James: So, TW and Denton, Texas.
-: Denton, Texas.
James: We both went to North Texas,
so we know where that is.
-: Ah, okay, gee, you were the fancy people.
James: Yeah (laughs).
-: So,
(Rosa laughs)
my family didn't have a vehicle
and my mom says to me, "You're going.",
and I get a list from TW that says,
"This is what you need to bring."
Bring a trunk, bring like,
they basically told you what to bring.
Clothing, whatever.
Um...
My, um-
My dad was like,
"No, you're not going."
He's the one that took me to buy a trunk.
He's the one that drove me around
to collect all the stuff I needed to buy to go.
James: Yeah.
-: And the day came
when I knew I was due to be in Denton,
like the next day.
So, my parents put me on a bus
from Mercedes to Denton
which takes what, like nine, 10 hours?
Yeah.
And I got on the bus
and there was a woman
from Harlingen going to TW on that bus.
Her name is Inocencia Alvarez
and she's also very active politically,
was very active politically.
So we started talking just because we somehow
both realized we were going to the same place.
And we picked somebody up from Beeville along the line.
And we picked up like two or three other women
that were going to TW.
James: Really? -: Mm-hmm.
This was in '67, right?
So it's crazy time.
So we all kind of got there at the same time,
took a cab to our dorm, and then discovered
that the dorm that I was in and that in Inocencia was in
was like the dorm where all the scholarship poor kids were.
James: I see.
-: So it was mostly Mexicans. Some were white,
a lot of young black women
who I had never had experience with,
anybody other than white and Mexican,
but it was clear that they were the smarties.
They knew what was happening.
So I made friends with them because they were gonna show me-
James: I see.
-: what I needed to do socially.
James: They knew the lay of the land at TW.
-: Mm-hmm, yeah.
So that, you asked about when do you see the shift?
When I remember when LBJ was running
with Kennedy for the presidency,
my dad took me to go hear LBJ give a speech in Harlingen.
James: Really?
-: And I remember just sitting on top of this car
and seeing like, everybody was just so excited.
He was like last night, Bernie Sanders,
that kind of like excitement.
James: Yeah.
-: And so you could tell that things were changing.
I don't know what, just the impression.
And then the fact that I had that teacher
in high school who was a reader
and just encouraged us to learn to learn.
I mean, why do you learn to learn
if you're gonna be there forever?
That didn't make any sense to me.
I knew things were moving.
And then when I got to TW and I realized,
okay, we're in the dorm for the kids who were here
just 'cause they got lucky.
But my dorm room had a vent about this big
right down the middle that was for the heating system.
And we all knew we were, we were like the poor kids,
but it didn't matter because all
of us were just thrilled to be at a-
I was thrilled to be at a school.
Inocencia was thrilled to be at school.
James: Right.
-: And so I went there for two years
as a home economics major
and
I did better
at political science, English, history, of course.
James: Why home economics?
Was that something that you felt was a natural track
that people had been selling you on?
-: Again, nobody was really selling me on it.
My mom was a seamstress and I had taught her to sew
with a pattern 'cause I was a home-
I took home ec because I didn't take chemistry and all that.
James: Yeah.
-: So I took a lot of home ec classes.
And I thought, well, I can teach, right?
So I can't teach math, science
so I can teach home economics.
But the strange thing was I was making really
good grades at history and political science
and other things, literature.
So there,
I was there two years.
At the end of our second year,
there was a, basically a riot in our dorm.
James: Really?
-: I don't know what happened,
but I remember our dorm mother.
Her name was Catherine and she lived in the basement
and I was an RA because that's part of my work study.
All of a sudden, a lot of this, the people that lived
in the dorm was just like basically a little riot
because we were the poor dorm
and nobody listened to them and blah, blah, blah.
And all I remember is, you know, 'Cencia and another RA
and I were stuck with this situation
and the dorm mother never came out.
So it went on through the night and the next day, you know,
'Cencia, who was from Harlingen
and who I think was really smart and very aware,
more aware than I was,
she said to me, "We need to get outta here.
We need to go somewhere else."
And I was like, "What are you talking about?
Where are we gonna go?"
She says, "I'm applying to UT. You should too."
And I don't know what made me do it, but I did.
And so that was my end of TW.
