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There's so much more to it.
And you're gonna hear a little bit
about that today because of
the pioneering work that he
did in welcoming Spanish-speaking
people into minority enterprise,
into helping them in education,
helping them be counted
in the census and so much more.
And we've put together an incredible panel.
And the history-making aspect of
this is that these were the people who were there.
They're the people who were participants
and who came up
with the initiatives, sat with
the President to create them
and then to execute them.
So, they were the
engineers, the participants of
so many things that -
in fact, I heard some
remarks last night by the
first United States Treasurer,
Rosario Marin, who is here today.
Please stand.
Let's welcome the first,
Madam Treasurer was the first
Hispanic immigrant Treasurer in the United States.
And I thought she put it
so well at a little dinner
we had with our panelists last
night when she thanked
them for opening the
doors, for creating the path
through which people like her
were able to achieve things
that historically they would
not have been able to do in America.
But she attributed so much of
that progress and opening
to these people
who worked so closely with Richard Nixon.
We have a panel; that's why
the chairs, and I'm going
to introduce the moderator of the
panel, who is Henry
Ramirez he was an
incredible educator - still
is - with the Whittier Union
High School district where he
pioneered in efforts
to bring Mexican-Americans into
the educational mainstream like
they had never been before and
he was noted nationally, given numerous awards for that.
He worked with the United States
Civil Rights Commission and did
extraordinary work there.
He was a counselor to
Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan.
And President Nixon, in the
first part of his administration, asked
him to be the first
Chairman of the Cabinet
Committee on opportunities for Spanish-speaking Peoples.
We're honored to have him and
he's going to introduce the panel.
Please welcome Henry Ramirez.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Good afternoon. On
behalf of my fellow
panelists, and myself, we
express our appreciation to
the staff here of
the Nixon Foundation, and we
welcome you to participate
today in our
discussions and in
the learning of history
that is going to go on today.
And since we only
have a couple
of hours in which
to retrace an
incredible history that the
world still doesn't know,
we shall begin by asking
Stu Spencer to come
out and take his place.
Stu is the person who,
in the 1950s started the
first activities of that
history, to be followed
by David Gonzalez, who
was my former student at
Rancho High School and who
joined Stu Spencer, to
be followed by a gentleman
that arrived in Washington,
D.C. in 1959 after he served in the Air Force.
He came from the southern part of Texas.
G.G. Garcia, who will
talk about the environment in
Washington before the
other persons arrived in the
late 1960s, to be followed
by Martin Castillo, the
first Chairman of the
Cabinet Committee on Opportunities
for the Spanish-Speaking People, a
very prominent attorney here
in Southern California, to be
then followed by, Theresa Speake
who helped President
Nixon and helped all
of us implement the
programs so that Hispanic
people could participate in
the business opportunities of our country.
And then, of course, Theresa will
be followed by Manuel Oliverez,
who will then tell
you about some of the things
for which he was
responsible that added to that history.
And then the man who
communicated to the world
the first things that
happened, and the first
things that happened, and the
first things that happened Carlos
Conde, a well-known writer
from Houston, Texas and
myself, Henry Ramirez,
who will try to
keep order today, in this
room.
So we will commence, each one
having a maximum of eight minutes.
But, truth be told, I know they're going to take ten.
We'll start with Mr. Stu Spencer.
Thank you, Henry.
They never make these tall enough.
Thank you, Henry.
It's not only nice to be
here today with a lot of
people that I worked with historically
in the political process, mostly California, some in Texas.
I just want to take a
minute and really thank Loie Gaunt for being here today.
Loie?
We used to call
her Mrs. Nixon.
I noticed that there's a lot of young people here today.
And that's a blessing, because when
I look at the members of this panel
and myself, and the things that we've been through.
We can tell you about
any damn thing we want to
and you're not going to know whether it's true or not.
So consequently I'm going to
really try to not be a
historical revisionist and tell
you as it was or
at least as I saw it in
the early days of the outreach programs.
I'm going to start by taking you back to the year 1950.
That was sort of the first
time, if you were a political
anthropologist you'd look at
the landscape and you would
see that there was really no
outreach being done by either
political party in the state of California at that time.
But in 1950, it was the
year that *** Nixon was running
for the United States Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas.
Earl Warren was running for
re-election against Jimmy Roosevelt
Democrats, son of the President Roosevelt.
And in California we had a thing called cross-filing.
Cross-filing meant that if you
were a Republican you could run
in the Democrat primary without the
designation Republican after your name of vice-versa.
If you were Democrat you could run in the Republican primary.
So, and I
was a student as East Los
Angeles Junior College at the
time and the
Warren campaign, the Warren political
strategist, they came up
with a concept that "Let's
take advantage of cross-filing, get
deeply involved, in the
Democratic primary in the barrio of LA."
Which I'll talk about a little bit later.
So, that community
at that time was about 80% Mexican.
Chicano is what they used to call themselves.
And 90% democrat, so it was a good test market.
So, I was contacted at that time,
I'm going to east
LAJC, by a man by the
name of Pat Hillings, who was a
successor to Nixon in
the old 12th congressional district, which
is later turned into the 25th.
I was a young man involved in
a lot of volunteer activities, a
young Republican, and driving
Hillings around, taking care of his laundry.
All the things that you do
as you start out in the
process and clinical the process.
Pat called me up and told
me about what the Warren people
wanted to do, and they
had spoken with the Nixon people, so to speak, campaign
organization.
And he asked me
if I would be willing to
go in, take over
this project which would last
about six weeks, and see
if we could put a campaign together
in East LA. Now, my
first reaction was, you know, why me?
I mean, I'm not qualified to do this.
But this is an important point about the Nixon organization.
The answer I got
was that I was a trusted peon
in the organization.
Otherwise trust was always important
in that organization.
And it should be in all political organizations.
So, I went and met
with the Warren campaign people and
I basically accepted the job.
And they had a
caveat that was interesting,
the caveat was that the
percentage of the money that
was spent in the budget
had to come out of the Chicano community.
So after accepting the
job, I went back to college.
I said, you know, I know where this place is,
but I don't know anything about it.
I have to find somebody that knows this community, this barrio.
I had a friend, a fellow student,
Eddie Maldonado.
Eddie was a, "street
smart", I guess is the term we use.
He wasn't political, but he knew the community.
He knew it inside out.
So I explained the project to Eddie.
I said hey, I would
like to get involved, I need
your help because I don't know the community etc., etc.
And he just kept looking at me.
And finally I said there's five hundred bucks in it for you Eddie.
I got him.
So I explained
the requirement, the money requirement to him.
I said who in the community
could come up with either
seed money, or help us raise it?
He says give me a day and let me think about it.
Two days later he comes back.
He came back and said
"You and I have a lunch
with a gentleman by the name of Armando Torres".
Armando Torres was in
the wholesale grocery business.
I think it was Sparton groceries, is that right?
And he had money, there was no doubt about it.
So, we explained the
campaign concept to Armando,
he accepted the responsibility and
he went out and formed a
small committee of other fellow
Chicanos with Dr. Kareon,
which is a famous name
in that community.
Consuela Tebonza, Frankie Vega who was front row.
His father was on that
committee and there were
others I can't remember to-date.
But the basics are, so here's what the campaign consisted of.
The first outreach campaign by
a Republican candidate, in this
case two, Warren and Nixon.
Very simple.
We put a headquarters in on
First Street, next to
the Karaoke bar, that was a mistake.
Karaoke bar was a union hangout.
After work they all drank beer at the karaoke bar.
Came out the front door
of the bar, there's a
big picture of Warren in a plate glass window.
He would throw a brick through it.
So, Armando Torres one
day got me aside, he says,
"Spencer", he says, "Do
all campaigns spend this much money on plate glass?"
I said, "I don't know.
Do at it Armando.
We'll find out later."
We had an appearance by the Governor Warren.
He came to the headquarters opening and
he came to a reception in
somebody's home someplace in the district.
I don't remember where.
We sniped the district at night with signs.
Both Warren and Nixon's.
And we had a
sound truck that spent about two
hours a day traveling the area,
promoting the two candidates in Spanish.
Now this is the bare necessities
campaign by today's standards.
There was no mail, there
was no radio, there was no television.
It was just a little
smaller actions, so to speak.
Now the area that I'm describing,
the barrio, you know it,
Atlantic on the East, Whittier
Boulevard on the South, LA
River on the West,
and let's say the Monterrey Hills on
the North, Hispanic then and 90% Democratic.
And in the end Warren received
25% of the vote and
I don't frankly remember what
percentage Nixon got, but it
was probably a little less, because
down ticket to a degree.
But the project was deemed very,
very successful by both campaigns,
Warren and Nixon.
And of course it was Nixon's first
statewide win and it
was sort of his launching pad
to the next goal he had in his life.
Now there was no follow-up in the
party apparatus, in the years
'51, '52, '53, to what we tried
to do in 1950.
But in 1952, Nixon
was selected as a running
mate for Eisenhower and they went on and won the election.
And I said, this time and
point in history was sort of
the beginning of what I
call the domination of the
Republican party in California by Richard Nixon.
And that lasted for 10, almost 15 years.
And I'll tell you, that domination
was thorough, workmanlike in
every way, and I will explain some of it to you.
Because his first step was to
take control of the party apparatus,
the Republican Party apparatus.
He named the state chairman.
He saw that the state committee
members were appointed were Nixonites,
as we would call them.
He concerned himself and his
people with who is the
county chairman in at least
the 43 major counties in the
state and then
he also had us and
other people find candidates to
run for the county committee who were, again, Nixonites.
So he was basically
reaching out to dominate his
own party here in California.
