Not long ago “Nation” magazine published an article by Ralph Guzman called “New Wind from the Southwest”. The article speaks of new leadership, new purposefulness coming from over five million Americans who have been quiet for so long. It speaks of Caesar Chavez at Delano; it quotes Dr. Garcia as warning of the new temper that is rising among the Mexican-Americans of this Nation. And it ends with a statement by Dr. George Sanchez which is engraved in my mind. No queremos que nosden atole con el dedo. “We don’t want to be fed mush with a finger.”
I am not here to feed you mush. I want to tell you about a new wind that is sweeping America today. Not only the southwest but everywhere. It is a wind of change. Not the wind of violence and riot and fire but a wind of understanding and conviction and action. It is a “quiet revolution” cleansing and purifying our society.
Three months ago I visited our Job Corps Center at Camp Parks near Oakland, California. I sat in one of the classrooms to watch the new way they teach English to the boys from the slums.
First of all the teacher uses a tape recorder to record exactly how the boys speak when the first come to class. But the teachers don’t correct them. They don’t criticize them. Instead they congratulate them on speaking a language which works where the youngsters have lived, a language which gets them exactly what they want, when they want it in the slums. When I was in the classroom the instructor played the tape back and said to one of the boys “I can’t speak that language. You’re one up on me. But there’s another language you can learn. A language that will help you get a good job and keep it...a language which will help you make money. We call it downtown language.” And then the instructor teaches English not as the only language or a better language, but as a second language. Then three or six months later he records the youngsters again and plays back the tape along with the original one. “Now”, he says, “you can speak two languages. Your own and ‘downtown’. I can only speak ‘downtown’.”
The boys from the slums are not humiliated or degraded. They are not made to feel that their speech or their “language” is bad, but is simply different. And that this difference was worth preserving.
In the five states of the southwest there are almost 2 million spanish-speaking children in the public schools. The National Education Association has just reported on the shameful conditions under which they are taught. I know this is painfully familiar to you. But it is shocking to me.
In some schools the speaking of Spanish is forbidden both in and out of the classroom. Sometimes students are whipped if they speak Spanish even though in some cases, 99% of the school enrollment is Mexican-American.
The children are repeatedly admonished, “if you want to be American, speak American.” What happens? The students withdraw. They grow sullen and silent and even, embarrassed and humiliated. More than half of the boys and almost half the girls drop out at the eighth grade level, to take low-paying, unskilled laboring jobs. And the condition of poverty is perpetuated.
This is a cultural imperialism just as devastating as political imperialism in Africa or Latin America. Too often here in America we have preached equality, but we required conformity.
We have bragged about our great melting pot nation. But we have restricted admission to it. One hundred years ago the slogan in Boston, Mass. said: -- “Irish Need Not Apply”. Today too often the message says: -- Mexicans Don’t Apply- Puerto Ricans Don’t Apply-Indians Don’t apply.
We have condemned the Mexican-Americans as ignorant. But often we Anglos have been just as ignorant; of the Mexican, of his customs, his language, his religion, his history and traditions. Too, often we have condemned the Mexican-American as lazy, slow, indifferent-poor. When frequently we Anglos are the ones who have been impoverished: by our inability to know and understand the Mexican-American. And by our impoverishment of spirit we have kept the Mexican-American poor. Those are harsh statements. But they are true.
Things are changing. A quiet revolution is taking place in America.
It does not make the headlines: exploding in riots and demonstrations. But it is taking place in literally hundreds of communities, through participation and involvement of Mexicans, Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and poor Whites in the solution of their own problems in their own’ ways.
The quiet revolution in education.
Two years ago the words Head Start and Upward Bound and Job Corps were unknown. When we first proposed them as national programs; the experts said they would never work. They said you can’t reach the poor this way. You can’t motivate the lazy and indifferent. Poor people have a different attitude and way of living. They like things as they are. And the “experts” added: “You can’t get teachers to teach the poor. You can’t find classrooms. You can’t enlist the thousands of volunteers you need. Well, they were wrong.” And our American system of education will never be the same again.
Let me tell you about just one child who, last summer, was part of the Head Start program in Nipoma, California. His name is Frank Mansera. They call him Pancho. He is six years old. When he entered “Head Start” Pancho got a physical examination. All Head Start children do. The doctors found that Pancho was suffering from hypo-thyroidism. That’s a glandular condition which can cause complete mental and physical retardation. The disease was working against Pancho. He had stopped growing at two. In the classroom Pancho had to be carried around in his teacher’s arms. His IQ was between 40 and 50. He could speak only ten words of English and about 30 of Spanish.
This summer, Pancho is again in Head Start. He has grown over 5 inches in one year. His IQ has gone up 20 points. He has an excellent command of English, as well as Spanish. And this fall he will be ready for regular school. Before Head Start, Pancho would not have had that physical examination he needed. Most people would have said, “Oh well, he is slow and lazy and stupid. His family is poor and ignorant. Nothing can be done for him.” And the schools would have rejected him as unfit. Not only is Pancho not unfit, but Pancho es muy hombrecito!
In Chicago, we used to put padlocks on the doors of the schools to keep the neighborhood out and the students in. We thought this was how you conducted education in a building called a school--with the rest of the world shut out. Now we know better. Education is only effective when you let in the neighborhood. When the family feels itself a part of the school. And the school is part of the community. When the culture children bring with them is respected. And when what they are taught is a second way, not a better way.