James: So you went to University of Texas.
-: I went to UT in '69.
James: Wow. What a blessed year.
-: Jenna Joplin had just left.
The shooting from the tower had happened the year before.
James: I was just about to say, yeah.
-: I actually knew a couple of people that had been wounded.
One of them was a young Mexican woman and,
you know, 'Cencia took care of everything.
She got us an apartment, Long-
I think Longhorn Towers or something like that.
right by - they were building the LBJ-
James: Library?
-: library then.
Yeah. I mean all that existed was a big hole
when we got there.
James: Yeah.
-: And we showed up at UT
and she was a literature major, I think Spanish literature.
And so I show up at UT in '69 as a home economics major.
How ridiculous is that?
So I then discovered that I, in order to be a home ec major,
I had to take chemistry which I never was able to even pass.
I couldn't get it.
So I went to my advisor and I was like,
"I don't know what I'm doing
because clearly I'm not gonna be able to get a degree
in home economics because I can't pass chemistry."
And he suggested,
"You know, why don't you major in something
where you don't need chemistry?"
which was sociology, psychology, something humanity.
Right? Political science, something like that.
James: Right.
-: And at UT, I decided if I could take statistics
and pass it, 'cause remember I hadn't taken algebra either,
I could get a degree like in the humanities somehow.
So I took statistics and barely, barely passed it.
So my degree, my degree plan was psychology.
James: I did the exact same thing by the way with math.
I took statistics so that I wouldn't have to take algebra.
-: Because statistics is just logic, right?
James: Yeah. It's just enough over the line.
And then once you pass that -
-: You can figure out norm, you can figure out just
by like learn to learn. That helped me.
James: Exactly. Yeah.
-: Yeah. So while- when I got there in 1969,
I showed up in my TW linen little dress
with my little pumps, 'cause at TW you were supposed to-
James: Oh, you had the TW logo on the-
-: No, just the little linen dress that everybody wore at TW.
James: Oh, I see.
-: They were still in-
James: In the back.
-: Yeah. And I remember coming on campus
to register my little linen dress
and of course everybody around me did not look like that.
So that changed quickly.
I also discovered at registration
that there weren't that many Mexicans there,
but I found them all,
(laughs)
right away, either in the apartments
or, you know, in the lines or wherever.
And very early on
I found they had at UT a National Chicano Organization.
And so I thought, "Well, I'll go there.
I'll find somebody, you know, that I'm comfortable with."
And only to discover
that they weren't so crazy about women in leadership roles.
James: Really?
-: Yeah.
So I then saw a table one day
and it was United Farm Workers.
Uh-huh.
Then I came into my own.
James: Yeah.
-: So I approached the table
and they were doing the boycott then.
So I started working with boycott as a student.
James: Had you heard, I mean, Cesar Chavez,
you'd been exposed to him?
-: In the news as something, you know, west coast,
not particularly that I was looking for them
but really early on, that's-
I thought, "Okay this is what I want to do."
My family had never gone to follow the crops
because we didn't have a vehicle.
James: Right.
-: And so, gosh, that helped me
because I didn't go away to follow the crops
and come back to school in October.
James: Right.
-: I was in school year round
because my dad didn't have a way to take us to the crops.
My father's family, my stepdad's family had-
he had sisters that would follow the crops.
James: I see.
-: Because they had a huge family
and because they had a vehicle and for us
it was just myself, my brother and my sister.
And we didn't have a vehicle.
And my dad had that little tiny bar
that kind of kept us fed.
James: I see.
-: So when I-
James: In other words, you had very much seen the types
of struggles that the UFW had been fighting.
-: Yeah, I saw my cousins would come back
and they would basically stay in my house for a few days
while their parents cleaned up the house that they had left
while they were following the crops.
And so I would see, they would tell stories about, you know,
"We wait for our parents. We're in the fields all day long
waiting for our parents."
They would talk about, I remember hearing them talk
about the planes flying over
and the poison being poured on them and-
James: Right.
-: I remember them complaining
about how they felt and all that.
And then they would come and they would be late for school.
So they never really caught up in school.
That seemed hard to me.
James: Yeah.
-: They seemed tired when they would come.
James: I imagine.