And he basically achieved that goal
when he ran for re-election with Ike in 1956.
And after the 1956 election,
a meeting was held,
a postmortem meeting, by the
Nixon campaign people.
And at this meeting were some of his best operatives,
I was not there,
some of his campaign people, best
operatives, and a whole group
of young Republican congressmen like
Joe Hope, Pat Hillings, Glen
Lipskin, Craig Osmond, Bob
Wilson, H. Allen Smith,
and politicos like Murray Chotiner
and Bernie Brennan and Herb Klein.
And the committee was chaired by Bob Finch.
Now all of the aspects of
the 1956 campaign were
discussed, and of course the
future of *** Nixon was
discussed, but also I
was involved in the future of
the party in the state of California.
So down, in that
meeting under, let's say
the category of the
future for the party
in California, Pat Hilling
brought up the idea and reminded
him that in 1950
we had an East L.A.
experiment, as they called
it.
And he raised the idea that there was
a potential here in
that community, that we should
pursue the party and the
Republicans and Nixon or we
should pursue strategies and tactics
to encourage Chicanos to at least take a look at the candidates.
And the conclusion was, they agreed,
and the conclusion was that the
vehicle that they would use
at that time was the
county party organization in Los Angeles.
Now, the next year and
a half was spent selling this concept.
Because we had other
powers, we had finance guys downtown.
We had other thought leaders in
the community who didn't
think practically, tactically, or politically
who we called, in those days, the downtown crowd.
And let me tell you who they were.
The were the L.A. Times, it was owned by the Chandler's.
It was some of the
oil companies, Signal, Union.
There were insurance companies: Pacific
Mutual, Ace of Call, Bankers,
oh these were the people ad hoc
committee, they called the shots in LA.
They decided who was to
be police chief, who was going
to be the Mayor, who would
be on the City Council, and
they were powerful and
in the main they did good
work for the city of Los
Angeles, but they didn't understand the word outreach.
So it was a tough sell.
Now the committee,
to set the tone for you, the committee of 30.
They lived in Pasadena,
they lived in San Marino, when
they went to work they didn't
even have to even drive through
East L.A. They came on the San Diego freeway.
And we were also
about a decade removed from
Sleepy Lagoon in the Pachuca Wars.
Now, I say that
because historically that was
the mindset of these people in the downtown crowd.
They didn't know what was in
East L.A., and they were
being asked to pony up
money, to make an [xx] to this.
Well, there were a sufficient number of
Nixon people on that committee,
thank God, that they
agreed and they
put money forward, earmarked money
for outreach for the Republican Party in L.A. County.
So that was a big step forward.
Now, nothing ever goes smoothly.
We had other problems.
Internal problems.
We had a Senator from, we
used to call him the Senator
from Formosa, Senator Bill Nolan.
We had a Governor who didn't [xx]
republicans, and Senator
Nolan and *** Nixon in
many ways were on a collision path.
They both wanted to be President
of the United States some day.
So, there's an old adage in politics.
If you are running for president, you
better have a solid favorite son
position before you go
to the rest of the nation.
Nolan didn't have that, and
of course now *** Nixon did.
But because of
these internal battles that were
going on, Bill Nolan
announcing he was going to
come home and run, not for
re-election, he's going to run
for the governorship because he wanted
to use his platform to go for the presidency.
This was a surprise to Goody
Knight, city Governor, so he's says, "What am I going to do?"
So we had to hear, you know,
a lot of conversations went back
and forth above my pay grade at the time.
But the end result was, Bill Nolan
ran for governor, Goody ran
for the Senate seat, Nixon sat
on the sidelines and watched them destroy each other.
And we lost 1958
because musical chairs don't
work in the game of politics
and you can't run in California.
Fun, write the word,
no one did.
So with Nolan
and Knight, running state-wide,
realizing that Nixon controlled the operation or controlled the party apparatus.
They were looking for friends.
And he had to turn to
this gentleman for his friends,
so Nixon made a very, very
fast strategic move at
that time that involved outreach.
Number one, he named a new L.A. County Chairman.
He named my old
former partner Bill Roberts and
myself as the staff people on the county committee.
Bill was executive director, I was field director.
And our liaison
to the operation was Bob Finch,
so Finch comes to us
and said, told us we had to do this.
But with it saw this
empowerment they were given
us came a very, very directive,
and that was
to revisit the Chicano question
and find ways to reach out and be inclusive.
So my partner and I, Bill Roberts, we thought about that a great deal.
We said, how do we do this?
Finally the answer that came
to us was, you know, let's not screw around.
Let's be bold!
So we went out and
established a Republican Community Service
Center right in the middle of the barrio.
We named a director named
Raul Benal, who was
a very savvy street guy, not
a political guy but he knew the community well.
We stayed open seven days a week.
We brought services to the area such as free polio shots.
The lawyers did it
from the downtown law firms who
could council some of
the people who lived in the
area if they had immigration problems, things of that nature.
If they had a
real legal problem, we'd refer them to a local lawyer.
We helped raised money for the
east side Boys and Girls Club,
and we held work fairs.
Otherwise, employers would come to
our Republican service center,
get a desk, people could come
in, they'd have jobs available,
they'd be interviewed, etc.
We made a requirement of the
businesses that came, that if
you've got a chair or a
desk in headquarters, every time
you interviewed a bunch of people you had to hire two people.
You can't just come here and talk and put on a show.
You gotta hire somebody.
And it worked.
We also held seminars
on health care, and things
like how does a teenager qualify
for scholarships, and all those
sort of those things that are important.
And also while this is going
on, Bill and my
partner and I were on the outlook for candidates.
We were trying to recruit
Chicano candidates to run for public office.
Tried to recruit Henry here.
He was too smart.
He didn't run.
But generally speaking on the
whole terms the community service center was simply one.
The Nixon Republican party at
the time was saying to the
community, "You got a
problem, you come and see
us. We'll try to help you."
And I'd like to stand
here today and say
that the community service center was a roaring success,
but it was a tremendous step forward.
The real test came
when the election was over in
the fall of November, if that
service center was still there,
because that whole community was
sitting back and laughing and
smiling and said, "The day
the election's over we're never gonna see him again."
We stayed.
We were there.
And we got brownie points.
And we got a lot
of good comments out of that so we stayed.
So things are
looking good in terms
of outreach in this part of the city.
Then a catastrophe hit us.
If you hotel in LA
in the 1960's, the Democrats nominated
a young, attractive, charismatic Catholic.
The east side of LA fell in love with John Kennedy.
You could not go into a
barber shop, a small
bar, or a mom and
pop store where there wasn't
a picture of John F. Kennedy on the wall.
That's pretty tough to overcome.
So, as we all know,
Nixon lost the election, thanks to Cook County, Illinois.
And a new county chairman came in
who didn't share the outreach
philosophy of the Nixon organization,
and he was elected.
Then after the defeat of Nixon
in '60 the party in California,
something set in which I'm
going to call, I'm creating a new word,
"Goldwater-itis".
There were people-
and I sensed it early on-
they supported Nixon in '60,
they voted for Nixon in '60,
but after he got defeated.
And it felt like,
oh boy we can go get Goldwater.
It was a sensation to
politicians, if you grew up in the Nixon school of politics.
They did not share the same ideals and outreach.
Their concepts were nothing like.
And of course the
pathway that he ran on,
Goldwater, was a basic
anti-communist platform which was
Nixon's big game anyway.
He was the guy that was on
the House Activities Committee and
he was the person, all the
heat from the Eastern press and
everybody because he was too
to *** certain members who
were alleged communists and so forth.
But the point is, outreach was
not at the top of the agenda.
It wasn't the second
thing on the agenda with
this new group that came in.
They were preaching the gospel of anti-communism.
Nixon had been preaching the gospel
of anti-communism and outreach, the
two of them together.
Now, all the downers being
said, I think
if we had a county chairman who
would have stayed back, taken the heat, stayed the course,
I think at the end of the
day the Republican Party of
California would have taken a
really giant step forward in
outreach because this
new chairman basically closed the
East L.A. Republican Service
Center, and the party continued
a lot of activities after that.
But nothing that was conducted in
the manner of a shared partnership for this community.
That was sort of the key to a good outreach program.
You have to make the people
you're reaching out to shared partners
in the effort and the
chairman didn't understand that.
But in 1960, later than
'60, early sixties, mid-sixties, they
elected a new state chairman by the name of Dennis Carpenter.
He was a lawyer from Orange
County, he was an ex-
FBI agent and he spoke very fluent Spanish.
And he shared these concepts about each.
So one of his first steps was
to hire David Gonzalez, who you're going to hear from today,
who became a statewide
coordinator later and was
one, one of the
real implementers of the outreach
programs after that for the Republican party.
So let me leave you with a thought.
The Nixon organization started thinking
outreach in 1950 and
it became a
part of their belief system and
sort of became ingrained in the body politics in the era,
both parties. Now you
can ask the question fairly, why did he do this?
Well number one, I personally
believe that he was like me. He grew up in California.
He went to school with Chicanos.
He adopted some of their cultures.
We played ball, we played with
Chicanos, we played against Chicanos.
We were all one big southern California family.
We had fights, yes we had fights.
So, it was
sort of in his DNA being
a southern California boy
from Yorba Linda to understand
something about the Hispanic culture.
And the second thing was tactically,
and he was a good tactician,
if you were looking at the
future and the votes and
where they were gonna come from-
we'd already gone through the migration
of rural Americans from the mid-west and everywhere-
you'd know they were coming in a
million a year in the
forties from the mid-west and the fifties.
Every year a million of them came in.
There wasn't that big
of a migration from Mexico at that time.
If you looked at it tactically
where, where is the future gonna be?
