[Vinicio Sinta] The one-person walkout story?
[Speaker 1] Yeah.
[Vinicio Sinta] Okay.
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] I guess my activism began in the second grad,
I lead a one-person walkout, I walked out.
I ran home, actually.
I had a wonderful second grade teacher, Mrs. Gonzales,
and she was actually one of
the few Hispanic teachers at the school,
everybody else was an Anglo teacher.
I think she went to have a baby or something,
but she was gone for a couple of weeks and we,
for some reason, got Ms.
(inaudible) who used to teach the class next door.
She wasn't a very nice lady,
everybody knew that and she took over our class.
Well, the kids would leave to
go pick whatever was seasonal,
the potato, the grape,
whatever and one of the little boys that had come back,
he had never really learned much English,
so it was hard for him to talk in
English and he was embarrassed to, so he wouldn't.
He would tell her he needed to go the bathroom,
but he would tell her in Spanish
and he motioned that he needed to go to
the bathroom and she
was real mean and she would tell him,
"If you can talk to me in English,
I'll let you go to the bathroom."
She even said it, she knew what he needed to do.
He tried, he stammered,
and then he finally got so upset that he just cried.
I had taken about like a take and I got up and I said,
"Look, Ms. (inaudible),
he needs to go to the bathroom,
it doesn't matter what language he can't speak or not,
he needs to go to the bathroom and you're
mean and you need to let him go to the bathroom."
She got all upset at me and she was a great big woman,
even to my statute today,
she probably stood six foot,
and so she was very scary.
She was just not a nice lady and she made him pee on
himself because he finally
just peed because he couldn't hold it anymore.
I got so mad that I
said some things to her
that I can't even remember anymore.
I'd heard a lot of things in my time because my dad was
union organizing and my mom and dad
would argue, I knew a lot of words.
I told her, I said," I'm going to go call my mom and
my dad and I'm going to tell them."
She reached out to try to catch me
and I've never been fast,
but I've turned out to be pretty fast that day and I
got away from her and I ran down
two or three long hallways with
her chasing and then I
think the janitor was chasing when she said,
she's running away or something,
I don't know what she said, she was a liar anyway.
I ran all the way home,
I ran through the park,
and they finally gave up, I ran through the park.
I lived very close and made it down the street.
It happened to be around two o'clock in the afternoon,
which meant we were only going to be in school another
hour and my mom was like, "What are you doing here?"
Then I told her the story and
she became very upset and she said,
"You sit right there and wait for your dad,
he'll be here in a few minutes,"
she says, "I'm going to get on the phone."
She started calling the PTA
and I told her who the little boy was
and she called around until she found the parents and
she called the parents and my dad showed up.
He was smiling when he saw me and he says,
"What are you doing here, you're to greet me."
I told him what happened and he said, what?
I remember him saying,
"Does your mother calling people?"
I said, "Yes," and he said,
"Okay, let me make some calls."
Then he went inside and he called the union,
called people in the union and
some people in Democratic Party,
apparently and they had already called the school too,
and the principal said,
"I'll be here, I'll wait for you."
At five o'clock, everybody
was supposed to go to the school.
At five o'clock, about 30 people
showed up and back then that was a lot.
We had the president of the Democratic Club,
we had my mom and my dad who were the PTA leaders,
and my dad who was president of his union and the guy
that was the precinct chair of the party.
It was people I knew,
people who had grown up knowing as
the adults and the parents
of the little boy and the little boy.
Thank God, they had changed his clothes,
I was really worried about that,
I said, "Oh, what if he still wet?"
The teacher, but the teacher had
been told to sit in the library,
so she wasn't allowed in the meeting.
Principal, Mr. Brian was his name,
he says, "All right,
Terry," that was the name they gave me by the way,
because there was five Teresas
and we weren't allowed to all have the same name,
so I was Terry with a Y,
he said, "Tell me the story."
I told him the story and
I've always been a good storyteller,
so I recounted the story
and the little boy said the same story pretty
much in Spanish and
Mr. Brian had somebody there to translate for him.
He was an Anglo principal at
a Mexican school but he was a good guy.
He heard the story,
he heard the little boy story and he says,
"You're not supposed to leave school," and
my dad was about ready to jump up
and I looked at my dad and I said,
"My dad told me that when something bad
happens and it's not
right for me to come and tell him, so I went home."
Principal just looked at me and said, "Okay,
well, that means you have their permission?"
I said, "Yes," and my father said, "Yes, she did."
My dad was ready to kick butt.
The principal and the parents all screamed
and it was confusing there for a little while.
Apparently, they'd been other issues on the campus
and it all came out that day and there
were more complaints about Ms. (inaudible) from parents
of her class and he says,
"All right," he said,
"What do you all want me to do?"
My dad said, "Well, unless you
want us to go to the school board,
which we're ready to go."
He said, "You move her out of the school."
(laughing). I remember him saying,
"You want me to fire?"
He says, "I don't care if you fire her,
he said, "You move her out of the school.
He said, "Send her over to the white side," he says,
"but don't leave her here."
Sure enough, that's what they did.
She disappeared, we never saw her again.
We saw her that day as we were all leaving,
he was walking towards the library and you
could see her sitting there
and when he came around the door,
she must have realized what he was going to
tell her because she started crying, I could see her.
My dad said, "Turn around,
don't worry about that.
Justice sometime is not fair."
He said, "You just have to remember
that to make justice right,
it's not always going to be fair."
I've learned that, as an adult, that it's true.
Pretty much from then on,
I was marked as a rebel or an activist or whatever,
whenever there was an issue.
Whatever school I was at,
I was called in to come and
see if I could help or whatever,
I became a mediator of a sort.
