The bus rolled up to the Frank Garrett Multi-Service on San Antonio's El West Side, where African Americans and Latinos alike lined up to tell their stories.
The mariachi band from Southwest High School serenading the audience and the opening remarks from Maria Berriozabal, San Antonio's first Latina councilwoman, were clear signs that the Voices of Civil Rights bus had left the South and had entered the Southwest.
As Berriozabal pointed out, African Americans, Latinos, and Asians have all shared the same experiences, from the sting of discrimination to the joy of inclusion and equality. "Nobody has lived our story like we have. It's up to us to tell it. If we don't, no one will hear it."
San Antonio may be one of the most progressive, majority-Latino cities in the nation, but it became that way only through an extended, persistent struggle that is still playing out.
One of the city's pioneering activists is Andy Hernandez, who worked alongside the late Willie Velasquez, the founder of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.
Inspired by the Voter Education Project in the South during the 1960s, SVREP was founded in 1974, working from the principle that the most direct route to equality and equal access is through the ballot box.
Hernandez, who is old enough to remember the discriminatory policies of San Antonio public schools that forbade children to speak Spanish, was on the front lines of Chicano activism through such organizations as La Raza Unida, the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, and the Mexican American Youth Organizaiton, and numerous political campaigns.
But meeting Velasquez changed everything. "We're going to build the biggest goddam Mexican voter registration project in the United States," Velasquez told
him when they first met. "Every gringo is going to respect and fear our vote."
Today, Hernandez is the executive director of the 21st Century Leadership Center at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, training future leaders. He's hopeful, though he recognizes there's work to be done. "No generation of Latinos and black leaders have access to education like we do. We're the most privileged generation ever. We've come from a long way back. When I was in elementary, 85 percent of Latinos did not graduate. Today, it's 50 percent. It's a tragedy. But the other side has to work harder to exclude us. So that's progress. They're on the wrong side of history."
