Interview of Esteban Torres

This is Virginia Espino, and today is January 19, 2011. I'm interviewing Mr. Esteban Torres at his home in West Covina. Mr. Torres, I'd like you to start off with your birthdate, if you could just give me that for the record.

Yes. I was born on January 27, 1930.

And then what we generally do is start with a family history, so can you tell me what you know about your early family history?

Well, I've been doing Ancestry [.com], you know, the programming that comes on the Internet. I'm subscribing to that, and so I've been researching our family, although I knew a lot about them. My great-grandfather [Eduoard Baron, born 1826] came from France, and he landed in San Francisco in the Bay Area in 1848, a little before the Gold Rush. He was born in France in 1826. In California--he came as a young man on a ship, as a ship hand, I guess. His uncle was the captain of the ship, and he came to accompany his uncle, and he liked what he saw here, and he decided to stay. And he stayed in the company of another compatriot of France, a Swiss gentleman by the name of Sutter, Colonel Sutter, who we now know as Sutter, Sutter's fort, where they discovered gold. And he stayed there at Sutter's development. Sutter had built a fort and a community they call Helvetia. This is the ancient name for Switzerland. He was a Swiss citizen, but he spoke French, as the Swiss do. So he got along with my great-grandfather, and he stayed there. Eventually he met a Mexican woman. This was during the period that California was under Mexican rule, and he met my great-grandmother [Concepcion Celaya], who was from Altar, Mexico. They got married, and he subsequently moved from the Bay Area down towards what is now known as Fremont. At that time, it was known as Washington Township. They raised a couple of children there, and he went into farming. This is what the [1860 U.S.] census report shows. He went into farming in the area. Then I don't know what happened, but he left that area, and they ended up in Mexico. Possibly my great-grandmother said, "Let's go back to my hometown," or something. They ended up in Mexico, and that's where my grandmother [Teresa Baron, b. 1873] was born. My grandmother was born in Guaymas, Sonora. I don't know for what reason my great-grandfather ended up in Sonora. There's speculation that the French were working in Sonora with the government of Sonora in mining efforts, and this was the French government, who had come in there to exploit mines. And conceivably, my great-grandfather may have met people that talked him into going into Mexico and moving down there, and that's where my grandmother was born. The family then later left Sonora and moved northwardly to the United States, and they settled in Tucson, early Tucson. They settled in around one of the Army's forts. In Tucson was an Army fort there. I remember my grandmother talking about when she was thirteen years old, they had finally captured the Native American Indian chief, Geronimo, and they had him in the town square there in a cage, and my great-grandfather took her down to see Geronimo. So she tells me a lot of stories about her father and her mother. They didn't teach her French. They raised other kids in Tucson, other siblings to my grandmother. And then my grandmother met a gentleman in Tucson, I guess. He was a notary. His name was Eduardo Gomez. And they subsequently moved to a mining center in Clifton, Arizona. It was a big mining center there, and he was a notary, working for the copper company. And that's where my mother [Rina Gomez b. 1908] was born, in Clifton, Arizona. So that's about as much as I know about that part of the family. My father [Esteban Torres] left his family. He was born in Rosalio, Sinaloa, Mexico, and he came as a young man in the late twenties to work the copper mines in Arizona, in Miami, the city of Miami. It was a big mining center there. My Clifton grandparents had moved to Miami, and so my mother met my father there. She tells me that he was an immigrant, was a good-looking individual. She saw him in, a Sixteenth of September parade they had in the little town there. He was dressed as a Matachine Indian, and I guess he was very becoming in that costume, and they met and talked and evidently they got married. And that's where they settled, because that's where he was working, in the big mine there. My grandfather died there, so my grandmother was left a widow. At about that time, as you will recall in history, the repatriation of Mexicans came about, and one day they came to the mine and rounded up all the Mexican miners, and they shipped my dad back to Mexico. That was in 1933. I was three years old. My brother [Hugo Torres] was two years old, and I never saw my father again. Never saw him again. Years later, when I was an adult, I had relatives visit me here in Los Angeles to tell me that after a long search, they had found me, that they'd been looking for me because my father had passed away, passed away in a small town in northern California, in San Joaquin Valley, [Tulare County], Dinuba. He was a farmer there. He had a big vineyard and town property, and he died without a will, and so my brother and I were the heirs to his property. And so never having seen our father, we inherited his property many, many years after. So that's about as much history as I know. I knew that the people that came looking for me were my uncles, and they said that my grandfather on my father's side [Jose Torres] had come up for the funeral. And I asked, I said, "So I have a grandfather?" And they said, "Yeah, you have a grandfather on your father's side. He's a very chipper gentleman. He went back to Sinaloa, and he's down there now." So I later arranged to take a trip to Mexico, took a family vacation, and I went looking for my grandfather in Rosario, Sinaloa, but I couldn't trace him, so I never saw him. Interesting, running around looking for these people, and that's why I got interested in the Ancestry thing, try to track them down, where were they born, where did they die, so we're accumulating records now.

Did you ever talk to your mother about that moment when they had to split?

Well, he never came home that day, and my mother and my grandmother then told me that besides the just general repatriation of Mexicans, they also repatriated--there were a lot of Yugoslavs also working there in the mines, and they were also shipped out. My father, as I recall them telling me, was also very much involved in union activity. The mine and mill, the smelter workers were the--at that time, they were joined with the International Workers of the World, the IWW, the so-called "Wobblies". He was involved with that, so probably even a greater reason why they got rid of him. And that always stayed in my mind that, well, I guess if you dabble in those kinds of [organizing] politics, you're bound to get some repercussions. But, no, my mother was able to eventually, after many years, through the court, obtain, I guess, a divorce in absentia, and so she remarried. She was able to remarry, and I had a stepfather [Gustavo Provencio] and I have siblings from that union.

Did she know he had been repatriated? Or did she have other ideas about what happened to him, at the time?

No, only that. We lived in a mining camp. I was born in the mining camp in Miami, in a tent city, and I guess the word went out to many other wives and families that their husbands weren't coming home. It was a tragic incident, and I've read about that and how I guess thousands and thousands of Mexicans, many of them American citizens, were repatriated back to Mexico, or voluntarily went back.

That's true.

My father I don't believe volunteered, but people tell me, my uncles tell me that eventually he came back to the States. He looked for us, and we had moved around. With his disappearance, we had to leave the mining camp, and we sort of wandered around some of those little mining camps. We knew people, and they housed us for a while, and eventually we ended up back again in--not back, but my mother ended up again in Clifton, her birthplace, and that's where she met my stepfather, and they married. And she and my stepfather left us, left my grandmother and I in Clifton, and they moved to Los Angeles, with the instructions that once they got settled here, they would arrange to have us meet them here in Los Angeles. And I can remember, you know, being with my grandmother and relatives, and we moved to Lordsburg, New Mexico, and we spent a number of months there. We finally got word that my mother was ready to pick us up, so they ended up going for us, and we moved to Los Angeles. We settled in East Los Angeles, and that's where I grew up, really. Went to grammar school there and junior high and high school. I'm a graduate of Garfield High School.

How many years did you spend with your grandmother?

My grandmother passed away in 1962. She lived to a long age. She was a sturdy woman, very sort of rigid, you know. She was a old Victorian style, I guess. She never changed her--she was born in 1873, with a large family of siblings, and she wore--we have old photographs of her--she wore those lengthy dresses, you know, down to the ankles, and corsets and pinned-up hair, and to her very death, she wore that kind of attire.

She came with you, then, when you moved to L.A. She stayed with you?

Yes. She came with us, yes.

Would you consider her your primary caregiver in the home?

She was. My mother eventually--I recall the Second World War breaking out, and my stepfather, who was a civil engineer, acquired employment at a large shipyard. It was wartime and so he was working there, and my mother then went to work in the same shipyard. She was one of those Rosie the Riveter-type women. She was a welder. They were making ships, and I remember her doing that kind of work. Both my grandmother and my mother were really the strength behind me. They encouraged me to continually strive, you know, to be a better person, never forget who you are, where you came from, never deny your ancestry, never deny your language, keep your language. They were avid readers. They were historians. They just read and encouraged me to read and write, and to this day I love to do those things. So I really credit them with a tremendous amount of support that I got in my learning years. They were very good.

So you recall any of the books that they read, or magazines or newspapers?

Well, I remember my grandmother used to read detective magazines. She had a real fad for reading detective magazines. But they read books, classic books. My mother read most of the classics and encouraged me to do the same. She loved history. She loved to read about history, so that's something that always stuck with me. I love to read history. I'm just always exploring and wanting to adventure and travel, and I picked up those traits, really, from her. So they were terribly resourceful women, very strong women.

Can you tell me a little bit about your home environment? And once you moved to East Los Angeles, what was your neighborhood like?

Well, it was not a bad neighborhood, because my stepfather, who had a good job, was able to rent a pretty nice house in Boyle Heights. We lived in Boyle Heights in a pretty nice, what do you call them--trying to think of the architecture of the home. It'll come to me [Craftsman]. The old frame houses, you know, that were built at the turn of the century around here.

Craftsman?

Craftsman, big large Craftsman home. And that's where I went to school, up in the Soto Street area. Then we moved back to the unincorporated area of East L.A, and it was a nice home. My stepfather had a drinking problem, so that was a constant problem, of course, with family relations, and so eventually my mother and he divorced, and so my mother became the real breadwinner. She was the one that went out to work, and my grandmother then took care of us. We were really under my grandmother's care. She was the lady of the house, you know, and again, a very stern grandmother, who really made us toe the line. If we didn't, she had a nice strap to--or told us if we misbehaved, "Go outside and get me a little branch off that tree over there. I need a little whipping rod here." So, reluctantly, we did it, but we knew she meant business. So we made sure we took care of things around the house so that we didn't undergo her strict, you know, demeanor.

Did you have responsibilities in the home, even as a child, like jobs or chores, that kind of thing?

Well, we did, yes, because there was an incident that I didn't describe to you. During the harsh depression, my father disappeared in the midst of this economic depression the country was in, so that my mother was left with myself and my brother. And I can remember to this date taking advantage--not advantage, but they had what they called in those days relief, the federal government. I guess you'd call it welfare today. And I remember going with my mother and standing in food lines. We would go, and they would pack a sack of groceries for us and vegetables. There was no work, so she couldn't work at that time, so they would hand out clothing. I remember wearing a form of corduroy jackets and trousers and kind of tennis shoes that were doled out by the government. And it was very harsh, and it was very [difficult] living in Clifton. The mines had closed down and there was no employment, and we were on this relief, and my mother had a comadre [Augeda Marquez], who had baptized my brother Hugo. And so her comadre and her husband were residents of El Paso, and they kept in touch with us, with my mother, and a relative of my mother's comadre came to see us and said, "You know, what, Rina?" She said, "Rina, my sister, who lives in El Paso, your comadre, has indicated to me that she would be willing to take Hugo to live with them." They had a good job. He was the manager of the company store in El Paso at the big smelter. There was a big smelter, still there in El Paso. So they had a nice company home. He was the company manager of this store where all the workers bought their goods and whatever, "And she said that they'd be willing to take Hugo, knowing of your economic condition, and it would be a great help for you. Would you accept?" So my mother, being in such desperate straits with myself and my grandmother and being on relief, she agreed to it. So I remember the day that the godparents came in their car, and they came for Hugo. We met them at the train station. That's where we agreed to meet. And so we said goodbye. I remember Hugo, to this day, sitting in the back of the car waving to us, and Hugo moved on to El Paso, where he would send us pictures and letters, and comadre would send letters to my mother, telling her, "Hugo is doing well, and he's in school." And we'd get these pictures of him and his tricycle and then a bicycle and then his cowboy uniform, and obviously I envied him, with all those luxuries that he was living with. And so my mother said, "Well, you know, once we get on our feet, we'll send for Hugo." So my mother remarried, as I told you, and we moved out here to Los Angeles, and she told my stepfather, she said, "Look. We're settled now. Let's send for Hugo." And he reluctantly agreed to. And at that time when my mother inquired about Hugo, his foster mother, his nina we called them, his godmother said, "Rina, my husband's just passed away. I just have to tell you that I'm now left with Hugo. Please don't take him. I mean, it would kill me if you took him away now. We love him so much. He's like our son, and my husband's just died, and what would I do without Hugo?" So my mother conceded and said, "Okay. Well, we'll wait a while, and then we'll try again." And she tried again, later years, let some years go by, and by that time she'd disappeared. She didn't live there anymore, and we couldn't track her down, so we couldn't track down Hugo. For years and years, my mother sought to find her comadre, but we couldn't locate her. She finally appealed to the Red Cross, I recall, and the Red Cross located my brother Hugo. He was already an adult and was in the Army. He was actually in the Army. He was in Korea. It took all that many years. But he didn't respond. It was so many years that maybe he didn't even remember us. He was very young when he left. And it was on the advent of being notified that my father was dead and that my uncle said, "You have to come now to Dinuba, to be the executor of his estate, since you are his heir, you and your brother. Where's your brother?" I said, "You know, we haven't been able to locate him." He said, "Well, we'll try to find him, because we need him to also be part of the estate process." And they put, I guess, professionals on the trail, and lo and behold, they located my brother Hugo. And so they brought him back to L.A. We met again after twenty-some years, and we were reunited to partake in the estate that my father left. He left a large forty-acre vineyard. He left some town properties. He was resourceful in his disappearance. We learned that he had come back and he looked for us. He couldn't find us. He somehow made his way to California. He moved up into the San Joaquin Valley. He went into farming. He went into a number of different kind of businesses, but eventually he ended up with enough money to buy this farm. And in the course of coming to California, the war broke out, and he was drafted. He wasn't a citizen. He was still an immigrant, and he was drafted, and he spent his war years in the Pacific. He was U.S. Army. And he came home, honorably discharged, and at that time, because of his service, they provided amnesty for immigrant veterans, and he gained citizenship that way. A lot of this I've learned through the Ancestry network, just tracking down the Army records and hospital records and things. But it was quite a story of how families could become disunited and broken because of the element of what we've seen in this country for so many years, the round-ups of immigrants and the repatriation, separation of families, and we were victims. We were victims like people are today.

Do you know why your mother didn't choose to go to--because she was not from Mexico--

No.

--why she chose not to follow your father?

Well, she didn't know where he went. She assumed that he went back to his hometown, but I guess in those days it was difficult for her to, as a single woman, venture out to go look for him. Why he didn't come back soon after, we don't know. We sometimes speculate. Maybe he didn't want to come back. Maybe it was a way of escaping responsibilities. "Hey, I'm free." There's always that speculation.

That left you on hard times, and you described a little bit about receiving relief and wearing those clothes, those government-issued clothes. Did you feel like that you were sharing the experience with other people? Or did you feel like you weren't a part of what other people were experiencing, that you had special needs?

Well, we know--I can recall that there were other people going through the same trauma, you know. It was a mining town, and there were a lot of people who were Mexicans, but they were U.S., they were Mexican Americans, and they were caught up in the same problem, the unemployment situation, the economic aspect of the whole country being in the condition. As a matter of fact, later on my mother, seeking some way of trying to provide for us, did obtain a job with what was called the Works Project Administration, the WPA. My mother, through my grandmother, had learned to become a good seamstress, so my mother went to work teaching other women how to sew in some kind of a WPA project. So she was able to earn money that way and get us off relief. It was a sad commentary. I read about the WPA period and the many stories of that time in our history and what happened to families and people and the kinds of projects that took place. I have a great interest in the great WPA works that artists were involved with, in mural painting and sculpture and—fascinating national projects.

That connection to that part of history is something that we don't often hear, you know, the personal stories of individuals. You hear about those large projects that have more of a national impact, like the murals. But your mother's experience, where--

And it made me have a great empathy for people who are down and out. It kind of always--when I went to work, I said, "Well, you know--." They said, "Do you want to join a union?" when I went to work. I said, "Well, yeah, I want to join the union," because I knew that I wouldn't get deported for it. But I wanted to follow what my father had been doing, and in a way, that was the way I got to be who I am today, working in that industry and representing workers and feeling their hurt and their empathy. Yes, it was a good learning curve for me.

Well, before we go on to that period of your life, can we just step back a little bit--

Sure.

--and I had asked you about your responsibilities in the home as a child, and while you were experiencing those hard times, did you have to find work for yourself or anything like that.

Well, you know, this is a period of time when I was just a child. I remember we lived in a pretty run-down little shack in Clifton, outdoor--no indoor plumbing. We had a little outhouse in the back. We had a pump in the backyard, and we had to pump water, and I remember doing that, to bring in the house in a bucket, and that's the water that was used for cooking and bathing and whatever. We didn't have a bathtub, so we had a big tub which my grandmother filled and put on the stove and warmed up the water. That's how we took a bath, things like that. I remember chopping wood. We had a woodstove. We didn't have electric lights. I remember the kerosene lamps we had. In a way, those were fond memories. I really liked what we were doing at that time. I used to love it when it would rain, and you'd hear the rain dropping on the tin roof, you know. And to this day, I just love being in a place where I can hear the rain falling. Yes, my mother would send us out, my brother and I. She would say--during the hard times she'd say, "Go next door." There's a field there, an empty field, and there were what they called greens. They were wild weeds, you know, called quelites, and we'd go out there and we'd pick them and bring them in the house. My grandmother would wash them, and she'd fry them and cook them with beans, you know. That was a daily staple. I remember we didn't have a refrigerator. Once in a while the iceman would come by and put ice in there, and that's where you kept canned milk cold, so it wouldn't spoil on you, and really primitive living. But it gave us a sense of survival, you know, being able to work hard to better the condition if we could, well, my brother and I, until he left, and that's when, of course, he landed in the lap of luxury. [laughs] And he did well. He did well for himself in El Paso, Hugo. Strangely enough, when we were separated for years and years, and when we met again twenty years after, twenty-five years after, for whatever reason, not having been together, he had the same traits that I had. He liked to draw, as I loved to draw. He loved history. He read history books. He loved to sing. He had a very good voice. He would go to Mexico. He would cross El Paso and go to Juarez, and he would hang out with the mariachis in the town bars, and he became a big singer down there, a big imitator of Jorge Negrete. He was very talented, Hugo. Bless his heart. He's now passed away. But it was so interesting to see him once again, you know.

Did you maintain contact with him afterwards, after that?

Oh, yes. After that we wrote consistently. A number of times we went to visit with him in El Paso, and he came here to visit. He brought his family. He had a number of daughters, his wife. He had learned to be a window dresser. He worked for a large clothing company, and he was the person that would dress their windows, you know, with the mannequins, dress them and put up all the paraphernalia that made the store attractive. He had great talent.

Did you ever talk about his feelings regarding your--

He didn't know. He didn't know, and, of course, he saw his mother, my mother, again, and Grandma, and he treated them kindly, but he didn't see them as his mother. He didn't see my mother as his mother. It hurt my mother, of course, but she understood that, in a way, she had a made a sacrifice, and he was the beneficiary, and if he had feelings to that effect, she understood why he felt that way. But that's, again, the sad commentary on what happens when people are dislocated from each other, you know.

Yes. Well, tell me a little bit then about your education. When you moved to East Los Angeles, was that your first experience in school?

Well, actually, I went to school in Arizona. I went to kindergarten there, both Hugo and I, and I think we went up to about maybe the third or fourth grade. So by the time I came to East Los Angeles, I had been to school. And the thing that both my grandmother and my mother taught me was, of course, we're a bilingual family. They spoke very fluent English, both my mother and my grandmother, and spoke Spanish as well, so that I was able to communicate in both languages. But being a Mexican kid in East L.A. and speaking English as I did, was kind of a phenomena to the teachers. They would say, "Oh, look at Edward," you know. "He speaks such good English. Edward, come over here and talk to the children. Get in the reading circle and you read to them, and then go around and have them read to you," you know. I can remember at that age, you know, sitting in a classroom reading to the kids, and then the teacher wasn't reading. But she would ask the kids, "What did he mean by what he said?" And the kids would try to interpret what I had said. They were learning English, you know. So there I was, a teacher's aide at that age. [laughs] And I liked to draw. My grandmother--was a good artist, and when I was little and I would see things, I'd say, "Grandma, draw that for me." So she would. She'd get a pencil and paper and draw a little tractor for me, or a farmer on a tractor as they rode by, and I was just amazed that somebody could do that. So I picked up on it so I could draw my own tractor, you know. And ever since then, I became kind of like the classroom artist. The teachers really wanted me to draw something to commemorate a holiday or something, or a poster, you know. I always got that job, so that was my claim to fame, even in my adult life. I mean, in high school I was a school artist. I was in the Army. I was the company cartoonist and sign painter and all that kind of stuff. It's always served me well to do that. It opened up a lot of doors for me along the way.

How do you feel your teachers treated you, then, in those early days in elementary school?

The teachers treated me well. There was one occasion when I took the wrath of a teacher that maybe wasn't happy with me. It was an incident that really did change my life, I think. We lived across the street from a school, where we went, the grammar school where I went. I was in the fifth grade, I think, then. It was during the war, World War II, and the custom was that families with--you know, we had a home--families would plant in their backyards what they called "victory gardens", you know, plant carrots and lettuce, and you'd have these little gardens where you could grow vegetables, and it was during the war. Rationing was in, so you benefited the home with fresh vegetables. And the schools did as well. They had agricultural classes, and we had a big space in the school ground where we planted all kinds of things, corn and tomatoes and carrots, and they had fruit trees and all that. And we lived across the street from that school. We had the bad habit, because it wasn't allowed, that on weekends we'd jump the fence, you know, climb the fence and go play on the swings, in the sandboxes, and we'd have fun on the slides and all that. And my grandmother would look out and see us there, and she'd say, "Get over here. You're not supposed to be there." And she was always on our case about that. So one day I went to school, it was a school day, and the teacher told the class, she said, "I have some bad news for you," she said. "First of all, I want Edward," that was me. They called me Edward, that was my name, Edward. "We want Edward to come up here to the front of the room." And I wondered what for? Maybe she'll give me some assignment or something. So she stood me over there by her desk, and she said, "Over the weekend, somebody came on our schoolyard and destroyed our victory garden. They took all our vegetables. They took all the fruit. They damaged all the plants, and Edward here was a part of that." I was shocked, I mean, for her to say that. Somehow, somebody must have said, "Well, Edward plays over there on the playground, and they come over the fence." I mean, somehow she knew that, so she blamed me for the destruction. And I was mortified. I was in tears standing there. And the kids were just like glaring at me, you know, and, "Ooh--," just--and she said, "Go sit down. Go sit down." And I sat down there. You know, everybody just [sneered at me]--I was an untouchable, you know. So I went home, and I guess my mother noticed I was really sort of downcast. She said, "What's wrong with you? What happened? Why are you acting this way?" And so she finally got out of me what had happened, and I told her. Well, she was furious. She was furious. She said, "I want you to go back to school tomorrow." She says, "I have to work. I can't do it. But I want you to go back to school tomorrow, and you tell that teacher, you tell Mrs. Osborne," I remember her name, "you tell Mrs. Osborne that I work hard for this family. I put food on the table. You have all the food that you need to eat, and you don't have to go steal food from school to eat. You know that we don't allow you to do that, and you wouldn't do it, and you tell her to apologize to you. And if she doesn't apologize to you, you tell her that I'm going to come over and I'm going to beat the hell out of her." Just like that! I said, "How can I say--?" "You do that. If you don't, I'm going to go over there and do this." Well, you know, that was a big order to put on me to do. So I went to school and I went up to Mrs. Osborne. I said, "Mrs. Osborne, I have something to say." "What do you have to say?" I said, "I told my mother what happened to me, what you said, and my mother said that you owe me an apology, because she works very hard, puts food on the table, and we don't have to steal to eat in my home. And if you don't apologize to me, she's going to come over, and she's going to beat the hell out of you." Well, "What did you tell your mother?" I said, "What you said yesterday, what you told me." "Well," she said, "then wait a minute." And she called the class to attention. "Children, I want your attention please. Edward's here. You know what I told you about him yesterday? Well, I want to apologize to him. He didn't do that. He really wasn't responsible, and he didn't do that." And, you know, the kids looked at me, and I was shaking. I never shook so hard in my life. And the teacher said, "Edward, tell them, tell them what you did." Well, you know, I already told her. She says, "Tell them what you did." I said, "Well, I went home, and I told my mother that Mrs. Osborn said that I stole the vegetables and destroyed the garden, and my mother's going to come over if she doesn't apologize, and she's now apologized to me." And all the kids were, you know, looking at me and all that. [laughs] Well, that experience really just fortified me that I could stand up and really express myself, you know, really talk to a group of kids, and ever since that day, I've never been afraid to stand up for my rights and for somebody else's, or speak before a crowd, or seek justice. That's been my--but that incident, I just credit that incident.

What a valuable lesson to learn at such a young age. Did you ever wonder how your mom became that kind of person? Because stereotypically, Mexican mothers, Mexican American mothers, are viewed as deferential to authority, as, the teacher knows best.

