[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] As you know that at UT,
part of it came from a cheerleader race in Crystal City,
other parts of it started in different,
it's like just went (noise) started.
Once I got up here to UT,
I walked on the campus and in about 24 hours,
I realized that it took me 24 hours
to see another Hispanic and I went,
where are all the Mexicans?
I would go to
classes and there'd be one or two of us, if that many.
I was a transfer, so I was already a junior.
I was almost particularly a senior.
I thought, where are the Mexicanos?
I had never worried about being a Mexican or a Mexicano.
I never worried about that. I was who I
was and I was what I was or whatever.
I never ran for
anything based on being Hispanic or whatever,
and that wasn't an issue because everybody was Hispanic.
It was just did you have a talent or
the backing of the voters or whatever?
I thought, well maybe I can find them in the clubs.
So opened up the Daily Texan
and I started looking for clubs that looked like
they might have Mexicans in them and I
found Mayo or Maso or one of those.
It wasn't Mecha. I think it was Mayo
and I found a farm workers support group
and there might've been one other one that had meetings,
so I went to them, and the Raza Unida Party.
That's right. I went to them and that's when I found
the Mexicans (laughing) and they were from all
over the valley,
El Paso, Laredo, Rio Grande,
the Hugilla, they were from everywhere.
They'd come to all these clubs almost for
the same reason because where was the Raza?
I said, now we don't even call it Raza back home,
it's just everybody is Mexican.
Why would I have to call them Raza?
That's when I started learning all the lingo,
and that was in 1972.
Well, see by then,
'68 had already happened,
the bunch of marches had happened,
I think Martin Luther King had died already too.
I started learning about Cesar Chavez
because of the farm workers support
group and I'm a quick study.
It doesn't take long for me to figure some stuff out.
Now, I've found a lot of people
who were using the movement also and I
thought I'll stay away from
them and I pretty much hung onto this.
Pretty much the same crowd of people that I hang
around with today are the same ones
that I hung around with at UT back in 1972 through 1976.
Even though I only needed a
year-and-a-half of schooling when I got here,
left to get my degree,
it took me longer because I had
no financial support from anybody.
I had to take a year off just to earn money to come back.
But I came back (noise) and I was only here till
76 because for all the talk about counselors,
I've had a bad experience with
college and school counselors.
I was one hour short.
I came to this school with
81 hours and I was one-hour short to
graduate because a counselor
had miscounted and misled me.
I had to stay another full semester for one hour,
so I took a three-hour course obviously,
where I would've graduated in '75
and if I hadn't taken off that extra year,
I would've been able to graduate '73 or '74,
but that's why when my daughters would say,
well, the counselor said this, I am very leery.
Actually it proved to be right
because with my youngest daughter,
what I had been telling her,
let me read it.
She wouldn't let me, she wouldn't let me,
and she ended up having to go to school a lot
longer because she just wouldn't trust.
That's very upsetting to me that
I've been through the system, you should trust me.
I'm not going to tell you what to do,
I'm just going to tell you trust me.
That's when pretty much my Chicanoism,
if you want to call it that,
blew open in the spring of 1972,
but I didn't know what to do with it.
I didn't know where to go. By that time,
I would see a Brown Beret here and there and
say (FOREIGN) who the hell do they think they are?
They just look weird.
Today, one of those former Brown Berets is
a good friend of mine, Gilbert Rivera.
I got to know Brown Berets.
He's still fighting for the same things,
except now I fight with him.
Well, we have for various years,
but I was always still a little bit more
advantaged than others because I grew up
in a union home where my father,
I think the last salary I remembered he
was making was 30,000 a year.
30,000 and I think about that today people are still
struggling to make 30,000 a year.
I'm retired and I bring in about 77,000 a year.
I'm not your average or normal working class person
even today because I lucked out,
I went to work for an international union,
just the right place at the right time and had
skills they wanted and wham,
that made history for me
because I'd never got to go to law school.
I was studying to go to law school when I got
laid off from City of Austin after I went to UT,
but I've always had insurance.
But when I was a kid growing up,
there was a period of time we didn't have
insurance because I think it was
a strike or layoff because that just happened.
It was like rich, poor, rich, poor.
You felt like you're rich and you went to being poor.
During one of those times,
my brother got really ill
and three days of fevers and convulsing.
He died because we didn't have
insurance and my father refused to take welfare.
My brother suffered for three days
of bacterial spinal meningitis.
I know that part of the misery.
But as a person,
I've always been covered by insurance.
Dental insurance, visual, well,
now I don't have it as a retiree
but I can pay for my glasses,
I can pay for my dental work,
but I didn't suffer like a lot of people suffered.
I'm not suffering today.
But I understood the movement and
I was more like a sergeant major,
then I was the outspoken leader at the time.
I made sure things happened.
When I was at UT, if
it hadn't been for the Chicano movement,
it would have been pretty boring.
I met a lot of people
who were involved in it and over the years,
leaders came from there.