You'd have to say, "If it's
gonna be south of the border,
it's gonna be south of the border."
So let's get involved.
Let's get into the outreach.
That sort of thing.
And it, it's ironic
because as we stand here today
there are more Mexicans
in L.A. than any city
in the world except Mexico City.
And that's what was
in his mind and other politicians'
minds, in the fifties and
sixties, when they knew
that this growth somehow, somewhere was going to come.
So that's it.
Thank you.
Do I turn it over to -
Thank you, Stu, for that
introduction into the
history of a
man that changed the world
in so many ways.
And following up
the work that Stu did,
he was the man that ran
the campaign to elect Ronald
Reagan president, ran the
campaign to elect Ronald Reagan
governor, campaign to
elect Richard Nixon president.
And he was there at the very beginning.
When our young
men had come back
from the second world war, had
gone to school, gone to
college, who were now
ready to take their
places in American society.
And so, we have a
young man whose father
was one of those veterans, and
who stepped in there to
follow up on the
work that Stu had started.
David, please tell us about that part.
Well, I thought about what
I was gonna say here today and
one of the questions that I get
asked a lot is, "How did you get involved politically?"
There was a young
man that I had met by
the name of Frank Vega who
brought me into a campaign that I knew nothing about.
It was in east L.A.
We were working for a
candidate at the time by the
name of Bill Rusko that was running for Congress.
Didn't know what the heck I was doing, tell you the truth.
But, we managed to pull
35% out of a
predominately Democratic community for a Republican candidate.
That caught the attention of
a fellow by the name of Dennis
Carpenter, who at the
time was the Vice Chairman
of the Republican Party, who the
following year became the Chairman,
and who hired me
on to do outreach for the Hispanic community.
Some of that outreach were cocktail
parties; we went to Democratic
organizations that we knew
weren't going to necessarily vote
for our candidates, but we
wanted to let, we took the battle to them. We
went to organizations like M.A.P.A,
Mexican American Political Association, and other organizations.
We went to city
council where a
group of us, like Frank
and some other gentlemen, knew city
councilmen and we befriended them
and went out and told our story.
There was no better time
that I can remember and I've
been involved politically for a long time.
For two gentlemen, Dennis Carpenter
and Duke Spencer, were
truly committed to the outreach of
capturing the Hispanic vote.
And without their support,
it would have been a tough uphill
battle to do because there was
opposition within the Republican Party.
They didn't understand the Hispanics, they
didn't understand that we, as
a family unit we're very conservative people.
We believe strongly in
our religion and our culture
and our family and our country,
and my dad served in the
Second World War.
I was second generation and they didn't know this.
And it was, the things
that were accomplished couldn't have
happened like I said, without the
help of Stu Spencer backing
it, and Frank Vega put
a lot of effort into
it, put together a lot
of, we had a,
we called a Young Turks Club,
a lot of young
guys out there doing the
outreach for us, and
Denny Carpenter definitely was very
instrumental as the Chairman
of the Republican party, knew
the culture, knew the language,
knew the people and
it was quite an
experience to have at
that point in time of
history to be doing
an outreach with these two gentlemen.
Thank you very much David.
At this time in history, of course,
in south Texas there was
a man that had been
working the fields in Michigan,
Illinois, Indiana, California, Texas.
With cotton, tomatoes, grapes,
and he joined
the Air Force when he came of age.
He came out of
the Air Force, went back
to his little town in south Texas
and realized that the world
about him had grown
up, and he belonged to a new world.
So he packed
his bag, he said his
farewell to his
parents, to his friends
and went in 1959 to
Washington, D.C. to go
to Georgetown University, and
because he knew Washington in
1959-1960, before any of
us ever even thought
Washington would be a
place of employment for us,
he was there with senators
and congressmen, working up
in Congress, working local
newspapers, and he
will tell us about the environment
that he found in Washington,
D.C. into which the
rest of us came.
So G. G., now it's your turn.
Yes.
In the movie "Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid," Sundance Kid asked, "Can I move?
I can hit a target by moving better."
I need the podium.
I'd like to
ask for a moment of silence
to remember those who have gone before us.
Mark with a sign of faith
especially those for whom we here pray.
John [xx] interim Chairman of the Cabinet Committee.
Jose DeSol full bird
colonel, US Army, retired from Puerto Rico.
Carlos Reese, Associate Director.
And Mercy Hernandez, Associate Director.
Thank you.
One of the many forms of Mexico is the canciones populars,
better known as the canciones rancheros.
It has been developed and cultivated
for over one hundred years.
Like the corrido, the generic
form is lyrics with a narrative set to music,
preferably musica mariachi.
The themes are love for romance,
history, values like
patriotism, maschismo and
volentia, boastful bravado among others.
In the middle
of one such song, a national
screen idol and popular
male vocalist, interjects the
lines.
Translated in its broadest
sense, it means, "I
do not ask for charity, I only seek opportunities."
Migrant farm workers from the
Rio Grande Valley in South
Texas in the early
40s and 50s were too
proud and it was a well order pride
to accept government handouts. We
traveled to the four winds
in excess of a thousand
miles each way in search
of work, rather than
to stretch our hands, palms
up, for government handouts:
unemployment, food stamps, and welfare.
We went North to the
Midwest: Wisconsin, Michigan,
Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois;
West to California, Oregon, to
the Yakima Valley in the
state of Washington; East to
Florida; and even the
deep South, Mississippi and Louisiana,
and back to the south Texas, Rio Grande valley.
The works of the ranchero resonated
in a preteen doing a
man's job in the
cotton fields or in
el bloqueo, the blocking of
sugar beets, with the
infamous short hold, of course.
I heard the echo in
President Richard Nixon's statement on
December the 31st, 1969
establishing the Cabinet Committee
on Opportunities for the Spanish-Speaking.
He announced that the 1970
census of populations would, for
the first time, count the
Mexican, the Puerto Rican,
and the Cuban heritage
peoples of the United States.
You see, before then we didn't count.
It was all in black and white.
Chairman Martin Castillo and Dr.
Henry Ramirez both were
personally responsible for that major achievement.
After 400 years, we were finally recognized.
Cristobal Colon, for whom
we celebrate this day, a native
of Italy, was a Spanish speaker.
He discovered America in the
name of the King
and Queen of Spain, Fernando and Isabella.
Martin Castillo and Dr. Ramirez
were the first and the last chairman of the cabinet committee.
The alpha and the omega as it were.
I am humbled by their presence here today.
At this point it is necessary
to cite an entire passage from the President's statement.
And I quote: "Many members of
this significant minority group have
been too long denied genuine
and equal opportunity," said President Nixon.
In signing the bill, he cited
specifically employment, job training,
and a real share in American business enterprise.
As a concern for his administration
for creating equal opportunity for all Spanish speaking Americans.
I will get back to capitalism later.
The purpose of the committee must
be read with a
beautiful respect for text,
in which every word counts.
He said, "To foster a
new awareness, with the
government, for the specific
needs and concerns of this significant group.
And to to insure that existing
and future government programs, in
fact reach the Spanish speaking people."
The first was a challenge.
It was difficult to overcome the
inertia, the mindset that
was there in the federal bureaucracy.
They had a fixation with African
Americans and recognizing their constitutional rights.
He foresaw then what was needed for the committee to succeed.
The dedication of its members,
the support of government.
The receptivity of private enterprise
and the proven drive and talent
of the Spanish speaking people.
In rereading that statement, I was struck with what he had done.
He gave us a shell, for a change,
the Cabinet Committee.
It would be up to us to
listen for the voices
from our community and to
transform them to national
policy for the White
House and the Congress of the United States.
He could have simply ordered his
very able personal staff to
do it, or his own
cabinet officers, Sante Cavo,[sp?]
perhaps, because he knew
comebacks and triumphs, the
same as we then too.
Respecting our integrity and
our traditions, he started
the best and most permanent way
for change for us through evolution.
He wanted us involved in directing our own destiny.
That was his particular genius.
Anyone can do a contra
study of the status quo for Hispanics,
before President Nixon took office and after.
The conclusion is inevitable.
There has been a radical
transformation of our community for the better.
This in part has been
the result of the Cabinet Committee.
Hispanics today are in the news
and we are represented in every
major field of endeavor, success models even.
I want to say President Nixon
created more executive level
positions in the federal
government and in the
foreign service than any other president.
More Hispanic millionaires, but
that is a task for the
historian, the statistician, the
Ph.D., poli-science majors, authors or curators.
The country knows who we
are by our sheer
numbers, we are
projected to be even more
numerous in the year 2050.
Indeed, 30% of the
total population according to the Pew[sp?]
Research Center.
We are the number one minority.
But it sure doesn't feel like it.
Our most significant task today
is to introduce new questions.
What about capitalism?
He started to do what
he really wanted to do for us.
That is introduce us to capital formation.
The world of stocks and bonds.
And in a share
of the prosperity of the market place.
Due diligence requires for us
to address other questions of the day.
There is not enough time at
this discussion to give a
spin on, for example, immigration
from the Spanish speaking world.
Education, which is of
paramount importance to us.
Health care and care for our veterans.
If you notice there is
no Hispanic voice in
the national traditional immigration monologue, for example.
We are like sheep without a shepherd.
We have no national spokesman.
Our solutions need to
be in the form
of legislation, appropriation bills
approved by both chambers of
Congress and signed by the President.
In the words of President Richard
Nixon himself, "We need a lobby."
We Spanish and Mexican in
particular owe a debt
of gratitude to President Nixon.
This man had a
great mind and was a great leader.
We need to tell that story.
It will be an easier task because
Dr. Ramirez is preparing
his memoirs, so we can use that to begin with.
