Sotomayor and La Raza on the Supreme Court

Current wisdom has it that judicial nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor – a member of the National Council of La Raza – is a shoe-in to the Supreme Court. “Today is a monumental day for Latinos. Finally, we see ourselves represented on the highest court in the land,” said Janet Murguía, President and CEO of the National Council of La Raza, a national organization with about 300 local affiliates.

So, what is this La Raza of which Judge Sotomayor is a member?

To listen to some, it’s quite scary. On May 28, Tom Tancredo, a former congressman from Colorado and a spokesman against illegal immigration, appeared on CNN comparing La Raza to the Ku Klux Klan – which does seem rather histrionic, as reports of Hispanic vigilante lynchings have been rather thin.

In only slightly more modified tones, a World Net Daily piece says the National Council of La Raza embraces the “Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan – which sees ‘the Race’ as part of an ethnic group that one day will reclaim Aztlan, the mythical birthplace of the Aztecs. In Chicano folklore, Aztlan includes California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and parts of Colorado and Texas.” The trouble is, there doesn’t appear to be much connection between the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan and the National Council of La Raza, though the multiplicity of organizations with similar names, such as the unrelated La Raza Unida, may be responsible for the confusion.

Which is frustrating because the National Council of La Raza is interesting enough without embroidery. It’s a development of Saul Alinsky’s work in California among the Mexican Americans, where Alinsky, another organizer trained by Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation – Fred Ross, a college graduate named Herman Gallegos, and Father Donald McDonnell, pastor of an East San Jose Catholic parish, formed the Community Service Organization (CSO) in 1947. CSO, assisted by Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, grew to have a national staff and became the training ground for a number of prominent “Hispanic” organizers, among them Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and – of course – young Herman Gallegos, fi rst president of CSO’s San Jose chapter and later as its national president. Gallegos stayed with CSO until the early 60s.

He then went on to become a consultant at the Ford Foundation, which in 1968 funded the creation of the Southwest Council of La Raza (SCLR), whose founding president was… Herman Gallegos. The SCLR was created by Ford as “an intermediary organization between Ford and the barrio-based organizations” that received sub-grant money. This allowed for some distance to be placed between Foundation grants – and later, US government grants – and local organizations with activities that “might be regarded as political.” [Herman E. Gallegos, “Equity and Diversity: Hispanics in the Non-Profit World,” 1989, pp 68-69.]

There were several years of conflicting goals. Gallegos felt “the community” wanted funding for “changes in institutions;” the Ford Foundation was looking for projects that could be measured concretely, in terms of housing units or jobs. A split was inevitable, with Gallegos going his way in 1970 and the SCLR becoming the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) in 1972 under new leadership, settling with Raul Yzaguirre – NCLR’s second president from 1974 to 2004.

Thus, Raul Yzaguirre remained in a top leadership position with NCLR for over 30 years, shaping its public policies. There’s NCLR’s position on Spanish language use. Yzaguirre is reported, for example, to have said, “US English is to Hispanics as the Ku Klux Klan is to blacks.” Sigh. Obviously, histrionics has no political affiliation. However, a NCLR “English-Only Fact Check” addresses the (apparently erroneous) perception that Spanish-language immigrants don’t learn English, and another NCLR publication, “Educating English Language Learners: Implementing Instructional Practices,” describes strategies for developing English proficiency in a student native in another language. Evidently learning English isn’t quite so deadly as Yzaguirre feared.

NCLR’s position on undocumented workers is pretty predictable. “NCLR supports comprehensive immigration reform that includes the following principles,” it says on the NCLR website, which boil down to wanting legal status (amnesty) for the undocumented people already here – and putting them on the road to citizenship – and “unclogged” legal channels for future workers to immigrate into the country. (See “Immigration Reform and the Alinskyians,” Spero News, 3-17-09, www.speroforum.com/site/print.asp?idarticle=18499)

All and all, membership in the National Council of La Raza it isn’t quite as exciting as it could be -- depending on how worrisome one finds a broad amnesty package for 12 million undocumented people -- but it does suggest a particular point of view, and probably a new direction for US immigration law.

Stephanie Block is the editor of the New Mexico-based Los Pequenos and is a founder of the Catholic Media Coalition.