Vilma Socorro Martínez on Texas

“In Texas, as many of you know, children were required to be educated in either the white or the colored school. Officials in Texas, and I have in mind Pecos County and Nueces County, which have large percentages of Mexican American people, could not decide whether Mexican Americans were white or colored, so we got no schools. In most other schools, as in Uvalde, we were in fact put into a third category of school, called the Mexican school.”

“In order to prevail in Texas, we have to argue what is now known as the northern de jure segregation cases. We culled through the school board minutes going back to 1919. We traced the development of their school construction policies, their school assignment policies. We noticed that even toys were provided on the basis of race; twice the amount was spent for children in the Anglo schools as for children in the Mexican school, even though there were double the number of children in the Mexican schools as in the Anglo schools.”

“The pattern of abuses in Uvalde County is strikingly reminiscent of the Deep South of the early 1960s. The Civil Rights Commission's study documents that duly registered Chicano voters are not being placed on the voting lists; that election judges are selectively and deliberately invalidating ballots cast by minority voters; that election judges are refusing to aid minority voters who are illiterate in English; that the tax assessor-collector of Uvalde County, who is responsible for registering voters, refuses to name members of minority groups as deputy registrars; that the Uvalde County tax assessor repeatedly runs out of registration application cards when minority voter applicants ask for them; that the Uvalde County tax assessor-collector refuses to register voter applicants based on the technicality that the application was filed on a printed card bearing a previous year's date. Other abuses were uncovered by the study of the Civil Rights Commission in Uvalde County, and elsewhere in Texas: Widespread gerrymandering with the purpose of diluting minority voting strength; systematic drawing of at-large electoral districts with this same purpose and design; maintenance of polling places exclusively in areas inaccessible to minority voters; excessive firing fees to run for political office”