We must follow up in this discussion with a solid action.
We need to meet again to
firm up these and other
recommendations and resolutions, which flow from this forum.
We couldn't begin to settle that
debt of gratitude to the
President by working with
the Richard Nixon Foundation and the
presidential library and museum.
I personally would like to
see a bronze statue of
the President with the two
Chairmen confirmed by the
U.S. Senate, to memorialize this
proclivity for us Hispanics,
and maybe a documentary giving
our side of the story, so
that posterity will not
hear just Watergate, Watergate.
In conclusion, I challenge
the majority in our community, Hispanic
Democrats, to show us
what they have for their voter participation.
High level appointments are commendable.
They are good for the individual
and even better for their appointing authority.
But what about the community?
Surely, they are not
satisfied with a special
assistance to the President with one secretary
and one administrative assistant.
Let us not kid ourselves that it's a dog and pony show.
We need institutions like the
Cabinet Committee with the President's
personal blessings and the
budget appropriations to reflect the desired clout.
Richard Nixon will undoubtedly
be remembered for Watergate,
as Kennedy will be for the Bay of Pigs
and LBJ for his
folding up under the anti-war student demonstrations
and Bill Clinton for Monica Lewinsky.
But we Hispanics will remember
Richard Nixon for defining
us and empowering us.
I repeat: Richard Nixon
provided us with a catalyst for change.
The means to empower, to benefit
Hispanics, the Cabinet Committee.
He expected us as staff
to listen to the Hispanic voices
and to develop the objective for our community,
to feel the need and the
concern of the Hispanic to be
consultants as it were
to the President and Congress, and
develop recommendations to national
policy to benefit our community.
In short, he taught us how to fish.
Thank you.
Relax.
Imagine for a
second Yorba Linda:
trees, rows of trees,
more trees, rows of
trees, lemons growing
from the branches, oranges growing
from the branches, of whom G.G. spoke.
Richard Nixon was born here.
As he grew up a very poor man.
He got to know us picking
oranges, picking lemons.
In that world, there is no hypocrisy.
When you're at the bottom of the
bottom of the bottom, human
beings get to know each other quite well.
And so when he was elected President,
January 20th, he swore on
the Bible to be a good President.
And a few days later, like
three weeks I believe, he
asked Martin Castillo to
come to Washington to be
in charge of those
Mexicans he got to know.
Martin?
Thank you.
Well, I was a lawyer...I am
a lawyer in Los
Angeles, but at the time I
was also and I
used to donate my services to all the Mexican-Americans.
War on poverty, nowadays
it's... and we
had quite a battle going on over here.
Because the predominate effort was toward the black community.
It was a constant struggle we're,
you know, dogs fighting over a little bone.
But they controlled the funding sources.
Opal Jones and her group
were downtown and we had
a Mexican guy in charge named Aragon.
We wanted to get our foundations
funded. We had to
arrange to meet him in
the restroom or something so
he could sign in cause the black guys wouldn't let us in.
That was the kind of
competition, so they came
to feel racist I
guess, but we were just
highly competitive, and you
know, if you're trying to knock me down, we try to knock you down.
That kind of stuff.
So we did it and I was used to it.
My dad was a career army
guy and he was at
Omaha beach on D-day
and I was a fighter pilot and we
were combative in nature I suppose.
But we're also very conservative with family values.
Very religious, very patriotic
and I was a Democrat.
In my book, we'd make ideal Republicans according
to the values that
Republicans continually espouse.
There are a lot of problems, but anyhow.
So, I was a Democrat.
I was asked one time by Judge
Leopoldo Sanchez, the first
Mexican-American that was elected to office to be a judge.
Later everybody was appointed.
And at the time reapportionment was
coming up and he asked me
to go up to Sacramento to lobby
Jesse Unruh, who was Speaker
of the House, and one of the most powerful men in California.
So I went up there with
a couple of guys and he
said, "Mr. Castillo why should
we vote to proportion a
district where a Mexican American
will probably be elected?"
I said "Well, because it's
supposed to be representative government and we're
a large group and we have no representation.
That's number one, and number
two, you always get our vote."
He looked at me and I'll
never won't forget this, he said,
"Mr. Castillo, we're always gonna
get your vote," and that
really bothered me.
Because it's like the
difference between courting a
girl and being married to her.
As long as you're in the
courting stage, you do extraordinary
things, I mean you
really bust yourself to do it.
Once you're married it's "okay
let's do that" or something, you know how it goes.
So I decided we had
to get in, somehow get into
the courting stage because I'm from New Mexico.
We had Republicans.
My dad was a life-long Republican
although I believed he was a Democrat.
And his friends were Democrats and
so when the Republicans were
in, we were in, when
the Democrats were in, we
were in, it didn't matter who
was in, we were in, okay.
My dad, by the way built,
he was head of Goolocks here
in Albuquerque, built the first
community center in Borelles, the community
center so I came
by it naturally in any rate
I was called by Ginger Seville who
had worked for Senator Keego, I
believe, as his head administrative assistant.
And she asked me to
be on a commercial for the candidate Richard Nixon.
It was gonna be filmed in New York.
Well I was very suspicious,
the Republicans calling me, I mean, come on.
So, but I agreed
to go, but I wasn't
gonna be clever, I wasn't gonna
write down anything in case
they got in my room and
knew what the questions I was going to ask or anything.
I was stupid but that's the
way I was thinking at the time
and so I went there and
there was a representative group in California.
A black guy, a postman, a
lawyer, a Mexican you know.
Supposed to be a representative cross section of California.
Well what happened is that I
hammered the candidate for about
15 or 20 minutes on Mexican-American
stuff, and he loved it.
I was cross-examining him because
I am a lawyer and he
loved it and he was fighting back and we were going back and forth.
We took about twenty minutes of the hour program.
And I guess he liked
it, because I was
called sometime later after he
won the election by Bob Finch
who, as you remember, was
the Lieutenant Governor of the
state before he went to
Washington. He had been
an administrative aide for
Congressman Nixon, I believe,
and he, he
was a very close friend of the President.
So he called me and asked me to go back on the transition team.
I didn't know what that meant, but it sounded like a big honor.
So I went. I had a big zapata mustache.
I remember I shaved it
off because I wanted to come
in at the lowest level of acceptance, you know how that works.
And so I got there and I stood out.
He was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare .
So I had to wait for him.
He didn't know I was
coming that particular morning.
I sat out there for most of the morning.
I waited for him.
He was in conference and all
the newspaper guys came out, and
the photographers, and there was Mr. Finch.
And I said, "Hi Mr. Finch."
He said, "Hello Martin, get to work."
That's all he said and he took off.
I thought he was going to embrace me,
and tell me how great I was for coming or something.
He said "get to work".
I didn't know what to do.
He said "talk to my secretary if you need anything."
So we got an office and
we got some machines, we got
a secretary, and what we
started doing was amassing
a job bank because I
was tired of hearing, "Well, Mr.
Castillo, we would hire a
Mexican, but there really aren't any qualified people."
That kind of stuff.
So we sent out
the word and we got a heck of a job bank.
There were all kinds of professionals all kinds of PhD's.
We found people under the
rocks that I didn't even
know existed, because I was
just from California, and that's what we did.
Well, after that I went
back to my law practice, and
I was sitting around there one
day and my secretary said, "Secretary
Finch was on the phone for you."
Well, by that time, he was like my hero for crying out loud.
So I went to the phone and I felt like saluting.
Instead he said, "Martin, the
President wants you to come
back and work for him."
I said "I don't want to go
back there, I did my job and
I'm happy and I got a
lot of stuff to do here, blah blah blah blah."
He said "Well come out and
I want you to talk to Daniel Patrick Moynihan."
He was called the Gremlin of the White House.
He was a Democrat also, and the President appointed him
because the President above all, in my view, was a pragmatist.
He wanted to get things done.
And he sounds the best way in his mind to get things done.
So Daniel Patrick Moynihan convinced
me, he was wearing no shoes, his
hair was all messed up, his
tie was rumpled, his shirt was out.
He said, "Martin, God darn
it you gotta come to work cause
the President thinks it's the greatest thing since enchiladas."
So that sold me.
Compared to an enchilada, you know what do you ask.
So I came back
and they appointed me
to be the Chairman of the Interagency
Committee on Mexican-American Affairs.
Now the Interagency Committee on
Mexican-American Affairs had been
started by Lyndon Johnson in
1967 and I didn't
find this out until I got
there, but it had a shelf-life of about six to eight months.
So I was going to be
out of a job in 6
to 8 months, after I shut down my practice, you know.
So I figured something had to
be... So I went
to the White House and I
told him I want to get a bill through Congress.
So the President says, "Well go do it."
I never, how do I get a bill through Congress?
Well we figured out a way, I'm sure the White House helped us.
And we lobbied the Democrats, Senator
Montoya, I remember Congressman Menhaym.
Senator Javits, the big Republican
guy with a big
constituency of Puerto Ricans helped us a great deal.
Rubicoff helped us a great deal.
All the guys from Texas, most
of them helped us Senator Tower
certainly did and it
was a lot of Mexicans in Chicago,
Kansas City, the Cubans
helped us because we changed
it to Cabinet Committee on Opportunity for the Spanish Speaking.
And the reason that came
about is one, we had
to get it through Congress okay and
we couldn't get it through with Mexicans in the word, just Mexicans.
Although we were sixty-eight
million, the Puerto Ricans were one and a half million,
the Cubans were a half a
million and the others were
about a million or a million and a half.
We were the dominant group but we didn't have a national presence.
Bob Finch pointed that out to me one day when I was riding with him.
