One Last Vote for Willie Velasquez

On a visit to his room in Santa Rosa Hospital here, I reminisced with Willie Velasquez, the founder and director of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. And it struck me, after watching the parade in and out of his room for several hours, that maybe “El Wee-Lay”--a name that, at 44, he still hadn’t outgrown--was not the genius we all took him for. We thought he was so smart, registering so many mejicanos, first in Texas, then in other states. Now I realized that all he had to do was register all his primos and tias and tios and compadres, and that alone would be enough to change the political bent of Texas.

I first met Willie in Washington in the ‘60s, when we had the Poor People’s March and assorted civil-rights activities in the capital. He, Ernie Cortez and other Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) types would come to our offices and con us feds into taking them to lunch.

In those days, I would sit in the Thomas Jefferson Reading Room of the Library of Congress and read the League of United Latin American Citizens’ LULAC News and articles about Albert Pena, the “radical” county commissioner in San Antonio.

I knew that Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in the library of the London Museum. Maybe I thought that if I read enough, this “revolution” would start all by itself. Well, little did I know. Willie was already starting one in South Texas. As one of the founders of the Raza Unida Party and of MAYO, he already understood, along with other young Chicano militants, that the key to bringing about social change was in the understanding of a simple concept: how to gain and retain power. I say “retain” because South Texas had already seen some successful takeovers that eventually failed.

The late ‘60s and early ‘70s in Texas were times of change. School walkouts, boycotts, “kill the gringo” rhetoric, marches. . . . These were times of unrest in the Mexican American community, due in some part to the national civil-rights advances of blacks.

The Raza Unida Party was being formed primarily to challenge the “good ol’ boy” Democrats. El Partido took control of the Crystal City schools, and later its city hall and the county courthouse. “El Wee-Lay” was part of it all. He organized a group called the Mexican American Unity Council and opened offices on the corner of Guadalupe and Brazos in San Antonio. I remember that place well because it had no air conditioning.

On one occasion, I took Homer Bigart of the New York Times to meet Willie. Bigart was writing a series on “the awakening giant of the Southwest,” the Mexican Americans. When we arrived at Willie’s office, we were asked to wait in a small meeting room typical of all Movement places of that time--with its pictures of Emiliano Zapata and Gen. Villa, men who understood the concept of power. Wee-Lay was running late and he sent his brother George out to help me entertain Bigart. We sat around a table in suits, perspiration flowing down our faces. George and I tried to explain the meaning of the song “De Colores” to Bigart. First we sang it in Spanish and then we tried to translate it into English. “Of colors, of colors, the countryside paints itself. . . . “ Bigart’s response was, “Yes, it does lose something in translation.”

The upheaval continued into the early ‘70s, and somewhere along the way Willie came to realize that the best road to political control was convincing people to register and vote. He became a missionary preaching the gospel: “If your streets and drainage are bad, register and vote. If you don’t like the way the schools are educating your kids, register and vote. If City Hall doesn’t pay attention to you, register and vote.”

I never heard Willie say just “register.” It was always “register and vote.” I never heard him tell anyone to vote for a Democrat or a Republican, either. Just “register and vote.”

In my work, I visited communities in Texas and New Mexico. I remember Pecos, Ft. Stockton, Alpine, Roswell. Every time I would meet with a group of activists, I was always told the same thing: “Willie was here.” You never asked “Willie who?”

When the Voting Rights Act coverage came to Texas, lawsuits were filed to bring single-member districts to the state legislature, and later to school boards and cities. Places that had never seen a Mexican American on the city council or school board now looked at Latino majorities. Maybe I’d been in my job too long, but I always noticed whenever I went into a city hall or county courthouse how many Latinos and blacks were working there as clerks, secretaries and office heads. Soon there were Mexican American city managers, county judges and mayors.

As the result of the work of Willie Velasquez and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, Mexican Americans began winning elections all over.

I remember when several city council members from a small community south of San Antonio came to my office for some advice. They had swept their election. They asked me, “What should we do now?” I told them to read the minutes for the past several years and find out what had been done by the outgoing council.

Several days later they called and said that there was another problem. The city manager, a rancher hired by the old power structure, refused to give up the minutes to the new, Mexican American mayor and council.

This was probably the only time in my 20-year career in the federal government that I lost my temper and used profanity. “Fire the s.o.b.,” I yelled into Uncle Sam’s telephone.

The gaining and retaining of power. . . .

Willie Velasquez died Wednesday. I wish there had been another way. I wish all he had to do was register and vote.