[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] I just wanted to hear where all my roots came from.
But I don't think I ever let anybody be racist to me.
I'm not really sure.
It wasn't really until I was with
my daughters and we were in
South Carolina that I ever
had somebody actually racially treat me racist,
biased, or whatever.
I was with my daughters.
We had landed in an airplane and
we were going to travel by car.
We were going to go on a lower Eastern Coast tour.
We went to eat in a restaurant.
We had just left the airport, we had a rental car,
and we were driving down the road,
and we saw this little country,
I said, let's just go ahead and eat.
We stood there and people behind us would get seating.
I thought it was because there were
two people or whatever.
All of a sudden, my daughter says,
"Mom, they're not going to serve us because of you."
(laughing) I looked at them,
I said, "Me?"
Then I went, "Oh, my God.
This is the South." I'd already worked in Louisiana,
Mississippi, Alabama, and had no trouble.
This was South Carolina.
I said, "Oh, my goodness.
Let's just leave." I said,
"I don't want to get into a fight." So we left.
We go down the street, a couple of miles away,
we see another one looks really good,
and we stopped and we got in there,
and almost the same thing happened.
I finally said, "Hey,
do you serve people of color?"
Everybody in the restaurant looked at me.
(laughing) Everybody was white.
A lady way in the back says, "I do.
This is my restaurant. Hold on."
She came out of somewhere.
She said, "How long have you been here?"
And my daughter says, "We've been here 10,
15 minutes and a lot of people have been seated."
She said, "I'll get you a table."
She sat us and she said,
"Who's the lady that didn't seat you?"
I said, "That woman right there."
I said, "We asked her three,
four times, were we next?"
So she went over there and she says,
"You're paying for their meal."
She says, "You all order anything you want off
this menu including desert. You hear me?"
My daughters went crazy,
and they ordered everything they wanted.
I ordered what I was going to eat anyway,
chicken fried steak, and potatoes, and whatever.
Our bill was substantial because it was three of us.
My daughter said, "Mom,
there really is racism."
Because really they had never really seen it either.
We live in this neighborhood.
They're brought up in this neighborhood,
they never saw it.
I said, "Well, I'll tell you now, I know it's there.
It's hidden, but it's there.
But I'm glad you've never had to feel it."
[Speaker 1] When did that happen?
And where in South Carolina?
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] Right outside of the main airport on a rural road.
What is the main airport in South Carolina?
Raleigh-Durham? It was right out of Raleigh-Durham.
[Speaker 1] It's in North Carolina?
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] Is that North Carolina? Okay. North Carolina.
Wherever Raleigh-Durham, that's how much I remember.
I would say it wouldn't have been more
than a 100 miles from
Raleigh-Durham because we had landed,
gotten in a car, and gone a
while before the girls were like,
I'm getting hungry; and we'd seen
all these great looking country restaurants.
So North Carolina;
all this time I've thought it was South Carolina.
But we landed in Raleigh-Durham,
and then we drove, we were headed towards the Coast.
It was just before we got to
the Coast and found our hotel.
We didn't have any trouble. We never had
another incident. It was just that one.
[Speaker 1] My other question about purpose.
You mentioned that some people
are prejudiced against African Americans.
What were relations in general between
Mexican Americans and
African Americans in Corpus Christi?
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] It was separated. In my neighborhood,
what happened was, over here this
is Greenwood Drive, and this is Horn.
This is in the South part of Corpus.
There is an area right over here,
right before La Molina.
La Molina was the poorest people.
That's where Selena came from.
If you've ever heard of the singer Selena;
she came from that area.
Actually, my cousin, Johnny,
and Joe Delgado lived in Molina.
This little section right here was a new community,
and African Americans had moved in there,
and there were some African Americans that had moved in
across the street from Greenwood, but not many.
That's where that about 11 percent
that went to Moody lived.
My area was totally Brown,
as in Hispanic-Brown,
and I never dealt with anybody Black except at school.
We were segregated.
I guess I never thought of it that way now.
Over where Mateo Justo lived,
Justo Contreras, that area was black.
But he lived on
some property that belonged to the Galvanes.
The Galvanes, I was related to them through my mother.
That was because of Justo.
Galvanes used to be
a very notable name in Corpus Christi.
They were some of the richest Latinos (noise) really.
They had a house in Ocean Drive,
one of the historical houses in Ocean Drive actually,
until he got busted for prostitution
and bringing in drugs,
and drug laundering, and all stuff,
along with a guy named Gonzalez,
and there went all the money.
They were devastated. The whole family was devastated.
They lost rank.
(noise) But he had property over here and
it was totally surrounded by black people.
The segregated school system was over there.
There was a school that was for the blacks only.
It was still going on when I was there.
What was it called? Solomon Coles?
I think it was called Solomon Coles.
It was over in
the area underneath the international bridge;
it's a huge, beautiful bridge in Corpus.
It's in that area.
It would have been what you would
call West of the bridge,
but near the docks,
all those huge canal and all that's there.
When we went into his neighborhood,
we would see a lot of
black people because of course they lived there.
Where the police station was in Corpus,
I don't even know it's still there,
but that was a black area.
It was very segregated;
the blacks lived over here,
and then there was a small group over here.
Everything else pretty much is brown or white in Corpus.
Now I've been gone since 1972.
I haven't seen a lot of change,
but I don't go there very often either.
I have some some aunts left there,
but I don't see them, but every once in a few years.