-: Yeah. So when I got to UT and I saw the table
and I started talking to those people,
that always attracted me more than Raza Unida
because to me that was just like hmm.
James: Yeah. The Raza Unida was ramping up at this time
-: Yeah. James: as well.
But you're saying that there was something
about Raza Unida that was offputting?
-: Raza Unida was
and Jose Angel Gutierrez was teaching at UT for a period.
When I was there was Jose Angel Gutierrez was teaching,
my husband Fred Cervantes was a political scientist
who came from Oregon.
And we met at UT and eventually I married him.
James: I see.
-: I asked him to marry me.
James: (laughs)
-: He said, "Yes."
So Juan Gomez Quinones was there, historian.
There was a Chicano linguistics class.
who even knew there was, you know?
There was a linguist there
who put it together with our language.
Some people took that class
and did some amazing projects there.
I didn't take that class
but I took Jose, his class, as pass fail.
I took my husband's class.
He was my boycott leader at one of the stores.
And I took his class, also pass fail.
I didn't take a grade.
And they had Chicanos in Education.
Dr. Trevino the teacher for that, the instructor for that.
So there were, a lot of stuff was happening.
So the farm workers came on campus,
Raza Unida came on campus
and we did voter registration drives
in east Austin
for that.
Sissy Farenthold was running for governor
and there is a dilemma.
Do you go feminist?
James: Right.
-: Or do you go Raza Unida?
And I remember the Raza Unida had made the decision to
have Ramsey Muniz be the candidate for governor.
James: Right.
-: And that had been a struggle
because initially the plan was to build a party locally
and then go statewide.
And something happened in Waco at, you know,
when they decided that Ramsey would be the candidate
that the plan to be local and then grow, just went away.
And he became the candidate.
At the same time, we were having the boycott
for the farm workers.
And so some of the people that I was at school with
were doing both.
Raza Unida and farm worker stuff.
James: Oh, I see.
-: I kind of leaned toward the farm worker issue
because of my family.
And because I just thought Cesar
is just an amazing human being.
James: Yeah.
-: You know, his thought processes.
James: Exactly.
-: And the whole nonviolence issue just really attracted me.
So we were doing Raza Unida, some of us.
Actually, the people I lived with,
most of them were Raza Unida people.
I lived with a bunch of guys
and they were mostly Raza Unida.
The boycott people,
it was American friends, farm workers and union.
And to me, the union people were just amazing
because they had it all.
They knew how to make it work for their families.
I saw that every day
and the electrical workers and, you know,
all the unions were doing-
their families were doing well.
I wished, you know,
I could have belonged to one of them as a kid.
And then we, some of us put together
a Chicano-
Theater Chicano group.
And we just kind of went around doing our little skits
which was ridiculous.
And none of us were actors, clearly
but some of the skits were pretty funny.
I'll give you an example.
James: Yeah. I was about to ask if anything sticks out.
-: Yeah. So we had one where we basically do our first grade
experience where the teacher happens to be a white teacher
and she comes around and she says to us all,
"Students, I'm gonna be your teacher.
And I'm Mrs. Whitehead." I think we called her
I mean, something really awful and- (laughs)
James: Stereotypical white name.
-: Yes. So yes.
So we were all sitting down and she would come in
and, "I'm sorry, but I can't pronounce your name.
So you're gonna have to tell me your name.
I will do a translation.
That will be your name."
And that sticks with me
because my fifth grade teacher who was Mexican said to us
at some point, "I'm gonna change your name."
My name was Rosa Maria,
so from fifth grade through high school
I was Rosemary, which I hated.
So at UT I changed it back.
James: I see.
So as a way of kind of embracing your culture.
-: Of taking back my name that my mother gave me.
So the Theater Chicano,
the little skit that I remember that relates to that,
the teacher Mrs. Whitehead comes in
and she announces to us
that she's gonna change our names
to make it more accommodating to her
and for us to be normal.
That's in the skit.
And then she goes around and she says,
"So what is your name?"
And I actually had a friend
in theater group and his name was Paz Peña.
And he would say, "My name is Paz Peña.
Me llamo Paz Peña."
And the teacher said,
"Well from now on your name is Peach Rock."
James: (laughs)
-: Delores Del Rio,
'Pains of the River' is your name from now on.
Cassie Mio Guerra is gonna be-