But I was also elected leader
from the ninth grade all
the way up to finishing high school
and went to Cunningham Junior High
and there I was a leader also
and then I went to 4-H Moody,
which is a newly built school.
It was the first school on the west side,
so that meant that 85 percent of that
was Mexican-American or immigrant.
There was a small percentage of Anglo,
and the next percentage was African-American.
I think there was 11 Anglos,
I remember not much more than that and poor guys,
they either had a Mexican accent
or they had a Black accent
because they felt like they had to affiliate with
somebody and so the poor white guys in our school,
I think they lost their identity.
But there I was pretty much
President of everything.
The reason was because early in
life I learned about political campaigns.
My cousin Johnny Delgado,
who now lives in Indiana and he
was very active in labor also with the UAW.
He would bring in the votes from the shop,
carpentry,
auto mechanics,
in the sight of the school that
was for the kids that weren't going to college.
Which was really most of
us that weren't going to college.
Then I would bring in the votes from
the side, on the other side.
It was like a machine and he'd
bring them in 10 at a time.
You could see when he'd come in and say vote,
vote for my cousin, don't worry about anybody else.
(laughing) He was a thug in a way back then.
He knows that, him and his brother Johnny.
But they were my cousins and I was their cousin.
The principal would ask me,
what do you not running for this year?
Because those people who would also like to run.
I would laugh and I would say, well,
I'm not going to be in this
or I'm not going to be in that.
But for the most part,
I took a lot of the leadership roles.
(laughing) I also served
on what they call the youth council.
I don't remember who started it.
But I represented Moody High School
and we would sit in front of the City Council.
The City Council members would be
behind us and then we'd have some tables
that we sat at and we were
there to participate in government.
That was an interesting part
of my life that I got to do that.
Then I went on to Del Mar Community College.
That's when I found out
what a poor education I had gotten.
I thought I was pretty snappy,
on my senior year, there was eight of us that
took trig and calculus, eight.
That was it, out of a whole class of 383 that graduated.
Even though I wasn't in competition for the
top 10 of anywhere in any way.
I loved math and so I just kept pursuing math.
I found out how short or how bad my education really was.
I got into an English class
and the first day I sat there and they talked
about mid-summer Night's Dream and Chaucer
and Shakespeare and I said, hell are they?
I found after the class was over,
everybody else seemed to know.
When the class was over,
I went to the teacher and I said, look.
I have no idea what you-all were talking about today.
Is it poetry?
I said I know some poetry,
but I never knew who wrote it for one.
Secondly, it wasn't even any of
these people you-all are talking about.
She said, well, let me put you through a test. She did.
She said, you're not going to make it in this class.
You're about two or three years
behind what most of these kids are.
I said, what? And she said, yeah.
I said, well, how do I take care of that?
She said, you're going to have to take
the course that doesn't give you
college credit in intermediate to catch up?
Well, the other thing that happened
to me was when I registered for classes.
There was no counselor that said you only
take five classes or six classes or four classes?
I took eight. The miracle of miracles. Nobody stopped me.
I signed up for eight college classes
at Del Mar Community College that's 24 hours.
Well, one of them was PE, so it wasn't 24 hours.
How I made it through that year.
I sometimes wonder, I still wonder.
I didn't fail anything.
But I was at school from seven in the morning till
two at night most of the time studying.
In clubs because I never could leave that out of my life,
whatever. I survived.
I ended up becoming one of the year I graduated in 72.
They had a thing at Del Mar College
that was very prestigious.
It was called Viking of the year.
It had always been won by white students.
Five, because five would win them.
It was in this area, this area.
Well, some years before state representative Bunia,
Tony Bunia had won it.
I knew Tony Bunia.
He was active in LULAC and quite a few other things.
A good friend of my dad's,
they played golf together and yes,
my dad was one of
the very rare things on he was a golfer.
That was really a weird thing for Latinos to be golfers,
but that's another thing on the side
there that I can
go back real quickly when I
was 12 and in the sixth grade,
I was helping my dad do
union grievances because I could read and he could read,
but he liked to argue with me,
so we would argue about it.
Then I would write the grievances, hand-write them.
He had a beautiful handwriting than I did,
but he just said that I could write them better.
The other thing that I was doing during
that time was I would do the,
oh gosh, I'm going to forget what they call it,
but it's what a golfer needs,
the edge he needs when he plays in a tournament.
I was doing that you average
the last five tournaments
that they've been in and then you divide it
and you came up with the handicap.
I was talking to attorneys and doctors and
representatives who would call
the house and want to know
what their handicap was for the next tournament.
I even learned to do that. They wouldn't talk to my dad.
They would talk to me because I was the one that was
doing all the averaging and I
kept the records and all that stuff.
That was the other thing I learned the world of
golf because of my dad.
I got to meet a lot of people
because of that because of my dad,
it always worked out that way.
But anyhow, back to high school and college,
I was devastated by the fact that here I
thought I was in a college preparatory classes at Moody,
which by the way, we headed to fight for.
Because when I started in
the 10th grade and you had to do your schedule,
I noticed that the only thing that was really there
were things like shop and
technical writing and just weird things to me.
I finally said what words,
things like English and
math and science and
because that was the other thing I liked science,
so I went all the way up to botany in high school.
Where are those things? Where's the college classes?
In the counselor then said,
you're not going to go to college.
Then I said, says who?
She says, well, your grades don't indicate.
I remember that the indicator and your test
doesn't indicate that you'll go to college.
I said, lady,
when I was 12-years-old,
I thought I was going to be a corn picker.
I said because of corn pickers used to come
by our neighborhood every Saturday,
they probably came by every day,
but I would only see them on Saturday.