[Andrew Hernandez] Make the case. They might have committed
a case so we put the numbers back in.
That was great though. Still don't
learn oppress our people.
That's his back red, put it back in.
That was worried though.
[Vinicio Sinta] At this point, you were doing the research
on your own, so where did that resources come from?
[Andrew Hernandez] Some of it came from states
that other people had done.
Some of it came from the census.
Nobody had really looked at the census
and look at eligible population
and the voter registrations
because nothing was computerized in those days.
We're talking about the early 70 's,
'74, '75. Well, mid '70 's.
Literally, to know how many counselors to vote,
I would get the list of
reservoirs and freaking count them.
All the Spanish surnames by hand,
1, 2, 3.
On the big ones, I would just your random sample.
Every 10th name and tried to get a percent.
But in most of the counties, literally,
I will spend a day counting
every single Spanish surname,
registered voter. It's what we do.
[Vinicio Sinta] This was at a local level?
[Andrew Hernandez] At the local level. At the national level,
we have the census data.
We could extrapolate from census data.
You had voter registration rates
so you could extrapolate that.
But at a local level,
and then, to find out which precincts,
we'd have to overlay the census
tracks over the precincts,
like in New York City
and other big cities and just assume that,
if distance in track is 80 percent
then the Latinos are at least six years,
7 percent of registered voters here.
Because we didn't have any other way of doing it.
In 1976, I did
the first study on
the Latino vote in a presidential election ever.
It was called the Latino vote in
the 1976 presidential election.
It was national, it included New York, Chicago,
Miami, Los Angeles, San Antonio.
[Vinicio Sinta] What happened eventually with
the proposal and all these stuff?
[Andrew Hernandez] Well, we started small operations in 1975.
It was me as a research assistant,
it was Roberta Cabrera as a field assistant,
Aron Sanchez was the administrative assistant,
and then Olive Alaska was
the director of the Southwest folder.
It was four of us that started.
The first year we only ran five campaigns,
it was mostly just going out and meeting people
and getting that work started so we ran five campaigns.
We had to run a campaign in five states.
I think Salt Lake City, Denver,
San Antonio,
I don't remember if it was
Albuquerque or Santa Fe, New Mexico.
But I don't remember the first five sites.
I know San Antonio was one of them and I know that
Denver was another one. I don't remember.
[Vinicio Sinta] Mr. Velazquez was part of
the group that launched (inaudible)?
[Andrew Hernandez] Yes.
[Vinicio Sinta] At this point, what was his connection
to how this evolved?
[Andrew Hernandez] Well, I mean, he had a lot of
contacts and he knew a lot
of people that were lost in a party members,
but by this time (inaudible) was in its decline.
A lot of the (inaudible) members that had one
(inaudible) either, were now joining
the Democratic Party.
Like one Roldonado stopped.
A bunch of folks like that, Teodoro Martinez.
These are all more for more (inaudible).
But because (inaudible) wasn't
winning and in fact there were losing.
In fact, (inaudible) husband Danny Masa ran against
the democratic state rep and lost three times.
They figured but we're not going to
get things done this way.
We're not going to take over this way.
Again, he broke with us and he
didn't believe that third parties
could succeed in this country.
He looked at the history of third parties and found
that they didn't succeed.
The other side of it is that, well,
it was about policy.
It was about making things happen.
I remember he always say, he told me.
He said, "The people don't care if you're right.
The only people in care if you get things done,
their lives get better."
In a way he was saying, they don't
care how righteous you are.
More of you are or right you are.
The only thing they care about their lives get better.
Their first job is to do that.
Not to be right, not to have
the right philosophy or ideology,
but to make their lives
better so how do you get that done
and his feeling was
a third party would not, could not do that.
[Vinicio Sinta] In your particular case,
how was the shift from being part of
the democratic campaigns in
San Antonio to being nonpartisan?
[Andrew Hernandez] Well, it wasn't
a difficult shift because all our campaigns
focused around getting Mexicans to vote out.
Now we had an organization
who whose only purpose was to do that.
Before our campaigns had
been get out to vote so we can win or Candy can win.
(inaudible) feel like get the vote
so that people fear and respect you.
It became less candidate
centric and more empowerment centric,
I guess empowerment focused. We could use that.
There's greater freedom there because you
weren't asking people to vote for a candidate.
You're asking people to vote for themselves.
There was a paradigm shift.
You're only asking people to vote for a party.
We're asking them to vote for drainage and
streets and schools. Does that make sense?
In a way, the freeing of the partnership allowed us
to talk more authentically about what vote really meant,
which is power to make your life better.
The party keep bad things from happening to you,
or the power to make good things happen.
Most of our politics,
of course, was protest politics.
Stop bad things from happening.
Which is now in the situation we're in,
now in this era that we live in, we're still.
But protests politics can only take you so far.
Because if things aren't changing people's lives,
people don't care about protests. They want progress.
Protest politics can only take you so
far then you have to
actually make changes in people's lives.
Willy understood that;
that to keep people engaged,
I guess, to keep the faith.
Because voting is an act of faith.
Voting is an act of faith.
You're telling people if you vote,
your life can get better.
