Central Los Angeles : Late Latino Leader Velasquez Honored

When Latino political organizer William Velasquez died in 1988, he had his eyes on California.

Velasquez, founder of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, had just overseen the opening of a Los Angeles office that he hoped would lead the nation in bringing more Latinos into the political process.

On Friday in a White House ceremony, Velasquez’s widow accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom on behalf of her late husband.

Velasquez founded the group in San Antonio in 1974. The Los Angeles office, located in Montebello, opened 12 years later. It has grown to become the national group’s largest and busiest office, overseeing 21 regional committees statewide.

“Especially in the last five years, most of the activity has been concentrated in California,” said spokesman Alfredo Cruz. Velasquez “was starting to look at the next step. He began to see that California was really the wave of the future.”

This fall, the group has launched an ambitious voter registration and political accountability campaign, “Accountability ‘96,” aimed at bringing issues that are important to the Latino community to the forefront in the next presidential election.

“Now that we’ve got millions of registered voters and thousands of elected officials [nationwide], the next step is to hold these officials accountable,” Cruz said . . .