And I said, "Mr. Finch, don't you think it's a little unfair?
All the dollars that go out
of here for the poverty programs and
for needy people, minority people.
The majority goes to blacks."
I said, "Why is that?
It just doesn't seem fair."
He said, "Well look around you - you see any brown faces?"-
we were riding through Washington- I said, "No."
He said, "Well neither do they."
So I realized that we had to have a national presence.
So this idea we
had to get the bill through to keep
alive, and had to
include the Hispanics too, Spanish-speaking,
to get the votes,
but it was also a great idea
because all of a sudden we had a national presence.
All of a sudden we meant something to politicians.
So now the first thing
to do, I suppose, and probably
the greatest accomplishment that the
cabinet committee made, by the
way, we had to shape
the bill, and we got it
through and we became
the Cabinet Committee on Opportunity
for the Spanish Speaking and I was the first chairman.
But the next thing
we had to do was to get some money.
The way you get money in the
Federal government, especially for
the minorities programs and everything,
by numbers, they go by numbers.
Politicians do everything by the numbers, haven't you noticed?
So to get numbers we
had to get into the Census
as a group, well that
was pretty tricky business because Mexicans
are Caucasians, a lot of people forget that.
We all know that.
And in fact it
really bugs me when a Mexican says, "Well, those white people."
I say, "God damn it.
God damn it.
You're white."
Anyhow that's another story for another day isn't it.
So we had to get
it, we had to get it into
the Census and so Maury
Sands, was a very nice
man, he was Secretary of Congress.
He helped us and of course the President was all for it.
And so we met
with the Census people, with the
help of Secretary Sands.
We convinced them, they believed us, they bought it.
A lot White House pressure, I must say.
Cause it was good for, for everybody.
And we got it through.
Well, the money started
coming in that way and our
job as ombudsman was to
see that various government agencies got
it out to the right places and
that's we had our staff
for, we had a bunch of
bright guys, bright young guys, some of whom are here.
They're still bright, but they're not
so young anymore like me,
and that was our job
and that's what we
did and probably the court
of Carlos Conde wherever he is, he stepped out.
He says it's probably this
effort of the cabinet committee probably
produced the greatest equal opportunity
for the longest time of any
of the things that the cabinet committee did.
And I firmly believe that, cause it's still there
and a lot of people are made at the word
"Hispanics," they call it a mythical term.
Well it was a political term, OK?
But it worked.
So, the next thing
that I want to talk about
briefly, Theresa Speake is going to
speak about NEDA - National Economic Development Association-
and how it prospered under
the guidance of Chairman Ramirez.
And I want to tell you how it happened.
And this is, again, the
President didn't care how things happened.
He knew what we were trying to
do, and he just said, "Do it."
And so what we did,
my friend Ben Fernandez who used
to work for me, or worked
with me, as a consultant, stole
the idea from a Mexican American
CPA in Colorado to give
technical assistance to Mexican
Americans to tap into the economic stream.
So I stole the
idea, Ben stole the idea,
gave it to me, I went
to Heladio Sandoval from Texas
who is head of the SBA, and
a very good friend of mine.
And I told him we need to get it funded.
He funded it, we got together a board:
Puerto Ricans Cubans, Mexicans.
We did all the right things to give them a national presence.
We formed a board.
They took off, we had ten
officers I believe to start
with and then Theresa
and her group carried it on to bigger and better heights.
Then we went on to other
things, cause we only had a staff of 30, I think.
Something like that, was around 30?
Yeah.
And so, we had a lot of work to do.
We worked.
We worked ten, twelve hour days. We
worked on Saturday.
Because and we knew that they were going to get us.
The President had told me, "Martin
get as much done as
you can while you can,"
because he knew, and I
knew that if we were just
being programatic and we
were centered on one thing like
that, that the politicians would
get it and they got
it, but not before we
got a lot done.
But we ran and we ran and we ran.
And, I just
want to read, I don't want to take much time,
but I want to read you
something that I think is
good because we have a diverse
audience here and we all have different talents.
We all have different ways of looking at things.
But we're all Mexican American
and we should be, in our
own way, working for a goal.
So let me read this.
"An understanding of the
role that we all play
must also be better developed
if we are to to reach our goals.
Each of us has something to offer,
just as each of us has his limitations.
The relevance and assessment of
each of us lies in
our subscription and commitment to
a common cause in accordance
with our available resources and talent.
Although we may track on
a different plane, or march to a different drum.
In the end, let me leave
a, let us leave a
legacy to future generations,
the significance of how we
did it, as well as the value of what we did.
But more important that we did it together."
Thank you.
And one of the persons with
whom Marty did it,
to get it done is here
in the audience and the
out of respect for him, in
recognition for the great work he also did.
I would love to
have Fernando Davrio, wherever
you are out there, please stand
up.
And so Theresa Speake will
now tell us how she
was able to take this
work that Marty Castillo had
done to start this
organization to help people
become business people,
to become part of our
economic system in our country.
Theresa, your turn.
I am very honored and humbled
to be here today in the
presence of these gentlemen who
went before me and
who were there. I was
not there at that
time, but as you said somebody
had to implement this later on down the line.
So the implementation part is
where I came into play.
I also want to recognize the
fact that we're here
to recognize and be
a testament to Nixon's legacy
on behalf of entrepeneurship.
This is what this is all
about and I was
doing some research in preparation
of my remarks and I
read the "Bridges to
Dignity" speech that he
made when he was running for office.
When he was running for office
he said, "You know, in this
country we have a
civil rights commission that concerns
itself with the rights,
the legal rights, the civil
rights of minorities, but
we do not have such
an institution or such an
organization that addresses the
economic rights of minorities.
If I get elected, when
I get elected, I am
going to look to do
that because it is critical."
He also, as has been mentioned before, was
a very astute politician, he recognized
that among that minority group were
Hispanics, the fastest growing
group in the country.
And why?
It's been said several times: he was a Californian.
I mean, he was raised with them,
he knew them, and he
recognized that this was going
to be a part of
this minority component that needed
to be assisted and that
is very important because he
also made a statement after
he was elected that said
"You know, everybody has the equal opportunity.
We kind of start with a
level field of opportunity,
but not necessary a level
field of knowledge, of understanding."
So it was very important to
follow through on this vision
that he had and he did that.
In March of 1969, shortly
after being elected, he, under
Executive Order, established the Office of Minority Business Enterprises.
That gave the authority and the
funding that was going
to be needed to put
in place some programs that
were going to assist minorities and their business development.
His vision, to me, and
it's already been said, speaks a
lot to the old adage:
Give a person a fish
and you feed him for a day;
teach a man to fish,
and you feed him for a lifetime.
So that really is the important
thing about the programs
that were initiated, that NEDA was able to implement.
And as many of you know, or
if you don't know you should know,
today Hispanics are the
fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in this country.
And woman, Hispanic women, are even the fastest growing.
So I am very proud of
that.
After establishing OMBI,
he then looked, or at
the same time, looked to
the cabinet committee to assist
with many of the things that he wanted to get done.
As Martin said, because I talked
to him before this, he said, "Let's get it done.
Just do it.
I have a mandate."
So he got involved, as
he mentioned earlier, in helping identify
this entity, which ended
up being the National Economic Development Association.
And, working with Ben
Fernandez, who by the
way, was the first Hispanic that
ran for President in the United States.
He is deceased at this time.
And with Hillary Sandoval, who
was the first Hispanic administrator, and,
by the way, although I was
unable to have my power
point here today, I have
a photo of Hilary that says "padrino."
So as you all know, he was the godfather.
He was the one that provided
that seed capital to NEDA when we first got started.
He gave us $600,000, which in
those days was a lot of money.
And we started with six offices.
And the whole idea
of the concept for this
organization was that it
was going to develop skilled entrepreneurs and professionals.
It was going to provide the Hispanic
community an opportunity to grow a middle class.
It was going to bring talent to
bridge the distance between Hispanics,
Hispanic community and the non-Hispanic business community.
And the idea was basically to
develop a measure of
independence and control
over the lives of Hispanics through business ownership.
Now that organization was
formed through a group
of Hispanic businessmen from across the country.
Puerto Rico, Florida, New York, New Jersey, California.
With us today in the
audience, and I would like him to stand, is Frank Vega.
He has been mentioned several times.
Frankie actually was
a signature on the
articles of incorporation for NEDA,
along with Ben Fernandez and
several other very prominent businessmen.
Again, the operations started with
six hundred thousand and it started in LA.
We had six offices.
Los Angeles, New York, Miami,
Chicago, Kansas City, and San Antonio.
Does that ring a bell by any chance?
Highly Hispanic-populated communities.
Our mission was to go out
there and reach those Hispanics
and those communities and get them into entrepreneurship.
Shortly there after we got a
two point one million dollar grant
from OMBI and then we
went to sixteen offices and then we grew to twenty-five offices.
I came into the picture in
1972 when I attended the Nixon
convention in Miami.
I met the NEDA people and
when I got back to Fresno I was
hired as an administrative assistant.
I was a very low man on the totem pole.
I was not the director,
I was not a PhD, I
was a single mother with
three kids and a high school
education working as a secretary working in this organization.
Now I want to say something about
NEDA. NEDA was a
premier organization.
All of their professionals had degrees.
And the reason they did that is
because they didn't want anybody to
say that this was just
one of those rip-off organization being funded.
No, no, no, these people had
degrees from Stanford, Harvard, I mean MBAs.
And here I was trying to grow in that organization.
So, I was going to school
full-time, working there and working my way up.
So I ended up in 1970
to 1980, I became the Director
of a NEDA office in California.