Yes. Well, her father, my grandfather, and my grandmother, really--they had five children, my grandmother and my grandfather, and my mother was the only surviving child. They had five children and my mother was the only--she was the last and surviving child. So they treated her like a princess. He had a good living. They had a good home, and they taught her. They taught her how to read and be a little lady and all that kind of stuff. It was that kind of upbringing that she had. My grandmother was, as I said, very worldly in her attitude about things, and always talking about her ancestors and her relationship with her siblings and her father, and what a great Frenchman he was. "The Tucson Fort on Bastille Day, they would come to the house," she said, "and they would bring the Army band, and they'd call out my father, and he'd come out to the porch, and they'd salute him and they'd say, "Mr. Baron, we're going to play the Marseillaise for you," the French national anthem, and they would play it and he would sing it. He'd sing. "It was so dramatic," she said, "that they would do that, because they knew him, they liked him, and they would come and do that." So those kinds of stories, you know, always mystified me, and, of course, my mother knew all those stories. I tell them to my kids today. It was fun. So my mom, yes, my mom was educated. She went to high school. She didn't go to college. Later years, she always attended some kind of class somewhere to learn something. And she became--after her divorce and after her having to really be the breadwinner, she worked in pharmacies, in drugstores. You know, starting out at the drugstore, eventually she ended up in the pharmacy department. So she was a clerk, and so she got to know everything about the pharmacy department. I have kids and friends that still remember her, in East L.A., going to one of the local drugstores. "Oh, I remember your mom. She was such a nice lady. She knew everything about pharmacy," although she wasn't the pharmacist. [laughs] But she was well educated, but mostly through reading, just reading and crossword puzzles and all that kind of thing.

Well, it sounds like her work in the pharmacy, that was self-education, self-taught, learning the medicines and what they're for and the prescriptions and that kind of thing.

She learned a lot just working in the shipyard, being a welder and having to know measurements and knowing math. She was pretty well self-educated.

Did she have any involvement with unions while she was in the shipyard?

Yes. She was a steelworker. She was a member of the Steelworkers Union. She would later tell me, when I was involved in the union, "Well, son, I was a steelworker, Local so-and-so, Steelworkers." And later she was a member of the Retail Clerks Union. She always appreciated the union. She always told me, you know, "Go union." [laughs]

So then tell me a little bit about your later education. So that was a seminal moment for you, that one experience in elementary school. Did you have any other experiences like that later on in junior high or high school?

Well, in junior high and in high school, I always strove to be a good student, in many cases. I was always ambitious. I always wanted to be sort of on the scientific side. I wanted to be a scientist, you know. I wanted to be an astronomer. And my mother would buy me those kinds of elements, a chemistry set for Christmas, or a microscope, or a telescope, so I always had those things, and I was bent in that direction. And kids, well, kids would call me a nerd, because I was into that kind of situation. The neighborhood kids, I would invite them over. "What are you doing?" "I'm mixing these chemicals because I'm making this." You know, "Wow." They used to call me professor. "Here comes the professor." [laughs] So I was just always on the verge of some adventure, learning about something that most kids didn't wander into in those days. I used to love electronics. I learned how to--you wouldn't probably understand about this. Early in the thirties, before the advent of radios, they had crystal sets. Have you ever heard of that? They had crystal sets. That's what they sold to a family that wanted to hear the news. It was a little box with dials on it, a little box like this [demonstrates], and they would have a little--you had earphones, you put them on. And then at the center of the box, you had a little stone like that, about this size, and with a little wire that came up, you could pick on the stone, you know, pick at it, and the stone is a crystal. It's an element that you mine. And the crystal would pick up sound waves. And if you had an antenna, if you put up an antenna wire and you brought it in and connected it to the set and with earphones and you picked, you could hear music, and you could hear the broadcasting that was going on. That's the way people got their--that's the way they did it. They'd put the earphones in a big bowl, and people could sit around the table and you could hear the music or the news or whatever was on. That was in the thirties. Well, when I was in the mid-thirties, I picked up on--by that time they had radios, had the big radios where you sat down and dialed, you know. But I had picked up on those little sets, and I learned how to make them, so I used to make my own crystal sets, and I got kids involved in learning how to make crystal sets. And then from a crystal set, you went into doing away with the little stone and having what they called diode tubes, little tubes you would put in there. They were glass tubes, and they would pick up the airwaves and broadcast to you on a speaker what was going on. Or you could have earphones. So I did all that sort of thing, and kids were amazed. My parents were always amazed that I was doing that. And I was forever building antennas and things like that. I wanted very much to be a pilot, and I said, "At least when I grow up, I want to be a pilot." So at Garfield High School, the war had just ended, as a matter of fact. The war had just ended, and they had a professor there, teacher, who set up a whole class on aerodynamics, and it was this class at Garfield High School. It was the teaching of aerodynamics, how things fly, how airplanes fly and how they are sustained in the air, and what causes them to take off, and I wanted that course. And being at the age and at the time when most Mexican kids were put into woodshop classes or metal shop, auto mechanics, "Hey, you guys will be good mechanics," or put you in print shop, I didn't want that. I wanted to be in the aeronautics class. "No, no. We're going to put you in the electric shop. You'd like electric--." "Yeah, I know, I like electricity." "Well, that's where you've got to go," said the counselor. "That's where you have to go." "Well, I want aeronautics." "No, that's not for you." Only the white kids could get aeronautics. So, you know, I really became rather disenchanted with high school because of that, couldn't get what I wanted to get, you know. I wanted to learn algebra, because that was something if you're going to be a pilot or something, you've got to learn these things. "No, you just stick with basic math. That's what you need to do." And I found it very dissatisfying to go to school, and I was on the verge of dropping out. In fact, I would feign illness and not come to school, or ditch. I'd get with some of my buddies, we'd go to the beach, or we'd hang out somewheres. And one day I was out of school but I was going to meet one of my friends at school. He said, "Well, come and we'll go out." He said, "Meet me at school." So I went there, and I was hanging around outside, and this teacher came out from the aeronautics class. He said, "Well, how come I haven't seen you lately?" And I said, "Well," I said, "I've been out." "Well, why aren't you coming to school?" I said, "Well, there's nothing here, really, to satisfy me." "Aw, come on, can't be that way," he said. "Well, no," I said. "I've been trying to get into your class, I don't know how many times, and I can't get in there. The counselors won't put me in your class." He said, "You want to come into my class?" I said, "Yes." "I'll get you in. I will get you in my class, if you'll come back." And I said, "Okay, it's a deal." So they arranged for me to go into that class.

I'm going to pause it just for a second.

Okay, we're back, and you were going to finish that story about school.

So Mr. Tower was his name, said, "I'll get you in the class, and as soon as we arrange for that--," I don't know whether it was starting a new semester or what, but he got me into his class. And because it was after World War II, he had acquired all sorts of paraphernalia in the classroom, and he had something called a Link Trainer, which is the cockpit of an airplane, had it mounted. And first of all, you would learn the aerodynamics of the time. You'd learn about cloud formations and the weather, meteorology, how cloud formation takes place, how the wind affects flight, lightning and all the things you have to know as a pilot. And you learn about the way that the propellers and the engines lift the plane and keep it afloat, and the rudders and the elevator and all those sorts of dynamics. And then eventually in the class, you got to go into the Link Trainer, and had the instruments of an airplane and steering and all the dials. You'd put on your earphones, and we had a radio tower in the room, with one of the students was the air controller, and you got into the Link Trainer and they would put a cover over it so you couldn't see, and you would fly only by instruments, as if you were in fog or were flying at night or something, you know, everything to make a pilot out of you. That's what the Army used. It's what the Air Force used, and he had it in the high school And then you bought insurance, your parents bought insurance, and he would take you out to the airfield in Montebello. This is Montebello. They had an airstrip. And you would get in these biplanes. You'd sit in the back seat, and the pilot would go in the front, or the other way around. You'd go in the front, the pilot in the back, and the pilot would take off, and you'd take off, and you'd read the map. You had to lay out a flight course, and you would fly down to Huntington Beach and fly along the coast and come back, and you'd be doing all these things, listening to the weather reports, and you were flying the plane. But you didn't land it. Then you would come back to Montebello and you'd land the plane; he would land the plane, and then the other students--it was an amazing course. But then he said to me, "Now that you're here in my class," he said, "you're going to be my weather man." He had the radio man. He had the controller. He said, "You're going to be my weather man." He said, "See the little back room over there?" I said, "Yes." He said, "That's going to be your station. You won't have to be here in the class with everybody. You'll be over there," and on top of the school, you know, the roof, they had all the weather instruments, the little propellers and things that are measuring the air velocity and all that, thermometers and all. And then in the little back room you could read those instruments, and that's the thing you would transmit to the pilot and all that. So I was the weather man. He said, "I want you to do something while you're back here." He said, "I know you're a good artist." He said, "So I wanted you to be in my class, because you're a good artist." He says, "I'm writing a book," and he says, "I want you to do some drawings for me that illustrate certain things about aerodynamics." He said, "For instance, you see this Bunsen burner here? The Bunsen burner here?" You know, a Bunsen burner with a little gas light coming out, little flame? He said, "And we'll put a flask of water on top, and then on top of the flask there's that piece of glass, and as the water heats up from the flame, it creates steam, and it starts to gather on the glass sheet up here. It condenses up there. That's the way the weather works, you know. The sun heats the water in the ocean, and the water in the ocean creates steam, and it goes up and condenses, it becomes clouds. That's what I want you to draw for me, how that is the basis of condensation." So I would draw that experiment. It was an experiment, and I would label it, you know, Experiment, Figure Number 1. And then he'd say, "Draw me this wing. Draw a wing and show the way the wind hits the wing and goes over it and how the wind also goes underneath the wing, and that's what keeps the wing in flight." So I had all these drawing assignments, you know. Great. And I was learning at the same time. So I got an A in class, but--and I was having fun. And he wouldn't let anybody go there. "Don't bother Edward. He's the weather man. Don't go back there," you know, keep them out of there. And so I had a ball. I had to leave the course because the insurance got really high, and most of the kids just didn't take up flying anymore. We continued the course, but you didn't fly. But later years, later years, I'm already an adult, I'm in Congress. I'm in the House of Representatives as a congressman. It's already been fifty years since I've been in high school. And I was telling my staff about this--I'm telling you. And they said, "Well, he was writing a book?" I said, "Yeah, he wrote a book." "Well," they said, "well then, congressman, the book should be in the Library of Congress, because every book that's written is in the Library of Congress." I said, "You know, that's right." I said, "Why don't we check it out? Maybe it's there." "Well, yeah, congressman, you're the only one that can check books out of the Library of Congress. You tell us and then we'll go get the book. What would it be?" I said, "I don't know what he labeled it or what," I said, "but it would be about aerodynamics, history of flight or something, by John Tower." "Okay." So they go to the Library of Congress and lo and behold, there's the book, and there's my drawings. [laughs] See, he was exploiting me.

And so you didn't have credit for the illustrations? He didn't give you credit?

No. No. In fact, in fact, we looked at the book, and he thanked everybody in the world, you know, how you do the acknowledgments in a book, how you thank the school principal for allowing you the time, and thanked so-and-so engineer, thanked pilots, and thanked everybody, but he didn't thank me for the illustrations. And I never signed the illustrations. And I've always since said to my kids, "Always sign what you draw. Always sign and put a date in a little corner." So we made copies of all my drawings, and I have them in my file. But that was my experience. It was a good one. Got me back in high school. I graduated. I owe it to him. It was a win-win. He won and I won.

That's beautiful. I think we should probably stop there, since you need to leave, and we still have some video left, so this is a perfect time to stop. Thank you so much.

This is Virginia Espino, and today is January 24, 2011. I'm interviewing Mr. Esteban Torres at his home in West Covina. Mr. Torres, before we started the recorder, you were telling me you remembered some stories or you had some memories that didn't get into last week's interview. Would you like to start there?

Well, yes. You know, having been born in Arizona and raised there for some years in my early childhood, I was fascinated by the Native Americans in Clifton, where I remember. I always thought of them as an interesting group of people. My grandmother [Teresa Gomez] would tell me stories about Geronimo, I think I mentioned that to you, the Indian chieftain. I would see Indians in and around Clifton, and I always felt very sorry for them, because they always looked like they were apart from the general populace. They were either traveling or moving around or selling objects, you know. So when I moved to California, I always recall them, and then I became involved in a program called Woodcraft Rangers, which was really a program for young men, as I recall, to engage in Indian lore, and it was called Woodcraft Rangers. I don't know if the program still exists. But we engaged in those things that were wannabe Indians, and we would camp out, we would go camping. We would set up tents, and we would do all the things that we had read about Indians doing, you know, making fire, primitive methods of making fire, and then we'd collect, try to find arrowheads and things like that. It was really fascinating. To this day, I've had a great interest with the Indian-Native American community, and I've been very close with them, working in Congress with them, working on legislation, and working with tribal groups here in the area.

What did you learn from that experience about them?

Well, it gave me a greater sense of understanding about Indian lore, about their culture, and it always fascinated me. I always read, try to read books about their history, their trials and tribulations, the terrible things that happened to them as a nation, and to this day I have a great interest in that. From that experience, at the encouraging of my mother again, who wanted me to stay active as a young person, I became involved in scouting, and scouting offered an opportunity for me to really leave the house and go to a camping experience in the mountains or in some camp. And you learned through scouting a whole series of issues that most young men or young kids at that time don't learn, especially in the barrio. There was a Boy Scout troop where I lived, but it was mostly Anglo kids. There were very few Chicanos, you know, Latinos, Mexicans in this situation, involved in scouting, and I really enjoyed it. It was fascinating, the kind of program that they put forth. I was going through a scouting test to reach the rank of First Class Scout, and I was learning to swim, and I had the unfortunate experience of almost drowning. So from that I sort of stopped there. I didn't finish the requirements for a First Class Scout, so I stayed at a second-class level, as it was called, Second Class Scouting. But the experience helped me in this way. When I joined the Army, here we are joining the Army. We're out in boot camp the first days that we're there. We have this tough drill instructor, this tough sergeant that's lining us up and asking us to come to attention, and he asks, "How many of you here," he said, "drove a truck, have driven a truck?" Well, everybody thought here's an opportunity to get into some truck driving in the Army, so a number of the fellows raised their hands, and the sergeant says very sourly, he says, "Okay, you truck drivers. Look over there." He said, "See those wheelbarrows? Take them off. You're going to start picking up all the trash around the barracks." So that sort of calmed everybody. They didn't want to volunteer any more occupations. Then he said, "How many of you here have ever been a Boy Scout?" Well, I didn't want to exactly say I want to be a Boy Scout, because I figured it was a trap coming, you know. [laughs] But I did raise my hand. And he said, "You, Torres, were a Boy Scout?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Okay. Well, from now on," he said, "you're going to be the squad leader here. Now line these guys up and march them off to the barracks." And that was my first test of leadership, I guess, becoming a squad leader, thanks to the Boy Scouting.

That's interesting because generally at that time--what year are we talking about?

I was twelve, so that must have been--

Well, you were in the military, and they allowed you a leadership role because of your Boy Scout experience. What year was that?

Oh, that was 1949. I was nineteen.

So, well, maybe, maybe not so much. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about the treatment that you received, being Mexican American, in the military.

In the military?

Yes. I mean, this sounds like it didn't really matter. You were given this leadership position, despite the fact that you're a Torres.

Right. Well, the sergeant, as I recall, a big gruff guy who we used to call El Oso, because he looked like a big bear, was a Latino, was a Mexican, so maybe he favored, you know, that hey, this guy's a Boy Scout and his name is Torres, I'm going to make him a squad leader. That was a good happening. Other events in being in the military, there was, I noted, a whole range of attitudes by soldiers against Mexicans. I went into the service before the Korean War. It was after World War II, and I suppose the seasoned soldiers, the people that were officers and non-commissioned officers, had fought with Mexican Americans, and they valued their role in the military. As we know today, there are many Medal of Honor winners. The greatest Medal of Honor winners are Mexican Americans, and they had a respect for Mexican Americans. But there were some who didn't know about the history or that, and tended to be discriminatory. They either excluded you from an event, or excluded you from a gathering, because you were a Mexican. They didn't figure that you had the wherewithal to engage with them. And there were some individuals who I think took it very seriously, to be racist. And I saw racism at its worst when I was stationed in Virginia, at the engineers' school that I later attended as a soldier. When we went to Washington, D.C., on one weekend, it was about four of us. One of them was an African American, and we were in downtown Washington, taking in the sights, and we decided to go into one of the drugstores to have a Coca-Cola and a hamburger. And lo and behold, we sat at the counter. The waitress asked us what we wanted, including me. She didn't discriminate against me. But she told the African American soldier that was with us, she said, "You know you're not supposed to be sitting here at the counter. You know where you're supposed to be." And he looked around, and he saw that they had a separate counter where you couldn't sit, you stood up. That's where the blacks had to go. And we said, "Why is that?" We protested right away. "Why is that? Why can't he sit here?" She said, "He knows why. He knows why." And then he got up to--we said, "Well, if he can't sit here, neither can we." So we got up and we left, and that was my really first experience at being hit with that. And as I found out, the public restrooms and water fountains had the signs "White" or "Colored," and that was my first experience with this kind of racism.

How did you feel at that moment, do you remember?

It was a shock, you know, that how could that be? Especially in this beautiful city that I was so impressed by, you know, the nation's capital, the Capitol building, the monuments, you know, the capital of the United States, telling my black friend that he couldn't sit at the counter with us. It was a bad feeling.

What did he do? Do you recall his reaction?

Well, he sort of accepted it, like he knew that he shouldn't do that. Maybe he wasn't aware that in Washington, D.C., it was no different than Alabama, where he was from. So he got up and was resigned to go over to that counter. It was a sad commentary on what it was at that time.

Was the military different in that regard?

You know, that was actually the time that--as I recall, in basic training we had African Americans training with us in basic training here in California. When I went overseas--I was stationed in Germany--the African Americans were in a separate unit. They were in a separate company. Our company didn't have any African Americans, until we were told by our commanding officer that from here on forth, the president of the United States, President Truman, had declared that the Armed Forces would be integrated, and we were able at that time to receive our first African American in our barracks, which didn't bother me, but I suppose a lot of people felt funny about it. And he felt funny about it too. But that's what the standard was at the time.

What about conversations about African Americans? Like we're privileged to those racist comments, because we're not African American. Sometimes people will say things in front of us. Was there any of that going on at that time?

Well, you always had individuals, even in our own community, as Mexicanos, making derogatories against blacks, derogatory statements or things, or jokes, you know, that sort. The gang I hung around with, the gang of people that I hung around with, didn't do that, because in our community we had--in our high school, we had actually one black student, and he was like anybody else. He was a great athlete and was a great football player. There was a family in East L.A. in the barrio, the Slayton family, who were African Americans, were the only African Americans, really, that I ever saw in East L.A. And they were held with high respect, because the whole family, they were all good athletes. In fact, they went on to become like all-city football players and went into professional football, the Slayton family. But there was racism, but it wasn't overt. You didn't bring somebody down or exclude them because of their color.

Can you talk to me a little bit, then, about the ethnic makeup of your community, your neighborhood that you grew up in East Los Angeles?

Well, the community I grew up in was a mixed community. It a majority of Mexican American people, but there were a lot of Anglo Americans that lived in the community, older people who'd settled there a long time ago. And little by little, we began to see the change in the community as more Anglos moved out or passed on, and Mexican families began to move in, such that there was a greater growth of Mexican families living in the general community. In high school and junior high school, there were really mixed ethnic groups. We had, as I recall in junior high school, we had Japanese. Actually, in grammar school I remember the Japanese, because I remember that very pointedly, because I had a good Japanese friend in grammar school, and one day the teacher told us, she said, "I want you kids to know that--," his name was Sidney Yamasaki, "that Sidney was not going to be with us. He's moving." We all were surprised, and she said, "Yes, Sidney has to move, and so he won't be around with us." And we all said, "Where are you going, Sidney?" And he kind of didn't want to tell us. He just said, "Oh, I just have to move." And I remember where his house was, because I used to go over to his home, and I remember his family packing up and getting ready to move. I really didn't know why they were moving. And I remember my mother asking me about Sidney, and I said, "Well, he's had to move. Why is that?" She said, "Well, you know they're interning the Japanese. They're putting them in internment camps because of the war." And that's how I learned that the Japanese were taken to detention camps and wouldn't be around. Later in junior high school, as I said, my fellow students were Armenians, a lot of Russians. I used to hang around with the Russian kids in grammar school. They were of a religious group called Molokans. They were a group that had been really kicked out of Russia because of their religious beliefs, and they had gone to China as an exile. And the Chinese didn't tolerate them, so they went to Mexico, and Mexico arranged for them to have land. They farmed land down in Baja California, and many of them from Baja California came into East L.A., and there was a whole group of Molokans that settled in East L.A., and I used to hang around with them. Well, the interesting family, you know, I learned a lot of things from them, eat their food and partake in their saunas, and it was an interesting group of people. I have since then traveled to Baja to see their origins, and found out that the Mexican government provided land for them. They wanted the Molokans to really populate and settle Baja California, and if you travel to Baja to the Guadalupe Valley, you'll see remnants of Russian Molokans still there, their villages and their little museum and things like that. In high school it was Armenians, Armenians galore. Our high school was near Montebello, and there were a lot of Montebello people, Armenians living in Montebello and in East L.A. But a lot of Anglo kids as well, so I grew up in that milieu of people. I never sensed any discrimination against anybody. Everybody got along together. But always, there was always groupings. You know, you always hung around with your own folks, or you mixed with them, parties, going out. If you were into sports and things like that, you participated with everybody.

By that time, the Italians and the Jewish community had shrunk a bit. Is that what you remember?

There were a few Italians. There were a few Jewish kids in our school. Most of the Jewish community was still in City Terrace. There was a large Jewish community there, and they were attending Roosevelt and Hollenbeck Junior High School. But over at Garfield where I was at, it wasn't to that extent, to that large of an extent of Jewish or Italian kids. I grew up in some interesting times, when it seemed to me there was no real ethnic strife. There were no big gang fights or things like that. If there were gang fights, they were among ourselves. You know, the Mexicans had their own little gangs, but they weren't violent gangs. Again, the gangs tended to fisticuffs, you know, and maybe a stabbing here and there, and that was about the end of it.

Today's really difficult for a young man--

It is difficult today, yes.

--to grow up in East Los Angeles, go to those high schools and not be approached about gang affiliation. Was it like that during your years, then?

No, it wasn't that way. Well, there were gangs, and it just happened the group that I hung around with, we were sort of a neutral group. We weren't gang members to the extent we know what gangs are today. We were more like a club, and while there were areas where the gangs were tough and didn't want another gang intruding into their turf, there would be some violence there. There'd be some fighting. I don't recall ever hearing about any shootings, though. We were sort of a neutral group of teenagers. We were called the Tea Timers. That was our nickname, and we were sort of neutral. We were sort of ambassadors. We could talk to anybody, and they would accept us and we would accept them. So we could cross turf lines and nobody would bother us. We'd go to a party or something, and if there was a gang turf, nobody would kick us out or anything, so we were left alone.

Well, what did that name mean to you at that time? Tea Timers?

Yes, Tea Timers. People used to wear dark glasses, little dark glasses, and that was supposed to be a sign that you were into marijuana, that you were using marijuana, which we didn't use. But it was a fad and so we adopted the dark glasses, and then people would say, "Are you guys taking tea?" They would call it tea. And we'd say, "Yeah, we're Tea Timers." And it was wannabees, if anything. But that was the extent of our gang activity. We weren't a gang, we were a club. In fact, we used to gather together and we were so nonviolent that we'd gather together and we'd play chess. We'd say, "Who could be a chess champion?" and we engaged in that. So we weren't violent.

How about writing poetry? Was that part of the club, or artistry?

No, we didn't do that. I was a local artist. I was good at cartooning, and I was doing that in high school, the drawing thing. I was a tattoo artist. I could put tattoos on my club members, so I was the local tattoo artist, things that I still have symbols of, and people say, "What is that?" I say, "Well, that's just a tattoo I put on when I was a young kid." And my lectures to high school students and students in school, as a member of Congress I would always tell them, "Yes, I have tattoos, but I would caution you to not have them." I said, "They're not good to have. You don't need tattoos to be anybody." So kids would say, "Well, let me see. A congressman with a tattoo?" And I'd say, "Yes, but don't do it." Now everybody wants a tattoo, you know. Times have changed.

What does that mean?

That was my initials, "ED" in quotations.

Yes, E-D.

E-D.

I see. Well, since we're on the subject of Ed, can you tell me when did your name change, or who started that?

