MALDEF in History

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Workers who are hired by the day have long been part of the American labor force. In the 19th Century, they were immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Poland. Later, immigrants from the American South, Black and white, were a native-born stream flowing into this pool of labor. But, for decades the clusters of men seeking work outside home repair stores or gathered on street corners in Southern California have been largely from Mexico and Central America.

Ambassador Vilma Martinez (left) Thomas A. Saenz (center) and Antonia Hernández (right).
(Photo taken at MALDEF’s 50th Anniversary Gala in San Antonio, Texas.)

As we near the conclusion of Women’s History Month, MALDEF celebrates its organizational history of women in leadership. For the majority of its existence since 1968, MALDEF has been led by women as president and general counsel. Women’s rights organizations aside, MALDEF may be the only national civil rights organization that can make that claim. We spoke with two of these women leaders, women relied upon by MALDEF through their many years of leadership and all the way up to today. MALDEF’s current president and general counsel, Thomas A. Saenz, has benefitted from both these leaders as professional mentors throughout his legal career.

For years, low-income students in San Antonio were relegated to decrepit schools infested with bats—yes, bats—where tiles fell from classroom ceilings and underpaid teachers fled as soon as they could get hired elsewhere. These schools lacked funding for classes wealthier districts took for granted such, as art and music. Basics such as math and reading in these schools were just that – extremely basic.

In Uvalde County, Texas, the political atmosphere of 1975 was such that election officials routinely ran out of registration application cards when Latino applicants asked for them. And tough luck for voters who could not read English because election judges refused to assist them.

State laws attempting to regulate immigration became all the rage in several states across the last decade, but the grandfather of them all was California’s Proposition 187. Voters passed the measure in 1994 after a campaign that bitterly divided residents and was championed by then-Governor Pete Wilson and the state Republican Party.

For years, the white men who always managed to win election to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors were called the “Five Little Kings.” Even as the Latino population continued to grow, the revolving door of white supervisors continued the same as it had since the current county boundaries were drawn in 1885.

California’s Kern County has used a rigged political system to exploit Latinos for decades. That corrupt system did not skip a beat in 2011 when county supervisors adopted a discriminatory district map, diluting Latino voting strength to prevent them from gaining a second seat on the five-member board.

Texas is a big state, and it once used big electoral districts, with multiple elected members, as a big way to suppress the Latino vote. After the Civil War, Texas used a big bag of voter suppression laws, such as poll taxes and strict voter registration requirements, to suppress Latino voters and shut Mexican Americans out of the Texas House of Representatives. Between 1880 and 1970, one Mexican American was elected in 1890 and four others were elected between 1961 and 1970.