If that doesn't happen,
then there's no reason why they should vote.
It's not voter apathy it's just that's not apathy.
That's being real about politics.
If I vote and nothing changes, then why vote?
[Vinicio Sinta] The other thing I was wondering
about at this point was
the Southwest border district.
He was focused geographically in
the southwest and he was focused on Mexican Americans.
Especially, considering that the research
also considered all their families in the US.
What was this idea of
the Mexican-American vote vis-a-vis
all the Latin American origin votes?
[Andrew Hernandez] Well, first of all,
because so much of
who we were and what we did
came out of the Chicano movement.
The Chicano movement is richly in ethnically based.
It's essentially, mostly Mexican-Americans.
Second third generation,
that had the leisure time to organize.
They didn't have to work full-time.
Mostly college students.
You have the disposable time
that you're not having to do what
these guys are doing right now.
There was connections and contact
with what was happening in
the South with the African-American groups.
The Black Panthers and
the Urban League and all that stuff.
Outside of New York City,
at that time there weren't a lot of
Jamaicanos or Latinos,
there were Puerto Ricans in Chicago, but not a lot.
In New York City, there were a lot of Puerto Ricans,
but that's about it, but nowhere else it was.
You didn't have the other groups there.
There was either Puerto Ricans or Mexicans,
that's it, in the early '70s.
There weren't other groups.
They were too small to mean anything.
Once they got into our barriers,
they became either Mexican or Puerto Rican,
regardless of who they were.
Then the Cubans were a whole different ballgame.
They were the reactionaries and
the conservatives and all that stuff.
They called us communist.
The Miami Cubas called all of us in
the movement communist because they saw it.
Because a lot of our folks
went to Cuba and support the Cuban revolution.
We had no relationship with the Cubans in
Miami who we considered
reactionaries and traders to
the revolution and they considered as communists.
Puerto Ricans had their own political machines and life
in New York City and somewhat in New Jersey,
somewhat in Pennsylvania, but
they were more machine politics.
They weren't independent politics. Does that make sense?
You did have the younger ones
and you did have groups like that,
but it wasn't like in the Southwest.
There was never any revolt in Pennsylvania or New York.
In the Southwest, there was a revolt.
There was a revolt against
the old Democratic establishment.
There was a revolt against LULAC,
a revolt against Henry B Gonzalez.
There was a revolt. You never had that revolt up there.
Because I don't think there was enough of them,
and the politics was different.
The politics in New York City and Pennsylvania
because it was Democratic machine politics,
always integrated leadership.
There were more politically integrated
because the politics of
the Southwest relied on
excluded Mexicans and Mexican American voters.
At least in Texas, there were southern Dixie crafts.
Their power rested on us not voting.
New York and Pennsylvania,
the Democratic machine power rested on
Puerto Ricans voting. Does that make sense?
It was a little bit different now.
Once we got started and got
going then other people heard about us and
then we help start
the Northeast voter restoration project.
We help start Midwest voter restoration project,
but that was until about the '80s.
[Vinicio Sinta] On that line, voting rights, for example.
At some point, there was legal arm of the.
[Andrew Hernandez] Yes. One of my first jobs
as a research guy, I remember what he said.
"Andy," he said, "You need to figure out why Mexicans
lose and what keeps us from winning,
why we can't elect anybody."
Along with Maldive,
I can't remember 67 or 63.
I'm getting old now. Let's say 67 counties.
We profiled 67 counties in Texas that had
significant Mexican American populations but
didn't have any elected officials to make that list.
Some cities were 50 percent Mexicanos
like Sonora Texas in
West Texas and they never
elected anybody, and supported nothing.
Your job is to go find out why we can't win.
Why we keep losing. That was
my task. Why don't we keep losing?
One thing I would do is I'd go into
these counties and these
cities and get the list of registered voters
and count them and look at the districts.
One of the first towns I hit,
because I had a little route all the way to El Paso,
was Sonora Texas, which was one we should've been
winning something in as
we were over 50 percent of the population.
They had a long history of been
sued by the federal government
for discrimination in the schools,
and there were just a bad town,
a racist little town.
In Texas you have
four County Commissioner districts, you know this,
and based on one man, one vote,
every district should have as close
to possible equal number
of people that live in that district.
One man, one vote. What I found is
the reason Mexicanos couldn't win is
because there was one district
where they put all the main Mexicanos in,
but they put 300 more Anglo voters
in than there were Mexicanos voters.
All Mexicanos were in one district,
but they packed it with enough Anglo voters that there's
no way they were going to win,
even if every Mexicano vote,
they had 300 votes as a cushion.
Then all the other districts, like one district had
67 voters, all white.
Another district had 30.
I looked at it and I thought, this can't be right.
I said something is wrong.
No, that's the way it is.
I told them, "That's just in our Voter Rights Act stuff.
This one man, one vote stuff.
This is constitutional stuff."
Then we start to find that that's true for
all these little counties.
That's how we couldn't win, (inaudible).
They drew the line so we couldn't win either by packing
and putting them all in one district
and then put enough Anglos in there to
beat us or by splitting us up four ways,
so we didn't have enough in any one district.