Jose Angel Gutierrez
By: Voces Staff
MAYO
Renato R. Ramirez
By: Voces Staff
Alfredo R. Santos
By Brigit Benestante
Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, Alfredo Santos was ashamed of his ethnicity.
“I didn’t like being a Mexican,” he said. “I was embarrassed, I guess, to be a Mexican.”
Sergio Porras
By Chris Touma
Two years before Sergio Porras received his draft notice to serve in the Vietnam War, he was marching in the streets of Uvalde, Texas, with hundreds of other Mexican-American high school students.
It wasn’t war or the draft they were protesting. The students of Uvalde High were fed up with discrimination in the town’s public school system.
Uvalde, 86 miles southwest of San Antonio, was divided by railroad tracks. Whites lived in the northern section of town; the Hispanics, south of the tracks.
Iris Galvan
By Rebecca Chavoya
An old Hispanic man pushed a tamale cart down the streets of Rosenberg, Texas, in 1974. Iris Galvan, 18-year-old high school student and member of Juventud Unida, approached him with a warm, welcoming demeanor.
“Have you ever thought about voting?” she said. “You have a right to vote. You are a citizen of this country.”
The man shrugged off her suggestion, saying that he knew his voice didn’t matter. “I don’t speak very good English,” he said.