Working my way my education
to fit in with that
NEDA model of a
professional. By 1980
NEDA had it's
ten years under it's belt
and it had really really
assisted a lot of people.
I had some reports that you probably all have seen here.
This is the twenty-five year report.
I have a ten year report here
and a twenty year report,
but in the first ten
years they had reported over
1.6 billion in 1980
of financial assistance for
their clients, not to speak
about all those firms
that got certified an 88
program and got contracts and grants.
I mean really this organization was
really very, very, very powerful.
And very, very supportive of
increasing the businesses in the areas they were at.
Not only were they helping
businesses, but they were
building minority banks, local
development corporations, small business
investment corporations, and therefore
within the communities they
were at, the resources were
there for the business people that
were trying to get started. In
1980 in December there
was a change the administration at the national level.
There was a movement
to decentralization of funding so
the national organization basically collapsed.
It folded, we were all
left without jobs, without anything.
I was in Fresno, here I
had a VP position
at organization that didn't exist.
So I talked to a
couple of ladies in the organization and I said you know what?
What we do is so important,
that we need to continue this.
So I incorporated my own
California non-profit as a
spin-off of NEDA and
we called it NEDA San Joaquin Valley.
We started with a small grant
in Fresno, we then got
the next round funding from MBDA,
which now the office of
Minority Business Enterprise had become the Minority Development Agency.
So we got that
first grant, started with Fresno,
went to Stockton, went to
Sacramento, went to Oakland,
went to San Francisco, came down
to Riverside, we grew the
California NEDA.
And that agency went from 1981
to 1997.
In 1981 I started my organization.
Remember, the national organization closed down.
Anna Muller, who had
been with the Albuquerque, New
Mexico operation and you
were there for the opening of that office.
I gave Martin his remarks
that he made that Anna had
sent me, of how proud
he was to see this organization
getting started in New Mexico.
Anna is still there today
doing the missionary
work, working with minority Hispanic businesses.
So the legacy goes on in
that MBDA is out
there funding these organizations, and NEDA is out there.
In closing what I want to
do is just talk a little
tiny bit about not only the successes of
the businesses we help with,
and I want to focus on one
in particular, which is very
near and dear to my heart in
the valley, but on the board and staff members.
Remember NEDA was not
only developing business, but it
was developing its people so
that we would go on to bigger and better things.
We had Phil Sanchez, many of
you knew Ambassador Phil Sanchez. He
was one of the original board members of NEDA.
I tried to get him to come up from Fresno today, but he couldn't make it.
But he had three appointments
from President Nixon, he was
the Director of the OEO Office,
he was an Ambassador to Columbia and to Honduras.
We had Micheal Cardinas,
Michael Cardinas is a
former NEDA board member.
He was appointed in a
later administration as a small business administration administrator.
John Lopez, a former NEDA
employee, became a McDonald's franchisee.
And let me tell you, that man,
I don't know how many McDonald's he
had, and he is right now
a major supplier for McDonald International.
And of course me, simple
little me. As I
mentioned, I was a single parent with a high school education,
I started as an administrative assistant.
I went on to be appointed by
Governor Dumasian, Governor Wilson,
President Bush forty-one, and President Bush forty-three.
So the legacy that Nixon
gave us of striving out
to do and grow is still alive and well.
Finally, the client:
Fred and Louise Ruiz started
their own little Mom and Pop
Mexican food products in Chileri
County back in 1979.
They came to NEDA in the early 80s.
We got them their loan to
build their first fabulous, you
know, plant because they
had been operating at an old,
like a turkey ranch house or
something, and the USDA
had come and said, "No, no, no, you can't be there.
You have to have a sanitary facility."
So they bought this beautiful
building with an LDC, through the
LDC to Larry Local
Development Corporation 504 loan.
Today, they have two thousand six hundred employees.
They are the first among the
top ten U.S. Hispanic owned
manufacturing firms in California.
They are first among the top
500 Hispanic-owned manufacturers
in the United States.
They are sixth among the
top Hispanic-owned firms in the United States.
In addition to being successful in
business, by the way Louise has passed away,
but Fred has been very active in his community.
He is a board regent
for the University of California
school system, best California systems.
He was inducted into
the Hall of Fame by
SBA in 1992, and
he has donated over a
million dollars to the Central
California Children's Hospital and
their Ruiz for Kids non-profit
has donated nearly one million
to children-based community nonprofits.
I rest my case about the
Nixon legacy with the Hispanic business community.
And the story continues of
which the world has yet to learn more.
In the Oval Office, he and
I had a long discussion
about many things that had
to be done and just
as Marty had worked
with the President way back
in 1969
when the Census Bureau
told the President, "Sorry, we
can't count the Mexican
Americans because all the
forms have been a printed and
there is nothing we can do,"
well at the
urging of Marty,
the President told them, "Destroy those.
Print brand new ones and
include the counting of
the Mexican-Americans and the Spanish speaking people."
With that knowledge of
the numbers, a lot
of things could be done and were done.
And so when I came out
of the Oval Office and went
to our offices of the
cabinet committee, I called
Manny, a wonderful man,
who also spent most
of his youth from kindergarten
to high school, I think high school, I'm not sure.
In about twenty-seven,
thirty-seven schools throughout the country.
He was a full-time migrant.
And after he came
out of the Marine Corps, he decided
at age twenty-some to go
to the ninth grade to get his high school diploma.
But the counselor told him no, no.
You go straight to college.
I came and I told
Manny, "Manny, I want you to do three things.
The President has already approved it.
One, we're going
to take the federal government to where the people live.
Two,
we're going to count in all
of the Federal government, the Army,
the Navy, all the
agencies, how many
Spanish speaking persons there are
there and how
much money goes out to the Spanish speaking people."
Pretty big job.
Manuel Oliverez will tell
us the story of what he did.
Manuel.
My legs aren't working.
He's 82 years old, but look at him.
Eighty-two years young.
Remember that.
First I want to
express my deep
appreciation to my great story teller over there, Martin Castillo,
who tells
a beautiful story and to
Dr. Ramirez for giving
me the opportunity to serve in
the cabinet committee for five years.
I was recruited out of Sacramento,
I was at a conference at Sacramento, Hank Ivedo
called me over there to
come to the side, and
we were having a state wide
Chicano conference in Sacramento
during that year.
And Hank
calls me over and he
says, "You want to go to Washington?"
I said, "What am I going to do in Washington?"
He said, "Well..." The only
thing I asked him was, will I
continue to serve my community
if I go to Washington, D.C.?
I didn't ask for cash, I didn't ask
for grade level, I didn't
ask for how much I was
going to get paid, nothing.
I should have asked, who's going to take all my furniture and stuff?
But I didn't, so I had to pay for it when I went.
Happens.
Well, I was new and I didn't know the game.
And he said, "Yes.
We have been told that
we can continue to serve the
Spanish community, you don't have to worry about that".
And so I said look.
Count me in.
That was probably April of '69.
Then I waited
and waited for the phone call
from him to say, "Hop a
plane and fly in."
On a Sunday, in I
think it was June 2 of
'69, I hopped a
red-eye special out of San
Francisco-because I'm from Monterrey,
California, now living out of Orlando-
and I hopped a red-eye special
out of San Francisco, arrived
there at 6:30, went to the old executive office building.
There was one guy sitting
with a bunch of chairs and I was the first one there.
And you have no idea
how scared you get when
you're sitting there and you're
now working for the government
of the United States and you don't know what the heck to do.
The United States of America!
You know, 300 million, 50 states,
and you're sitting there and
you don't know, "What am I supposed to do?"
Well, it doesn't take very long
before the system gives you,
you know, you hack on to
the system and it rolls along and you're okay.
But I still remember that, 41 years ago.
In 41 years I still
remember that feeling in the
pit of my stomach, what am
I doing here?
But then it became
a lot of fun.
I just want to comment on
one thing that, on NEDA, I
have to be, the company, my
leaders to SBA when they
sat down with Hillario Sandoval and signed the first contract.
Fly on the wall
on all of these things that happened.
But one of the things that
isn't mentioned is that Fernando
Fernandez, also being
chairman of NEDA, he was
the first Chairman of NEDA.
He was also a precursor of
getting us started on savings and loans.
He was hot on savings and loans.
That's when I found out if
you got a board together, got a
couple hundred thousand dollars you can put a savings and loan together.
And he went around the country
getting, putting savings and
loans together. My brother Pete
Oliverez, he was an entrepreneur
and he was with Ben Fernandez in that particular.
So I just want to
share that. That isn't too
common knowledge that we, with
NEDA, also had a strong
drive on creating savings and
loans by Hispanics,
for everybody.
You know, everybody wanted a house, or a building.
You can't say saving and loans
are for Hispanics, run by savings alone.
Hopefully the profits are for
Hispanics, but the loans are for anybody who went.
Now, the chairman says
"Manny, I want you
to talk about what you did at the cabinet committee."
I was Director for Program Operations.
That's why I was a fly on the wall on most of these programs.
I want to talk
about one, two, three, four, five
things: Federal regents, Agency
Task Forces, 16 point program,
team, and top level support.
If you're taking notes those are
my five topics and I'll go through them pretty fast.
There were ten region offers during
that time we were, this is
1970 to 70- I left in '73
to go to the air force.
10 regions, and I was
instructed to put together a team
to go to six
regions, and they were
San Francisco, Denver, Dallas, Chicago, New York, and Kansas City.
And we put the
team together, chaired by
Dr. Ramirez, and we
asked two...we had two questionnaires we gave them.
One questionnaire had to do
with personalities, your representation
and utilization of Hispanics in
policy making and grants giving jobs.
How many do you have?
Where do you have them?
How do you recruit them?
And second is contracts and grants.