Well, my great-grandparents, both my great-grandfather and my grandfather, were Edwards, Eduardo, Eduard, and so I was named Esteban after my father, Esteban Edward. My grandmother, who didn't have a relationship with my father, and after my father disappeared and was deported and wasn't around, she said, "I'm not going to call you Esteban. I'm going to call you Edward. You're Edward." She said, "That father of yours, Esteban, I don't want you to have that name. You're Edward." And Edward I was, you know, or Lalo, Lalito. I grew up with those names. As I got into school it was, of course, Edward, and then eventually the kids started calling me Eddie, Eddie. And as I grew up to adulthood, it went beyond Eddie, and it just became Ed. And as I got involved in my military experience, I was called--the military then, however, when I joined the Army, said, "Let's see your birth certificate," and I had to show that, and they said, "Well, your name isn't Edward. Your name is Esteban." And I said, "That's right, but I use Edward." "Well, no, you have to use your real name in the Army." So in the Army I was Esteban. But that was hard for military people to pronounce the name. They would pronounce it all kinds of different ways, so I chose then to just call myself Ed, so I was Ed in the service. When I came out and went to work in a factory, I was known as Ed. When I campaigned in the factory as a union steward, my campaign was Ed Torres for shop steward, Ed Torres. When the union drafted me to become higher leadership level, I was Ed Torres. Then when I got involved in the movement, the Chicano movement, it was not fashionable for me to be called Ed. I said, "I want to be Esteban." And that's when I chose my real name again. And, yes, so why not? That's a good name. And I've been Esteban ever since.

Can you talk to me a little bit more about that change? Because you were Ed for, what, thirty years, twenty-five years?

I would say so, yes.

What was that like, going to Esteban after that?

I liked it. It was good. Everybody dropped their nicknames, you know, and became Moctesuma, or became Alberto. People became Joaquin. People just dropped their nicknames, their anglicized names, and we took on our birthright names, because it was the thing to do. We were Chicanos, so let's use our real Mexican names.

You weren't the only one then, at that time, doing that?

Oh, no, no, no. It was a lot of people who, people would say, "Who's Esteban Torres? You mean Esteban Torres is Ed, Ed Torres? I know Ed." Or people would say, "Eddie, you mean that Esteban is Eddie Torres?" They were shocked, you know.

Did you have a political ideology at that time? Is that why you made the switch?

My political ideology really started when I joined the Armed Forces. It was after World War II, and I was joining the Army. I was now Esteban, but I wanted to be called Ed in the Army. And I went overseas to Germany, distraught country that had been really ruined by World War II. I arrived there when it was just ruins, and I began to sense what had happened and what was happening. We were involved in a cold war, and we were in involved in a war of ideologies, and, of course, the military puts you into that framework. You're here in Occupied Germany. You're an occupier, and I was. We were labeled and wore the uniform of constabulary. It was a form of police. We wore a certain kind of uniform with a certain kind of helmet and insignias and trappings that made us constabulary. We weren't military police, law enforcement within the military. We were occupiers of Germany as constabulary, and the enemy was--there was no more enemy. There were no more German enemies, because Germans had been subdued, and the only Germans left were the ones that had been prisoners, and none of them had fought Americans. They never claimed to have fought Americans. I hardly ever met a German that said, "Yeah, I fought the Americans." They always fought Russians. They always fought in the Russian front. They were there. And then, of course, our enemy became the Russians. The Russians were occupying Germany, as we were. And so there was an American zone and a Russian zone, a British zone, and a French zone, and that was the territory we were living in. And we were guarding that the Russian zone would not spill over into the American zone, because we had lines of demarcation, and the communists were there on the eastern side, and we were over on the western side, and what divided us was an imaginary line. Usually it was a border made up of rivers and a mountain range, or in other parts, yes, there were wire fences, and in the Berlin area it was a wall, the Berlin wall. So that was the ideology that we were taught to think about. That's the enemy, and we have to be careful, because their plan is to subdue us and take over, take over Western Germany, France, England, and then to the United States. And so you're a soldier. You were cognizant of that enemy force out there, and you have to do everything to safeguard against that kind of an invasion. So my job--I was with an engineer company. I had gone to an engineering school in Virginia, to be an electrical engineer, to fit into a unit that would have the services of an electrician. But when I got to Germany, I didn't get that position, even though I had--I think I told you that by chance I had met somebody, and I said that I wanted to go to Germany, and he said, "Really, you do?" I said, "Yes." He said--because I had been told heretofore that Germany was closed off to any more people going. But just by chance, I met this individual who said, "If you really want to go," he said, "I have an opening, and I could fit you in there," and that's how I got to Germany. But when I got there, the job that I was supposed to fill was already filled, and so I was sort of in limbo. And so by dint of that, I was put into a unit that, again, my drawing experience. They said, "Well, since you don't have an assignment, we want you to work with the public relations officer here, and help us with the newsletter that he publishes. And you can be the artist. You can be the cartoonist for the little newsletter." So that was my job for a long time, just doing that, waiting for either my real position to open up, or something else. Well, that something else came up eventually, and they said, "Look. We have an opening for a radio operator. You like electronics, and you like all these new electronic issues. Why don't you go to the radio school and learn to be a radio operator?" So they sent me to school, and I became a radio operator in a combat-engineer battalion. That was my assignment. And then when I got out of the radio school, I came back to the battalion. They said, "Well, we're going to assign you, then, to a reconnaissance unit, and what you're going to do is we're going to send you out with a reconnaissance team, and you're going to reconnoiter the border between the Soviet side of Germany and the American, and you're going to reconnoiter that border with the reconnaissance unit, and you'll be the radio man for that unit." So that took me into the countryside. Really, we had to leave the barracks in a big city and go into the countryside and reconnoiter that unit. So it's like camping out. I mean, you're living in the countryside. You're commingling with Germans, because you ask directions. You want to know what's there, what's across the river, what do you see over there? It's a form of intelligence, and we were gathering that intelligence and then sending it back to headquarters, that there's a unit of Russian tanks over there, or there's a unit of infantry, Russian soldiers, based in this woods across the river. It was all designed to keep track of the enemy, and it was a great adventure, because I got to travel through the western part of Germany along that border, and we would stop at every part where that border had--where there was a river and it had a bridge crossing. We had to disembark from our unit, go down to the bridge, go under it, measure all the infrastructure, the steel beams, wooden beams, stone, whatever it was, and calculate the bridge for demolition, so that if a war came, if there was an invasion, we would know what tonnage or what amount of dynamite that bridge would need, and we could blow it up. So we were just gathering all this information on the bridges, on the crossings. If there wasn't a bridge, could we cross over and go the other way? So we would need to build a bridge. So was there adequate materials around to build a bridge? Was there a saw mill? Was there a gravel pit? Whatever we would need to be able to span that river and get to the other side. And it was all that gathering and data taking and picture drawing and picture taking, and I had a great experience doing that. Eventually, I got to be the reconnaissance chief, and I was no longer the radio operator. I had my own team, and we'd be doing that all the time. I got to learn German just by doing that, by mixing with the natives and talking to them in their dialects and their language. In that unit, since it was a form of engineer intelligence, they said, "We'd like to send you to the American intelligence school, based in southern Germany," in a very beautiful area in the Alps, a city by the name of Oberammergau. The city is famous because every ten years it has a passion play that's put on by the whole village. The whole village has a huge theater, and people from all over the world come to watch this passion play, which is "The Passion of Christ." And the whole city, the full village participates in the passion play as Jesus and Mary and the shepherds and everybody, and it's a huge stage. It's big like that and so--but the intelligence school was based there. It was a German intelligence school, and now it was an American intelligence school, and they taught German and they taught other languages that we might need should we come in conflict with the Russians. So the school people took notice that I could draw, and they said, "We want you to help us draw a series of training aids, large posters that we'll use in classes to train our officers and some of our intelligence people on the nature of the Russian, how the Russian grows up, how the Russian lives, how the Russian peasant is indoctrinated and moved into the military, how he's indoctrinated as a communist, and we want you to show that in drawings, and in a cartoon form. You show a family of Russians living in their peasant home. The Russian soldier is poor. They're peasants, and they live together in one big house with one big stove in the middle, and nighttime everybody comes into the house, chickens and pigs included, and everybody settles in for the night. Eventually the army will draft this young soldier and take him to Moscow, to one of the big military camps, and they'll show him the grandeur and the wonders of the communist world, and they'll show him the huge buildings in Moscow, with lights and modern devices, and that all of this he has to protect for the motherland. We want you to depict these things in drawings. We want you to depict what their officers look like, what kind of insignia they wear. We want you to depict what kind of weapons they use, all being drawn out, and we'll furnish all the materials, and you'll do all these drawings." So I found myself with another job, see. And, yes, those drawings were developed and were reproduced, and they were used as training aids, to train our people how to understand the Russian nature, the Soviets.

Did you write the text? Or did you do research?

No, no. Well, no, they gave me things to look at, and from there I would do my drawings. But so I was indoctrinated. I mean, I'm doing the work to indoctrinate others, so I was very patriotic, obviously, and I was very wary and knowledgeable about who the enemy was. And all my reconnoitering and all my learning about them, I was a good American patriot.

How great was the threat, do you think, or at that time, how great did you feel the threat was, that they would invade?

Well, you felt the threat. I mean, there's constant information coming in that the Russians are moving, where they're moving, where they're at. It's all based on intelligence. There was talk at one time about the possibility--in fact, they were willing to train me to speak Romanian. They said, "Romanian is very much like Spanish. Do you speak Spanish?" I said, "Yes." They said, "Well, we'd like you to learn Romanian." I said, "Well, why?" "Well, we'd like to send you to Romania" That was Russian territory. That was Soviet territory. The Romanians were Eastern Bloc Soviets. "And we would set you up there, and you would be a Romanian, undercover, and you would be contacting us as to what's going on over there." And being cognizant of the threat, and being a good soldier, I said, "Yes, I'll do it." But something transpired and they weren't able to go through with the Romanian language course, so they cancelled the project, so I never got there. But it was that sense that, well, why not? It's an adventure, and you're serving your country, you're fighting the enemy. If I can pass as a Romanian by learning the language--maybe they look like me. I guess they figured I looked like them, so why not? Anyway, that was a great experience for me, in that capacity, and, of course, that led to other things. It led to a higher rank. At a very young age, I was accumulating a lot of stripes on my sleeve. And I learned a lot, I learned a lot. The Army really transposed me from a teenager, a barrio kid, into a man. I became a man. I never had a father, but just living with men and having tough men around me and ordering me around and disciplined me--the discipline on me was tough, because you were of lesser rank, and I was a soldier. But eventually I became a sergeant, and I ordering people around, and it gave me a great sense of leadership, that you could tell a group of men what to do and how to deploy themselves, how to follow orders. The time came when my term was almost up. I remember this. I remember being on a reconnoitering mission one time. We were out somewheres near the Russian border, and it was evening time, and for some reason we stopped. We were looking at our maps to see where we were and trying to--and it was a huge cloud that just was up in the sky. I'd never seen a cloud that huge. It was an awesome cloud, and it was covered. It was kind of reddish, you know, and dark, you know, like a big storm coming. It looked awesome. And we wondered, what could that be? Maybe it is a storm of some sort. And just coincidentally then, a message started to come over the radio in code, telling us to report back to headquarters, to leave what we were doing and go back to headquarters, that there was an alert, that we were now on alert, on military alert that the war had started in Korea, and that the United States was now involved in a major war, and that we should expect anything to happen. Maybe this was the time that the Soviets would make a move to strip us in Western Germany, so they were calling us to return to headquarters and prepare for that. It was scary. I don't know what the cloud had to do with it. It was just coincidental. But I remember it so poignantly, that that happened that day. But because of that, we were told that our discharge would not come about, my returning back to civilian life was not in the program. I had signed up for three years, and it was just about up. In a new presidential edict, all Armed Forces had been extended for another year, so everybody in the Armed Forces at that time, their terms were expanded for another year. So I was there for another year, but it was under really almost a wartime condition, because now we were in an official war with the Soviets, the Chinese, Koreans, South Korea. There was thought of moving us to Korea, but they said, "No. We have to hold the western front, because if you take us out of here, then they move in." So those were the aspects of what the cold war did to you, how they developed an ideology for you. When the four years was up, I said, "That's it. I want to come back home." I was getting a lot of mail from home, you know, my mother [Rina] and my grandmother [Teresa], my siblings saying to me, "We miss you. Come home. Your time's up." On the other hand, I had pressure from my officers who were saying, "Reenlist. Reenlist and stay with us. If you do that," they say, "we'll send you to officer school, training school, and you'll become an officer. You have all the elements of being a good officer. I mean, someday you're going to be a colonel or you're going to be, who knows, maybe a general." They were throwing that at me. It was tempting. I liked the military. It was invigorating for me. I liked the adventure that I was living, you know. And then I thought about it too. Then I got word that the Congress had declared that all returning veterans, like the veterans that returned from World War II, we were now included as veterans, and that we would be subject to the G.I. Bill of Rights, that we would have--in my case, with four years of military enlistment, I would get three years of college. So I said, "That's for me. That's what I want to do. I love the military, but I think I want to go back home and go to college." I was up in the air about it. Then they said, "Well, go home. See your family. But we want you to come back." So I left. I came home and got a taste of civilian life. I got a job. I remember a friend of mine getting me a job at Lockheed, Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank. And then I said, "You know, I shouldn't be doing this. I should be in college. I should be following a profession that I wanted." And that's when I decided that I would enroll in an art school, a very fine art school in Los Angeles called the Los Angeles Art Center, which is today, it's left Los Angeles. It's now in Pasadena. It's the art center School of Design in Pasadena, a very reputable school, and I went for a number of semesters. I enjoyed the work. I wanted to be a commercial artist, but I learned that it was tough. You really had to compete with a lot of other folks that were studying to be commercial artists and were really good, and I figured, you know--and the whole approach was, "Well, you're not going to make it in California. You're going to have to go to New York. That's the place, Madison Avenue, where you can really practice your profession." And I just wasn't in the mood to go to New York. I'd been away from home, and I didn't want to go to New York, and my parents said, "No, don't go. Stay home. You've been away four years. Keep going to school, but we'll house you. Come home." And I decided that I would do that, and so I decided to stay in college, but I'd change my major. I wanted to be a teacher, be a teacher and engage in fine arts, teach art history. That's what got into me, talking to people who said that's a good area to be. I always wanted to be a teacher. I always remembered my experience with teachers and how a teacher saved me. Maybe I can do the same to kids. Then I met my wife [Arcy Sanchez]. We were sweethearts. I had known her since she was seven years old, and here I was now twenty-three years old, out of the military, and I met her again. We were all family friends, you know. She was my sister's [Grace] best friend. I had a sister, and she was my sister's best friend. So then I saw this little girl that I'd seen, you know, growing up, now had turned into a butterfly, and I said, "Well, that's for me." So we started dating, and she said, "Well, I really appreciate your wanting to be a teacher and all that, but, you know, you can't be an artist living in a coldwater flat and be married. Somehow you've got to find a job and go to school." I said, "You're right, I should get me a job." So I really sought to get a good job that I could work at and at the same time continue my school, and by luck, again, her brother ["Sonny"] engaged me in an offer that he could find a position for me where he worked. He worked at the Chrysler Corporation here in Los Angeles, and the Chrysler Corporation, which made automobiles, was moving to--they were already here in Los Angeles, but they did defense work. They were making aircraft wings and aircraft parts, and they would do some automobile parts, but they didn't assemble cars. They had a plant up north in a town called Pittsburg, up by the Bay Area, and they were moving down to Los Angeles to establish an assembly plant, so they were hiring. And so I checked it out and signed up and got a job at Chrysler, here in Maywood, California, a big auto plant, the beginnings of a whole new West Coast assembly plant providing different models of Chrysler automobiles, Plymouth, Dodges, and DeSotos. So I got a job as a plain linesman, you know, working on the line, doing spot welding, doing the grunt work that you do as an assembler, and there went dreams about going back to Germany and going back to Officers Training School. I'd now settled in California, had a girlfriend, had a job, and started going to school again.

I'm going to stop you right there, because I'm going to change the battery, and then I'd like to kind of circle back a little bit and ask you some questions about what you had mentioned when you were in Germany.

We're going to start again, because it wasn't actually recording. So I changed the battery. Now we're back, and I wanted circle back a little bit, back to your time in the military when you were on those reconnaissance missions, and maybe explain a little bit about the threat of communism, the perception against communism, and your feelings about the Russians, the Russian community.

Well, having firsthand learned from the experience of being on site, I saw, actually, Russian soldiers across the border. We came upon a group one time we were on reconnaissance, and we were following our maps, and we knew they were somewheres on the imaginary line and somewheres in the forest, and lo and behold, we came upon a road that we were on, and there was a barrier across it, big logs. We looked across there and sure enough, facing us was a big Russian tank, and we knew that we had come upon the Russian side of Germany. They looked at us, and we looked at them, and we waved, and they waved back, and they kind of started to, you know, get themselves prepared for whatever. They climbed into their tank, and we sort of waved to them goodbye, and we turned around and went away. But that's how tense it was. And there were always incidents of sometimes reconnaissance teams like that crossing over, unbeknownst to them, and getting caught on the other side, and then being taken prisoners, and that became an international incident, and there would have to be all kinds of negotiations to resolve that problem. It happened a lot in Berlin, where there was an established wall and fences, and sometimes people, for whatever reason, did cross over to the Russian side, and they were apprehended, and that created a big problem. So we were always wary of that. Don't do that. Don't get yourself into that situation. The whole training, the whole indoctrination was that this was the enemy, and we had to be prepared to fight them, because they had something else in mind, a system that was different than ours. They were going to enslave the western world. They had an ideology that called for an enslavement of freedom, and you would lose that. You would be living in this police state, all the elements that, well, were true. As we know in history, there was a huge problem taking place in Russia over a period of years, what they had gone through, the Russians, what Stalin had turned the country into. I didn't have a great sense of the real history of the Russian Revolution or the Russian ideology. I wasn't cognizant of the "Communist Manifesto," and I didn't really understand that aspect of history. I just knew that this was--the Russians had been our allies during the war. They had fought against the Germans, you know. We were allies. We were helping Russia. But then after the war, a decision was made that they had other issues in mind about the western powers, and so now we were in a standoff position with the Russians, and you have to be careful because they're bent on taking over. And everything you know about our country and about our history, they're going to dismantle. We don't want that, and you have to fight. That's your orders. So that was the feeling. I came home. I came home from the military and on that occasion, I recall seeing on television this phenomena that was taking place where there was a U.S. Senator, his name was Joe McCarthy, was holding hearings, and these hearings were bringing forth witnesses or people to testify before his hearings, about their communist activities, you know. He claimed that he had lists of communists that had infiltrated the State Department, the U.S. Army, that had infiltrated the film industry, they were rampant in universities, had infiltrated all aspects of American life, and he was going to root them out, and he was going to root them out just like he had to do for a salvation of our country and our rights and all that. And I said, "Right on," you know, "Right on. Those are the guys, you know. Boy, this senator, he's on it." And I watched those hearings with great interest. And his demeanor, he was gruff and rough and tough, and he was putting people out of jobs. People were saying that either they were taking the Fifth Amendment, or they confessed and said, yes, they were involved, and those people were then hustled off, and they were going to prison. They were going to jail. And you found out about the Rosenbergs and how they had betrayed the country by providing the Soviets with our atomic bomb secrets, you know. This was all calculated. This was all coming to for real is what I had been over there learning about. Then this was all coming to reals now, and I was watching it on television, and I was really impressed. Well, you know, I was a patriot. I had been a soldier, and I'd been trained and indoctrinated with that thought. And here I'm seeing a member of the United States Senate disclosing these crimes that were taking place here. Well, that was cemented in my mind as to, okay, so that's what the whole issue was. Now I'm beginning to understand, you know, from a historical sense, what has happened. But I still didn't know exactly what happened. Why was all this happening? What was this schism that was taking place, political schism that was taking place in the world? The whole world was now involved. We're still in Korea, fighting them, and the Chinese are now involved with them, you know, with the communists, so that the communist Chinese are a part of all this, and you started learning about Mao Tse Tung and his revolution and what he's doing and how he's a student of the Russians. And it all started to unravel, and I started to really understand it, you know. I go to work. I start my job at Chrysler, and I get involved. I'm involved in my job there, working. One of the prerequisites in working at a shop like Chrysler is it's called the open shop, or closed shop rather, and you have to join the union. It's a contractual agreement that the Chrysler Corporation has with the United Auto Workers of America, that if you hire into their factory, you have to join the union. Well, I didn't know much about unions. I'd heard about them but never really understood what they were all about. But I had to join it to keep my job, so I signed a declaration that I would join the union, and I would go through a probationary period of I think it was sixty days without joining the union, and if I decided at the end of sixty days that I didn't want to be in the union, I could leave the job. I wouldn't have a job. But I wanted the job, so I joined the union. Okay. So now I'm working in the factory. I start to use my talents again. Fooling around on break time, I would draw cartoons, and the guys around me would say, "Hey, that's great. Draw me," or, "Draw that guy," or, "Show us doing this, show us doing that." I would do that, like I did in the Army. That was my claim to fame, you know. I was approached--my whole idea was, you know, if I do this, maybe the company'll ask me to do their newsletter, and maybe the company'll put me up in the front office. This is my scheme. It's worked for me before. Why do I have to work in this grubby hole here in the ground with spot welding and sparks flying and smoke and noise and all that, when I could be wearing a white shirt and drawing up front? I thought of that. And I was approached by union guys, saying to me, "Hey, Ed. Jeez, you really draw good." I said, "Yeah. I think I got a request to do something for the company newsletter here." "Aw," they said, "don't do that, don't do that. They don't understand what we're all about. Draw for us. Draw for our union paper. You be the cartoonist for our newspaper. We have a newspaper, the union local here. They call it 'The Feather Merchant.'" I said, "'The Feather Merchant?'" "Yeah, it's a name they picked up. It has something to do with a group of people." It was a fairy tale of some sort, and the feather merchants were a part of that, so they called the newspaper "The Feather Merchant." And they said, "You should draw in there, and all these workers here in the plant will see it. You do it for the company, they're not going to care. Few people read the--they don't get the company magazine. The supervisors get that, you know. Do it for the union, for the people here, the workers." And so I said, "Well, why not?" So I checked in with the local union and the editor of the paper, and he said, "Yeah, do us some cartoons," and I started doing that. And then I kept working on the line, and pretty soon the same union guys came up to me again and said, "Hey, you know, we really like what you're doing. That's really good the way you communicate, and the guys all like you here. Why don't you consider running for the shop steward?" I said, "What's that?" They said, "Well, you know, the shop steward, he's--actually, right now we want you to be what we call blue-button steward." I said, "What is that?" "Well, you wear a little blue button, and you're working on the line, and if some worker sees your button and he has a problem, he'll come over to you and he'll say, 'Ed, I need to get the chief steward to come and talk to me. I have a grievance. I have a problem.' So then as the blue button, you get a break or something, you go look for the shop steward, and you tell him that Joe needs to see him." And I said, "Okay, I'll do that." So I got to be a blue button. It was a little rank for me, you know? There I go again. So I started being a good blue button. People start coming and saying, "Hey, this foreman is really picking on me. God, he wants me to do this. I can't do it. I'll hurt myself, or I can't do it. I need you to call the steward for me." I said, "Okay. At my break I'll get the steward over." So that was my job. I was a kind of a messenger, you know, carrier. So I'd find the steward, I'd say, "You know, Lopez wants to see you. He's having a real problem with a foreman." "Okay," the steward says. "I'll take care of it. Thanks." Did my job, you know. Back to work. Pretty soon the union guys are coming to me and saying, "You know what? Elections are coming up, and we think you'd be a good shop steward. The guys really like you. You'd be a good shop steward." I said, "You mean like the shop steward?" "Yeah, but he's leaving. But we want you. We want you to run for it, and we'll back you up. We'll campaign for you. We'll do all the things necessary for you to win." I said, "What does it involve?" "Well, you've got to get involved. You've got to read about the union. You've got to read the contract. Here's the contract. Read it and go through it, and you have to know all these rules and regulations, because when you're the shop steward, you've got to defend those workers against the management, because if you don't, they'll fire the guys or they'll lay them off or they'll penalize them or they'll take pay from them and all that. You've got to be their lawyer, you know. You know how to deal with that." Well, I was a sergeant in the Army, I was dealing with all kinds of reconnaissance and all that. Why can't I do this, you know? So I agreed to be a shop steward, "chief shop steward", and the guys really go all out. They print buttons for me. "Elect Ed Torres for shop steward," you know, and signs in the shop, "Election coming. Elect shop steward Ed Torres." Other people got involved in the campaign, candidates as well, but I was the guy they were really pushing, and I was campaigning, and my wife, Arcy, was helping me make buttons and little leaflets and things that I would distribute. I'd tell the guys, "I'm going to run. Would you put this on your lunchbox?" "Yeah, we'll do it for you." That was my first hand at politicking, precinct working almost. So we really got involved, and I won the election. I became--it's a secret-ballot election. They have to hold it under government regulations. There's an election day where everybody goes to vote at the union hall and the secret ballot. And I got elected as the shop steward in what was called the body shop. It's where they frame all the automobiles, where they put the frame, where they put the chassis, the roof, the trunk. They're not painted, they're just raw metal, and you're filing and welding all the spots and warts and dents that are in the car. That's the body shop, really tough, dirty place to work, dangerous, noisy. But I was the shop steward, and all I did was run around with a clipboard like that, just waiting for a blue button to come up and tell me that there was a problem somewheres. I'd go over there, and I'd say, "What's your problem, Joe?" "This foreman wants me to come in and work overtime, and I can't do it. I have my family. My wife works and I go home and I take care of the kids," and this and that, "and I can't work the overtime. I'd like it, but I can't do it, but he's forcing me to, and if I don't, he's going to fire me." So my job is to go to the foreman and say, "Look. You've got a problem here. You can't force him to work overtime. I mean, first of all, you can work him eight hours, but you can't force him to work overtime. That's almost on his own, if he wants to do it. He'd like to do it, but he can't. He has a problem." "Well, but he's a good worker and I need him." "I know he's a good worker, but give him some respect. He has a commitment to his family." "Well, I've got to go to top management and find out if I can do that." So you bargain, you negotiate, and you write it up. You get your grievance form, and you write up the guy's name and what--it's like taking a police report, and you write it up, and witnesses and everything, get the guy to sign it. "You sign it. You asked me to come and do this for you." "Yes, I'll sign it." Yes, the foreman comes back and says, "Okay, he's off. He doesn't have to work overtime." So once again, you know, I settled a problem, and it's that way every day, every hour, some problems, you know, somebody falling, somebody getting hurt, somebody not coming into work because they were out--a hangover or something. They're going to fire him, or they're going to lay him off for a few days. That was your whole job. But here's where we'll come back to your question. My colleagues, my good supporters, start inviting me and Arcy--"Hey, we're having a little gathering tonight over at Gene's house. They're putting on a small play, a theater group, and we'd like to invite you to come over and see what's going on." I'd say, "Okay, we'll go." You know, why not? They're my supporters. They're befriending us, inviting Arcy and I, my wife. So we go, and it's a nice backyard gathering, you know, and barbecue, and they have a play. They've set up a little stage, and they're doing a play from some theater bit, and they have actors and music and the whole bit. It's a nice social gathering, you know. And they start talking about, "Well, this is--." And the play is always related to workers and their struggle and their fight for equity, for social justice, or for beating the capitalist system, you know, and it's the workers, you know. And, yes, I'm learning about this, you know, the workers. "Here, take this home, read it. It tells you all about the workers and how they started." So I read it. Oh, "The Communist Manifesto." Hmm, interesting. "Okay, I'll take it home." So, yes, I took it home and I read it, and it's interesting. It's interesting. It's historical. And I start--let me check this out with my own history books, you know. I start reading about it. What does all this mean? How did all this happen? You start learning about the Russian Revolution, and you start learning about Trotsky and Lenin, and you start learning about Stalin and his role and the purges and the proletariats and it's what's coming around. My friends, my mentors, are young communists, you know? They want me to join. They want me to be one of them. The patriot? I had to think about it. I say, well, golly. Then something is happening in American labor. There's a purge, based on what Joe McCarthy's doing. "Let's get these people. Let's start cleaning up Hollywood." You know, you have the Red scares, the Hollywood Ten, the purging of the writers and the screenwriters and people like that, because somehow it's conceived that they have communist allies, that they're part of the party. Some of them are saying, "I take the Fifth Amendment. I'm not going to tell you that I'm a member of the party." "Well, okay, you're out of a job then." We start learning about the purges in the Army, and people start denying that they're not affiliated, you know, but McCarthy is forcing people. He's got this Red scare going all over America, and people are losing their professorships. People are being victimized by his Red baiting, and I begin to understand what's taking place. And in a sense I start--and then I learn that a lot of these mentors of mine are college professors that have left their jobs and are now working in the factories alongside me because they have a goal in mind, that they want to teach workers, Chicano workers, to be leaders, to become part of their movement, and that's all part of infiltration and getting you to understand their ideology and what it means in terms of historical terms, and how it's something that workers should be doing, and that we need blacks, and we need Chicanos to become leaders in this movement. And the labor movement, the unions, the Auto Workers Union, is very much committed to this whole notion that whole notion that we've got to clean house. And all these leaders that we have, some of them are, in fact, Reds, and they start purging their rank and file, and they start purging their officers, and at Chrysler they're taking out these workers, these mentors, and take them out in the street and just waylaying them, you know, just beating them up and forcing them to leave the job, forcing them to resign, just get out of the way. And to me it seemed, in a way, unfair, you know, that that kind of action would take place against what I consider decent people, people that had some ideological reason for wanting a greater sense of social justice on the working lines for American workers, for auto workers. It was tragic, and somehow you had to either join them or ostracize them as well. Or you could just defend them, because they were workers. You had to. But they were leaving, they were being forced out. But they had brought me to a stage in life of a whole new awakening about what was the cold war all about? Why was all this happening? So that was an interesting experience, opened up our minds to a whole new different world.

