[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] I had to because she wouldn't stop it,
and that was the number we were
given. That's who showed up.
I didn't call the Texas Rangers,
I called the Texas Department of Transportation.
You were supposed to call and who shows up at Texas.
I said, oh, my God, it's a ranger.
But he got it solved for us.
[Steve Arionus] That leads me back to the previous question.
Also the late 60s
early 70s there were a lot of organizations,
there was a lot of activism.
Was there any collaboration or work alongside?
For example, African-American organizations?
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] The peace movement had already happened,
I think that was in the late 60s.
When we got here,
a lot of that had already happened.
That thing in New York,
that big concert had already happened also,
which had also sent out another movement.
I couldn't go to any of that stuff.
There was collaboration with
the liberal Whites who we used to call Hippies.
I never thought of myself as a hippie.
My kids call me a hippie, and I laugh,
because do you even understand
what the hippies were like.
I believe in peace and so we,
most of us didn't believe in the Vietnam War.
There were people dying every day, Vietnam War.
Sometimes the collaboration was in peace movements,
stuff about the Vietnam War
and what was going on in Vietnam.
Brown power and Black Power and Hippies.
(laughing) The white power, I guess.
We collaborated on the Farm Worker Movement type stuff.
We got a lot of white liberals
that would come in and help.
Some of them belong to our groups.
(noise) That's where they felt most comfortable.
Even to today, there's,
there's this racism about how
pure a Chicano or Latino or whatever you are.
I still see it.
when I went to do my thing,
my tests, I said I'm 62 percent.
Some other people who had talking the loudest,
they've had their tests.
Some of them are 38 and 42 and I say
okay. (FOREIGN) Me or you?
I said, I have more indigenous blood than you do,
my God, and I'm the white one.
They used to call me though, the white one,
because I have the name Neely.
Today I carry the name Wiseley.
But that's because I have two
daughters named Wiseley or I
would've dropped his name when
he died and been just Perez.
But, after 40 years of being a bit as Wiseley,
it'd be too hard to find me.
Wiseley there's less than
a 100 people in a whole country that have that name,
so I'll just keep it.
But there was some,
but it was exclusionary.
There was, like I said, there was racist
inside our group that didn't want those white people
involved in our movement
or those hippies will
cut their hair and wear suits the next time you see him.
It was true, that part of it was true.
All of a sudden you'd see them,
they'd go home and yeah.
They weren't hippies anymore now they
were in law school or they were, yeah.
I think it was mostly social, economic,
but people didn't really figure that out until now.
Now we realize that it was the dollar that divides us.
It's what divides me from most of
the people I run with on the east side.
It doesn't really divide me
from the people here in this neighborhood,
which are primarily White.
They always try to get me to be
involved in what they're doing because they
know of my activism and
my connection with elected officials
because I've worked with so many over the years.
I can make a call and get a meeting.
For that they recognize me.
I've never been mistreated in this neighborhood,
but this tends to be one of the more liberal,
radical democratic voting boxes quite in the city.
Guess I'm lucky that I moved in here.
But it's because I couldn't get a house on the east side.
I tried we'd been on five houses.
Either we got outbid or we
couldn't get the bank to give us money
because they wouldn't they red lined it,
they wouldn't give you money on the other side of 35.
All I wanted sometimes with
25,000 or 30,000 to get into a house.
Over here they gave me 80,000 and I
bought this one, for $29,500.
Moved in to what used to be a brown neighborhood.
This area, he was black,
but around me was a brown neighborhood.
But I didn't find that out
until much after I had bought the land.
Nineteen, in the early 1928ish,
this was a brown area.
But then the white community figured out this
was a nice area and gentrification happened,
so it became a white community.
There's probably two or three brown families here,
maybe two that are from that far back.
Rest of them are all gone. Who told me?
Was my white friends.
This used to be a brown neighborhood. I said, really?
I started asking,
East Austin used to be a white neighborhood,
and it's going to be a white neighborhood again.
Things just evolve,
downtown used to be brown, all brown.
We've been shut out of downtown.
Now, I would not have been as shut out at
other people because I worked,
my husband worked, and we had
credit and we were able to if you have,
the almighty thing is credit.
Can you establish credit?
That's why a lot of times when people
are talking about leadership classes,
we're putting things together.
I always try to say there has to be one about banking,
and knowledge of credit,
and checking accounts, and credit scores.
There has to be, because to
survive in this socioeconomic world,
you have to know these things.
If you don't know, you're going
to be bumbling around like
a dumb fool and you're never going to make it.
When they asked me about leadership,
I would say don't leave out the financial world.
I'm not trying to say everybody should be rich. Why not?
But that's not going to happen,
but at least teach him how to be able to buy a home,
to qualify to buy a home.
To maintain a home.
Everything that is related to how buy a car,
how to keep a car,
how to maintain a car, I said those are
all things that if you want to
keep up in society today, you've got to.
I think that everybody should be
taught the history of the roots.
I've tried to teach my kids and I'm trying
to teach my granddaughter who she be.
When I say, you need to learn to speak Spanish,
not because you're Mexican or
because you have Mexican blood.
I said but because she has less Mexican blood than I do.
But because when you go to work somewhere,
if you speak Spanish, that's a plus.
I said you're aunt could
sign my daughter and
she refused to get certification for it.
