William C. Velásquez

• William C. Velásquez
• Born: May 9, 1944
• Died: June 5, 1988

Was a Mexican American civil rights activist and political organizer. His organization, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP), became the premier Latino voter registration organization in the nation and was central to providing research on the Latino electorate in the U.S. Velásquez was able to create viable political programs that achieved Latino empowerment in a post-Civil Rights era that had become increasingly conservative. SVREP provided a model for future political Latino outreach.

William (Willie) Velásquez, Jr., was born in Orlando, Florida, to William and María Luisa Velásquez in May of 1944. His parents were natives of San Antonio, Texas, but the family moved when William was stationed in Orlando during World War II. María Luisa would move back to San Antonio when her husband was deployed to the Pacific theater. When William returned from World War II, the family stayed in San Antonio. Willie, as they called him, would spend his entire educational career in San Antonio. His mother, who always made sure that Willie attended the best schools they could afford, sent her son to private Catholic schools. Catholicism and school would be influential forces in Willie’s life; they gave him a sense of right and wrong. After graduation from the predominantly white Central Catholic High School, Willie attended St. Mary’s University, a small Catholic university on San Antonio’s Southside. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Economics in 1966 and decided to continue his studies for a graduate degree in the same field.

Texas in the mid-1960s was experiencing significant political and social shifts as the ethnic Mexican community was beginning to challenge their social subordination and economic exclusion. Velásquez was drawn into the struggles, and in 1966 he became an organizer in the Rio Grande Valley for the United Farm Workers Union, the union started by Cesar Chávez and Dolores Huerta in central California in 1965. When he returned after a summer of labor organizing, he met a group of fellow Mexican American youths interested in change. Velásquez, José Angel Gutiérrez, Mario Compean, and Ignacio Pérez formed the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) in 1967. They chose the name because it sounded relatively benign and figured that the name could obscure the more radical activities the founders had in mind. MAYO was supposed to be an organization of organizers. The purpose of the organization was not to establish hierarchical connections and top-down control. Instead, MAYO was supposed to train organizers and leaders and provide them with the skills they needed to organize the communities they were from in Texas. MAYO would be responsible for training the leaders of most of the Chicano student walkouts across the state from south Texas to the Panhandle.

The upstart organizations needed funding and Velásquez and others saw hope in Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty programs, which provided millions of federal dollars aimed at ending or alleviating poverty across the nation. In an effort to access those funds, Velásquez cofounded the Mexican American Unity Council, a community development corporation and umbrella group that would help fund MAYO and a Chicano newspaper called Caracol. The other leader of MAYO was Gutiérrez, who was moving the organization toward a more political direction. The organization would eventually become a political party called La Raza Unida (the United People’s Party). Velásquez was supportive of their efforts, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that he differed in political strategies and he left the organization in 1970. He found a job that same year as a field director in Phoenix for the Southwest Council of La Raza, which would become the National Council of La Raza (which changed its name to UnidosUS in 2017). Leaving the National Council of La Raza in 1972, Velásquez started to work on an organization rooted in his own vision. For two years he sought funding to launch the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. In 1974, it opened with little fanfare in a small office in San Antonio. From humble beginnings, SVREP would leave a sizeable impact.

SVREP was a non-partisan organization that was committed to registering Mexican American voters in the Southwest in off-election years and mid-term years. During presidential elections, the Democrat and Republican parties would often launch substantial get-out-the-vote campaigns to entice Mexican American voters. After Spanish-language campaigns and the elections, politicians rarely delivered on their empty promises to Mexican American voters. In 1960, for example, Mexican American politicians in Texas helped create Viva Kennedy Clubs to encourage Mexican Americans to vote for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. Over 90 percent of Mexican Americans voted for Kennedy and helped deliver Texas’ electoral vote in a very tight election. Essentially, Mexican American voters won the presidential election for the Democrats, yet Mexican American politicians and citizens did not see any noticeable changes based on their vote. Velásquez wanted to change that by getting Mexican Americans involved in local elections and engaging them politically year round.

Velásquez was not a radical and he lacked the fiery rhetoric of many Chicana and Chicano activists of the time. What set Velásquez apart was his delight in the seemingly quotidian to bring about reform. He told Newsweek in 1987, “When we got Mexican-American candidates saying, ‘Vote for me and I’ll pave the streets,’ that’s when the revolution started.” He wanted to focus on the local—better schools, better streets, better jobs—not the national, as a way to attract Latinos to political participation. Velásquez believed that if Latinos could see real change happening, they would understand the power of electoral politics. SVREP conducted 1,000 voter registration drives in 200 cities and Indian reservations. It litigated eighty-five successful voting rights lawsuits.

The Southwest Voter Research Institute (SVRI) was chartered in 1984 to better understand the needs and opinions of Latino voters. It was an offshoot of SVREP. SVRI was a groundbreaking institution that helped research the Latino electorate, providing demographic and voting trends for the public and politicians alike. SVRI was one of the only organizations involved in this kind of research and Velásquez became president of the research branch in 1988.

Through his efforts, Velásquez made the nation aware of Latino voters’ potential power and made Latinos aware of their own political power. He had become so influential that he was scheduled to introduce Michael Dukakis at the Texas Democratic Convention in Houston on June 18, 1988. Before the convention, he had a routine check-up and was diagnosed with kidney cancer. He was treated at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, but there were complications. Velásquez passed away on June 15, 1988. He was only 44 years old. His rosary was attended by 2,300 people and his Mass, held at St. Mary’s Church in San Antonio, was attended by 1,400 people. President Bill Clinton awarded Velásquez the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in recognition of his efforts to the nation. He was only the second Latino in U.S. history to receive the award.

Willie Velásquez was a moderate and a pragmatist. That put him at odds with his more ideological and radical contemporaries, but he was neither complacent nor deferential which put him at odds with the earlier Mexican American politicians. Willie wanted many of the goals of the Chicano Movement, but he had different strategies to achieve them and different solutions to solve them. He believed that local politics were more important in engaging Latinos politically because local issues affected the community most. Once previously unregistered voters saw that their votes mattered, they would believe in the power of voting. Velásquez’s and SVREP’s motto was su voto es su voz, (your vote is your voice). Velásquez helped the Latino community’s voice be heard. In 1974, SVREP registered 2.4 million Latinos. By 1998, the number of registered Latino voters had grown to 7 million. Thanks to the efforts of SVREP, Latino politicians increased. In 1974, there were only 1,566 Latino elected officials in the U.S. In 1987, there were 3,038 Latino elected officials. Willie Velásquez helped transform American politics by changing the American electorate.

The most comprehensive biography on Velásquez is Juan A. Sepúlveda, Jr., The Life and Times of Willie Velásquez (2003). In 2016, PBS released a documentary of Velásquez’s life titled Willie Velasquez: Your Vote is Your Voice. His obituary appeared in The New York Times (June 16, 1988).