Okay, I guess you need to stop now, so we can pick up next week in our next interview, and we'll pick up there, because I have several questions that I want to ask you about that experience with the--

Okay. But that's the whole cold-war thing.

Right. Fascinating. And I want to ask you, maybe you want to think about it over the next week, is how did you initially reconcile "The Communist Manifesto" with your experience in the military and anti-communist doctrine that you received. So we'll talk about that next time. I'll stop.

This is Virginia Espino, and today is January 31, 2011. I'm interviewing Congressman Esteban Torres at his home in West Covina. I wanted to start with backing up and talking a little bit more about your work with Chrysler. Maybe you can describe to me a typical day, what that looked like. What did you do on a typical day at work?

Well, it was early in the morning. Shift began at six-thirty in the morning, so you had to get up pretty early, and we lived quite a distance from the Chrysler plant. I lived in La Puente, and it meant getting up five-thirty, five o'clock, yes, five o'clock I recall, and then getting ready and then there wasn't much traffic at that hour, so you had ample time to get to the plant. Large parking lot. You went in, passed through security, and, of course, you had to be in your work station by six-thirty when the lines would start moving. Initially, my work there was as a spot welder, in other words, working in what they called the body shop. It's where the automobile takes its shape from the chassis up. Chassis comes on the line, rolling along, and workers put the floors on and then the side panels, and, of course, the roof, and the spot welders, using these electronic guns, high-voltage, are able to spot weld electronically all these pieces together, so the automobile begins to take shape. And it traverses through this long line, assembly line. There's no assembly really taking place. It's all metal, and eventually acetylene tanks are welding parts of the metal together, and there's a lot of grinding and a lot of pounding and noise going on. These electrical guns make a lot of noise and shoot a lot of sparks, so that you wear protective clothing and goggles and gloves. You have to be well protected. The automobile goes through a process of getting hot molten lead placed on places where the welds were, so that the lead covers up the joints that have been spot welded, and then the lead is on there, hot lead. It's done by individuals dipping into big pots of hot lead and spreading it on there with spatulas, and there's all kinds of joints that have to be covered with this lead. And as they're covered and the lead dries, the vehicle goes through a booth. It's an isolated booth that protects the workers outside of the booth from what is now going to happen, and what happens when the vehicle goes to that booth are workers inside the booth, wearing suits as if they were in outer space, you know, they're completely covered with plastic masks and hoods--their whole body is covered--because they then have to grind the lead with grinders, and there's just this tremendous powder in the air of lead dust, which is sucked up, of course, by vents that are in the booth. It's very dangerous work in there. Those workers are required monthly to take blood tests, to see if in any way they've ingested lead and it's now in their blood, so they have to go through these blood tests every month. Every day they come out of those booths, they have to take their uniforms off, the hoods and their protective clothing, and leave it in there, and then they come out and they have to immediately go into showers and shower so that any lead that might have come through their suits is washed off. It's tough work working in there. Constantly, you're building a car every minute, so every minute there's a car coming through, and they're doing this. It comes out of there then and the car gets wiped down so that there's no lead dust on it, things like that. And then you have workers who begin to file the lead--the lead's been ground off, but you have then them filing with files to an even, smooth level, so that you don't even notice that there's any lead on there. It's just a seal, you know, a very fine seal, and they have to sand it and all that. That's dangerous, too, because you're dealing with lead dust and powder, but you're not grinding anything. And as the car proceeds through to the line, then the body work people start. These vehicles, as they come through and traverse through these lines, get bumped. Machines hit them, and the welders hit them, and sometimes they come, when they come in trainloads, they're bumped by just being in the train and they're unloaded, so they acquire scratches and dents. And so you have this whole line of metal workers taking out what they call dings. There are little dings on the car. You're taking them out with hammers and little picks, and then you're filing them and then sanding them smooth so that you don't know there was a dent there. It's tough work, and it's moving quickly. It's moving quickly, one a minute, one car, less than a minute really, coming by you, and you have a station where you have to take the dents out of the side panels or any dents on the roof. And then, of course, then they put the windshields on. They frame the windshield, and you have to grind around the windshield. No glass is put on there yet. You're just really framing the windshield so that at another station they're going to lift a plate of glass and put in a windshield, but that's one of the final processes. And the cars eventually come through. They're finished on the line. They then go up a conveyor into a paint station, where they're dipped into big vats of paint, depending on the color of the car. First of all, they're dipped in primer paint, so that every car gets primed. But that was the work of the body shop, very dangerous, very noisy, tremendous noise, terrible violations of the work standards, because workers in a hurry to finish their job on their station use methods that they shouldn't use. Like they would grind lead, you know. They'd want to cover a ding up, so they'd put lead on it and apply heat and then melt lead onto the ding, so to speak, and then they'd start grinding the lead off. Well, you can't do that unless you're in a booth, and you would do that. And a foreman would sometimes tell a worker, "Get that ding. Put some lead into it," and the worker would obey. Or he'd say, "No, I'm not supposed to do that." "Do it," you know. And that's when the worker would call for a steward. The steward, in this case when I was the shop steward, would have to come up and hear his complaint. "What's wrong?" "The foreman's making me put lead on this ding, and then I have to grind it off and sand it and use asbestos to cool the metal and all that," and he said, "and you know, that's dangerous. That's against the rules." So I'd have to call the foreman and say, "Why are you doing this? Why are you allowing this?" "Well, he's too slow. He's not really moving." "Regardless, you're violating an agreement, a work standard that is not allowed, so you give him extra help or whatever he needs so he doesn't have to do that." And that's the way you would adjudicate these problems. And then it's, like I said, these bodies then go into another department up the conveyor, and that's where they get painted according to their color scheme or whatever. A lot of smoke, a lot of smoke in the air, a lot of noise. A majority of workers that worked in the body shop for any number of years eventually go deaf. It's very bad on the ears. And you plead with the management to provide earplugs. You plead with the management to provide gloves for the workers. Sometimes a foreman will say, "I'm out of gloves. I don't have any gloves." And people are working with their bare hands, with sharp metal, with lead, with asbestos and all that sort of thing, and that was the end of your day.

Were you ever injured on the job? Or do you have any lasting--

No, I wasn't. I have a hearing problem in my older age, because I think that was part of that. I mean, when you're old, people lose their hearing, but I think I lost my hearing at an early age. So it's difficult work. Then the vehicle process goes through various departments. After the paint, then they start assembling it, you know, putting in the engine, putting in all the various lines, the seating, the seats, the windshields, the back window. They start putting--every piece in the automobile is put in by a human, and it's constant speed. And that's one of the biggest problems in the industry was that the management, in a hurry to build a car, would often shortchange the number of welds that you needed. Perhaps on the front of the car where the front wheels are going to go, the brackets, you're supposed to put in ten welds. Well, to put ten welds at a moving line is difficult, so they would cut it down to, say, five, and engineering-wise that was dangerous, which we would complain. We would say, "You know, you're not meeting the work standard. We're supposed to have ten welds on there, and he can only put in five. That means you should have another person putting another five to maintain a ten standard." "No, the five'll do, the five'll do," and we would complain. And, of course, later, later years you found reports that Chrysler automobiles on the road, the wheel bearing, the wheel bracket that was getting only five welds, they'd hit a hard bump or something and it'd collapse, and your car would go off the road or turn over or roll over and you have accidents. That's why you have recalls. But it was this constant line speed that they wanted to maintain, that one car a minute would come off the line, finished car come off the line, and to maintain that, they'd make a lot of shortcuts. And so my biggest problem as a shop steward was attempting to maintain a work-standard line speed. If there was really a minute, okay, so it's a minute. But you have to have the necessary workforce to be able to do that work in a minute, and they would try to cut on the manpower. You know, you want to eliminate workers because that's eliminating cost. You want to eliminate the number of screws or welds or whatever, you're finishing up with a bad product. And that's what you see today. You have all these problems with Toyotas and Hondas and different cars. American cars went through all of that.

Well, I'm interested in--I understand the ideology behind the owner of the company. They are interested in profit, and that's what you're kind of--

Production equals profit, yes.

How do you get the employees, like the foreman and those upper-management people, to buy into that and also force those below to work that fast? They're not really--are they benefiting from the profit too? Do they get something out of it?

Well, the management, the foremans and the general foremans, they're management, and they're under the gun constantly to increase production, increase it at a lower efficiency rate so that their money--there are costs incurred in that. That's money. And the faster you can build and produce, the more cars you're producing, and that's money. That's an income. You're going to sell that car. So the foremen are under a tremendous amount of pressure, and the general foremen to order them to increase that productivity no matter what. And so the steward, myself in this case, would--and I was trained to do this. I went to an engineering school through the union, to teach me what they call time-and-motion study. It's the study of how a person can carry out an operation with given different elements in an operation, so many seconds per element to complete a process. You have to use a stopwatch for that, and you have a clipboard and itemize each of the elements. You pick up the piece of equipment, you walk three steps, you put it in place, you time that. You grab your electric air pistol and you shoot ten bolts into that piece; you time that. You back away from it, that's so much time. That's the work standard you have to follow, and the management will increasingly, deliberately, very sneaky-like, literally turn up the line speed, and the cars start--by fractions of seconds they increase the line speed, so that if you're carrying out an operation like the one I just mentioned, eventually you'll notice that you're not able to complete it. You're going to miss a bolt or two, or something's not going to fit, because the car's moving too fast. And so the worker will complain, and then I have to search out the foreman or the general foreman and tell him the line speed is going on. "I timed the line speed. It's not a minute any longer. It's fifty seconds. You're carrying an operation out in fifty seconds, not sixty seconds." But, see, those ten seconds will make a difference. By the end of the day, that's all factored into productivity. So it's tough just being able to monitor that, and fighting with them, and arguing, and you have to then get into the process of writing that up as a grievance. You write it up on paper. It's like writing out a ticket, a traffic ticket, the time, the place, the individual, the line, the item, and then you submit that grievance to a higher level, to your bargaining committee, who will raise it with the top management as a grievance that has to be corrected. And it's that way throughout the whole plant, on every operation, so it's a tough job.

The stereotype is that the management-worker relationship is tense and stressful, and management is abusive. Is that what you found, working?

Sure. And they yell and scream at you, and they goad you to hurry up, to keep up, and you know, these workers are human. You know, they come in Monday morning with a hangover. They had a fun time over the weekend. And you're slower, or you got a cold. You just can't move the way you did last week, and so you have an impediment that's slowing you up. You've got a problem at home, or there are individuals that I would see on the line who would never talk. They were just--they would carry out their operation with kind of furious face, you know. They'd be sweating and mumbling to themselves and pounding away at that ding, or pounding away at that weld point and just screaming at it, and never--you'd go up to them and say, "What's the matter, Johnny?" He wouldn't answer you. He'd just hammer away, and you knew that person was going to have a breakdown at any point. I mean, and people did. Some folks would go off their rocker, so to speak, and create problems, safety hazard to the workers around them or themselves, or take it out on a foreman. So it's a grind.

Did you ever participate in any work stoppages or those kinds of--

Well, there were times when word got out that, "We can't take this anymore. They're just not regulating the line speed, and there's just so much abuse going on." At a given time, I mean, people would be--there would be ringleaders or individuals who would spread the word, "Hey, when lunchtime comes, or before lunchtime, let's just walk off the line. Or somebody turn the switch off, stop the line." And, of course, the foremans would notice and, "What's going on? The line stopped." They want to check. And sure enough, everybody'd come off the job and start walking out the plant, and then that was an uproar, you know, the foreman yelling at them, "Get back, get back." And they'd get on my case. "Torres, get these guys back in here. We're going to fire them. If you don't get them back in here, we're going to fire them. You have a responsibility, you know, to keep this line going and working." "Yeah, I know," I said, "but you caused this. You caused it." Big arguments that way, you know. Eventually the workers would get out in the yard or parking lot and grumble and yap and vent all this workload that they had, the anguish they had, you know, really, really tough. And yes, I would say, "Let's go back in, you guys. Come on, you know. We're going to correct it. We're going to do it." And I'd have to go back in the shop and sit down with the management and say, "Listen. These are the reasons this happened. You have to slow down the line speed. You're killing these guys. You're killing them. That's why people erupt this way and get violent and just leave their job." And, of course, they always wanted to grab somebody and penalize somebody for having really created that situation and stopped the line. "Who stopped the line?" "I don't know, but I think it was so-and-so." They want to purge, they want to purge somebody on it, so it was difficult.

Were they successful?

No, not in most cases. It was something that the workers planned carefully, and the word got out, and when the line stops, somebody tripped the switch and ran off or something, but the word was, "Hey, it's a walkout." And the word gets out there and everybody--some people don't walk out. They just sit on the spot and they don't move. But the majority of them, in order to be organized about it, they walk out.

So did you consider that to be a unified group of people?

Well, you had to have some organization to do that. A group of people had to officiate, so to speak, the process. You know, "Hey, we're going to walk out. Tell so-and-so, tell so-and-so, when the line stops, just walk off the operation." And, of course, the foreman sees you walking away. "Hey, get back here." But everybody else is walking, so you're not incriminated by yourself, because other people are doing it, and you're just going with the crowd. It's difficult. It's a difficult situation.

Well, let's talk a little bit, then, about some of the biggest challenges that you had as a shop steward. I think you had a more elaborate title, which was chief steward.

Yes, I was the chief shop steward. There were other stewards on the line, as I think I mentioned earlier. They were line workers. They were on the line, and because they were activists and because they were good union people, you asked them to be a blue-button steward, and a little blue button. You gave them a little blue button that said steward on it, and they would wear that, and all workers knew that if anything was happening around their operation and I wasn't around, they didn't visibly see me, they would tell the blue button, "Get Torres over here. Get Torres here." So, "What's the matter?" "Well, you know, this and this and that is happening. I have a grievance here, and I need to have the shop steward, the chief come here and resolve it for me. Get Torres." So that worker, when he could, on a break or if he could just tell another blue button down the line, "Get Torres." And it's a process, it's an organized process, and it finally would get to me. I'd have a station down at the front end. I'd have a desk with a phone and I kept all my materials in there, and I would hang around that desk, and when the word got to me, "Torres, they need you over in Bay 6, I'd start walking to Bay 6." Now, when you start walking the line and people see you, they want to call attention to something that's bothering them, and you have to tell them, "Wait a minute. I'll be right back. I've got somebody on Bay 6 calling me." And so I'd get to Bay 6 and sure enough, the individual would tell me, "Look, I've got this problem. I came in late today. I had to take my wife [Arcy Torres] and our little baby to the clinic, and we got in traffic and I couldn't get to work in time. I came in an hour late, and this guy wants to give me three days off, and I'm explaining to him that I didn't do this on purpose," and get the foreman. Tell him, "Look, this is the problem with this man here." "I don't care what his problem his. His job is he's supposed to be here at six-thirty on the job, and he disobeyed. He wasn't here, and I'm going to give him three days off." And then you just have to get with the foreman, and meanwhile the line is moving. You don't stop anything. The line is--and that operator has to keep working, and you're walking along with him and the foreman, and you're arguing, negotiating, you know. And eventually you try to reason with the foreman that, "You know, it was an emergency, just like you might have," I said. "You want to get three days off because you had an emergency at home?" Eventually you'll reason with people, and that's the way it worked. But that was the chief steward's job was to answer a call for assistance somewheres in the shop, and it was carried out through a series of contacts by the blue buttons who'd reach you.

What did you find that were the biggest issues for the workers? Were they onsite, or were they other things like medical care or other kinds of legal services?

Well, everybody had a problem. It's a big shop. People working in the body shop are just like miners, you know. They're tough individuals. They're not office workers. They're tough guys and used to hard work, and they all have external problems, because their lifestyles or where they come from--and everybody has a problem, whether it's a legal problem or it's an illness in the family or it's a family disturbance. I can't tell you the number of reasons why a worker would come to work and not complete his operation or--

As I said, many workers had physical problems that they had to have attended to, often on the scale of an emergency, and they may be late to work or not come in at all, and that upsets the management, because that worker is absent. So that means somebody has to replace him to finish his operations, and generally they have a group of relief men, they call them relief men, or they double up on the work. They ask the workers on each side of that worker to do what he was doing. Well, naturally, that creates a problem. You're putting a load on his colleagues because he's absent. So the next day you had to reckon with that, because immediately the foreman would want to know why he was absent. Did he have a reason? Did he bring a doctor's excuse? Did he really go see a doctor? Just like school, you know. "Bring me a release from your doctor that you were out because you really had an emergency, you weren't just playing hooky." Yes, it's a whole social situation of all the kinds of social ills that might affect workers. They're impacted by their work environment and by the external environment that they live in, and they have to come in every day at this hour and work and do this monotonous work that is just monotonous. Day in and day out, you're doing the same operation, unless eventually you move up from the operation. You can be a metal man one day, pounding away on dings and working the metal, and then but maybe somebody quits a welding position, and you want to vie for that position because you know how to weld, and so you apply for that position, and that takes in, you know, "Call the steward. Call Torres. I want to get that job over there." And then you have to ask him, "Well, can you weld?" "Yeah, I can weld." "Well, let me find out." So you've got to go to the foreman and say, "I've got a replacement to take the place of that welder that left. I have a person over here." "Well, okay. After the job or during his break, let's see if he can weld." So when that worker gets a ten-minute relief--it's called relief--quickly I would tell him, "Get your goggles on. Get over there and show them you can weld." And he'll go over there, and if he's a welder, he's a welder, and they'll make arrangements to put him in that position. So, see, you would get off that other tedious job you were on, and you move to maybe--the welding is tedious, too, but it's different, and it pays a little more, so it's like a little promotion.

I was also going to ask you about those people who worked with the lead, the toxic lead. Did they get paid more because of the--

Yes. Yes. But few people wanted that job. They understood the hazardous aspects of the job. You invariably, because you're working in that environment, even if you're not in that booth, that lead is around. You pick it up on your shoes. It's like dust, and you take it home. People walk into the house with dirty shoes, and you've got kids crawling around the floor, you contaminate. So you have to be very careful, you know, how--you tell people, "Be careful. Make sure you clean your shoes before you go in the house. Make sure you're not carrying lead on your coat or your lunch bucket. Be careful."

Sounds risky.

Yes, it is very risky.

Well, last time you mentioned becoming friendly with some other union members who were also members of the Communist Party, and we didn't really finish that discussion about, well, the literature they gave you about Marxism. How did you feel about that, considering you were in Germany during the cold war and had all these beliefs about anti-communism?

