[Vinicio Sinta] Before we begin the questions,
I will read a brief introduction that
we have at the beginning of each interview.
Before we begin the interview,
we need to formally state
a couple of things for the record.
First, I am Vinicio Sinta of TCU and we are here
recording an interview for
the Civil Rights and Black
and Brown Oral History Project.
Today is June 9 of 2016,
and I am here with
Teresa Perez-Wiseley in Austin, Texas.
Ms. Perez-Wiseley, I will ask you a number of
life history questions and we can
talk as long or as little as you want.
Participation in the interview is voluntary.
It will be recorded,
but you may ask me to turn off
the recorder and go off the record at anytime.
You may also end the interview whenever you want.
We will leave you with a business card with
name and contact information for
the project. How does that sound?
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] Sounds fine.
[Vinicio Sinta] Any questions before we begin? Perfect.
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] I should put my phone on.
[Vinicio Sinta] Tell us a little bit about your background.
Where were you born?
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] Corpus Christi, Texas in 1952.
I'm a groundhog or February second.
I grew up on the west side of Corpus Christi.
That is an area where
World War II veterans came to settle because they could
buy houses with $2
down and the houses cost around $2,000.
It was a lower middle-class.
Most of the people in my community.
That was probably 30 blocks, let's just say.
They worked at a job where there was a union.
They were either oil and chemical workers
or as in my dad's career,
he's helped organize his employer
and that was Reynolds Metals.
They were aluminum makers.
He started out with an aluminum Union
which he helped organize.
I used to go with him to his organizing meetings.
I was two, and fork when I was four,
I think I still remember a
few of the things that happened there sketchy,
but I do remember some fights my dad got
into and stuff like that with
people who didn't want to join the union.
But by the time I was five,
the union was in,
and my dad was an activist.
I started helping him do his grievances at the age of 12.
At that point I was in sixth grade.
He went to the eighth grade.
He always used to say I was
smarter than him and that I should help them.
I learned how to read my first
contract when I was around 12.
I didn't understand everything about it,
but I did understand the jest of most of it.
In school I was
probably an average to a
little bit better than average student.
But pretty much from the start I was an activist.
That's because my parents,
my dad was in the union.
My mother was president off and on or the PTA.
They were both activists in the Democratic Party.
They were normally precinct chair and election judges,
just dependent on which,
I knew what a voting machine was at a very early age.
My dad would have me stand.
I didn't get paid, but he would have me
stand right where the back
of the machines were and he'd say,
don't you let anybody back there.
That's because as we found out
later on as we got older was that,
the machines could be rigged,
and my dad didn't want anybody
to get anywhere near the machines,
so that was my job.
I think I was about eight when I first started standing.
Well, he would let me sit
but basically guarding the back of the machines.
But in the second grade,
I lead my first walkout.
It was a one-person walkout.
What happened was, my school was probably
99.9 percent Mexican American or Mexican immigrant.
We had one Anglo family in the neighborhood.
I had forgotten that
until the other day when I thought about Billy.
Billy was Anglo and his family
was Anglo, but they were very poor.
They lived over where we lived.
Yet we weren't in the poorest neighborhoods.
We were in, like I said,
pretty much lower middle-class.
Because these guys were earning
more money than most people,
because most of them were, oh,
and they were also postal workers
that were in the union and of course,
steel workers, which is what
my dad ended up becoming in the long run.
But there was a very mean teacher in
the second grade and her name was Ms.