On September 29, 1995, voting lawyer Willie Velasquez was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Velasquez and the organizations he founded are credited with the dramatically growing political awareness and participation of Hispanic communities in the Southwestern United States.
The son of a union organizer, Velasquez was one of the five founders of the Mexican-American Youth Organization, or MAYO. Beginning with voter registration drives and walkouts on college campuses around San Antonio, MAYO expanded into organizing high school students and even managed to elect several candidates to local school boards. Inspired by groups like the Black Panthers and leaders like Malcolm X, some members of MAYO went on to form the Raza Unida Party, a party that aimed to elect Hispanic candidates without relying on Republican or Democratic establishments.
Velasquez worked as a boycott coordinator for the United Farm Workers, a union that organized farm workers across the southwest and brought national attention to their working conditions in the late 1960s. He then went working for Raza before embarking on the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in 1972. SVREP, whose motto was “Su vota, su voz” (Your vote is your voice), sought to combat low voter turnout, the voter apathy, and the deprivation of the institutional vote that affected the Hispanic community – Velasquez believed that the Hispanic community had a lot to learn from the civil rights movement and sought to address many of the same systemic issues as leaders of prominent as Martin Luther King, Jr.
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While he wouldn’t live to see the full effects of his work – he died suddenly of cancer at the age of 44 – Willie Velazquez has certainly achieved his goal of activating the Hispanic electorate. Today, SVREP claims to have registered more than 2.7 million voters, trained more than 150,000 political activists and won more than 100 civil rights cases. Although the Hispanic turnout is often significantly lower than that of whites, it has risen sharply in recent decades, increasing tenfold from 1.3 million in the 1994 general election to 13.5 million in 2016. In his speech to the White House in honor of Velasquez, then President Bill Clinton called Willie “a name synonymous with democracy in America”.
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