Yes. Well, at first I took it with a lot of suspicion, you know, why me? But as I indicated, they were people working the line, and they worked throughout the plant in different operations, and when you have a lunch break or something like that, they would gravitate to you and say, "Hey, Ed, how you doing?" You'd get to talking, and then that's when you get the invites to chat with them. They wouldn't give you any materials there in the shop, you know. This is all done if you went to an invitation to a gathering, that they had a meeting or something. And I was interested. I was interested. "What's going on?" You know, I wanted to get involved in the process. And it hit me when I was given literature that pretty much said that they were left-wing. So I would listen to them, and they'd say, "Listen. You know, we've been watching you. You're a really good--people really like you. You're a good leader. We're working in the shop. Jerry here is a Ph.D. He's a professor, and he's come to work in the plant because he believes in this, that the workers need to have leadership, and this is what is happening in the Soviet Union and other countries where there's industry. The workers control things. They work hard, and they have rewards. But they have leaders, and you look like that kind of leader, that you could help the Mexican Americans here in the shop. I see you with them, and you talk to them, and everybody likes you, you know, and you can be a great leader. We don't have Chicano leaders here in the plant, in the shop, and you're one of the guys we'd like to help. So we have meetings. We talk about what's happening around the world. We talk about the labor movement. We talk about the importance of workers and responsibilities." And I was curious. What is it, you know. I mean, here I was in the Army, drawing about the Soviets, how they operate, but here it is in my own country, in my own shop, these people--and they were mostly young, mostly. They weren't old folks, they were young guys. So I became interested in their approach, and, literally, they influenced me to want to be a leader, to want to be a part of the workers' organization where we could have better working conditions, and I was all for that. I said, "That's interesting." But they kept saying, "Maybe you could join our organization." I said, "Well, what is your organization?" "Well," he said, "we're not communists. We're socialists. We're called Young Communist League." "Oh," I said, "yeah. Well," I said, "are you communists?" "Well, we don't carry cards, communist, but we believe in that system. It's a good system, and we think you'd be a good leader." So they said, "And you should consider running for office. You would be a good steward in this department. The guy that's here, he's in with management. He doesn't care, you know. He goes along," and this and that. "If you were here and you took care of the workers and accrued to their grievances, I mean, that's what makes leadership." So I was willing to do that. I was willing to get in there and do that job, and they were very helpful. They were very helpful. But at that time, in the UAW [United Auto Workers] itself, in the UAW nationally, there was a big struggle between the Reuther brothers [Walter, Victor, Roy], who were really leaders in the United Auto Workers movement nationally, Walter Reuther, Victor, and Roy, these are the three brothers, and there were factions in the union. One of the factions was a communist faction. They were really in the leadership in the UAW, and they didn't like the Reuthers. And the Reuthers are moving in and moving up, you know, and the Reuthers were, by and large, democratic socialists. Their father and their ancestry had been Germans, who were socialists, and the father, I remember, would take the young Reuthers after church on Sundays, they'd take them to a restaurant or someplace, and the father would make those kids stand on a soapbox and make speeches, you know, little. And from a little age, they became little labor leaders. I mean labor leaders, you know? And that's the way they grew up, and they were the pioneers in building the UAW. But there were factions, and this was during the cold war. Well, it was before the war. It was during the war. There were a lot of factional fights. There were groups in the UAW, they were Stalinists. There were groups in the UAW, they were Trotskyites. There was that whole battle going on. And then there were those that were opposed to it, to those factions, and there were fights about what the U.S., what the United States was proposing. As long as we were allied with the Soviet Union, things were okay, the factions were happy. Of course the Trotskyites weren't, because it was sort of a pro-Stalinist thing, you know. And then the non-Stalinist and non-Trotskyites were not happy with having those folks in the union, because they believed that the Hitler-Stalin pact was going to impact on the union, impact on the country, so they were opposed to all that, and that's what the Reuthers were. They weren't Stalinists, they weren't Trotskyites, they were Americans, you know, very concerned about the internal workings of the communist membership in the UAW. So these factional fights precipitated a whole series of struggles within the union, and eventually, the Reuthers took over. They were able to win elections, and Walter became the president. And even then, they very much were able to capture the executive board seats and keep him from being a functional president by not giving him the power to make appointments, and it was a struggle. And not only in the UAW. This was happening in the Steelworkers, this was happening in the Electrical Workers Union, the garment industry. A lot of industries were infiltrated that way, so there was a big struggle here during the war and the postwar, when the Marshall Plan was enacted, that we were going to assist the European powers, Germany, you know, to rebuild itself. And there was a lot of strife then, because on the one side, Reuther and his coalition wanted to help perpetuate the Marshall Plan. They were involved in alliances with German unions and the British unions and the French in hoping to recover Europe, and the communists had other notions. They wanted to organize the Germans, their part of Eastern Germany and the Warsaw [Pact] states, you know, Poland and the Balkan states and all those. They were organizing a different kind of unionism. So there was this cold-war struggle going on worldwide. And then that all thing filtered over here, too, because here in the United States you had the same problem, the factions within the labor movement. Here in California, here in Los Angeles you had the AF of L, the American Federation of Labor, and a separate entity was the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the CIO was very much split along those political lines. You had the left wing and you had right wing, so to speak, or centrists, you know, who looked at the left wing very suspiciously. You had people like Dorothy Healey, who was the president of the communists here in California. She was very supportive of the left-wing group, and her husband [Philip Connelly] was a member of the executive board of the CIO council here in L.A. So they had a lot of control over what was happening in the plants and factories. And the AF of L, of course, didn't have any of that. They were right wing if anything, very conservative, so there was no merger between the two bodies. So that allowed factories, Ford and Chrysler and General Motors, to have these factional groups there too. There came a time, there came a time when the UAW began to purge the communists nationally, in Detroit and back East, that that movement came to the West Coast, and there was a purging here in the plants, the auto plants, talking about auto plants, of taking those folks out. In fact, at Chrysler before I got there, there had been a large demonstration where they took the people who were admitted communists, or at least left-wing leaning, and brutally beat them up and just threw them out of the plant, never to return. Some of them remained. They were ostracized even in the plant, because they stayed, but they were ostracized. They got the worst jobs. And the young element came in, the one I'm talking about. They stayed and they wanted very much to create the same kind of worker leadership, and that's when I came in, I guess, and they said, "Hey, this is a guy we've got to train and work with us," and that's how I got into the situation, although I never joined their club or their organization. And eventually, I really cut my political teeth in that aura. Sure, I'd been in Europe during that cold war, but I wasn't politically inclined. I didn't really understand the dynamics, you know, except that they're the enemy and we're the Western powers, and we've got to protect ourselves against them. But I didn't understand the international aspect of what was happening here and abroad. It was coming into the union that I really became cognizant of the political aspects, the economics and the industrial aspects of what was going on. When everybody was purged and they left the plant, some of those young people lost the enthusiasm, and they sort of merged into and became Democrats, and I did too. My wife and I, we'd just recently got married, we knew a lot of these people. We eventually joined the Democratic Party. We became registered Young Democrats in the Eastside. There were no Eastside political organizations, and we were the Young Democrats, and that opened up a whole new world, a whole new avenue of political participation. Now, coupled with that, I was still the shop steward, and another office came open at the local union, Local Union 230, which I was a member of. They had an opening for the chairman of the political action committee, and I was gung ho on political issues, so I ran for the position. I was going to run as the chairman of that--it was called the Political Action and Education Committee, and the education part of it was to educate workers about conditions, about the labor movement, about the role we could play in politics, and moreover, the chairman of the committee would be the editor of the union newspaper, so I figured this is where I've got to be. First of all, I want to be the chairman of the political action group, because that involves all aspects of politics, national, international, not international but really more national and local. But the education part, you know, the newspaper, the editor, I could use that vehicle for education and being shop steward at the same time, see. So I was wearing two hats. And that really was where, as I said, I cut my political teeth in the union, really, understanding the world of politics and eventually internationally, foreign policy and issues of that measure.

Can you maybe talk about any aspects of those early discussions about communism and socialism, any part of that ideology that you either really--distaste or disliked, or any that you really felt like, this makes sense in this kind of situation of a factory work environment?

Well, that experience took me from being a conservative, sort of right-wing ideologue, having come from the military, and all of a sudden learning about a whole new world, a world of work and how work affects a social and economic situation, and learning about this new process where it wasn't conservative, right wing, but left wing, socialism. I still had a distaste for the communist aspect that was with me, and I didn't trust it, and I didn't want to go with it, but I learned a lot about the leftist aspects. I really began to study about the labor movement intensely, you know, really read about it, learn its history, learn about the struggles of American labor and world labor, and I liked it. I said, "That's where I'm at." And I learned about the revolutions and the Mexican Revolution and how labor played a role in that, and how the communists, the Russians, picked up on that revolution and tried to mold that for their own revolution in the Russian Revolution. They learned a lot from the Mexican Revolution, but it was different. It was a different situation. And I studied, as I said, the history of American labor, the mergers and the various aspects of the organizations that were brought about during the robber-baron era. Well, even back to colonial times, how the cord wainers guild and how in the building of the republic, how the workers really had an important role to play, as revolutionaries and as builders of making working people have a place in the development of a nation. And then, of course, the early efforts to organize when we became industrial, and the struggles in the railroad industry, the steel, and eventually the auto workers, I mean an intense, wonderful history that I was now a part of, and I knew the people, the pioneers. Eventually, as we'll talk, I became part of that international leadership. I gravitated from the shop steward to the chairman of political action and education, and I eventually was asked by [Walter] Reuther to join the International and move to Washington. Well, actually, he asked me if I would consider coming to Washington to work in the Foreign Affairs Department of the UAW, which was a world body, really. So all of this was a product of education vis-à-vis the labor movement.

Just to get back a little bit to the PAC, the political action committee, Political Action and Education Committee, maybe you can talk to me a little bit about some of the issues that were important to you or that you pushed forward with that committee.

Well, the political action committee really entailed grooming union membership to be more cognizant of American politics and the role that a local union and a local union member can play in electing people that were friendly to labor, friendly to what labor issues were at hand and the candidates that would benefit the labor movement, should they be elected. And that always took into account the aspect of registering workers to become voters, to become voters, preferably Democrats. You begin to establish ties to the party and to begin to make contacts with their candidates, whoever they're fielding for Assembly positions, state senators, supervisors, who's going to be President of the United States, who's running for governor. I mean, that all comes on the lap of the committee, and it's the committee's job then to begin to disseminate the information, to organize the workers so that they become part of that whole political process, and bringing in those candidates to the local union to talk about the issues, to talk about the issues that are most present in workers' minds, you know, housing, education, healthcare, greater freedom, all aspects that are political. That was the mission, and I really relished it. I was riding high horse on this. Plus you're the editor of the newspaper, and you use the newspaper as a vehicle for education by posting and putting in the kinds of articles that are relevant to what workers would want to know about things around them and what's politically beneficial to understand as a worker.

Did you have any particular friends in the Democratic Party at that time? People that were union friendly or labor friendly?

Well, I learned to meet them. I remember one of my first assignments as the chairman was the executive board of the local union said, "We want you to support a candidate that we're really strongly supporting. He's out in the South Central-Long Beach area. He's running for the Assembly, and we want you to walk precincts for him." I'd never walked a precinct in my life, so I got together with the campaign committee, and they gave me a precinct to walk, a number of precincts, all by myself. I got leave to leave the plant, to not be in the plant and go out for a whole week. There was somebody substituting for me in the plant, and I got to go for a whole week and walk precincts for this candidate [Vincent Thomas]. And my district to walk, of all places, was Watts. I didn't even know Watts existed. So I was walking precincts all over Watts, and it was interesting because a 95 percent African American community, and I kind of marveled at being in that part of town and being able to knock on somebody's door and talk to the resident to tell them about this particular candidate. In fact, the candidate was an African American, so I wasn't like promoting a white candidate or somebody else. It was an African American. And I really liked the experience, being able to go one on one with a resident of a house or the owner of a business and being able to talk to local people. And one day I was walking, I recall, the precinct on a certain street, and I was looking at my list, and just looking at the list I looked up and I saw this residence which was not there. It was burned. It was a house that had burned down. I looked up--I couldn't believe it. I looked up and what do I see? These huge towers. And I couldn't believe it. I thought I was in a dream world. I hadn't seen them from far away. I just came upon them. So there was nobody there. In fact, I went in. There was a gate there and I went in, and I looked around this burned-out building, I guess a living room and a kitchen, and the house was all concrete. But the roof was caved in and the doors. Everything that was wood had burned, the walls inside. But he had in the backyard these huge towers, you know, three of them, and I just couldn't believe it. So I went next door, because my other address that I had to canvass was next door, and I said, "Who lives next door? I mean, I have the name here." "Oh," they said, "he doesn't live there anymore." I said, "Do you know where he's at? Is he available? Is he still here in the neighborhood?" "No," they said. "He moved. I think he went up to live with his sister in Fresno or something." That was, what was his name? I think his last name was Rodino, Rodio, something like that [Sabato Simon Rodia], yes, the famous builder of the Watts Towers. And I went back to the headquarters, I said, "Hey, you know what I just came upon?" They said, "What?" "I went to this property," I said, "looking for this person, and lo and behold," I said, "I look up and there's these huge towers." They said, "What do you mean towers?" I said, "Yeah, these hundred-foot towers made out of cement with ceramics on it. I mean, I've never seen anything like that." And they said, "Are you sure? Are you sure you saw--what have you been smoking?", you know? "No," I said, "I'm serious. These huge towers are there." Well, nobody had heard of them, but I felt that I had discovered the Watts Towers. [laughs] Of course later they became famous. That was quite an experience.

That's so interesting, because it's not that far away from here.

No. I know.

But at the time, it was a world away.

Oh, yes, it was. So anyway, so based on those kind of precinct walking and then arranging for candidates to come to our local union to address the membership, I got to know a number of candidates that were running for office at the time. I remember later Congressman [Edward] Roybal, he was running for, I believe, lieutenant governor, and so we endorsed him, and it was my job to prepare the leaflets and get the leaflets from his campaign headquarters and make sure that we had them at our plant gates to distribute, for Edward Roybal. I remember pushing for Kennedy, John F. Kennedy. I remember [E. Estes] Kefauver. Kefauver was a candidate, a Tennessee senator running for Congress; Adlai Stevenson, a lot of folks like that. I remember one time he was in town, and I asked if we could get him to our meeting--Hubert Humphrey. He was a senator. And I remember Hubert Humphrey coming to our meeting. I met him at the door. The driver dropped him off and we started to go into the meeting, and he looked around and said, "Is there a restroom around here?" I said, "Yeah, right here." He said, "Never go into a union meeting without going to the restroom first." I said, "Oh, really?" "Yes," he said. "You may get caught in there for hours and not be able to come out." [laughs] So that's a lesson I always learned, you know, that you don't go into these meetings without going in the restroom first. But people like that I met. I was impressed with Alan Cranston, who later became our U.S. Senator. I remember--well, I got to be involved in all kinds of campaigns later, when I was not in the shop any longer, but it all was a process that blossomed as the chairman of the Political Action and Education Committee. The great thing about the education committee was that the UAW had a program that every summer, you know, when it was summer, we would gather all of our stewards, our little blue-button stewards, and chief stewards if we could get them, because the auto industry was very erratic. It had what they called layoffs due to non-production. They would literally stop producing at a certain month and go into retooling production. I guess the market wasn't that big to sustain the production, so they would close the plants down. And I would gather all our shop stewards and blue buttons and committee men, and the regional UAW office would arrange for us to have a summer school, UAW summer school. The early summer schools that I remember were up in Ventura County, up by the mountains, by the Sierras. There was a big camp up there. What is it called? It's a woman's--near where Cesar Chavez, where he's at in La Paz, Keene, California. It's up in the Sierras. There was a camp up there, a really nice camp, and we would take all of our stewards up there, and we would have these well-organized classes. The international representatives would come from Detroit. They're experts on collective bargaining, on public speaking, on the time-and-motion study, automotive engineering. People would bring in guest speakers. Upton Sinclair, the great author who was a socialist, would talk about his times, and I remember his offering his home right here in Monrovia to any one of us that wanted to write a book. They could use his guest house to live and write. I always wanted to do that. The summer school was a well-organized university for all of these labor leaders, and very well disciplined, no fooling around. Early in the morning up and around, going to the classes, to the workshops, listening to our political leaders, who would be invited, listening to Walter Reuther if he came in, or any of our regional directors. I mean, it was a place where you really learned the history, the history. That was what was important, the history of the labor movement, which so many of our people, our young people, never understood. What is labor history? And it's such a wonderful and beautiful history, and that once you learn about it and once you feel that you're a part of it, it's just something that just grows in you. So I remember that I had won an award at East L.A. College in a speech class, for being best speaker of the year in that class. It was great. I had a lot of fun doing that. And so when I went to that summer school--I was a chairman of our education committee--I signed up for the public-speaking course. I'd already been through one, but I wanted to really perfect it. So they said okay, and they said, "Here are some categories that you should talk about. What do you want? Pick." I said, "Well, let me pick foreign relations and trade policy." So I read up on some stuff about that, that pertained to the union and the work of the union and how all that affects workers. So it was my round to speak and I got up, and I made this really impassioned speech, you know, that if--you're supposed to be emulating being a candidate for Congress. So here I am making a campaign speech, and I started to talk about my platform, what I would do, the kind of legislation that I would seek and authorize in the House of Representatives, and this is the way it would affect our trade policies as a country, but this is the way it would affect our workers, and the dynamics of trade, and this and this and that. It went great, you know. And then lo and behold, I didn't know it, because when you're speaking you don't see people, you just see a buzz in front of you, a fuzz, you know--Walter Reuther himself is in the room. And he says, "Hey, I like your speech. That was very good." I said, "Thank you, thank you." He said, "What do you do? What do you work in the shop?" I said, "Well, I'm a shop steward and a chairman of the PAC committee." "Very good," he says. "You know, we're really changing our union," he said. "We don't have--you're Hispanic, right?" I said, "Yes, I am." He said, "You speak Spanish?" I said, "Yes, I do, very much so." "That's very good," he says. "You know, we're really thinking about opening up our union to have more Spanish-speaking leaders, and we need to organize. We need to organize in your community. We need to organize in your state. We need to expand our union, our numbers, so that we have more Hispanics in our union, because I know there's a lot of workers here in California, and we want people like you." I said, "Well, I'm working at it." He says, "Well, very good." He said, "I want to talk to your regional director about this." So I thanked him, and it was great talking to this great leader. This guy was a world leader, you know. He wasn't just the workers' leader of UAW. He was involved with the Roosevelts, he was involved with FDR and Eleanor, he was involved with the German chancellors and the British and the Canadians, everybody. He was a very powerful man, you know, and he was congratulating me on my speech. So the summer schools were just an impressive vehicle for the education of workers, and you took your family with you. I took my wife. We had been recently married. I think we had our first child. We took our first daughter up there in a mountain setting, very serene, very nice, and after that I became a regular at the summer schools. In fact, I eventually became a lecturer and a speaker at the summer schools. It was a great adventure, great adventure. And, of course, I used the newspaper, which was titled--the title of the newspaper was "The Feather Merchant." I've thought about that the other day. I don't recall exactly how the word feather merchant came up, and I'm going to look it up. There must be something on the Internet about the feather merchant. I think it had to do something with Rip Van Winkle or something. There were some people around Rip Van Winkle that were called feather merchants or something.

Interesting title. Well, that brings me to the issue of diversity, you know, you being recognized by Walter Reuther and being wooed because of your heritage. How diverse was that--once you got to that point that you were socializing or interacting with these high leaders within the union, these high, not necessarily--I guess the shop stewards would attend the summer school.

Oh, yes, sure. Oh, yes.

But there still was a hierarchy, it seems.

Oh, yes. The International, it's called. It's the people that--the UAW is broken up by regions throughout the United States and Canada. We were also a Canadian union. And the regions, the one I was in, California is Region Six, and that's composed of Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii, Arizona, Texas, and Colorado. That's Region Six. And wherever there were automotive plants, aircraft, agricultural implement and other kinds of industries in that region, that's the region and it's run by a regional director who was an executive board member of headquarters in Detroit. So each region has a regional director who's an executive board member, an officer of the--and it's called the International union, because it also includes Canada. So here, this is what happened. I'll tell you how it worked. I was really involved in political action and then something began to happen around Los Angeles, well, in California. The activists, Chicanos, Mexican Americans, not so much Chicanos, Mexican Americans began to really rally around the need for us to have a strong state political organization, and they called it MAPA, Mexican American Political Association. And a lot of former political leaders and union leaders really, including some congressmen and assemblymen, began to put this leadership organization together, MAPA. And we got involved. I got involved and my wife and I and our friends, our union friends. We all wanted to be involved in MAPA. And so we went to a MAPA conference, one Sunday or one weekend, that they had here in L.A., and the--I just want to preface this a little bit. Before that conference, there had been a congressional election going on, national congressional election, and the union had sent me out to work for the congressman, put me on leave again, and I went to East L.A., and I set up an office for the congressional candidate. And I was able to recruit community around this congressional office with bumper stickers and posters and precincts and organize precinct workers and all that. It was my job, the coordinator. The congressman had been a former assemblyman, now running for Congress. His name was George Brown, and he was running for Congress for the first time, a burly man, a big liberal, and he wanted to represent a diverse community, and he wanted to include very much Mexican Americans. He had with me in my headquarters another gentleman, who was his--how should I say--he was a man that he relegated to putting up his signs. He was a sign painter, so we had signs all over the district, Brown for Congress, Brown for Congress. And that sign painter and his family were very much involved in politics. His name was Raúl Morin, and Raúl Morin had the fame of having been a World War II veteran and had served in the Pacific theater of war, and he wrote one of the first books about Mexican Americans in the military. It was called "Among the Valiant." And he wrote a book about all the heroes and all the Mexicanos, you know, who had given their lives or came home as great heroes, and that was an outstanding book that everybody praised. That was Raúl Morin's book, and he was my sort of colleague in the political office there, along with his wife and his kids. So it was a successful campaign, and George Brown won. He became the congressman. And when he began to open up his staff or staffers, I bid on the job. I said, "I'd like to be your field representative," knowing that I'd be working for a congressman. I wouldn't be in the union anymore. I would take a leave from the union. They would give you a leave to do that. But I would be a congressional aide. Well, George Brown decided I'd done a good job and all that, but he wasn't ready to employ me as his field representative, and I was a little distraught over it. I just thought I'd worked so hard for it, you know. And he said, "I can't do it," he said, "because Raúl Morin has asked me to do the same thing." And he said, "And really, I have to pick somebody else, because there's a conflict here." So he picked a third person to be his field representative, and as I said, I felt a little distraught about it. So then a couple of weeks later we go to this MAPA conference, and there's a lot of all Mexican Americans, you know, Chicanos now, at this conference, and we weren't Chicanos yet. This still wasn't the movement days. We're Mexican Americans. And who's there at the conference but the regional director of the UAW for Region Six, who was a young Yale-educated chemist who decided he wanted to be involved in the world of labor, and he came to work in Los Angeles at the North American Aircraft, where they built all the space vehicles, and he was a shop steward there to begin with. Then he ran for president of the local union, and he led one of the big first strikes in aerospace in the West Coast. Here's this intellectual, you know, coming from back East and becoming this labor guy and becomes a great leader in leading the strike. And now he runs for office and defeats the regional director that was here, and he becomes the regional director. His name was Paul Schrade, and Paul was really a very progressive leftist, very progressive leftist guy, and he really started to change the regional structure with different representatives. He was now, as the regional director, a member of the executive board in Detroit, and Reuther had told the regional directors that he wanted this new emphasis on organizing the UAW and to make it diverse, and so, "I want organizers in all these regions to begin to organize people," Reuther told them. So Paul Schrade comes back and he has this mandate that he's got to put organizers into the field. And so he's at this conference, and my wife Arcy is talking to him, and another colleague of mine, who was a shop steward, they're talking to Paul and they're saying, "Hey, so what are you doing here, Paul?" "Well, I'm looking at the conference of Mexican Americans. This is a dynamic movement going on, and we need more Mexican Americans in there in the political process," and he's really--and they say, "Yeah, but what about your union?" My wife says, "Well, what about your union? I don't see any Hispanics in there. I don't see any Latinos in your union. I mean, why haven't you picked Latinos?" "Well," he says, "I don't know the region that well yet. I'm looking, and eventually I guess we will, but right now we're sizing up our budgets." You know, he was giving a lot of discussion around that. And they said, "Well, you ought to pick some Mexican Americans to be the organizers. What about Ed, my husband? He's an organizer. He puts together things. He knows the labor movement." "Well," he says, "I appreciate that. We have a lot of people like him." You know, he's--I wasn't there, but she's telling him that. So anyway, one day we're celebrating--he calls me and he said, "We're going to meet with George Brown." He said, "We want to congratulate him over his election," and all that, "so the assistant regional director and I are going to go visit George Brown and congratulate him," and all that. On that occasion, I remember the Cuban crisis has just taken place. So here's George Brown, a new member of Congress, and here's the Cuban crisis is going on. I remember seeing that on a television screen in his office. And anyway, we sit down with George Brown and talking about his new role as a congressman, and, "I understand Ed here helped you in your campaign." "Ah," he said, "he was a great field organizer out there in precinct office and all that." "Yeah, Ed did a good job," but not good enough to be his field rep, see. And Paul Schrade tells George Brown, he says, "Well, Bill and I," the assistant regional director, "Bill and I have decided that we're going to put Ed Torres on staff. He's going to become an International representative. He's going to be an organizer for Region Six." So, wow, you know. And I'm sitting there. I made it, you know, I made it, an International representative, because that's what they're called, International representatives. And so I reported for work on next Monday or something, and I joined the new staff of organizers. As I recall, there were about eight of us that were picked up as organizers for Region Six.

You didn't know beforehand that he was going to make that announcement?