Just two big things, contracts and grants.
How much money you got, and are you giving it to Hispanic Americans?
Just make sure you give it to qualified Hispanic Americans.
Got to be able to do the
job, but... Those were
the two things and they flew
all over the country.
The team of six...about ten
people to a team under the
chairmanship of Dr. Ramirez.
And we had these six regions.
And it was...it had never
been done before, so I
think we were kind of creating
a path that has been followed by many others since then.
A follow on
to that was the Agency Task
Forces, which that was in the regions.
Now we did the same thing
in Washington, D.C.
And G.G...Mr. Garcia was
one of the many team members
who was given a region, an
agency or two agencies to develop
a strategic plan to deal
with recruitment of Hispanics
or the utilization...the recruitment and
utilization of Hispanics in the
federal agencies and also contracts and grants.
The same thing we were doing in
the regions, we were trying
to do in Washington, D.C., our team.
Now, to be honest
with you, we were
full of ambition, we full
of dreams, we were full of
hope, we were full
of ourselves, I guess,
because as I've been
doing this business since '69, and I still do it.
I'm retired, but I still do it.
And I have come to understand
that we were like
Don Quixote with the windmills,
because there is a
myriad of regulations and
attitudes in the
system that make progress
almost impossible.
Make it almost impossible, but the
beauty of us is that
we were so ignorant that we
didn't know that.
As I look back now
that I've been doing it so many
years, I have
no regrets of what
we did, G.G., when we took on the system like we did.
But we took it on with faith
and we took it down with hope and
we felt that every day we would be able to make a difference.
And I think that
two things have remained since then.
One is what Martin Castillo
spoke a minute ago about the census.
The census continues to count
us and keeps increasing in terms
of the complexity of the
questions they ask about us
when we go out for numeration.
That data then is used to program.
And so there's more opportunity for
us because of that census.
So, the census, the cabinet
committee and census, what it
did for the census, is the biggest thing they ever did for Hispanics.
Everything else is kind of,
all these little programs that I
was involved in, they had a shelf-life.
But not the census.
The second thing that has continued
is the 16 point program.
The 16 point program
the Hispanic employment program, the
Spanish speaking program, whatever you want to call it.
The reason that it's one
of the big ones is because it
creates, it still continues
to make the
agencies aware of Hispanic
Americans and the need to do something about it.
To recruit them, to train
them, to promote them,
and to provide opportunities for them.
Now, does the system
do it the way we would like it to and expect it?
No.
I'll be honest with you.
It doesn't.
But that doesn't mean that it won't.
That doesn't mean that we quit.
That doesn't mean that we stop.
We continue to push.
I've been doing that for 41 years,
I will continue,
and I won't stop.
My hope still remains that what
we started in the cabinet
committee way back in '69,
that it will be, you
know, you never lose hope, como Don Quixote.
You keep on rolling.
And those who follow
us, like Theresa followed us,
and others will follow Teresa,
the young people who are
in the colleges and universities now,
they will follow us and
what we have said and shared
with you today will make a
difference, and they will
create that change that creates
a level playing field for everyone.
And G.G. said, you know,
Hispanos, Mexicanos o Hispanos.
We're a family.
We're a family, you know.
A Hispanic family.
And we don't ask for anything.
I never ask for it.
I don't ask for privileges, I
don't ask for exceptional efforts.
I just want an even break.
I just want an even break for my people.
I just want them, if they're
qualified, if they're educated
if they're willing to work,
if they can do the
job, then give them
an opportunity to do the job.
And that's all.
That's all I've ever asked for myself.
That's all that Teresa, who
told you her life story, starting
from a clerk to
be a state director and put
together an internal percent.
That's something that almost everyone of us has internally.
But regretfully there are
some conditions that
don't enhance that or don't
let it flower the way it should.
I don't point fingers at anything,
I'm just saying that's the ambiente
that we live in that impacts
upon our opportunity to improve
our condition in our great country.
One of the things that I
was very proud of in the
committee was the people I worked with like G.G..
And Fernando Rio Castallie,
he was our administrator.
Ray Carrasco from Sacramento out of El Paso.
Mr. Conde.
Alejandro Misera
from El Paso and Carlo Fluis, su alma esta con Dios,
He was a, these were all tremendous, and many others,
these are the ones that I remember.
They were tremendous individuals with hope
and ambition and the drive
to improve opportunity for Hispanics,
a great team.
And finally I think what
made the job so enjoyable,
not only the opportunity to serve our
community and the expectations that
we could make a difference, was
that I and G.G., and
the rest of us always knew
that Dr. Ramirez was
right behind us, and
if anybody called up and
said, you know, "Fire those sons of a gun," he says, "Why?
They are doing their job. "
Which means we had top-level support.
When you have top-level support, you can stand out and take on the system.
But if you don't have
top-level support, you'd better be careful because you can lose your job.
We always had top-level support.
I could always count on Dr.
Ramirez to protect us,
to be our buffer, that would
let us continue to do our job.
And so I gave
great great thanks to these
2 men, 1 for bringing
me on board, Martin Castillo in
'69, and to Dr. Ramirez, who
gave me the effort and the
opportunities to do all
the programs and work
and serve my community, serve my people, serve my country.
I think the biggest thing is, to serve my country.
The country's been great.
My mom never went to
school, my dad only went to
second grade, I went
to grammar school never went
to high school. Thankfully
in California if in
junior college you can cut, they let you stay.
It took me three years to
do high school, and then I
went to the university, then I
went to got my Masters
then I went to Harvard for executive leadership.
So, in this country,
you know, it's up to you.
I'm so proud of being an
American and the great opportunities it give us.
From migrant farm worker, you know,
no education at all to
be able to serve the President of the United States.
Can you imagine?
The more, when I think about it, I get goose pimples.
It really, it really
something to know that
in this beautiful, great country of
ours a migrant farm worker can do that.
And, I leave you
with that, I just want
to share that sense of great
pride I have in this
beautiful flag that I wear on my lapel.
Thank you.
You see, Stu Spencer, what you started?
And so this
man, Richard Nixon, with
all the firsts you just heard a little bit today.
One day in the Oval Office
I said to him, "You know,
we don't have single Mexican-American General."
He said, "Well, dammit, go make one."
The man wound up with four stars eventually.
General Cavazos.
One time I told him, "You
know, our culture, is such
that we love God.
We're God fearing.
And cultures define a person's relationship to God."
So I said to him, "You have
White House Sunday service here
all the time.
I would like to have an archbishop say mass here."
He said "Well, let's just do it!"
So we invited Frankie Vega and
four hundred and ninety-nine more
Mexicans to come to
the White House for a Sunday service.
For the first time.
I wrote him a memo that
said, "I'd like to
have this country recognize our heritage."
So, he proclaimed National
Hispanic Heritage Week.
UCLA gives credit to Lyndon Johnson for that,
but it was President Nixon.
It's just on and on, and
so, in Spanish we
have a word that's called
"informador," the one who informs.
And so if people don't know
about all these things is Carlos Conde's
fault because that was his job.
So, Carlos would you let know what you did at the White House?
Thank you, Henry.
I didn't hear anything you said.
I'm the last one on
the program and I feel
everything has been said.
I feel like the guy who
thought nobody was paying
any attention to him, so
when he died, he had
on his tombstone, "I told you I was sick."
And this is, so
I'm going to be short
because everything has been said
very eloquently by my colleagues.
He's been recognized before, but
I would like to wake him up
again and recognize him once more, Fernando Diniro.
You're one of us and
you should be up here
Fernando because you made some
great contributions to the
early Hispanic movement in
the U.S. So, I always
think of you in that regard.
I'll tell you how I
got to Washington for the
second time because, I was
a Washington correspondent early in
my career, and then
I went to Latin America
as a correspondent, again as a foreign correspondent.
And then I came to Houston, Texas
to work for the Houston Chronicle.
And I wrote a five
piece article called "The
Hyphenated Americans," and it was
nominated for a Pulitzer prize,
which I didn't win,
I won other prizes, but I
didn't win that one. But it
got a lot of play and a
lot of publicity, and George
H. W. Bush was a
congressman from Houston.
And so I got to know
him by covering some of his
stories or when he
came and doing some of
the stories on him.
One day after President Nixon
had won the presidency, he
called me and he
said, "Would you like
to come to Washington to work
for President Nixon on Hispanic Affairs?"
And he explained to
me what I would be
doing or what he thought I would be
doing, excuse me, what he thought I would be doing."
I said "Sounds interesting."
So he said, "Let me put
the person on the line
who is heading that committee."
And he put Martin Castillo
on the line, and Martin
explained to me what I
would be doing for the
cabinet committee, what he wanted me
to do, and I
accepted and went and it
was one of the most
interesting experiences that I
have had in my life, although
I'm still a journalist, and
this is what I've been
for most of my life, my profession.
I went to Washington to try
to develop a program that
the people in the
US could understand about the
Hispanic-Americans.
And at that time when I
was going from Texas to
Washington - although I had
been in Washington as a correspondent
- Spanish speaking sounded a little bit pretentious.
And it sounded pretentious because I
came from Texas and I
was a regional Latino
and I always thought that they were Mexican-Americans.
California was a long
way from Texas and
the few that I knew, they
always came back saying they
were from Pasadena or
places I've never heard of.
So it didn't register to me.
So, I said, "Why Spanish speaking?"
And so this was because
they wanted to start including the
Puerto Ricans, who at
that time didn't register
with the large Mexican-American community.
And at that time, as
you'll recall, the Cubans
were just coming into
the country after the Castro take
over. So they weren't,
in a way, computing with us.
It was hard to accept them.