Corpus for me was a good area to grow up,
but was not the best and I know that now.
I would love to have been my granddaughter
today who's at Ann Richards.
The attempt they're making there to make
up for the lack of in the past is the best I've seen.
But if the child doesn't
care or doesn't want to utilize it, doesn't matter.
But I would have utilized it.
I would've used the hell out of it because
it offers you everything you can imagine.
When I was in school (FOREIGN) there was nothing.
It was just school.
Now I was a blue bird
which is different than Girl Scouts.
I didn't even know Blue bird still exists.
I was in that group and I liked it.
My daughters were Scouts.
I was their troop leader.
I believed in girls leadership.
Today I am always
suggesting that we should start
leadership in the third grade.
Because from my own experience,
I knew that in the second grade
even I took a leadership role.
If you give the person the opportunity I
think that they can handle it.
We're not talking about huge leadership trips.
But why not start teaching them early?
Put them in leadership classes in
the fifth grade and stuff like that.
But corpus, it was a Latino city.
It still lives today.
But the people that I grew up with,
there was nobody really professing Chicanoism
or being a Chicana or nothing.
It wasn't anything like that.
I think we were all trying to be like our fathers,
trying to live the American dream.
I knew that we were on Mexican lands.
I knew that this used to be
Mexico all the way to California.
I knew that my mother and my
father's family's had all
pretty much lived on this side of the river.
When people tell people,
go back to where you belong or whatever,
(laughing) I always just alive.
I said, well, our families grew up here. I am home.
This is my home. At one point
in my life I would tell people,
you go back, don't be telling me to go back.
What is wrong with you? Do you know your history?
I belong here. I guess
I should say that in Corpus Christi in 1972,
in the spring of 1972,
I had just been named Viking of the year,
which is a huge deal.
A guy named Eskimo and another guy came with
him from the University of Houston
to recruit me to the Raza Unida Party.
I remember saying, ''The Raza,
who party, the hell are you talking about?
I'm a Democrat.''
How would I be anything but a Democrat?
That's what you're supposed to be,
not a republican,
a democrat. They talked with me.
I think we sat there and talked at
the Commons at Delmar for most of the afternoon.
They tried to tell me about
the Chicano movement, about California,
about corky,
about all these people that I'd never heard of,
and I said, ''You're talking
about those (inaudible) in California,
all those radicals that want to burn
buildings and was stalking
Carmichael and all those people,
I said, I don't want to be part of that.
I'm not part of that. I'm going to go to college.
I'm going to be an attorney,
and I'm going to succeed.
I promise you that.''
I remember Eskimo was really dark like my dad,
and he had beautiful white teeth, so when he smiled,
they shined and I said,
''What do you know about being me?
You don't know what I've been through,''
and I told him a little bit of what I've been through.
He says, ''You're exactly what we need.''
He says, it's like you're the crossover.
You have to believe in what's happening.
It can't be just,
I said look, ''The way I
look at this movement that you all are talking about,
is like the really super smart kids that are
now up there thinking, we've been cheated.''
Whatever I said, ''I know I've been cheated.
My education would suck.''
I said, I know that now.
I said, but I got a much better
one here at this community college.
I said, and this community college opened
its arms to me as far as I'm concerned.
I said, and they were white teachers.
That's all I've ever known as white teachers.
There's being very few Mexican teachers
in my life, very few.
Mr. Godoy and Moody was a good one.
There are very few.
I said, I don't know what I think I am,
but I don't think I belong in Raza Unida Party.
They left me their names and
their phone numbers and they said,
''You're going to come over, we promise you.''
Well, I forgot that that year I
decided I wanted to be president
of the Young Democrats when I came to Houston,
I wanted to have the position when I came here.
I had the largest college young Democrats club
in the state at the time.
They weren't like we talked about today,
phantom members, they were real members.
We've collected dues from them.
We had meetings, we supported Democrats.
I called up here to Austin
to find out what the rules were and
what I had to do to file and whatever,
and I spoke to the party chair,
that was in 1972.
I'd have to look it up now,
but I think it was Bob's Legal that I talked to.
I don't want to blast his name,
but whoever you were in 1972,
president who was leading
the Democratic Party at the time,
said to me, ''Well,
Teresa, that position is held by a white male always.
There has never been anybody else.
It's an uphill battle for you to try to
become President of the Young Democrats.''
I said, there's nobody that's going to tell me never,
and I'm just going to let him get away with that?"
I said, ''What do you mean?''
I said, ''Are you saying that
a woman can't hold the position?
Are you saying that a Mexican-American
can't hold that position? Which one are you saying?''
He said, ''I'm saying that
that position is always been held by white male.''
I said, ''Well, that's not what I
expected out of the party chair.
I thought you would say, yeah,
go ahead file, here's what you have to do.
So you're saying that there is no place for somebody like
me with the Democratic Party
because I'm not white and I'm not a male?
Is what you're saying?'' "Yes".
"Okay. Thanks for the info".
I called Eskimo.
I said,'' I'm going to join your Raza Unida party.
Is there an organization at UT Austin?",
and he said, ''Yeah, we're just starting it up.''
I said, ''Okay, give me the names.''
I came to Austin with that as one of
the things on my agenda,
was to find out about
this Raza Unida party that was dribble rising
the Mexican community or
the educated Mexican community
because it seemed like it was coming out of the colleges.
But then I found the people
that had been some of the catalysts,
I met them at UT,
they actually came to UT.
I met some of the people
who were involved in the organization.