[Teresa Perez Wisely] UT campus.
I think the most dramatic thing I ever did
besides the one-person walkout,
was participate in the takeover
of the UT President's office,
I think it was between '73 and '76.
I can't even tell anymore.
I've got the article somewhere.
We planned it.
It's like I was waiting for the FBI,
the CIA, the NSA,
somebody to catch us in our meetings.
But we actually planned it.
I was not allowed to be one
of the six that got to go up there.
I was really upset about it because I want it
to be one of the six that got to go up there.
My friend Pablo went up there.
He's since passed away.
My friend Cynthia Perez,
who is still alive and still a radical and still
my friend was one of them. There was other.
But, those are the only two that I clearly
remember as they came out of the building.
But we planned it and I kept thinking,
man, I'm probably on the FBI list or something.
But as it was, I got
Secret Service clearance when I went to meet Mandela.
I thought, I guess I didn't have bad;
I passed Secret Service clearance for
the same level of you're going to get around
a president or whatever, or be around them.
I didn't really ever step foot in East Austin
very often.
There was a period of time for
about five months that I actually
lived over there in a little apartment thing.
But hanging around, work around,
eat at a restaurant in East Austin,
yes, but no I can't claim that I did.
But I associated with people from there.
[Vinicio Sinta] For the record, can you tell us what was
the context around the takeover
or the attempt to take over the office?
[Teresa Perez Wisely] Actually, it's never been resolved.
We were complaining because at
the time that this incident happened,
the number of Hispanic/Latino surnamed
Americans that were registered at UT was less than 500.
There was 800 and something Spanish surname,
but the rest of them were foreign,
like from Spain and maybe even Mexico.
I really don't remember anymore,
but I know that Spanish surnamed Americans.
It was like less than 500.
Today if you look at the numbers,
I think it's almost the same.
I don't think it's too much more.
We were complaining about that.
There wasn't a Chicano Studies Department.
They had this Ombudsman.
That Ombudsman had about the same values
as that package of corn tortillas over there.
They're more worthy than that ombudsman was.
It did nothing for us.
There might have been
a Hispanic Student Affairs person
that didn't help us much either.
All of it was just for us visual.
They could say they had it,
but it didn't do nothing.
It didn't improve our lives.
It didn't give us more classes.
We were wanting cultural awareness classes.
We wanted classes about Latinos.
There was a lot of things that we trying to get,
you know, that was the crux of it.
We thought if we got coverage from
the paper and the television
and whatever that they'd be pressure.
But really it didn't do much of anything.
[Vinicio Sinta] You mentioned that many students
found they approached Raza Unida.
[Teresa Perez Wisely] Farm Workers Support.
[Vinicio Sinta] The Farm Workers Support. (OVERLAPPING)
[Teresa Perez Wisely] I think we had a MAYO.
[Vinicio Sinta] Was there a crossover between them,
or collaboration?
You mean were there white kids in
it and stuff like that or? (OVERLAPPING)
Actually makes collaboration outside of the room.
But also like if the same people were (OVERLAPPING).
[Teresa Perez Wisely] It was the same people, what are
you talking about?
It was the same ones.
You might find a few more in one than
you did in another.
Probably not everybody was
in the farm worker support group.
I've never even been a farm worker.
I pick cotton for less than five minutes,
and didn't get paid by the way.
I think I picked cotton for a minute.
I don't know how long that incident happened,
but I had never been one,
but I understood a little about their life and
their culture because I went to
school with a lot of farm worker kids.
They weren't even talking about
organizing back when I was a kid.
It wasn't until later when Cesar Chavez started
organizing them that we would hear about it.
My dad said something one time.
I think what he said was,
"There's this Mexican trying to
organize the cotton pickers."
I said the, "Cotton pickers?"
He said, "No the ones that pick
the vegetables and stuff like that."
I said, "Well are you going to help him?"
He says, "Well,
I don't think there's any here."
He says, "But yeah, we'll help him."
That was pretty much all I ever heard.
But when I got to UT, there was a woman
named Rebecca Flores Harrington at the time.
She was the lead.
She was the only, I think,
international staff person, or
state's organizer for the farm workers.
Somebody probably her had
started that farm support group.
But we were more of
an intellectual support group I think.
I learned that from her the other day
when I was in fact,
she was sitting right here at
this table a couple of nights ago.
She said, "You guys weren't
really doing the things that I needed."
I said, "Well, what did you need?"
And she says, "Well, I needed
people picketing" and I said,
"Yeah, we were in college, Rebecca.
I worked my ass off to get through college.
I wasn't this white kid
who had their parents paying for their college."
Mostly that's what I meant when I was at UT,
was rich and white kids.
I said I'm not one of those.
I was one of those that had to work
for a living to be there.
I couldn't afford to get arrested, and stuff like that.
I thought just that was
not a goal in my life was to get arrested.
If I was mostly
an intellectual resource for
you all then that's what I was, is it?
But, I didn't ever consider myself an
intellectual anything for anybody.
I just went to the meetings first of
all and foremost to meet Mexicanos.
Then secondly, learned the cause
and became committed as much as I could.
The MAYO, Mexican
American Youth Organization it was really
more social than it was anything else.
I can remember more parties and drinking and stuff like
that, and guys and
girls having great times more than anything else.
The other one let's see there was MAYO, there was,
Raza Unida did more things
because we were trying to get pie in the sky.