Mexican-Americans
probably constituted about three fourths or more,
maybe eighty percent of the population at that time.
So, it was a
job and the President
wanted to include every one.
And so we undertook that
with the leadership of Martin
and then Henry and I
did some work which
I guess they thought was
good enough and then they asked me to go the White House.
And so I went to
the White House as the first
Spanish speaking, or the first Mexican-American.
And for a while,
I guess a lot of people
thought that I was one
of the Filipino waiters because I
looked something like them.
So I went to
the White House, and I was
the first one there to undertake some of the probe.
I was working under Herb Klein by
the way, who was the
the director, not the director
but they called him counselor,
Communications Counselor.
And it was a daunting,
not problem, but a challenge
because again there were
three quarters of the people
were Mexican-Americans in
the U.S. The Cubans didn't
even get to be a
million and the Puerto Ricans were,
in a way, isolated, so we
had to find a way to bring them in.
And Martin, to his
credit, did very good
work in trying to integrate
all the communities.
My challenge was trying
to educate, not
educate, but to inform,
I guess is a better
word, the press, the
media about Latinos.
For a while, you know, everybody
wanted to call us Chicanos.
And of course, Chicanos played bigger in the Southwest.
Didn't have any meaning at all
to Puerto Ricans in New York.
And, the Cuban Americans
could care less about, you
know, what the Mexican
Americans' problems were because they
did not have the same problems we did.
So, how do we coalesce all of them?
Well, by and
by, again with Martin's
leadership and then Henry's we
were able to put together
a program, all-inclusive, but we had another problem.
And that was the problem of the
Mexican-Americans and the Southwest.
Chicanos were
always struggling with those
problems, because we
called ourselves the Spanish-speaking
Committee, they thought we
were, again the word that I use, were pretentious.
So we were always trying
to struggle with a
common unity and I
remember Martin was with
us, Henry was still
not the Chairman, but I
organized a meeting
in Houston and it took me a long time.
And so, Stacio Mendiola who was from
Houston, and he's now
one of the academic leaders
at the University of Houston.
So you know we set it
up very well, tables
and plenty of people,
and right in the
middle of the program, here
comes Stacio with all
his gang, and boy, there was a brawl.
And so, that was
one of my probably most, interesting experiences
that we had, but it got
better and then we
went to New York and it
was easier with the
Puerto Ricans and the
Cuban-Americans by that time
were beginning to establish you
know there their own communities here
and so it wasn't
hard for the Cubans, but
it was difficult for us
with the Mexican-Americans. For
one thing, most of them were democrats,
die-hard Democrats. Didn't want
to accept or understand that
President Nixon wanted to
be an all-inclusive President.
There were always issues that
were coming up that we
could not, in a
way, confront successfully. You
know, like education programs
and so forth, but little by
little, and then
with the help of all the
Latinos who were now coming
into government in all
the agencies, that began
to change because of them.
And we had
one strategy, which I tried
to promote, and I
say it worked and it's
still working, but what we were
trying to do,
and they could spell it,
Henry and Martin and the
rest of my colleagues could speak
better to that, but what we were
trying to do and what
I was trying to do with
my job was to promote
the fact that we were going
after the mid-level jobs in government.
Because at that time,
if you were recall history, Johnson
did not have very many appointees.
Kennedy did not have very many,
hardly any appointees.
So we were
realistic enough to know
that we were not going to get any cabinet jobs at that time.
So what we said
is, let's go for the
mid-level jobs and then
we'll put our own people in
there, and those are the
ones who make the decisions as Manny
pointed out, these are the
ones who control who gets
hired, how you're going
to divide up the money and so forth.
And I think we were successful, because
later on we made a
list and we had about 60, Henry?
Or 80 appointees?
We went in that
direction, and then we
felt that things would get better.
After I went to
the White House and I
will end with this,
after I went to the White
House, it wasn't difficult
for me to try and
advance these programs, but there
was also many times when
the White House, because of
the way it was made up, would
not pay much too much attention to us.
We really had to
work to develop a program that was all-inclusive.
It was not the President, the President being Nixon.
It was more the mindset
of those who had come with Nixon.
And it was difficult
for them, I guess, to
accept the Latino and
appreciate what he was
trying to do and what he was trying to accomplish.
But little by little,
like everything else, we did it.
And take a look
now at the at the White House.
I was the first one, a long time ago,
I grant you, but now
there's counselors to the
President, special advisers.
So it's become now just
something that's routine to
have Latinos, but 45
years ago, I
guess, I was the first one.
And I still have
my check for when I
testified at the
Watergate Grand Jury, I
never cashed it, and I
think Henry was one.
Who else was?
To me it, I guess
it was sort of
a, if you can call it a badge, but
maybe I wouldn't wanna go that far,
to be that extreme,
but it was an accomplishment.
It was a sign of accomplishment, you know,
the fact that
they thought I had
been involved enough to
be cited by the,
not to be cited, to be
indicted, not indicted either.
I should've..., but to
be subpoenaed, that's the word,
subpoenaed by the
Grand Jury and when I
told them what I was
doing I guess they accepted it
and here I am.
But I would like to close
just by saying how much
I appreciate the people
who put this together and gave
us the opportunity to talk
to you, and I for
one did not think
that there was still that
type of appreciation
for the work that
was done by what I
called the pioneering group
in Washington and these are
the people you see here and
I am glad to have
been just a little bit,
made a few contributions to it.
So I thank Martin,
my first boss, first leadership,
and I thank Henry who continued the job.
Thank you very much.
And now as a finale
I think you are writing
questions some of you?
And I think they're gonna bring them up to me.
But as they bring them up
I would like to add a
few little tidbits.
First one is that I
have finished writing a book
about that time and it
has a possible title, not
for sure, of 'The
Nixon No One Knew.'
For many reasons the
story you heard today
is not something, it's a
good one, but not something that
other people in New
York, New York Times CBS,
NBC, etc., want the world to know.
And Watergate brought an
end to the cabinet
committee, and it's sad.
I recall when Herbert Hoover
had assigned an FBI agent
to be my liaison.
And he would always check my
travels to make sure that
there would be no problems.
And one time this agent came
to me, and he said,
"Let's go for a ride."
Went to Virginia, into the
woods, where he
kept looking around and when
he saw that no one
had followed us, he said
to me, "I have applied
for a transfer out of
Washington because I
will not get caught between giants.
They will squash me.
I just came out of the
office of the counselor,
the lawyer to the President, the
man who's there in
the White House to advise the President.
The counsel for legal affairs.
His name is John Dean.
And I went
there yesterday, right after the break-in.
Because we knew that
he was the person that knew
about the people who did the break-in."
But that day, the President,
Ehrlichman, Haldeman were out of Washington.
So he went to his
office and John Dean said,"I
'm too busy right now.
But come back tomorrow."
So he went back the next day.
And John Dean says
"You see those three boxes in the corner there?
Anything you want is right there."
So the man told him, "You know what?
You have already obstructed justice."
He folded up his briefcase
and he said, "I'm leaving you now."
And that's when he came to me and said, "This thing is bad.
That man knows a lot," and,
you know, now he's parading
himself as a person
that didn't know anything.
That's in my book.
And many other things like that.
So we thank this
man who occupies
a very big place in history.
I have some questions here.
This is a good one:
what is your fondest memory
of Richard Nixon?
Being in that Oval Office
when he says
to me, "You know, I eat enchiladas.
I eat tacos.
I ride horses, I go
to 16th of September parades,
I wear hats, I wear
sombreros, I try
to get that Mexican vote, but
all I ever get is five
percent.
This time I want you to help me get fifteen percent."
And I reached into my shirt
pocket and pull out
a three and a half by five
card and I said
"Mr. President, I suggest if
you do these five things, you'll get twenty-five percent."
Well, he laughed, twirled
around in his chair, and used
interesting language.
He said, "You know, you're just a Latin teacher.
I'm the politician! And you're
telling me you're gonna get
twenty-five percent if I
do this things?" "Yes, I suggest
read them well," so he
did, he said, "Haldeman,
get in here. Dr. Ramirez said I'll
get 25 if we do these things,
let's do it."
One of them of course was
we got to bring in 100
Mexican/Americans at very
high level positions and of course we worked at it.
We got someone to 76.
There were other things, but that's all in my book.
That was a fondest memory.
How much time do we have?
Jonathan.
One more question.
Let's see.
Before the US Census counted
Mexican-Americans, how did
the US government meet the
needs of its Latino population?
Well...One time I
called the Pentagon and I
said, "You aren't advertising
to get recruits into the armed services."
"Oh yes, we
advertise all over the
place for minority recruits."
I says, "Well, how
much money do you spend on
Spanish TV, Spanish radio,
Spanish newspapers?"
And he said, "We don't have to go there.
We do that in the LA
Times and New York Times
and ABC, CBS, because
they're Caucasians, they're white people."
All the money went into black media.
Things like that.
We didn't count.
That's the answer.
Jonathan, we're finished.
Ladies and gentlemen, I
hope you've enjoyed this panel presentation.
Thanks to each and every
one of you for participating, both
you as an audience and you as participants.
To show our gratitude and
we historically have had
many panels like this and
major speakers and I know why you come.
You don't come for the lavish honorariums.
You come for the gifts that
we give you and today
is no exception because we're
presenting each one of
you with a beautiful
limited edition, limited to the number we can sell,
mug: "what would Nixon do?"
I should have had special ones
made for you, "what did Nixon do?"
Because you have answered that
question in terms of
the historic initiatives, the vision
that he and you expressed on
behalf of Spanish-speaking
people. And thank you
for building a record that we
will have online within just
a few days, thank you for
coming, I hope all
of you enjoyed it, please come back.