In Head Start and Upward Bound, education is not being locked within the classroom. Parents, non-professional teaching aides, volunteers, doctors, teachers, the entire community are deeply involved in a process of change; a quiet revolution. There’s another “quiet revolution”. That revolution is justice. Justice isn’t locked up in a courtroom or a lawyer’s office, any more than education is limited to the classroom. Our Legal Services program is bringing justice to the people where they live. It is being practiced in neighborhood stores, on the streets of slums, on Indian reservations, in migrant camps where the law that the rest of us take for granted had never penetrated before.
This isn’t justice imposed from above. It is the people’s justice in every sense of the word; and more than 1,000 lawyers in over 500 locations are proving to the poor that the law is not their enemy. In Houston, Texas, our Legal Services program has two novel features:
First, each neighborhood law office is subject to the control of the people in the neighborhood -- the poor people. I don’t mean nominal control. The people have the right to do everything, including firing the lawyers from the program.
Second, there is special provision for one attorney to review everything that happens in that program: to take on all complaints, and to act where necessary. His decision is final, and he cannot be fired or penalized for siding with the poor.
This is justice, visible, tangible, not remote in a city court room or the paneled office of a successful law firm. The people are participating in making the law work for them just as they are in making education work for them. Things are changing.
There’s a quiet revolution in housing as well.
The old idea of public housing required us to tear down the old slums and build new slums in their place.
We know now that people will not respect a home that has been imposed upon them. It must be a part of them and of their lives. And so in every slum and ghetto in this country, poor people are doing their own urban planning -- clearing up the debris -- building vest pocket parks and playgrounds.
In Guadalupe, Arizona, a community of Mexican-Americans and Yaqui people built a community center, complete with meeting-hall, classroom and recreation room with their bare hands. They sifted the sand, mixed the cement, pressed out each block in a pressurizing machine and cured them in the hot sun. And then they built another building to house their credit union.
In Phoenix, Arizona, the slums had no paved streets, because, in Phoenix, the poor lacked the capital to meet the large assessments necessary. Despite this, they raised their voices and petitioned the council to have the streets paved even though they will have to bear the costs -- and the city fathers, long deaf to their voices, have worked out an installment plan to make this possible. Many of the people in this community are Mexican-Americans.
One of the quiet revolutions we have worked has been in housing for migrant farm laborers in the Central Valley of California. Many of these people are Mexican-American. And their situation is one of the great disgraces of our American society.
In California, we have developed programs to furnish desperately needed shelter for farm workers. For years, they have been living on creek banks, in chicken coops, or in their cars. Thus far we have only made a beginning in the development of inexpensive, but comfortable temporary housing. We have stimulated architects and construction material firms to put their creative ingenuity to work in the development of decent housing for people whose need for shelter has been ignored. I am not yet happy with the designs I’ve seen so far: but each one gives way to a better model. And we will work on the problem until it is licked.
I could go on and on with examples of the quiet revolution in health, in job training, in family services, but this would seem like a commercial for what we have accomplished in the past two years through the war on poverty.
Frankly, I do not mean it to be a commercial, even though I am proud of our accomplishments. What I am trying to tell you is not what we have done, or even what is left for us to do. But to describe the change that has come over our nation because the problems, at last, have been recognized. And the solutions have been charted.
What I am saying is that the padlocks have come off the school house door. And they have come off the hospital door and the court house door. And the door to city hall. Private corporations are running Job Corps centers. Religious institutions are operating Head Start programs!
Universities are taking poor children onto their campuses in Upward Bound, and then reaching out into the communities to improve the secondary education there.
Recently, I saw a picture in a San Antonio newspaper of a Catholic Bishop surrounded by 15 or 20 priests picketing, on the streets, protesting the low wages paid to migrants in the Rio Grande Valley.
Two years ago, before the war on poverty began, this would have been impossible. Religion was locked up in the churches; and poverty was locked up in the ghettos.
Now the locks have been broken. We have developed a new concept of democracy. It is called “Community Action”. As yet it has been realized only imperfectly. It has been viewed with misunderstanding and suspicion. But it cannot be denied.
The mayors realize that their communities cannot prosper without it. Industry and labor recognize that they must become a part of it. The professions understand that without it, their services cannot reach the millions of Americans who need them most.
What is Community Action? It is simply “democracy”, practiced to a degree we have not experienced in our time.
For the American Negro, it means a massive assault on the complex of problems inherent in the ghettos of large cities, and in the back waters of the rural south.
For the American Indian, it is a “revolution on the reservation”. For the first time, Indians are running their own lives. Indian wisdom and experience is being called upon.
For the migrant farm worker it means housing and education and justice adapted to his own way of life: in which he himself participates.
For the Mexican-American, it means an appreciation of the value of his culture and traditions: an acceptance of his differences and a complete ticket to first-class citizenship.
If our programs are not helping to provide this, I want to know about it. If there are things we are doing wrong, I want to be told. This is why I wanted to come here and to meet with you. I know you will not be silent.
A few months ago I was visiting our Job Corps center at Camp Gary, in Texas. I met a powerful young Mexican-American boy who had tattooed on his arm the words “born to lose.”
I will not rest and I know that you of the G.I. Forum will not rest until no American feels that because of his birth he is doomed to defeat.
Your organization is named G.I. Forum because your founders knew that after World War II there would be battles to fight here at home. I welcome “your fighting spirit” to the war on poverty.
The National Education Association Report entitled their study of schools for Mexicans as “The Invisible Minority.” Tonight and tomorrow you are no longer that.
Its subtitle was far more appropriate... “Pero No Vencibles”. “But Invincible.” That is the spirit in which, together, we will wage this new war.
