval.

Wrote Letter

What apparently rankled some board members the most was a letter Hernandez wrote last October to the Federal Communications Commission in support of the sale of Los Angeles television station KMEX and nine Spanish-language stations nationwide to non-Latinos.

The sources said that several board members, particularly those on the executive committee, believed that MALDEF should not have supported the sale of the stations to Hallmark Cards Corp. and First Capital Corp. of Chicago for $301.5 million.

“(Hernandez’s letter) made it look like we were against our own raza-- people who were bidding for the stations,” said one source close to MALDEF.

Hernandez said she wrote the letter only after Los Angeles U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer approved the sale. The new owners also assured Hernandez that the stations would continue to broadcast in Spanish, she said.

“We considered it an issue important to us,” Hernandez said.

But last month, Hernandez was directed by the board to send another letter, disavowing her support of the sale, Serna said.

Several MALDEF staff members said they were not sure how the dispute would affect the future course of the civil rights organization on some issues. Wong, for example, was head of the group’s Immigration Division and she had been a leading spokeswoman for the group on the implementation of the newly enacted immigration law that grants amnesty to thousands of illegal aliens in this country.

Controversial Past

Anaya, whose approval rating was 12% when he left the governorship, brings a controversial past to his new post.

He was state attorney general before being elected governor in 1982. But dropping oil and gas revenues set up a confrontation between Anaya, a liberal Democrat, and conservative Republicans in the New Mexico Legislature.

In 1985, legislators were forced to sit in a special session to approve funds to keep the state Capitol open after Anaya and quarreling conservatives could not agree to approve the appropriate funds.

Commuted Death Sentences

Last November, he took what may have been his most controversial action as governor when he commuted the death sentences of five inmates on New Mexico’s Death Row to life imprisonment. He did so because he believed that capital punishment was “immoral and anti-God.”

Earlier in the year, he declared the state a sanctuary for Central American refugees. He was the first governor to make such a declaration.

And on his last day in office, Anaya reduced the sentences of two former aides who had been convicted of taking kickbacks from a contractor.