No. He made it. I guess the good lobbying that my wife and my friend gave him, he figured he would do something. I guess he probably vetted who was Ed Torres. So I got to be a Region Six organizer, and that was a tough job, because our mission as organizers are to go to a plant that's not organized, a big factory, you know, and stand outside the gates and infiltrate the factory. I mean, you can't get in because security. You can't get in to talk to people, but you can get them when they come out, and you can hand them a card and tell them, "Do you want the union here? Do you guys have problems here? This is what you need." It's Chrysler all over again. They have all the problems of Chrysler, but they have no union to protect them, to deal with their grievances, to deal with their vacations or salaries or rights or anything. They don't have that. They have the company runs everything. They fire on will. Whoever they don't like, they fire, and when you have a union you can't do that. You have to go through a process. And so you stand out the gates and you tell them, "Do you want to join the union?" You give them a card. "Mail it, mail it, mail it in. Nobody'll know that you mailed it in." And you collect cards. They come in the mail. You have a factory of, say, five hundred people, and you get four hundred cards or three hundred cards, you figure there's potential there. Then you start working with each card, who's who, where'd they live, and you make arrangements to have meetings, maybe at some local restaurant or cafe or church hall or something, and you invite them. And they go to hear what do you have to say, so you have to really be able to articulate the importance of the union security that comes with being organized and selecting a good union to do that, and what it can get for you in terms of your benefits and salaries and vacations and all those kinds of things, a grievance procedure. What you're doing is propagandizing for the union, and you try to take polls to see how many of those people have you really influenced, and how many who were not there would go along as well. So you keep working at that. It may take you months. It may take you years. But eventually, there'll come a time when you have a government-sponsored election by the national government. The National Labor Relations Board comes out and holds an election, and those workers that work there, by secret ballot, vote whether they want the union or not. And if you've done a good job, if you really articulated the issues and have been able to convince people that it's good, they will choose. They will choose, democratically. They'll pick a union or say no. Sometimes you have a competing union that competes with you, so they have to decide which one of those they want, or if any, so that makes it even tougher. And the company does everything to undo what you're doing. They intimidate the workers. "If you sign one of those cards, you're out. Did you attend that meeting the other night? If we catch you attending those meetings, you're not going to be here very long." Or the company will select an employee, you know, a stooge, to go to the meeting and tell us who's there and what did they talk about, and then they come back and they report, and the company knows that you were there, because so-and-so told them. I mean, there's all kinds. They hire high level what they call labor consultants on how to beat the union any way they can, legislatively or politically or through intimidation or whatever process. So it's a tough job, very difficult to organize a plant of human beings based on their own social problems and economic problems, and that's what I did. That was my job. And it's tough, because you have to be there early in the morning shifts, when the workers are going in. You have to be there when they come out. You have to meet with them at night, when they're home, in their homes or in the church hall or in the restaurant. I mean, it's a never-ending job, and then you, too, are intimidated. If the company gets the police to, you know, "Don't let them park around the plant anywheres," or, "Stand in the gates and don't let them leaflet the workers at this point," they send the sheriffs out and the cops. And in some places, I know, and back East, the organizers get their tires slashed. They get beat up. They're sleeping in motels at all hours of the night, traveling to the towns, trying to organize, and they get vandalized, and it's really, really murderous. But you really become hardened and very smart on what's going on politically, and just harmful. You have to be careful.

Were you ever threatened, or were you ever harmed?

Oh, always harassed, harassed, you know. So that was our goal.

So you talked about work in the body shop and how hard that was and how difficult that was, and now you're talking about organizing and how hard that was and how difficult that was. Comparing the two, which one was more rewarding or more difficult?

Well, a job in the shop was tough because of the environment, because of the clamor and the angst that you have, because you're defending workers and you're fighting management and you're policing the line. You're monitoring line speed, and you're writing grievances and negotiating and bargaining with management, and that's a whole life in itself, you know. Organizing, again as I said, is tough. Yes, you're out in the open. You're not--

Okay, we're back on.

You're out in the open, of course. It's early mornings. It disrupts your family life, because you don't see your kids in the morning. Everybody's asleep and you have to leave. And then during the day, you're out there. You have to go back to the office and start preparing your materials. You're going through all your data, printing your leaflets, calling on political friends or people that you know that can help minimize the harassment that you're getting from local law enforcement. You know, all those things come into the process. Then you have to prepare for the shift when they're coming out, and you go through all of that, and then you have to prepare for maybe the second shift going in, so it's a twenty-four-hour job, as opposed to being in the shop, where you're limited to the work hours. The thing I should indicate is that when I was working in the shop, doing my shop steward work and my political action, I was going to college. After work and after the overtime period, starting the day out at six-thirty to be in the shop, I'd get out--three-thirty was our departure time, but then the company always wanted overtime. They wanted workers to work overtime, so you have to stay there with them. As a steward, you have to stay with them, and it may be it's just a small crew, maybe just ten people. They have to do touch-up jobs and things that require--they can't do during the day, so they keep a skeleton crew after to pick up on all the stuff that hasn't been done during the day, and you have to be there with them. And by the time I would get out of that, it was six-thirty in the evening, and then I'd have to run to college to make my first class at seven, and that would go on till about ten. And then you'd go home, you haven't seen the family. The kids are asleep. Arcy's been with them all day. And then you have homework. You're doing night homework till twelve midnight, one o'clock in the morning, and then there you go back at five in the morning again. It was rough. It was rough. But it was worth something. I always knew that down the road it would all pay off, so to speak. My wife was so tolerant, that she knew that I had to do that. It was a love of labor, but at the same time, she knew I was trying to get an education so that I could enhance my capabilities of providing for a family, and burning a candle at both ends was what I was doing.

Let's leave it there, because I'd like to talk a little bit more about that. Thank you so much.

This is Virginia Espino and today is February 23 [2011]. I'm interviewing Congressman Esteban Torres at his home in West Covina, California. Today I'd like to start with going back also, and not necessarily moving forward, but going back to what you said last time about the role of the Young Communists League in helping you to gain a foothold as a leader in the UAW. I was wondering if you could reflect back on maybe how this organization, how this group helped or hurt the labor cause at that time.

Well, the Left was obviously very much involved in the labor movement here in Los Angeles and in California, to be sure. This was an important time in history, and labor lines, labor groupings were really influenced by the Left in Los Angeles. I know that the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] organization--the AFL-CIO were not an organization at that point. There was the AF of L [American Federation of Labor] and there was the CIO. The CIO being a more progressive part of the labor movement, had many of its members working within the unions, within the various locals, and there was a split between those that were dedicated very much to the Stalinist line at that time, and those that were opposed, and that caused for confrontation at many times and created a split. When I came on the job at Chrysler Corporation, there were elements of the Left involved in the factory, working there, and that's how I was introduced to them. They introduced themselves to me and asked me to consider being part of a leadership, being that I was a Mexican American. There was an absence of Mexican American leaders, and they wanted to foment a process where more Chicanos at that time could get involved. And I was willing to partake in that. I felt that I had something to offer, and that's how I got involved. They were very helpful to me in formulating a campaign on my behalf, working with me, and talking to me about various aspects of the party line, and I could sense that this was something that I had to be careful about, because here I'd come from a whole different scenario. I'd been freshly out of the military in western Europe, fighting the enemy, so to speak, and here you have people in my own backyard talking about the things that I had fought about in Western Germany. But the way I perceived it, it wasn't an onslaught on my community or my job or myself. These were people that were trying to coax me into understanding what the Left was doing and why it was important, and why they were involved with workers, and the cause, and this and that, and I felt a sympathy for those workers and what they were trying to do with them. And, you know, slowly I began to perceive a whole different notion of what socialism was, what communism was all about, but I was very careful, of course, not to get too involved with their particular brand. But I did take advantage, if you will, of their lessons and their ability to talk to me and lead me in the direction that I could be leader in a very important movement. But, you know, in the greater part in Los Angeles and the CIO, there was, as I said, there was a split organization, and there were many confrontations that took place, which cause the schism within the labor movement. I recall at Chrysler that there came a time when there was a purge. There was a purge of left-wingers in various local unions, especially in the Auto Workers Union. I know that in Detroit, in the UAW's headquarters and the organization, there was a big purge by the leadership, Walter Reuther and the members of his administration, to purge the communists out of the union. This was done in basic union political fights that they had and eventually getting rid of these people.

Here in Los Angeles, I recall that many of the left-wing workers, leaders, were taken out of the shop after work and beat up, and many of them never came back. Some of them came back, but they were isolated. They were ostracized in the plant, some of the very people that I was working with. So I had an empathy that, my goodness, you know, here these guys are trying to help workers' cause, and here they're getting beat up because of the ideological aspect of what they believed in. So I followed that, and, of course, I never committed myself to becoming a card carrier or becoming any part of their organization. But there were some heady times that transpired in the labor movement with this whole concept of Soviet-influenced attitudes. People like Dorothy Healy, who was the chairwoman, I believe, of the Communist Party in California, was very much involved with much of the union efforts. Her husband [Phillip Connelly], as I recall, was a trade union leader in the CIO organization, and eventually all that splintered and caused a big division in the CIO here in Los Angeles. I read an article recently that [Nikita Sergeyevich] Khrushchev had come to the United States to try to take contact with Americans, especially American trade union leaders, and they met with him. Some of the top labor leaders in the United States met with Mr. Khrushchev. He was very arrogant and sort of demeaning to them, saying that they really didn't represent workers, that they really represented the capitalist class, and I know that he ridiculed Mr. Reuther especially, for being a lackey of the capitalists in America. And then he came out to the West Coast and he met with the longshoremen here in Los Angeles and liked them very much, because the longshoremen was a left-wing union at the time, headed up by Mr. [Harry] Bridges, who was an avowed communist, leading an American union. And of course Khrushchev took to him in great strides and congratulated him for the great cause that it was bringing about here. So that didn't go well with a lot of American labor leaders here and throughout, but these were the things that were taking place at that time.

Can you tell me a little bit about, or maybe explain your understanding of Reuther's position at the time? Was it something that you agreed with, or something that you disagreed with, the anti-communist stance?

Well, you know, the Reuthers initially, in their early organizing days, as young men went to the Soviet Union and worked in Russia. They worked at the Gorky Ford Motor Company, both--actually, Walter Reuther and Victor, his brother, traveled throughout the world, and in order to pay passage, in order to find employment, they went to work in the Soviet Union, as I said, at the Gorky Ford Motor Company. And they saw Soviet life as it was. They didn't quite think that it was the kind of thing that they would want to bring back to the United States, so they always had an antipathy towards the Soviet style. And I know that in the early days of their organizing efforts, when Mr. Reuther became president of the union, he made a big effort to purge the communist leadership that was in the union, and he took a great part in the postwar period in helping build the Marshall Plan, the United States' efforts to rebuild Western Europe, etc., but always this attitude that they had to be careful not to let the communists, who were very active, of course, in the postwar period in Europe, of trying to control labor in Germany and Italy and in many of the countries there. And so there was a great effort by the United States government, along with the Marshall Plan, to support European workers and to keep them free of communist infiltration and leadership, and to that degree there was great effort at making sure that the communists didn't take control of the port unions and the transportation unions in France and in Italy, etc. A strange aspect to all this. There was a communist leader here in the United States, who was the president of the Communist Party USA. His name was Jay Lovestone, and Mr. Lovestone was a member of the presidium of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, a member of the hierarchy, and a very prominent communist, of course, in the United States. But he had a falling out with Stalin. For some reason, he took sides on an issue that Stalin didn't concur with, and expelled him from the presidium, got rid of him. And he came back to the States and took revenge on Stalin by denouncing the Communist Party and becoming a full-fledged patriotic American. And this gentleman, Mr. Lovestone, became a very important figure in the administration of the AFL, the union of the AFL, and became a staunch anti-communist, just rabid. He was just against him, so everything he saw and perceived that was Red, he was communist, and he was sort of the guiding force in the AFL to purge unions within the craft unions and the other unions of the AFL, in getting rid of any communists, if there were any. And when there was a merger with the CIO, when the CIO and the AF of L merged, he became a confidante or Mr. George Meany, the president of the merged organization, and began a campaign of rooting out anything that smacked of socialism and left-wing or everything that he perceived to be communist. And that became a big issue with the Reuthers, who, of course, had purged communists within the UAW, but everything that wasn't communism, you know, they--after all, the Reuthers were socially minded. They were probably democratic socialists, their upbringing, their father. They believed in socialism as a form of justice for workers, but not communism. But Lovestone went after them, and there was this fight, continuous fight with the Reuthers and Lovestone and Meany, so that the AF of L took aggressive positions on anything, because of Jay Lovestone. So all of that came to play, of course, in the purges that took place out here in the West Coast.

Were you ever worried about how you were going to be perceived?

Well, you know, my opposition in the union, when I would run for office, my opposition would tag me as a communist. They'd say, "He's a commie." I mean, you do that to any adversary that gets in your way. You're going to tag him with something that's not good. But I wasn't, you know, and people knew I wasn't. But I had the title, and I had to be defensive about it.

Did you ever feel that you had to openly criticize the Communist Party or the communist influence?

Well, I never was in a position where I had to do that, really. I didn't have to repudiate the party. I was in no position to do that. I mean, I wasn't a member. I was attacked as being a communist, but that was just hearsay and a political jacket they put on me to try to defeat my cause.

Well, looking back, do you think that they served a purpose then and maybe could serve a purpose in the future? I'm speaking about the Communist Party. Since you were there before the purges and then watched the purges, do you think that they had a role to play and could still have a role to play?

No, no.

Or that system of beliefs. Maybe not necessarily what happened in the Soviet Union, but the philosophy of communism and socialism.

No, I don't think there's any aspect of that coming back again. I think that was a period of high tension in our country and the world, and it's something that in my work, in organizing, later on as I became a leader in the union and my job as an organizer and working in foreign countries where the communists were very active, I had to fight to keep them from impeding the work we were doing with the unions, in South America and the Caribbean. I went to work as an organizer in Argentina and Mexico, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, and there was always a communist presence. This was the cold war period, and the Communist Party, the Soviet line had also--in the world of global politics, in the labor movement what happened in the postwar period was that the Americans and the western forces, in order to defeat communism in the postwar period, formed a labor alliance. At first it was felt that all workers in the world should join together and fight for justice on the job. You know, we had fought with the Soviets during the war against fascism, and so after the war, when there was talk of building a worldwide organization of labor, the Soviets were invited. But immediately there was opposition from the American sector that they didn't want the Soviets involved in any kind of world organization, and the Soviets didn't want to belong to an organization where capitalists were involved, so there was an immediate division. So what happened from the western powers is that they created an international labor organization called the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the ICFTU, and the Soviet bloc, the Soviet bloc created a world organization of labor called the World Federation of Trade Unions, WFTU, and these two bodies went out worldwide to organize workers into their cause. Well, I found myself in Latin America, working as an organizer and as a representative of American labor, confronting members of the Soviet bloc organization, who already were trying to organize workers in Argentina and Chile and Mexico, who belonged to or were thinking about belonging to the Soviet bloc. So we always had those confrontations. As I recall, the UAW line was that we will operate independently of the assistance of, say, Latin American workers. We will work independently, free of any US State Department or any US Intelligence Agency's trappings. We wanted to make sure that workers perceived us as bona fide trade unionists, not tied to the US government, not tied to any agency of the US government. And the Soviets, they operated on the basis that they were part of the Soviet empire and that they would make things better for Latino workers in Latin America. So there was this big fight going on all the time, and that's where Jay Lovestone, who influenced Mr. Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO to create a kind of organization in Latin America, and in other parts of the world, for that matter, to organize workers but with American corporate support and State Department support, which often--it's already been publicized and written about, that there was also infiltration by government agencies such as the CIA working with the labor movement, American labor movement, in parts of the world, helping to bring down governments and bring down anybody that might be connected to a Soviet-type political process. We remained independent of that. We just would not do that, and we had greater success, I think, working as an American union with vis-à-vis a Latin American union, their knowing that we had no government involvement.

Did you get involved in any political campaigns in Latin America, in the same way that you did in Los Angeles?

Well, we would always take a position that we would work in Latin America on behalf of those workers, those organizations that were bona fide trade unionists, that were fighting for their particular security, their benefits, their trade union efforts to bring social justice and economic justice to their memberships. And in most cases, the governments at that time in Latin America were very much dictatorships, military juntas running these governments, and obviously, they weren't going to provide those kinds of benefits to workers. They wanted to keep workers down and bust unions for that matter. This is what took me, as I say, to different countries, but never getting myself involved in the political process. You had to stay clear of that. Sometimes you were antagonized and you were persecuted by the governments, you know, thinking that you were an outsider coming in to influence their workers against their regimes, so you had to be very careful.

Do you have any specific examples of when that happened?

Well, we would be organizing in a particular area, a particular plant [in 1964, Siam di Tella Argentina] where the military would come and they would say, "You're an outsider here. What are you doing?" And they'd round us up and take us in, you know. But I always had the good fortune of being an American, and I could always call on my embassy that, "Look, I'm here as a bona fide trade union organizer with an organization. I'm working under the conventions of the International Labor Organization, a UN body. I'm working under the auspices of the Organization of American States and the United States. I'm not here to do any political damage. I'm here to work on behalf of workers." And eventually they'd release you and let you go, but it was touch and go.

Were you ever afraid?

Yes. On many occasions I was afraid of the situation. Then I had the other problem that in many cases, where you ran across workers who were heavily influenced by Soviet attitudes or maybe the WFTU had gotten to them--my assignment was to go work and organize workers in the automotive industry. At that time, the United States began to outsource, began to--we already had factories in Mexico for many, many years. General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, other companies had come into Mexico, Volkswagen, Fiat, other European automotive companies. The same was taking place in Argentina and in Chile, in Peru. You had American companies down there, some of them new companies and new American presence, and we knew they were there because they were leaving the United States to seek cheaper wages, exploit workers who had no knowledge of trade union principles and benefits, and so our job was to go down there and curtain their efforts as much as we could, and how could we do that was by organizing those workers, showing them how we operate in the United States, tell them about collective bargaining, telling them about how you can develop a grievance procedure, how you could work for benefits that were commensurate with the kind of productivity that they were providing for these American companies. Obviously, the company didn't like my presence there. You know, "You're an agitator, you're coming here to influence these people to work against us," and I would say, "That's our right, to move around the world. You do it. We can do it too." So I became a teacher, teaching workers how to put together a contract with the General Motors Corporation or the Ford Motor Company. But I had confrontation with many of the workers, who would say, "Well, you guys, the Americans are down here, especially you," they'd say, "because you speak Spanish. They send you down here to try to influence us, and you're probably just working on behalf of these companies." And I'd have to really do a good job explaining to them that I was a bona fide trade unionist, I was not a company lackey there, you know, front man for the companies. On other occasions, I had the workers--I'll give you an example of workers of Brazil. I was teaching a class in industrial, what we call industrial engineering, a method of how the workers, the shop stewards, the union representatives on the line would be able to use engineering methods to time the speed of productivity, the speed of the lines that are moving along, and workers are working on particular automobiles, etc., etc. It's a scientific way of keeping control of line speeds, and, of course, line speeds, if you move the line faster, you'll get more production, but you wear out the workers, and you get them injured, and you get them punished for not keeping up with the work, etc., etc. So there's a scientific way of timing the product. That's how it moves. And you can slow the line down by having a contract that allows you to do that. Well, in one instance with the Brazilian workers, one worker kept saying, "You know, look. We know you're here to try to teach us how to defend ourselves. But more than that, I think you're here because you want to know what we're doing and how we're operating, because--," this one particular worker kept badgering me on that, kept saying, "You're a CIA agent." I said, "I'm not a CIA agent." And it would disrupt the class, you know. It would disrupt my line of instruction, because I had this individual just badgering me all the time. We went on that way for about a week, and after the course was finished and I was passing out diplomas, he did come to me and apologize. He said, "I'm sorry," he said, "that I did that to you," he said, "but really, I know now that you are really a trade unionist. You're not a CIA agent as I said you were, so I apologize." And that man today is the president of Brazil, Lula [de Silva], who was just on my case. Well, he was with the Workers Party. The Workers Party was a very leftist organization. It was a leftist party, and he was a Marxist, you know, and he attacked me on the basis that I was a capitalist and a lackey of the American government and an intelligence agent. But he later apologized to me, and we became good friends. But this was the turmoil that transpired during the cold war. I was in Argentina one day, and I was invited to the labor attaché's home. Labor attaché is a member of the American Embassy staff. And he said, "I understand you're here in Argentina." He says, "We got word that you were coming in. Be careful." He was trying to tell me to watch out, don't do anything that's illegal, because you're going to be subject to persecution by the government here. And I assured him that I wasn't doing anything like that. Just coincidentally, because I was a United Auto Workers representative in Argentina at that time, and I was visiting automotive plants as the Argentines wanted me to do, the unions, they wanted to show me how their production was going and the problems they were having with the management, and I was telling them in my seminars down there how we control those issues, how we work with management, how we negotiate, how we have the collective bargaining agreements, and how we protect workers on the line working--that was my job. I was a technical assistance provider. And we went to one factory. Unbeknownst to me, all of a sudden the whistles blow and everybody stops working, and they round up the management, and the workers put the management in the tool crib, in the tool cage where they hand out tools. It's barricaded by a fence. And they said, "We're going to sit down and negotiate with the management, and we're going to take over the plant," and they did. And there I am in the middle of this, you know, and I knew that that was going to cause some problems. I was accused of being a United Auto Worker organizer there, causing those workers to take the plant and sit down like the auto workers did in the United States. You know, it was just coincidental. I didn't do that. I wasn't there doing that, but management thought that and so did the government people. Here's a UAW sit-down strike strategy, and this man is here provoking these people to do that. So, well, I had to talk my way out of that one.

How did you manage to talk your way out of that one?

Well, I mean, once they reached agreements with the workers, and I explained that I was there doing what I was doing, that I had nothing to do with a history of the auto workers some twenty years before me, they let me go.

But do you feel, looking back, do you feel that your presence and what they might believe you stood for helped them to move one way or another?

Oh, indeed.

Or do you think it was just really truly coincidental?

I'm not sure I understand that.

Well, when you look at just that one situation that you just explained, and you have these workers who know you're coming, who know about the UAW and the US labor movement, or must know something about it, do you think that you might have influenced their thinking or influenced their motivation?

Well, I thought about that. I remember my first day there, I took from the UAW--it was customary for me to do this--a large artistic album. It was a production of the UAW by artists, showing them a history of the American labor movement and how unions started in the United States, beginning with the cord wainers [shoemakers] guild, the people who made shoes during the colonial period, the guilds and how the guilds established themselves, the glassblowers and the carpenters and all those craft unions, and how eventually with the industrial revolution, how workers organized and you had the birth of the railroad unions and the dockworkers, because we were in an industrial revolution, and how the factories eventually organized, and the book depicted all these things, and it depicted how the railroad workers had struck the company when the working conditions were intolerable. It illustrated the sit-down strikes in Detroit and Flint, Michigan, and Lansing, Michigan, when the workers took over the General Motors plant and the Ford Motor plant, and the Reuthers were involved. This was all artistically done, and I gave that as a gift to that union down there. So they're very knowledgeable. They're very sophisticated. They knew about American labor history, but here was a representative giving them a gift, an artistic memento of history. But that could have influenced them, maybe. They didn't tell me they were going to do that when I went in, but it took place.

Did they gain anything from that?

They did, they did. They got conditions. They got conditions. A lot of the things that I talked about in my seminars, they were able to improvise into contractual agreements that they would not allow for workers to grind lead, because lead powder and you ingest that, and that's toxic. That creates early death. And I told them how we dealt with this issue in the States. We build protective units where the automobile gets the lead ground, but it doesn't spread out to the whole shop, and all the workers that grind the lead are covered with protective clothing, and oxygen is given to them so they're not breathing the lead. They didn't have anything like that. So these were things that were won by the kind of international solidarity that we built around worker to worker, so this was our cause.

How did the US corporations or the US--what was it, Chrysler, that you were at that time?

I was a Chrysler worker here in the States, now a United Auto Workers representative.

So you were not involved with a specific automobile company at that time, on staff.

No, I was on leave. When you go on the UAW staff, the company gives you a leave of absence. Under the contract, you're given a leave of absence to partake in union work, so you're protected. Your seniority is protected.

Okay, so then how did the Chrysler Corporation respond to your working in Latin America?

Well, obviously they didn't tell me, but you know that they know that the UAW had workers in the field. I was responsible for Latin America, but we had staff members responsible for Africa, for the Far East, Japan, Korea. We had workers in Australia, helping Australians. We had people working in Western Europe. We had people working in Spain. Chrysler had a big plant in Spain. One time there was discussion about sending me to Spain to work with them, because my background, but I didn't get to that point. Spain was still under the regime of Generalissimo Franco, who was the dictator, and that would have been pretty tough handling these kinds of issues there.

It seems like most of the governments in Latin America were also dictators during that time.

At that time they were, yes.

Did you go to Guatemala or some of those other?

No. Guatemala did not have production, automotive production. Most of the large countries that I just heretofore mentioned did. I was in the Dominican Republic. Puerto Rico had a Ford plant, but that's US territory. You know, the corporation, the management knows that you're there. It was always a practice of mine to introduce myself and say, "I'm here. I'm on an assignment with the union. My embassy knows I'm here. I'm registered with the labor attaché. They know that I'm working down here. I'm trying to cement better relations with these workers and with your company. We're part of a worldwide effort to build social economic justice on the workplace. You're here to build automobiles and make a profit for your stockholders and sell automobiles." It was the greatest thing I remember doing.