I never got to meet people like Corky but I met
the people from the Latino movement here in Texas,
the Raza Unida leadership and stuff like that.
[Vinicio Satin] Can you tell me about the friends
and the contacts that you made while at Raza Unida?
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] Well, who would I pick out?
There were so many. Pretty much
everybody I know was (FOREIGN).
At one time we were all democrats
first and then we became (FOREIGN).
Let's see, who do I know?
Marta Cotera and her husband
were leaders of the (FOREIGN),
they actually came from.
She was from Mexico.
I just found that out recently.
I never even thought of that, that she was
born in Mexico and became an American citizen.
But she was part of that movement and her husband.
She's a highly educated individual.
She's a historian basically
and her husband's an architect.
They came out of the movement.
Who did I meet? All those days are flying
by my head and I can't tell you
the name of each individual.
(inaudible), that was supposed to have been one
of the administrative leaders or founders.
I'm not sure that he was the absolute number one founder,
but he claims he is.
I knew Ramsey (inaudible)
not as well as my friend Alicia,
who lived in Corpus also she lived in
La Cuarenta and I lived in the West side.
La Cuarenta is a much poor area, tough, rough.
My dad would say, (FOREIGN).
He would say, don't go over there.
Don't get into that area,
especially at night, don't go over there.
Well, I never had any reason to
be in that side of town anyway.
The only thing that was out there that I would go to
is a cemetery and we'd go in the day,
and nobody is going to go cemetery at night.
I might've, but they're not open.
Ramsey was the sweetest man I'd ever known.
I felt so bad for everything that happened to
him because he was a part of the (inaudible).
I'm sure that's the only reason
all the bad things happened to him.
Jose (inaudible) became, I guess, fairly successful.
He's a, I think a professor
now and he was an attorney too.
Every once a while I see him.
He still has that massive chip on his shoulder.
I don't think that's ever changed.
He wrote the book, The Gringo Handbook,
and I read it and it was so racial that I finally said,
(FOREIGN) ''Follow this stupid book.''
I don't want to
believe that everybody I know that is not,
well, let's put it this way.
I don't care what color they are, there's racist.
Brown, white, black,
yellow, reds, it's a little bit different than other.
I have a totally different view
on what my red brothers and sisters,
why they feel the way they do.
They were annihilated.
I thank the gods, that there's still some of them here.
But I've known racist of every color.
It bothers the hell out of me when
they'll start spewing their anger and their hate.
I have a personal friend who
constantly breaks White people
and I have to constantly tell her,
''I have White blood,
my mother had White blood,
my children have more White blood than I do.
Stop it.''
I've told her this over and over,
she has heavy Spanish influence in her Spanish,
not Mexican, Spanish.
I said, ''You're as White as they are, stop it.
I know that somewhere in the back of me there's still
some racial roots because
of my dad's racism towards Black people.
I try not to
ever remember any of that or believing any of that,
but I know it's there, I mean,
just the way it's not there.
When my husband was dying,
he had brain tumors and they were eating away.
Well, they eat away at the part that says,
behave and don't be racist.
Because near the end of his death,
he would say some of the most
awful racial things and I'd say,
Bobby, look at me.
Remember, you've lived with me 28 years.
Your children are part of me.
You don't mean that.''
But he grew up in Alabama.
He was a,
what was the guy's name,
the Governor that got shot and put in a wheelchair?
He was awful.
Wallacite. He had been a Wallacite
before I ever met him, and he still believed in him.
Every once in a while he'd say,
Wallace was a good guy and I'd say,
''How can you say that?''
But racism is learned.
You're not born a racist, you're taught.
You can be taught as an infant,
I'm sure as a walking child, whatever.
So the roots are deep.
But I tried to just live wherever I
live in the worst racism there can be is social,
economic, and there's financial.
Because I live on the west side.
Everybody thinks I live on the east side
because my politics, I do a lot,
I hope all I can on the east side, south side,
northeast side, I fight for their rights.
Then somebody will say, ''Well, where do you live?''
I said, ''Over on the west side over.''
They'll go, ''What? You don't even live over here?''
No. I wasn't born in Austin either.
That's the other prejudice there is against
people who aren't Austin knights.
I've been here since 1972.
I've been fighting for everything and anything that was
necessary to fight for since 1972.
I don't think that I have to fight for whether I was
born or raised here, my kids were.
But I've done everything I could to advance
every in anybody in the city of Boston since 1972.
[Vinicio Satin] Speaking of East Austin,
when you were attending UT
and working with these organizations,
did you go often to the east side, did you work there?
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] I never had to work there but we did projects.
When you're a UT student, you don't have a car.
Well, most of us didn't.
So it's not like that you can just go.
There was going to be march,
there was going to be an action.
We'd all get over there somehow.
I have friends who did a lot more close work with,
say, the Brown Berets,
who tend to have lived in East Austin,
still live in East Austin,
a lot of them, the ones that
haven't been gentrified and moved away or whatever.
We did some things,
but most of the things that I did were on.