Couple Sees Growing Role for Latino Rights Group

In the heated, often polarized world of ethnic politics, Gil and Susie Flores stand out as low-key, conciliatory and quietly determined advocates of civil rights.

Third-generation Americans who choose to live in a densely populated, low-income neighborhood of immigrants, they have more than 40 years of community activism between them, much of them spent volunteering for the League of United Latin American Citizens.

LULAC, one of the nation’s oldest and largest grass-roots Latino civil rights organizations, was formed in 1929 by a coalition of Latino groups in Corpus Christi, Texas. The group’s projects brought the two divorced parents together nine years ago, and fittingly, they were wed between workshops at the LULAC national convention in Anaheim last month.

“LULAC is like my extended family, so it made sense to get married when everyone was already in town,” Susie Flores said.

A few days later, Gil Flores was sworn in as LULAC’s new state director, and Susie took charge of the organization’s Orange County district.

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Instead of a honeymoon, the couple spent most of the past few weeks putting together an ambitious agenda for LULAC, a once-prominent national organization that lost much of its clout and membership in California over the past two decades.

Sincere, passionate and optimistic, they hope to expand LULAC’s membership in California and regain the respect of state and national legislators. “I’m going to make sure that we have positive movement,” said Gil Flores, 54, who listed affirmative action, immigrant benefits and bilingual education as key areas for activism.

“I don’t want the Latino community to become a separate class or to become disenfranchised. We have a lot of energy that can be used for the common good, and we’re here to stay.”

It’s a challenging task: Even as the state’s Latino population grew, LULAC membership steadily declined from a peak of several thousand in the late 1970s to about 1,200 today, he said.

And LULAC, which was once at the forefront of movements for equal rights in education, housing and employment, has been only a minor player in recent years on issues ranging from affirmative action to government benefits to immigrants.

“There are still a lot of people who don’t know what LULAC is,” said Gil Flores, a senior engineer with the Boeing Co. It all comes down to a lack of leadership, he said, and he plans to change that--in his own mild-mannered way.

“The Latino community has been the whipping boy for five years,” he said from the small two-bedroom apartment in downtown Santa Ana he shares with Susie and a teenage son from a previous marriage. “Either that makes you madder and you take action, or you don’t confront it and hope it goes away. Well, denial doesn’t work, so we’ve got to take action.”

Larry Luera, LULAC state director from 1980 to 1982, said a new generation of Latino politicians--including California Assembly Speaker Cruz Bustamante and Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove)--have created a more favorable climate for up-and-coming Latino leaders such as Susie and Gil Flores.

“We can only be successful if people [in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.] are paying attention to us, and we’re starting to get that now,” Luera said. “It seems like the tide is turning, and in Gil, we have a real strong leader who can take advantage of it.”

The Texas-born Vietnam veteran, who recently completed a master’s program in nonprofit leadership at Chapman University, has designed an Internet home page for California LULAC at www.californialulac.org. He also is rehabbing a small office near the couple’s apartment to be used as LULAC state headquarters.

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He has scheduled a leadership retreat for October, when the state organization will adopt a vision and action plan. With Susie, he is also planning summits on youth education, women’s issues and the elderly for early 1998, and will co-sponsor a voter registration workshop in Santa Ana in September.

“The basic thing I try to fight for is justice,” Gil Flores said.

Susie Flores, 41, a county health department administrator who also serves on the board of the Girl Scout Council of Orange County and the Soroptimists, a professional women’s group, said her passions are women’s issues and youth involvement--in part, because her own early adulthood was limited by expectations that a young Latina should be a mother and homemaker first.

Married at 19 and soon a mother of three, she put off higher education for 10 years before finally studying at Cypress College, funded in part by a LULAC scholarship.

During her year at the helm of LULAC in Orange County, she said she plans to hold workshops on parenting and education. And she will continue to co-sponsor an annual all-day workshop for young Latinas, called Adelante Mujer, at Rancho Santiago College.

Both Gil and Susie Flores emphasize the importance of starting LULAC councils on college campuses and involving more young Latinos in the organization, which has been criticized by some youths as irrelevant or out of date.

LULAC became a force for change and inclusion through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The couple hopes that can happen again. “Society has changed. The ‘60s are behind us,” he said. “It’s possible that the problems are becoming too big for the old way of thinking. They’re overwhelming. But we can deal with them.”