What are some of the lessons that you learned from that experience?

Well, there were many. You know, the camaraderie that you build with the trade unions in the country, who never realize, really, that Americans have that capacity to go down there and do that. But the whole idea here was that we could join as workers in a worldwide organization, and we did that as--again, I told you about the ICFTU being the western worldwide organization of free democratic unions, and the WFTU [World Federation of Trade Unions] being the Soviet organization that was doing the same thing we were doing, but in another vein, you know what I mean, trying to convince those workers to be Soviet-oriented. Because there were communist unions in Latin America, and some parties, many of them underground, but they were there. But one of the ways to work internationally was that there is a system in the world of labor called trade secretariats, and these are individual federations of, say, teachers. Teachers worldwide have a worldwide organization. It's called the International Teachers Trade Union, and it's based in Geneva, Switzerland. Steelworkers, auto workers, and aerospace workers belong to a worldwide organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, called the International Metal Workers Federation. And all workers in the world who are in democratic unions, free countries, belong to that trade secretariat. The one that we belong to, the UAW, we were an affiliate of the Metal Workers Federation, the IMF. The IMF represented thirteen million workers around the world. No, it was more than that. It was something like thirty-five million workers around the world, in a federation, and they're all united. You pledge solidarity. You pay dues into that organization, and that organization acts as a sort of a conduit for other affiliates to work worldwide, so you have this worldwide solidarity going on. We would have a strike in Detroit by General Motors workers. They would walk out of a plant because of unjust conditions or whatever was going on, a big trade dispute, and they would stop work in Detroit. The workers in India, in New Delhi, at the General Motors plant in New Delhi, would walk out in sympathy for the workers in Detroit, and that puts pressure on the company. My god, you've got two big plants that produce with their workers walking out. We'd better settle this issue. So this is what's called solidarity. Or you could get workers in New Delhi and Detroit and Caracas, Venezuela, and San Paolo, Brazil, all General Motors plants, walking out on a given day, in solidarity with the guys in Detroit, or perhaps everybody walking out for the workers in New Delhi, see, to settle their cause. So this has been the world of trade union solidarity. Given the conditions today, you see a great decline in the labor movement here in the United States, given our economic, the outsourcing issues, but there is also labor decline in some of the other countries that we had trade union solidarity with, because of diminishing economic problems there. But these organizations are still alive.

Well, I don't know if you've been following what's happening in Wisconsin--

Yes.

--and the governor's attempt to--

Bust the union.

--to take away the basic right to organize.

Right, bargaining, collective bargaining.

Collective bargaining. I heard on the radio a woman commenting that the unions were useful at one time, but they're no longer useful anymore, they serve no purpose today. How would you respond to that comment?

Well, that's not true. I mean, the unions organized long ago, during our industrial revolution, when the robber barons, as they were called, the large corporate managers, owners of the industries, you know, would just abuse the workforce. And little by little, again, given the background of Europeans and others that came to our country as immigrants who had trade union experiences in their own countries in Europe, provided our Americans with knowledge of how to come together and how to build a sense of unity, and by withholding their work they could bring the management to sit down with them and work out conditions at work, and that's how they started. And as the depression came, we had a president who believed that there was a need for greater amenities to workers in the United States who were unemployed, decreed that we could have a Labor Relations Act, that we could have Social Security, that we could sit down and let workers organize. The workers in Detroit, who struck the automotive plants, they weren't organized. There was no union. Those workers faced machine guns, and they faced beatings, and that's why they had to sit down and hold the companies and sit in the factories. And so that brought management to their knees, so to speak, to work out conditions of work, and it's been established the benefit of pensions and seniority and wages and conditions at work and the collective-bargaining process, which was endorsed by the government with legislation, and that made America a great country of middle-class people, the working people of the United States. Those that didn't organize, those that didn't have their unions, the companies, in order to offset the union coming in and forcing them to do these things, did it on their own. You know, they give workers pensions. They give workers benefits and wages and vacations, because they don't want an outside force coming in, the workers telling them what to do by sitting at the table with them and working out a contract. They do it on their own. So workers without unions have benefited in this country. They've benefited. Now, for that lady to say that they're no longer useful, you know, it's just not correct. It's still useful. That's why Americans have the conditions they have, because unions brought that about. Now, that's not to say that there isn't abuses in the system. There's always a rotten apple somewheres, and there's organizations that have abused their power, have caused some companies in cases to close up because they can't compete, or they can't carry out their process because they're outspent, whatever. That was bad strategy and thinking on the part of the unions, and so there are some that have been infiltrated by underground forces, you know, that corrupt the leadership and corrupt the process, and those are bad, like you have in every case. It doesn't have to be in the unions. You can have it in government or in the private sector.

Why do you think, then, that there is a decline in union membership?

Well, in large part because of outsourcing, because companies that produced here figured that they didn't want to any longer pay the kind of wages that unions brought about to their workers, and they could leave the country. They could become part of a multi--well, the large corporations that go abroad, who have no loyalty to the United States, really, their loyalty is to the dollar, it's to benefit the stockholders, and they will go to China, or they'll go to Malaysia, or they'll go to Honduras or Guatemala, and exploit people there who need money, who'll work for a meager salary, who will employ children, will abuse women or men, who--there are no working conditions. There are no working standards that are imposed on them by their governments. So that's why we have decline. The private sector in this country, the largest country that produced all the goods and services that we know about, know about today, are no longer here. They've gone somewheres else, with this scheme of outsourcing. Even your service employees, people that answer phones, and people that answer your consumer questions, are based in the Philippines or in India or some other country, working out of some neighborhood, cheaper wages. They speak English and they can answer your questions about your credit, about what's wrong with your computer or what's wrong with your refrigerator. That's why it's declined.

This is jumping forward a little bit, but I was wondering if--I mean, you're kind of bridging the labor activism with the government role and the government responsibility and legislation, and you were directly involved in both those things. You were directly involved in labor organizing and directly involved in government as congressman. Did you ever have to deal with these issues as a congressman, writing legislation or passing or supporting?

Sure.

Do you have any examples of--

Well, I mean, every so often in Congress, the issue would come up that they were going to do away with Social Security. You know, they wanted to privatize it. That's something that was started by the unions. We had a president at the time who felt it was good for all Americans to have a semblance of security after retirement, and he brought about, through legislation, with the support of the unions, the Social Security Act. That's why we have it. And there are forces at play today that want to bring that down, that say that we don't need that, that we should maybe privatize it, not have the government provide that. It's not the government. The workers are participating in that as well as the government. It's a shared system. But they feel that it's too much of socialism, it's a form of socialism, and we ought to have it privatized. We ought to let insurance companies or private companies handle your pension, you know. So it's brought before the United States Congress to repeal the Social Security Act, and somebody comes up, usually the Republicans, saying that they want to impose or bring in their system and have us vote on it, and we have to, in our committees in Congress, we have to sit down and weigh the facts, weigh the issue, and eventually vote on it. No, we can't do that, or we won't, or maybe we'll modify it. That's been done. We did that when I was in Congress. There was an agreement with President Reagan and Speaker Tip O'Neill to reform a part of Social Security that provided some adjustments that would correct some of the problems that the system was having. That can be done. It's all done legislatively. We did that. And we do it on every other occasion, whether it's national labor--there's an effort in Congress since I left, that was going to allow--there's a law now that allows every worker in an unorganized plant or factory or industry--if they want a union, because the organizer is active there and wants you to join a union, the workers do that democratically, by signing a card and saying, "Yes, I would like the union to represent me." Other workers will say, "No, I don't want a union to represent me." Well, how do you decide that? You have a democratic election. And there's a law that calls for the National Labor Relations Board to come in to the factory, in the cafeteria, and hold an election, and they count those cards. They're like ballots. And in the end, it may turn out that 150 employees don't want the union, but 700 do, so the 700 win and everybody becomes members of the union, and that becomes, then, the rule. You're now represented by this union. Now, that mandates the corporation and the union to sit down and carry out collective bargaining. What are the demands that the union wanted? What are the demands the company doesn't want to accept? That's called collective bargaining. And you'll end up with a set of rules and contracts and positions that are honored on both sides, and you work with that, and that brings about peace. It brings about equity for everybody. It brings out social justice, economic justice. That's the way it's done. Well, the Republicans want to do away with that law. So we have to sit down in Congress and, depending on the number and who controls the House and the Senate, you can either repudiate these laws, or hold them, keep them. So you're always doing this.

When you were in Congress, were you involved with labor and the Department of Labor? Or did you have other issues of priority? Did your focus change a little bit?

Well, yes, we're always involved with the agencies of government, all the agencies of government, the Cabinet, the president and all his agencies. Congress has a say-so on their budgets, has a say-so on their appointments. The House of Representatives does not confer appointments on the members of the Cabinet and the agencies, the Senate does that. That's the Senate prerogative. But yes, we had that kind of involvement all the time. I remember a young woman working for me in the White House. I worked in the White House as a presidential assistant, and I had a young woman from La Puente here who went to work in my office in the White House as a staffer. I hired her. And after I left the White House, after President Reagan came in, our Democratic staff then dissolves. We all leave the White House. She continued to come back to La Puente. She went to become a trustee at the Rio Hondo Community College. She became an assemblywoman. She became the first Latina senator in the State of California, and today she's the Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis. So, yes, I had a lot to do with those kinds of issues and people. But that's how we worked together.

Do you have any specific examples of an issue that was important to you at that time, something that you really were a champion of?

Well, I had so many issues, and I championed many causes. I championed the environmental causes. Right here in the city they had a major waste disposal landfill that was allowing dangerous toxins to be dumped in there, and it was causing a lot of turmoil in the community. People clamored to shut it down, but the city government wouldn't do it, and the corporation that was in charge of this great landfill wouldn't do it. So I took it upon myself that if I ran for Congress, I would work hard to close down that landfill through legislation, and that was my campaign banner, so to speak. And when I went to Congress, I engaged in legislation by holding hearings here in this district, bringing congress people here, holding hearings with management of the landfill and with the community, and based on those testimonies and all the investigation that was done with the Environmental Protection Agency and everybody involved, we passed legislation to close down the landfill, and it's now a beautiful shopping mall down the road here. It's no longer an active landfill. Which protects, of course, the environment and the people around it, and it provides for monitoring so that the toxins that are buried there are taken care of and are not affecting the environment. That's just one example. I championed--again, my empathy for human rights, for making sure that people can benefit by having food and have medicine and to have liberties and whatever, I championed the dropping of the embargo against Cuba. I mean, I went to Cuba. I saw the people, how they struggled to eat and to maintain themselves in health. Very poor conditions by eleven million people who live in deplorable conditions because we effect a trade embargo upon them. We do not allow anything from here to go there. We do not allow other nations to partake in providing goods and services to them, and if they do, we punish those nations. People go without simple things like aspirins and heart medications, heart valves or x-rays or things, because although they have free medication, but often very hard to provide the essentials to them, because we don't allow these kinds of commodities to go to Cuba. So I introduced a bill in Congress to do away with the embargo. Well, I was told that it just would never work. It would take a long time. So my best shot was to drop all the other embargo aspects. Let's forget about bringing in cell phones and television sets and things like that. Let's talk about basic needs like food. Cubans are getting their milk from New Zealand, by ship, frozen. They get their meats and vegetables from other countries who can get them there, plus what they grow themselves. So I felt that by having legislation that would allow at least our government to provide food and medicines to the Cuban people, that would be okay. And so that passed, and now we have farmers going to Cuba and selling their apples and their vegetables and their corn and milk and cheese and all those things, and medicine, medical equipment and medications. The only condition that, again, the reactionaries in Congress put, was that the Cubans had to pay for those with what is called cash on hand, no credits. You had to pay for it. Well, the Cubans are able to do that to some degree, but not to the extent that if you had credits, where you could get bank credits to do it. But that's a cause that I feel very good about.

And it sounds like it was a win situation for both.

Yes. Yes.

Do you think that line against the embargo, is that political, economic?

It is absolutely political. It's really a reaction to Fidel Castro fomenting a revolution in Cuba and expropriating, nationalizing American industries there, oil. People that owned--Americans, Americans that owned things in Cuba were nationalized and are very vindictive that one man could do this to us. Of course, he did that to Cubans as well, and a lot of Cubans fled. The wealthy people of Cuba fled. So they are a very powerful force in American politics, who pressure the government to continue the embargo, and we do it as punishment to an eleven million small island, and because they're communists. Well, on the other hand, we deal with another communist country that also abuses human rights, but has, what is it, one and a half billion people. But that spells dollars, one and a half billion people, plus we're in large hock to them, because they buy our Treasury notes, communist China. So why do we deal with them and not with Cuba, a small little country right off our shores here? It's punishment. It's political.

When you were trying to pass this legislation, what were your biggest challenges? Or what was your strategy as far as ensuring that you would have the votes?

Well, a lot of it was personal campaigning, going to each member of Congress and showing them what my visits had shown, and what I had uncovered in Cuba, and I saw there, and the importance that this was not humanistic on the part of us as individuals, that we shouldn't be doing this to people. And surprisingly, I got a lot of votes just by doing that. The people that were supportive of my legislation did the same with other colleagues. You know, it's a question of word of mouth to individuals, a personal approach and lobbying your colleagues to go along. Why do we do this? You get most of the people, other than those--the Cuban Americans in Congress wouldn't go along with it, although they would tell me, "We like--Esteban," they'd say, "Esteban, you know, we can't go with you. We can't vote for this. But I've got to tell you, my grandmother loves you." A lot of them would ask me when they knew I was going to Cuba if I would take something down there for them for their relatives, but politically, their hands were tied to be able to vote for it. So that's how they felt. And we got a good number of people to vote for it. Eventually, it passed, the law passed.

Did you feel at the time, or did anybody warn you that it might be a political risk for you to take on this issue?

Well, yes, people questioned, "Why would you want to do that? I mean, why?" Well, over the years you build up relationships with people. I had a very good friend here in California who owns an airline, and he had a contract to fly people to Havana. And he said, "Would you want to go with me and see how things are there? My family still lives there. I want to show you." And I went with him. You know, I'm a member of Congress. I can travel to anyplace in the world I want. And based on what I heard, you know, about how terrible it was there and dangerous, it was completely opposite. I never saw an army tank, or I never saw a soldier stopping me or police. It's a very open society. Maybe in their own society they have their own safeguards, and I understand that they do. They have the committees, neighborhood committees that watch everybody, and they have a very rigid political system. They have political prisoners, but people have political prisoners all over the world. And I exhorted Mr. Castro to release some of them, and he said he would consider it, given their crimes or whatever. I talked to him about the legislation. He said, "You're a hero down here already for just proposing it." I mean, it's just taking contact with people.

Can you talk to me a little bit about what he was like? What was it like being in the same room with him?

A very interesting man, very learned on many issues. I daresay he knew more about us than we know about ourselves as a nation. He's really politically astute on the issues of the United States and how we play a role in the world and other countries, but very much tuned of what our Congress does and how we operate. He goes on for hours talking about everything under the world, you know. He's just very, very knowledgeable, very courteous, very nice. I had dinner with him a number of times, a very interesting individual. Said that he would be willing to do certain things, if the United States would do the same, and he told me to come back and talk to the president, which I did. And president here--I talked to President Clinton about him, and he said, "Yeah," he said, "I appreciate your doing that, but okay, yeah, we have to work out some differences," and this and that, you know. And so they haven't happened. But you have to stand up to the issues and the what I call egregious position we've taken against that poor little country. We have the case of the Cuban Five, the five Cuban spies. They were Cuban intelligence agents that came to Florida to spy on the Cubans that are in Florida, because you had terrorists going to Havana, blowing up people, destroying property, and the intelligence, the Cuban intelligence agents were monitoring the Cuban community in Florida, sending back reports on who was engaged in terrorist activity against Havana, against Cuba. There was a group of airline pilots that would fly over Havana and drop leaflets over the city. Well, you know, Castro found that very devastating to him, that planes from Florida, flown by Cuban pilots, American Cuban pilots, would fly over Havana dropping leaflets on the people, telling them, you know, to revolt or to do this or do that. I mean, if Cuban planes flew over Miami, we'd shoot them down. They weren't shooting anybody down, but they warned us. Castro said, "Don't let those Cubans come over here, because we're going to send up our Air Force and bring them down." And so the five agents that were in Miami, Florida, one of them was based near the airport, and he knew when those planes would take off. So he would call Havana and say, "Here they go. They're taking off." Well, those five agents were arrested, picked up and arrested. We knew who they were. They had come to us and said, "Look. We're here because we're spying on what's going on in Miami and Tampa and those areas." And the moment that those planes took off, they flew over Havana, the Cuban planes went up and shot them down, killed one of the airplanes and pilot and his co-pilot. The other plane got away and landed in the States, but came back home. But those five agents were picked up and they were complicit with murder in September 1998. They had a hand in the shooting down of those planes. So they're in prison now. Those are the Cuban Five. They're in United States prisons here. One of them is here in Victorville, who I went to see [Gerardo Hernandez]. There's an international group that's supporting them, trying to get freedom for them, because that's all they were doing. They weren't spying on the United States. They weren't spying on our intelligence system or anything. They were spying on their own people, who were terrorizing Havana. But we have them in prisons, and we have them in life. They're in prison for life, at least one of them is, the one that radioed that the planes are flying over, leaving for Cuba. He's here in Victorville, and he's in for life.

Do you ever think in your lifetime you're going to see a change?

I do. I'm--

Okay. I'm wondering if we can just back up a little bit and start with the work that you are involved in with the Cuban prisoner. I think you mentioned the Cuban Five.

Yes.

So you can start with the fact that he's in Victorville and some of the activities that you're involved with, and I also asked you if you thought in your lifetime you would see a change in policy.

I think in my lifetime I will see a resolution to the Cuban issue. I know that we worked hard to--I worked very hard with the Congress, now that I'm a retired congressman, I've worked with the Foreign Relations Committee in Congress to try to effect a policy, not on the embargo so much, but travel, because travel is a right of Americans. We can go anywheres in the world that we want, and yet we're prohibited from traveling to Cuba. The Bush administration invoked a legislation to not allow Americans to any longer go to Cuba. We could go to Cuba, but we had to go under certain conditions. As a reporter, as a scholar, or as a medical person you could go to Cuba and study their systems or talk to them. We had that sort of reciprocity to do that, but the Bush administration cut that out. With the Foreign Relations Committee, I had lobbied them. I had lobbied them along with the people that are involved in this to get the Obama administration to, by executive order, allow for Americans to continue going there again. Now, the president can do this. It wasn't a law that was passed in Congress. It was the president did it, Bush. Now Obama can undo that, which, by the way, he did about a couple of months ago, a month ago. Americans now go, and you can go under the same conditions as a reporter, media person, a scholar, church individuals, and medical people can now go to Cuba. And my friend here in Los Angeles, who has the airline, of course, he's very much interested in that, to be able to take people, direct line from LAX to Havana. So we've been working on that, and it's become the reality. The next thing I would hope would be that the Obama administration has also allowed Americans from all walks of life to send money to Cuba. You couldn't under Bush. Under Bush, you could only send money to your family there, and you could only visit one or two times a year. If you visited, say you went to see your grandmother who was ill once, you went again, then the third time she's dying and they want you to come, or she died, you couldn't go the third time. You could only go twice. So they had all these restrictions. Obama has lifted all that, and now Americans can send money and can travel, so things are opening up. Not so much that they're going to drop the embargo, but eventually, how long can you keep this up? I mean, what's the sense? What are we proving?

Does the United States gain anything from that embargo?

Nothing. We gain nothing from that. We have no trade relations. We have a law that we passed that prohibits other countries from delivering to Cuba, and if they do, we castigate them for six months. They can't come to our ports and deliver anything. So go ahead and send something to Havana, but don't come back to deliver anything to us for six months. You know, this is stifling trade. But eventually I think that we'll be able to work through this, and it takes a lot of community effort. It really takes a lot of voices to be able to reach members of Congress. It's difficult with the kind of Congress we have today, you know, which is, in the House especially, with the Republican majority, they're very adamant about--although the Republicans, in a certain way, the members that were participating in the heretofore with products, with goods, with foods, vegetables, were Republicans. They were representing agricultural states, Kansas and Washington and states that have produce that they could send to Cuba. They're Republicans.

It doesn't make sense, when you speak in those terms, because it serves their economic interest, it seems--

Exactly.

--from what you're saying. Then when you met Mr. Fidel Castro, did you feel--because the impression that we get here is that he's very dogmatic, he's anti-imperialism, anti-US. How did you find him in your negotiations or your discussions with him?

None of these things. The man is, he's charismatic. I mean, his demeanor is just overwhelming. He's very bright, he's very brilliant. He is a political thinker. Yes, he has an attitude. He believes in his brand of socialism, that that's what he wants and that's what he wants to pursue in Cuba. He's handed it over to his brother now, and at the same time, I think he has an influence on his brother, but Raul Castro has brought about certain changes that Fidel never talked about and never would want to agree on, like letting people have cell phones and computers and things like that. They're allowing that now. They're opening up. I think conditions are bringing that about. I think the more exchange we have with the Cubans, like we had with the Eastern Europeans during the cold war, by our people going to Czechoslovakia and places like that, that you begin to change the attitude. I think if Americans could go to Cuba and partake there in their culture and their industries and whatever they're doing, spend money, that it would just eventually open up, as it did in other countries behind the Iron Curtain.

What about this question of labor justice and of working-class justice, what you advocated for in other parts of Latin America?

Well, under the socialist system that Fidel Castro and his regime runs, the union, it's the World Federation of Trade Unions, that's the Soviet-bloc model, the state is the union. The state controls the union, so you don't have a free democratic union, so to speak. It's a state union. That's the system. It's like it was in the Soviet Union, I suppose. The unions that were there were state controlled.

Did you ever have a chance to analyze them or to observe their workings?

I visited the Soviet--you mean the Cubans?

The Cubans.

Oh, not really, no. When we were there, we went on a mission to do other things, not to partake in that aspect.

I'm just curious about the differences in US democracy and Cuban socialism and what were some of the advantages of their system or disadvantages of their system in comparison to ours.

I couldn't speak to that, because I really didn't have the opportunity to engage in that. But I would think that it was very much along the WFTU line. You know, they're tied to the state structure and controlled by them, and under the socialist or communist system, it's the workers that control things, and I don't think the workers control what happens in Cuba. I don't think the workers controlled what happened in the Soviet Union. But they were tied to the state, in that sense. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the--"The Communist Manifesto" speaks to that.

Well, it looks like it's almost one o'clock, so why don't we leave it there before we start on a whole other topic. Thank you very much.

This is Virginia Espino and today is February 28 [2011]. I’m interviewing Congressman Esteban Torres at his home in West Covina. Congressman, last time we were talking about your role in Latin America and educating the union members there about their rights and how to negotiate and bargain. But I was wondering if you could explain to me just some details of the labels that were used. I’m not familiar with, for example, what it means to be an international representative versus what it means to work internationally.

I see, yes.

Maybe you can differentiate.

Well, the unions, first of all, you have a union local, which is a local union that’s organized by workers in a given geographical area, and that becomes the local, Local Number 230, as was my case at Chrysler. The Chrysler workers there organized that union within the Chrysler factory, Local 230. But the locals are chartered by an international union, and the international meaning that the United Auto Workers [UAW] of America was an international union because it also represented the Canadian auto workers. So you cross boundaries, national boundaries, and you represent workers in two countries, so therefore you’re international. Some unions do not represent workers in another country, so they’re not international unions. The international also gives them a rating of being able to affiliate themselves to international labor bodies. As I mentioned to you earlier, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, which was a— [Interruption. Recorder turned off]

Okay.

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions was a postwar world body that was organized in London, and all of the free trade democratic unions outside of the Soviet bloc joined that confederation. It was made up of millions of unions across the world, what we called the Western allies and that category. The other international body that organized and broke away from the International Confederation were the Soviets, who initially joined as well, but they didn’t see eye to eye with the Western outlook and created their own, the World Federation of Trade Unions, WFTU, so that’s another international body. And that’s the world of international labor. So you come back to the United States. You have your international union, the UAW, and they have oversight, constitutional oversight over the local unions. The local unions are autonomous, but, nonetheless, they are, in a way, governed by a set of convention, constitution, etc., etc., that binds them to the International. So a local union representative, like I was, I was a shop steward in the plant, working in the plant. When I was asked to consider becoming a staff member of the international union, I had to leave the shop. I no longer worked in a shop, and I had to report to a regional office here in Los Angeles that was affiliated to the international union in Detroit, the headquarters of the Auto Workers. So I was no longer a local union representative; I was now an international union representative, with that title.

