“There’s a growing sense of pride”

In terms of the culture itself, there’s a lot more activism in the Latino community, throughout San Antonio. The mayor we have now, many city council people, people in the school districts — they are Hispanics.

As a result, in the Hispanic community, there’s this growing realization that we’re just as competent and capable as anybody is in this country. And oftentimes, we’re more willing to contribute to the American Dream, as we call it —but do it in a way that’s going to benefit everybody, that’s going to take advantage of the strengths we have as a culture, and really bring about change. For me, that’s been a dramatic change in the last 25 years.

There’s no question that [antiimmigrant sentiment] makes it harder to organize. But simultaneously, there’s a deeper realization that we Latinos are important. You take the Bush phenomena that just occurred in Texas [1998 election of Republican governor George Bush]. Not that I supported that — but here you have someone who figured out how to reach the Latino community, and knew the importance of it. Now when would you ever have a Republican doing that in the last 25 years? And I think that’s a challenge for us for the future, to ensure that we don’t get misguided, that we understand who really is out to benefit the Hispanic community, who’s really out to bring about change.

Organizing any place is difficult, but it’s really challenging in the South. Change is coming about, but in the South you have some really deeply embedded racism, and refusal to recognize people’s rights, and refusal to treat people as equals, as human beings. There’s a long way to go in erasing that kind of mentality—especially in the rural communities, it’s like a whole ’nother world. You get there and confront some of these employers, and they have relationships with the judicial system, with the school system, and their beliefs just permeate the whole climate there.

For example, we’ve been organizing a big mushroom plant in Quincy, Florida. It’s the biggest mushroom plant in the southeastern part of the United States. It’s a mostly Hispanic and African- American workforce there. Those workers had fought every step of the way. They finally said in March of 1995 that they had had enough of the abuse. All they did was, during their lunch break, they picked up the UFW flag with the black eagle, and did a little demonstration inside the plant. As a result of that, the president of the company got so angry, he went and fired 80-something workers, had 25 of them arrested. He fired close to 20 percent of his workforce, just to demonstrate to everybody that he was in charge, and that he wouldn’t allow this to happen. We’re still fighting. That’s just an example of what we continue to encounter there.

So it’s a super challenge to organize in the South. But at the same time, there’s a lot of hope, too. I know the union UNITE has been successful in winning key victories there. We continue to make our victories, and although they’re small sometimes, they give us the hope and faith that we’re going to be able to move forward there.

I think the biggest challenge for us is to ensure that our children have a better future than what we’ve had. That our children, our future, have an opportunity to be respected, to be treated as equal human beings, to get a decent education, to have opportunities that we did not have in our lifetime, and we need to fight for that.