Now, it was like the reason
I'm telling you to is because it's another language.
You got to learn how
to equip yourself to make yourself employable,
because if you cannot work,
your prospects are really poor.
[Steve Arionus] You finished college, so you got the journalism degree.
[Teresa Perez-Wiseley] I have a degree in journalism and the first job
that the statesman paid like 87.50 a week,
no benefits for a cub reporter.
The City of Austin paint 117.50 a
week for a clerk with benefits, insurance.
After having been a student for so long,
a starving student,
I chose the route of the city of
Austin and became a clerk.
But I was there four years and nine months and I rose,
I got like three or four different promotions and
they also move laterally a couple of times.
I never became a journalist per se.
I edited newsletters. There was always a newsletter.
That was one of the things I used to do is I
would be one of the people that put up the newsletters.
Whatever clubs we had,
that tended to be something I like to do.
At four years and five months,
I have finally gotten the professional job as a monitor,
as a position, and it paid $18,000 a year
in 1980, which is not bad.
I went on vacation and before I went on vacation,
one of my friends and I was already a union member.
I joined the Union. One of the things that my dad taught
me and that I understood
that didn't even have to think about it.
You go to work, there's a union, you join it.
I had to look for this union.
I found out there was a union at
the City of Austin and there
was no one at the door saying join
the union. What I was used to.
There was no one writing me a letter
even saying join the union.
I've dug around, I found out if I know where
their office was and drove to the union office and said,
"I work for the City of Austin,
I'd like to join the union."
That's how I joined the Union in 1977.
Every Monday I would drop
union literature in the people's desk,
every Friday the janitor would give me
back what had been thrown in the trash
and he had been able to pull out without
throwing it away because he was my buddy, the janitor.
I would use the material again on Monday.
For four years nobody would join.
There was four of us, out of 91,
93 people working there,
four of us were union members.
They wouldn't say they were in a union,
but I did I knew who they were.
I told everybody, when I went on vacation that year,
"There's going to be layoff.
So you all better join the Union
as I've been dropping cards again today."
I dropped cards everywhere.
I said you all need to join the union.
I was already the steward, which was the representative.
But there's going to be a layoff.
I said I'm telling you they're preparing
the pink slips right now.
Oh, no, they're not. I said
I already have friends and personnel.
Sure enough, two weeks later I come back.
I think we'd gone to California that time.
Where we parked as I came around the corner,
here was our building, the building is gone now.
There's a big hotel now.
As I came around the corner like that,
everybody was outside and I thought, what's going on?
There's fire thing or something?
As I got closer, they saw
me there, they start rushing towards me,
they said, "We got pink slips, we're getting laid off."
I said I told you that you join the union?
Yes, we all join.
Everybody joined the Union.
All 90 people in the whole building,
everybody joined except the director
and his girlfriend, the secretary.
Everybody joined the Union,
including the assistant directors, everybody joined.
I said really?
Yeah. The cards are in your drawer.
You could lock your door.
We've been meeting with a union
every day after five since you left.
I said, "You'll got the notices on Monday?"
They said, "Yeah. You've got one too."
I said, "I know I got one."
I went and opened my door and as I opened the door,
all the cards started popping out
because there were 90 card stuffed into my desk.
I said, Why don't you just give to the union?"
Well, you're the one that been trying to get us to join.
So we put the cards in your desk. I said fine.
That evening, I went
[to the union hall at 5]00 with everybody else and
the unions the guy was Paul Gottlieb said,
"You did a good job organizing your work site."
I said, "I've been trying for four years.
They said Teresa, they listened."
Every one of them joined and we are writing
a different plan to present to council to
defend keeping the agency
versus getting rid of it because it was
90 layout slated 91, out of 93.
Everybody but the boss and
his girlfriend were going to get laid off.
We literally used the same accounting staff,
writing, the people that write the proposals.
All of it was right there from our own and we came up
with an alternate plan to save the jobs.
Then you have to go before city council and
do all this and we made
presentations and we had meetings,
we had press conferences, everything.
Well, when it was all over,
we saved 89 jobs.
One woman, nobody would hire.
She was an elderly lady who was little bit gone.
But she finally got hired.
Only one that didn't get hired, it was me.
That's because I had been the leader, the ram rod,
the one that went to all the meetings
with the council that with the union and everything.
I had expected I would have trouble.
The union had said,
you might end up having trouble before it's all over,
but we'll get your job
and we'll fight for you at the end.
I couldn't even get an interview in the PIO office,
which is public information with a journalism degree.
They wouldn't interview me
and my thing was when they didn't hire me,
I go back with
tenacious enough that I would go back and I would say,
"Why didn't you hire me?"
Then I went to so many of those meetings we've got silly.
But the one that I thought that I
had to go back to it was a PIO office.
The guy was a director and he says, "You're too educated.
You are the only person that would
have a degree in journalism in
this department and you're perceived as threatening.
That's why you're not going to get hired here."
I said well, thanks for telling me
that because at this point
I don't want to get hired here.
I said I'm going to go back
home and I'm going to get into
LSAT course and I'm going to finally get
in or try to get into
UT grad and to get into UT Law School.
But first I'd take the test.
I was going to take a year off and
study and earn unemployment.
I was so excited, I was going to get unemployment.
The Union came and came.