We're trying to get brown people elected by
brown people because this is a state of brown people.
Obviously that was a very difficult thing to do.
But, we were so glad when we got garnished
almost four percent of
the populist vote in a gubernatorial campaign.
That was like unheard of and we were able to do that.
Then the state changed those thresholds so that
no third party could ever really ever get in again.
But we did that.
Should I be proud? I think so.
[Vinicio Sinta] Did you become involved at any point
in any of
the campaigns that Raza Unida run in Travis County?
[Teresa Perez Wisely] Yeah. All of them from 1972 on.
[Vinicio Sinta] What were you doing?
[Teresa Perez Wisely] Well, we were getting out the vote.
We had signs.
We would pass out literature.
Mostly we were trying to get the vote on the campus.
But in 1973, I was already living off campus.
I was one of the few married students
on campus.
I got married in June,
the 7th of 1973.
I hadn't even been at UT a year.
I met my husband
within a couple of weeks at the time that I moved here.
He was a roommate of a family friend.
I was not part of a lot of that social network because I
didn't social network with
that group anymore because I was already married.
It was like I did the first year or so,
but I met my husband too,
most of those were all single people,
looking for their partner or mate or
friend for the night or whatever.
and I wasn't one of those.
I had had a boyfriend from
the eighth grade till
the second year of community college.
Always had somebody all my life.
Again, when I got to UT,
I think I was single,
whopping eight months before I was
married because I found
who I wanted, I knew it's who I wanted.
He was a white guy, a
skinny little white guy from San Antonio,
Texas, who thought he'd been a Mexican until
he grew up, and
someone said you're not a Mexican, you're a white guy.
But, because he lived in a brown community
and he spoke all the right words
in Spanish that he needed,
probably the bad words and all that.
He grew up in the part of San Antonio that was all
Mexican, and here was this little skinny
white guy in us.
All his friends were Mexican, but he wasn't.
Then, I think culturally they
moved him because they needed to make him white.
They moved him to Alabama and he had to go and
live there for a while and then when he came
back, he was white.
Now he wasn't even brown
anymore and he had already been married,
but I met him through a friend.
He was not a UT student or anything like that.
We were married 27 years until he died of cancer.
A lot of these things we're social,
but little by little we got involved.
It was if some horrible thing had happened at the city,
then we got involved in an action or something.
If there was something going
out on the east side, and they
needed bodies to fill a line, and we were there.
We had a poet that came from San Diego, California.
His name was (inaudible).
He rebel roused the mentality,
through his poetry and through the poetry
of others like Sanchez.
He brought that part
of the world to us that didn't even know existed.
I started reading those books
that are published in very small numbers.
I still have a lot of them turning brown and brittle.
Like the (inaudible) that (inaudible) wrote,
but I have a lot more of them down there.
In fact, I just heard there's a
new and being written about
the Latinos in North Texas.
I'm probably going to find that one and buy it
and find out if I know anybody in there,
but there was a lot of folks.
I even got to meet Emma Tenayuca,
but just a brief encounter
because she had come somewhere that we were all at.
I got to meet (inaudible) she was
the great-grandmother of a friend of mine who used to
go to school at UT and
I guess she would had to have known
all the two main leaders of
that war in 1910 and around then.
[Vinicio Sinta] Villa, Zapata.
[Teresa Perez Wisely] She knew Villa and she knew,
what was the other one?
He even knew how to fly a plane.
There were only two in that movement,
I mean the leaders.
[Vinicio Sinta] Well, Emiliano Zapata in
South Central part and Pancho Villa.
[Teresa Perez Wisely] Pancho Villa. She had known them
as a child.
She was a child, but she was a soldier
there at 13 or something like that.
She had pictures of her with straps.
Oh, it was so cool. I got
to meet her because she had come.
She was in her,
I believe in her late 80s or early 90s when I met her,
but I got to hear about that revolution through her,
she'd come to talk to our group about it.
I never got to meet Koki,
for instance, I don't know if he
was something New Mexico or Arizona.
I never got to meet any of the new
Mexican or Arizona leaders
because I didn't go to,
for instance, (inaudible) National Convention.
But that was the first time I was
ever a delegate to a national convention.
It took me till 1991
to become a national delegate of
the Democratic Party for Clinton,
to become a national delicate because
it's not an easy thing to do.
It takes a campaign and it takes money.
If there's a lot of apathy,
then it's probably easy.
But, my house in 1973 was
a polling place for (inaudible) party.
I had a little-bitty rental house,
and I think we had all of 24 votes come in there,
or maybe it was less than a 100.
I don't remember anymore, I don't think I
kept records of things like that.
But I had to call the Texas Rangers.
God forbid that I would call the Texas Rangers,
but I had to call the Texas Rangers because my neighbor
kept pulling out the voting sign that said,
no campaign in-between here and that spot.
She kept taking it out and we had to
keep putting it back and she would take it out.
She was an elder lady about 80 and she kept saying,
that's not your yard,
and I would tell her "It's not your yard either,
15 feet of that is the city of
Austins and this sign is on the edge,
the furthest most piece.
Stop taking it out."
"I don't want it in my
yard," so she would take it out and,
well, I had to call the Texas Rangers.
The Texas Rangers came,
asked us what had happened,
they went over to her house,
put it back in and they told her
you take it out, we're going to arrest you.
She didn't take it out anymore.
Everybody in the whole community said,
"You call the Texas Rangers?
You called the Rangers?"