El Concilio to Honor Latino Leaders
Cloromino Camacho’s fiery speeches emboldened Ventura County farm workers in the 1950s to leave the fields and strike for better wages. His 40-year battle for Latino civil rights earned him death threats from the Ku Klux Klan and gunfire from a would-be assassin.
Today, the 80-year-old Oxnard man has reluctantly given in to declining health. He is recovering from the quintuple heart bypass he underwent last January. But his passion still smolders. His youngest child, Sonya Camacho, 34, says she doesn’t ask him about the old fight because it demoralizes him.
“When he does talk about it and he does tell stories, he starts to cry,” she said. “I think, because he can’t do it anymore.”
Camacho is one of nine people to be honored tonight by the nonprofit service agency El Concilio del Condado de Ventura at a ceremony at the Embassy Suites Mandalay Beach Resort in Oxnard. He is the third person to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award since the group started issuing them in 1989.
Camacho was a construction worker when he joined the Community Service Organization in 1957 to fight alongside Cesar Chavez. He worked early mornings and late nights to organize voter registration drives, food collections, job skills classes, English lessons and immigration help for farm workers and their families. In the early 1960s, he became president of the organization, a title he still maintains.
“I used to tell them, ‘We don’t have the money, but we’ve got the people,’ ” he said.
When the KKK came to Ventura County in the 1970s, Camacho was at the top of its call list.
“They threatened if anyone went to protest that they would come after him,” Sonya said.
Camacho acknowledged the dangers he faced with his job.
“I was threatened a lot of times,” he said. “One time they shot three times, but they missed me. Yes, of course, I was afraid, but I kept doing it. I didn’t show them that I was afraid.”
Camacho and the other award winners are role models for youths and families served by El Concilio del Condado de Ventura, Executive Director Francisco Dominguez said.
The awards ceremony is expected to bring about $70,000 in donations to the center’s $1.2-million operating budget this year, he said.
Each honoree was nominated by community leaders, local media, business owners, educators and social agencies. El Concilio’s board selected the winners in November. The other honorees are:
* Vince Ordonez, who died in November of bone marrow cancer at age 52, will be honored posthumously with the agency’s first ever President’s Award.
The Oxnard native devoted as much time raising money for the area’s charities and neighborhoods as he did parenting his two sons, Tony, 24, and Alex, 22. His oldest son will accept the award.
Ordonez was a board member to six charities and assistant executive officer of the Ventura Superior Court. He was the first Latino to serve on the county’s Planning Commission and on the Board of Regents of Cal Lutheran University and the first paid executive director of El Concilio.
“He helped out a lot of people,” said his son, Tony. “But he would still always make time for us.”
* Manuel M. Munoz, 41, the Oxnard owner and publisher of Vida Newspaper, the county’s only bilingual newspaper, is the group’s Business Award winner. By educating readers on participating in the 1990 U.S. census, Munoz helped bring more state and federal funding to the area.
Munoz, who is from Mexico, followed relatives to Oxnard in the late 1970s. He soon realized that Ventura County Latinos lacked a unified voice, despite the fact that they made up 30% of the population, he said.
Since then, the area’s burgeoning Latino population has helped boost the publication’s circulation from 7,000 in Oxnard in 1983 to 35,000 countywide today.
* Javier Gomez is an Oxnard educator who uses his teacher’s salary to maintain Teatro Inlakech and Inlakech Cultural Arts Center, where Latino families can learn to dance, paint or sing--all for free.
He founded the bilingual community theater in his backyard 24 years ago and in 1993, Gomez and his wife, Irene, refinanced their house to fund a studio in Oxnard. Today, about 150 adults and children are regulars in classes that Gomez oversees after teaching all day at the newly reopened Haydock Intermediate School.
Gomez, 49, is El Concilio’s Cultural Arts Award winner for the second time. He also won the award in 1992.
* Santa Paula High School Principal J. Antonio Gaitan works to instill self-confidence in his 1,450 students in the same way that the small schools in Piru did for him.
Three years ago, he replaced remedial classes with college prep courses, a move that boosted the grades of his students.
Gaitan, 47, is El Concilio’s Education Award winner.
He has spent 23 years with the local school district and is known for his work in securing state and federal grants to fund after-hours and weekend tutorials, mentoring for migrant students and a six-week summer program for incoming freshmen.
“To achieve anyone’s dream, there has to be hard work and self-motivation,” he said, “because that’s what determines your success.”
* Dr. Martha Gonzales, the first doctor in her family and a national advocate for Latino health issues, credits the Chicano movement with her success.
She grew up the seventh of eight children to parents who had elementary school educations. Gonzales was born in Mexico to a carpenter father and a mother who worked as a maid and a seamstress.
Despite the family’s money struggles, all eight children graduated from college, thanks to scholarships.
El Concilio is honoring Gonzales, 46, as its Health Award winner. “When I was a child, I never saw a Latino doctor,” she said. “I’m definitely a product of organizations like El Concilio.”
* Morey Navarro doesn’t mince words when he is talking about problems in south Oxnard, and he doesn’t waste time motivating people to help make changes.
Navarro, 49, is known as an outspoken man who knows the right people to get jobs done. When he wants help cleaning up a neighborhood, he goes door-to-door to rally residents and uses his own tow trucks to pick up debris.
The Oxnard planning commissioner has helped create a south Oxnard Neighborhood Watch program, Police Activities League and the South Oxnard Assn.
“All we did was create an information highway between local people and city hall and the people who do the work,” he said. “Everybody had talked about changing things, but nobody had done anything about it.”
* Jess Herrera spent his early 20s as a Port Hueneme dockworker, rolling barrels of asphalt and frozen orange juice and tossing sacks of coffee. He worked there long enough to realize some changes had to be made.
Herrera is the winner of El Concilio’s Labor Award.
He spoke up about safety on the ships and docks and in the early 1980s was elected to lead thousands of workers as executive officer of the Port Hueneme dockworkers’ union, Local 46.
Now Herrera, 52, serves on several influential boards, including that of the Oxnard Harbor District, the Port of Hueneme’s Harbor Commission and the county’s first Latino political action committee.
“Anything that improves the working conditions of the port is going to improve the lives of the people living there,” he said. “You’re not just helping the dockworker, you’re helping an entire family.”
* Sandra Martinez was 16 and spoke no English when she left Durango, Mexico, six years ago to join her older brother in Thousand Oaks. She wanted to make money and quickly started work at McDonald’s, with no plans to finish high school.
But her brother, Sergio, insisted she attend school, enrolling her at Newbury Park High School. There her ESL teachers encouraged her to pursue a college education.
Martinez is El Concilio’s Youth Award winner.
Six small scholarships helped fund her first 2 1/2 years at Moorpark College, where she was an honor student.
Starting Monday, Martinez will attend Cal State Northridge. She also works for the Conejo Valley Unified School District, tutoring and translating for students and their families.