In that capacity as an international representative and a staff member of the larger body, I engaged in various aspects that you don’t do at the local level. I started out as an organizer, organizing factories in the Los Angeles County area, in Santa Ana and in Orange County, to affiliate them to the Auto Workers. We selected targets to organize, and we went about that kind of job. So for about a year I worked as an organizer, bringing new people into the United Auto Workers International Union, and then once you did that, those people working around that factory affiliated themselves to a local union. So you have local unions all over that are representing workers in given industries, and they, of course, are governed through a constitution to the international union. So for the first year I served as an organizer, and in that capacity I carried out organizing activities for the international union. Subsequent to that, because of my language facilities, because of the ability to be able to work within language areas here in L.A., Los Angeles County, Orange County, I came to the attention of the larger international headquarters, who said, “We need some Spanish-speaking representatives, and we are wanting to increase our staff representatives to include more language-proficient representatives.” So I happened to be in the right place at the right time. There came an opportunity where in the world body the United Auto Workers was affiliated to the International Metal Workers Federation. These are separate trade-related organizations, for instance, and they’re mostly based in Geneva, Switzerland or Belgium, and some in London. These are called international trade secretariats. These are organizations that are composed of a specific trade. For instance, all teachers in the world, in the free democratic world, are affiliated to the International Federation of Teachers Unions. They’re based in Geneva. So teachers, some unbeknownst to them, their organization is affiliated to that international body, and that way they can communicate, they can organize, they can collectively have solidarity programs with their sister unions in other countries, exchange programs, exchange ideas. It’s a trade organization.

The United Auto Workers was affiliated to an organization called the International Metal Workers Federation. It had thirteen million workers across the world, with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. And the International Metal Workers Federation was then divided into various divisions. They had, for instance, an Aerospace Division. They had a Shipbuilding Division. They had an automobile and agricultural implement organization, and we were affiliated to that group. The president of our international union, Walter Reuther, was a president of that Automotive Division in Switzerland. So, you see, there’s a worldwide network working together through fraternal means, to be able to engage in worldwide organizing, education, solidarity, support, many aspects of keeping working people together, and so that’s why you get the titles of international, because we’re so related to these bodies. We’re talking about a time when, as I explained, we were in a postwar period after World War II, and there was a very serious effort by nations, and especially the Western allies, to make sure that in the rebuilding of Europe, that unions were involved, because these were the working people that had been either dispossessed, exiled. There was huge unemployment. The Marshall Plan came into being, the assistance of the United States to rebuild Germany and France and Italy and those countries, but labor played an integral part in that rebuilding. 0:09:37.8 And, of course, there were sides to be chosen, because, take Italy, for instance. Italy was a country that had a Communist Party. This is the postwar era after World War II, and communists were moving to consolidate their power in Italy and build a government. There are still members today. There’s communists in the Italian political scene. But at the same time, this tug of war took place where American ships bringing equipment, say, to Italy or to France, machinery and other equipment that was needed to rebuild Western Europe, the port workers in those countries often were affiliated to communist unions, and there was an effort, then, to build up the democratic non-communist unions to confront those unions. There was a lot of fighting between them, strikes that would shut down a port and you couldn’t deliver goods. So you had to have the other side working and fighting to allow those goods to be delivered. And as we know now, in doing that, labor became a very important element in making sure that we were fighting the communist buildup in Western Europe, to the degree that the American unions, at that time the American Federation of Labor and the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations], were very much involved in helping the Western ally unions with materials, with leadership, with equipment as well. The Auto Workers Union, with Walter Reuther, who had ties to the European unions, his brother Victor, who was also a very active organizer, was sent to Paris to represent the CIO in France, and from there became the sort of conduit to help the Western ally unions rebuild themselves so they could confront the communist unions, and you could have democracy, so to speak, Western democracy, so to speak, prevail in Western Europe. This was the role.

The only big problem here became that the AF of L [American Federation of Labor]-CIO, through its very autocratic president, Mr. George Meany, required that anything that smacked of communism, he would inject amounts of money to help those Western unions combat those communists, which is okay. That was the fight. It was an ideological fight taking place in the postwar period. A lot of that money was money that was coming through the United States government, through the State Department, through various agencies of the government, and one of the agencies was, of course, the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency]. CIA became very much involved, as a covert organization, in how that money got channeled into Europe, and they didn’t do it as the CIA organization or the United States government; they did it through front organizations. They created front organizations, different names, and it was through that that they channeled money, and they used the Labor Movement to get that money into Western hands.

Do you recall any meetings where those issues were discussed? I mean, it sounds like you were off organizing on your own, but did you come back and have general meetings of staff? Did you meet with Walter Reuther?

I was not involved in that aspect. This was post-World War II. This was in ’46, ’47, ’48, ’49. I was still in high school. But in ’49 I joined the Army and I got stationed in Germany. And, you know, as a military soldier, I was not privy to that sort of undertaking that was taking place in Europe. I was a soldier guarding frontiers and making sure that the enemy at that time, the adversary, was not going to cross their borders and invade Western Germany and eventually Western Europe. It wasn’t until later that I learned the whole role that labor had played in that aspect.

So when I became a member of the United Auto Workers International staff and became cognizant of that history, which I had not participated in, I was just more informed. So then you had this element, this shadow government operating, which was the CIA, being able to channel funds through bogus organizations to certain labor unions, to engage in stoppages of work or engage in beating up the opposition, you know, whatever, and a lot of unions carried out that kind of work. This was a struggle, and the AFL-CIO was very much involved in that. A process promoted by Meany's advisor, Jay Lovestone. Now, the Reuthers were involved. Victor was in Paris helping the German unions rebuild, helping the French unions, helping the Italian unions, the Brits, by channeling money and making sure that he coordinated that stuff on our behalf, and it was there that he noticed that the AFL-CIO, the AF of L, actually, had also a person, a counterpart to Victor, operating out of Paris. A man by the name of Irving Brown was a man who was conversant in many languages, who was able to set up the same operation that Victor was doing in Paris. He was carrying it out with unions, channeling CIA funds to them, or State Department money under, as I said, front organizations. Well, you know, the AFL-CIO, through Mr. Meany, felt that this was the way to do it. This was the way you combat the enemy. The CIO people were a little more dubious of that, because they saw direct government intervention into the world of labor, and they had a philosophy of not engaging in that kind of covert money going into organizations. They didn’t want any part of that. So there was always that division. When I came on the scene, there had developed a similar organization for Latin America. They created a tripartite organization here in the United States, called the American Institute for Free Labor Development, AIFLD. AIFLD was tripartite because it brought in American unions, U.S. government, and U.S. corporations to set up an entity by which they would funnel money into Latin America to the kinds of unions that could confront the spread of communism, but very heavily influenced by corporate and government activity.

And while the UAW had been a part of suggesting that we ought to do that in Latin America, we never suggested—we, meaning the UAW—never suggested that corporate representatives should be part of that. It was in conflict with general labor-management traditions. You don’t involve the management in your operations. But they wouldn’t acquiesce to his requests, and so UAW left the AIFLD organization, and they continued to work. It’s now a fact that through bogus foundations and other types of funding, they were able to finance programs and projects that worked against left-wing organizations in Latin America, especially where American corporations were involved, and, in fact, got into areas that labor shouldn’t be involved in, which was by the use of covert money to bring about the downfall or bring down the leadership of certain government leaders in these countries. As an example, AIFLD was very much involved through these trade secretariats that I mentioned to you earlier. Let’s take, for an example, the Public Service Employees International. Through their representative in British Guiana, they were able to topple the government and bring down the leadership of a prime minister there by the name of Chedi Jagan. He was an East Indian in Guiana who was—I’m not conversant with that, but he was married to a woman, an American woman [Janet Rosenberg Jagan] who was a communist card carrier, and she was a great influence on Chedi Jagan.

So the American Labor Movement got involved in bringing him down and putting up an alternative representative to be the prime minister of British Guiana, a man by the name of Burnham. But, see, here you had the involvement of the American Labor Movement involved in covert anti-government activities, to bring down a leadership of another government by using public employees, public-service employees, to create strikes and cause chaos and bring down a government. And we objected to that. There’s numerous cases in other countries where they did this. They did this in Brazil. They did this, in large part, in Chile, in other organizations in Latin America. And that is where I found myself confronting AIFLD representatives who were organizing in Latin America. They would recruit young labor leaders in Latin America, send them to the United States to a retreat in Front Royal, Virginia, and train them in how they could administer and how they could organize and how they could combat adversarial unions or governments or whatever, so that we had a cadre of people operating in Latin America that were being paid by American corporate funds, by covert CIA money, and by money that was funneled to some projects through the Agency for International Development and a lot of State Department involvement. And we just didn’t want to get involved in that kind of activity, so we were largely independent of that, and that’s where I worked. Now, on numerous occasions I would meet with my counterparts, my AIFLD counterparts, and they were cordial to me, but they knew that I had a different approach on how to work, and they sort of pooh-poohed my approach to theirs. I remember going to Argentina, my first trip there, and I’ll tell you how that came about. The Argentine Metal Workers Federation, a large union in Argentina that grouped all kinds of metal workers—auto workers, steel workers, shipbuilders, electronics people—they were all in one federation in Argentina. It was called the Unión Obrera Metalurjíca, the UOM, and they were headed up by a very dynamic leader by the name of Augusto Vandor. Vandor was of Dutch extraction. He was a very loyal Peronista. He was a member of the Peronista Party and looked to many people like he may be a successor to Domingo Peron, who was now in Spain in exile, and Augusto Vandor looked like the kind of person that could lead a Peronista Party back to power again. But, of course, the Peronista Party in Argentina at that time was not an operational party. They were sort of underground. You had a thinly veiled military government in Argentina. You had a president, Ilia, but it was basically military people running that government.

So the metal workers in Argentina were very much desirous, because Chrysler and General Motors and Ford had now relocated to Buenos Aires and Cordova, and some of the cities in Argentina were producing American automobiles, but they had no knowledge of how the American corporations operated, and they needed technical assistance, assistance in how do you bargain collectively with Ford Motor Company or General Motors. So they attended a world meeting of the IMF, and they met Walter Reuther and they met Victor [Reuther], and they said, “We need the UAW to help us do these things. Could you send some technical assistance to us? Could you send somebody to tell us about how you operate in the American sector?” And Victor said, “Okay.” Victor was the head of the UAW’s International Affairs Department in Washington, D.C., and he said, “Yes, we’ll find somebody to send down there and work with your people, hold seminars, provide technical assistance, provide a sense of camaraderie, of fraternal assistance with your metal workers’ organization, but he’s coming down there as our representative, and you’ve got to help him and guide him in the right way. Don’t get him in trouble.”

So after the meeting, the meeting in Europe with the Argentines, Victor came back to the United States and he called up Paul Schrade and said, “Paul,” he said, “do you have somebody down there in your region that can speak Spanish and is a good organizer and someone who really understands the United Auto Workers’ system and can transpose or transfer that to the Argentines?” And Paul said, “Yeah, I have just the right man for that.” I had been, of course, working with Paul, organizing, so he knew my background, and so he asked me, he said, “Would you consider taking an assignment to Argentina to help the Unión Obrera Metalurjíca? They’re asking for a Spanish-language representative, and Victor has asked me to recommend somebody. Would you do it?” Well, that was a big order, you know. So I thought about it and talked it over with my family, with Arcy [Torres] and the kids. I said it was an opportunity for growth, that it would be something that I could put under my professional belt as an organizer, and it would be good. I didn’t know for how long, but it would at least a couple of months of work. So we finally agreed on that family-wise, and I went down to Argentina. It was an exciting, if not dynamic, experience for me, you know, going into the hotbed of Peronista politics, going into a place where it was military controlled and working really almost underground with these workers and their union. They were respected. They were a powerful union, and as a union, they had built tremendous amount of facilities for their members. They had hotels, they had worker banks, they had housing. They really knew how to operate and build for their union people, but they were still under the gun of a military government not allowing them to do certain things, not understanding the American corporate mentality that was down there then, and here I was helping them overcome some of those areas.

That’s where I said I got caught up in a sit-down strike. Coincidental, the UAW had led sit-down strikes in the early thirties and mid thirties, and some people perceived that the presence of a UAW person in Argentina was trying to carry out and relive those sit-down strikes, and I really wasn’t doing that. I had explained to them the history of the UAW. So it was an interesting endeavor. I became very close to the Argentines. They wanted to take me many times on their excursions, so to speak, to go meet with El General [Juan Domingo Peron] in Madrid, Spain, where General Peron was still in exile. They had contact with him, and they wanted me to go meet him, and I always very gingerly told them that I couldn’t do that, that I had to stay loyal to my own politics at home and that I shouldn’t engage in that. But they were on the verge of bringing back Domingo Peron to Argentina so he could govern again, and they would come to Washington. Well, as consequence of that trip, I was so successful in integrating those metal workers and affiliating them to the International Metal Workers Federation in Geneva, the worldwide body, I brought in some 50,000 workers into our affiliation, so I became a big hero in the UAW and the IMF. When I came back with—well, the Argentines had their convention where they voted to affiliate. I telegraphed Victor Reuther to tell him that this had been accomplished, mission accomplished. They were very happy to know that I had done a good job, and upon returning to Washington and discussing that with them, they told me, “We’re going to create an Inter-American Bureau under the International Affairs Department, and we’d like you to head it up. So it would require that you come and live in Washington, move to Washington, operate the bureau out of our International Affairs Headquarters here, and you will have access to all the Latin American countries. You will be the chief organizer, and you will deploy others to provide the kind of technical assistance that you did to other countries.” So I became the Inter-American representative in Washington.

Before you left for Buenos Aires, did they give you any training or a political project or a labor project before?

Yes, yes. As a matter of fact, I was going to particularly engage in showing the Argentines the way that you control line speeds on the production line. It’s all done through mechanical process, you know, line moving. It’s a rail line where the cars move, and each operator does a different operation on the body of a vehicle, and eventually that’s the way the assembly process takes place. But if you move that line at a certain rate of speed, which gets down into minutes and seconds, you can up production by many number of units, automobiles, and if you can control and have an agreement with the management that they can only move the line to the extent that workers have the capacity to finish their operations, then everything goes well. But management, of course, being that they want to produce at a rapid rate as many cars as they can in a given time, will upgrade the speed of that line, which causes accidents, which causes people missing operations, which causes tremendous damage to a worker’s health and well being. So you have to, then, understand by process of breaking down each operation that each worker does, breaking it down into elements of time that he has to perform that operation in line with that line speed, and you do that by a process known as time study. You do it with a stopwatch, and you’d write down all the elements that he’s doing, and you’d time each element. As a consequence, you end up with a given time that he has to perform his operation. And that takes some schooling. It’s called industrial engineering.

They sent me to the University of Iowa for a whole week just to engage in that process. The UAW uses that very effectively in all its factories and all its auto plants, to make sure that management maintains a rate of speed on the line that will produce cars, but not excessive speed to endanger workers and for them to get more productivity. So I had to do that. Of course, I had briefings by State Department people, who gave me a background on the political aspects in Argentina, what was happening, who was who, what to be wary of, what not to do, and things like that. I had briefings with the International Labor Organization. This is a U.N. [United Nations] body that had an office in Washington, D.C., and they talked to me about labor standards, international labor standards, what countries have to abide by in terms of dealing with labor in general, a whole lot of history just on Argentina, you know. By the time I got there, I was pretty well cognizant of most of the aspects.

You mentioned before that—we’re talking the sixties now.

Sixty-four.

Sixty-four. You mentioned before in the forties, the objective of the U.S. government through the CIA was to thwart communism. Was there any objective that you experienced in the sixties? Because Peron wasn’t a communist. Peron wasn’t a communist, so it doesn’t seem like—

No, but they were very active. They were active in Argentina underground. They had a growing resistance movement, Tupamaros, who were Marxists and were knocking off, killing government people and people that were in any way involved with Western capitalism. I had a very good friend that led one of the sister unions of the Unión Obrera Metalurjíca, the local, the union they ran the auto workers’ section, called SMATA, S-M-A-T-A [Sindicato de Trabajadores Mecánicos]. There was a very dynamic leader, Dirck Kloosterman, also of Dutch descent, dynamic leader leading that union and bringing—I mean, we helped him a lot with his technical assistance because they were auto workers. They came to the States. We gave them instruction. They would visit Detroit and visit automotive factories. We did a lot of that international exchange, that we brought people in and showed them how we operate as a union in the United States, so they could go back with all this information. I would coordinate that through my staff. One day the Tupamaros came to Kloosterman’s house. There were a couple of individuals sitting outside on the sidewalk, and he came out of the house with his wife and kids, and he’s going to work. He got in the car, and these two individuals pulled out a machine gun and machine-gunned him right there, killed him, because that was the kind of ideological war that was taking place in Argentina. Vandor, the great leader that I’ve talked to you about, was at a racetrack. He loved to go to the racetrack and watch the horses. As I recall, I was in Argentina at the time, I recall, that I went to their headquarters, and there was talk of—they’d always let me into their headquarters, but it was very highly guarded because he had a lot of threats against him.

As I understand, at one point he went to the racetrack. He was there and somebody let off a bomb and killed him, assassinated Augusto Vandor, a great leader. Who knows who did that? Because he was prominent in political power. He was leading major efforts to democratize the country. My initial visit to Argentina, they told me, “We are so proud that you’re here representing the United States auto workers, that you’re representing the IMF, because we like that organization, and we want you to be with us on March the first, where we’re going to celebrate our Plan de Lucha.” And I said, “Oh, well, I’m happy I’m here to participate with your Plan de Lucha. What is going to happen?” “Well,” he said, “we’re going to bring all working people from Argentina, from the tip of Tierra del Fuego, from Patagonia, from all over. We’re going to gather in Buenos Aires and we’re going to march. We’re going to have a historic march through the city, demanding that this government begin to give us our labor rights. We want you to be with us at the front of the line, with our banners and our drums. We’re going to march.” I was honored that they would be asking this of me. I remember going home that one evening. I lived in a local hotel there, and I was telling the cab driver, I said, on February the twenty-ninth, I said, “Well, tomorrow is the Plan de Lucha,” I said. “I see the posters all over, the Plan de Lucha.” He says, “Oh,” he says, “Plan de Lucha.” He said, “These dumb union people do this every, every year, and they get gunned down, they get shot up, they’re beat up, they’re put in prison, and they just keep it up.” I didn’t sleep very well that night. I just worried about that.

“My god,” I said. He says, “You know, the tanks come out. The soldiers are on the rooftops of the buildings. They shoot at them. They shoot them down. They keep coming back every time with their Plan de Lucha.” He said, “Yeah, tomorrow’s Plan de Lucha,” and he left me with that sentiment. And I didn’t sleep very well. So next day they did. I participated in the Plan de Lucha, and it was a riotous situation. I look at what’s happening in Egypt and Libya, and I imagine the same thing. It was just hundreds of thousands of workers marching down the Buenos Aires streets, tanks on the corner, soldiers around, but they didn’t shoot anybody. Everything was very calm. The workers marched up to the Parliament. I was asked to go up on the Parliament stairs with them, and they sat down with Parliament leaders and discussed a revision of labor rights for workers in Argentina. Vandor was the head of that. He was the head of the organization that was moving that through. So he was a very powerful, important man, and to learn of his assassination, of course, I deeply regretted that whole thing that they would take advantage, you know, the military or whomever did that, to kill him.

Why did you think, though, that march was so important for you to attend, that you would potentially risk your life?

Well, I didn’t know that that would happen to them. But I figured I’m here. It’s all in a quest of labor solidarity. They said, “We want you at the front of the line with us, to show that the IMF is with us, the UAW.” I felt honored that they would be asking me, not knowing, perhaps, the risk. There’s always risks when you have giant mobilizations of that nature. The taxi driver did frighten me, of course, but nothing happened, thank goodness.

Did you have doubt whether or not you would attend?

Well, I had doubt. I had doubt, but then I figured, well, I’m here to do something, and I’ve been asked to do this with them, and there’s a lot at stake. If I don’t show solidarity with them, if I don’t put myself at the front of the line with them, are they going to affiliate with the IMF? Are they going to say, “The representative they sent cowered out on us”? I didn’t want that to happen.

Did you think about consulting the U.S. government, asking—

I didn’t have time. You know, it was one date or the other. Yes, you see, I tried not to engage our government on these kinds of issues because you don’t know what they’re going to tell you to do. I was invited by the American labor attaché—this is the person that’s in charge of labor with the embassy, the American Embassy, and he knew I was in Argentina. He met me and he told me, “It’s good to have you down here doing this. I understand you’re going to be working with the UOM. They’re a very important organization, and we’ve been trying to get to them. We’re trying to talk to them and keep good relations with them.” And I said, “Yeah, I was sent down here at their request, and I’m working with them through the IMF.” He said, “Well, why don’t you come to my home tonight.” He said, “I’m having a little gathering for some visitors from the States.” So that evening I went to his home, and I got there early and I was looking around his library, looking at all his books and furnishings. Another gentleman walked into the room, and I assumed he was an Argentine because they would invite Argentine guests. He said, “Labor leaders are coming.” So this gentleman walked in, and he looked very Latino to me. Came in and I introduced myself in Spanish, and he did too. He spoke excellent Spanish.

And I said, “I understand there will be some American labor leaders coming down here.” He said, “Yeah.” He said, “There’ll be some.” I said, “What union do you belong to?” He said, “I’m an American. I’m one of those individuals. I represent the AFL-CIO.” “Oh,” I said, “really?” And he said, “Yes. That’s my job.” He said, “I represent Latin America for the AFL-CIO.” So I said, “So what’s happening?” He said, “Oh, a lot of things. A lot of things are happening. What about you? Are you open to have breakfast tomorrow? I have some people I’d like you to meet.” And I said, “Yeah, I could do that.” He said, “All right. Let’s make a date.” So we made a date I’d meet him at the hotel where he was staying, and the next day I recall having breakfast with an individual who was the head of—now, I explained to you we had the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions [ICFTU]. It was based in Brussels, and they had regional organizations. They had organizations in Africa, they had organizations in Asia, and they had an organization—these were regional organizations—in Latin America. In Latin America the organization was called the Regional Organization of Latin American Workers, ORIT, O-R-I-T [Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores].

So for breakfast that morning, I was meeting with Arturo Jauragui, who was the general secretary of ORIT. ORIT was headquartered in Mexico City. That was where the regional organization for the ICFTU was based. So I met Mr. Jauragui and, you know, just small-talk. He spoke in Spanish. Andrew McClellan, the American AF of L-CIO representative was there, and he chanced to ask ORIT, he said, “How was your trip?” He said, “It was great.” He said, “I’ve just come from Brazil, and Mr. Jean Guillard is on his way out. We got him out. We got him out.” Jean Guillard was the president of Brazil, a very populist president who was taken out by a coup d’état by the military, which took over Brazil and turned it into a vicious dictatorship. And you see the connection? “We took him out.” And that’s when it really—what I had learned and read about was a reality in front of me. So I always stayed clear of those types of encounters with ORIT or with AIFLD or with the AF of L-CIO people, because they were on a quest and they were covert actors in this kind of drama. It was an ideological drama in Latin America, and throughout the world, for that matter.

That was a heated period, too, the sixties in Latin America, like in the United States. But did they try to convince you or talk to you, or did they have a spiel that they—

They understood the way that the UAW and the IMF would operate, that we were independent. They didn’t rag on me or anything. They wanted to know why we wouldn’t belong to their operations. My statements were to the point, that we were independent of government support, independent of any covert activity, and I said, “I know what’s going on. We know what’s going on, and that’s why we’re following a mandate that our conventions and our foreign-policy operations do not allow for that.”

“Well, you people are barking up the wrong tree.” “Well,” I said, “that’s how we are able to work with many of the groups, because many of the groups don’t want to be involved in that kind of political undercover type of work, and we’re able to do it openly, and we don’t have any problem.” That’s why I had so much trouble with Lula [de Silva]. When I get to Brazil, he thinks I’m one of them, and he’s telling everybody, “He’s just a CIA agent, operative, covert agent here.” And he kept doing that and doing that. Finally he realized that he was not talking to one of them.

That was the groundwork. That was the underpinnings of the suspicion that Lula had.

Yes, yes.

That makes a lot of sense.

In later years, when I was in Congress, now, the U.S. State Department has a program where they recruit potential leaders from countries, from foreign countries, even countries that are antagonistic to the United States. The U.S. government recruits them to come to the United States under what they call a Leadership Grant Program, and they bring them to the United States, they expose them to various aspects of our society, depending on the country they’re coming from or the profession they’re coming from, and let them experience what it’s like to be in America and the way that we live and work and partake in society. So a lot of those people that are chosen, they’re targets that the State Department through its embassies selects these individuals and brings them to the States through this kind of what they call leadership grants.

I recall being in Congress and being asked to consider a gentleman from Brazil by the name of Luis Silva, Lula, you know. Would I agree or would I recommend that they bring him in as part of a leader grant? And having known him and know what he was, I said, “Yeah, bring him. He’s an important person.” So Lula came to Washington, D.C. We had a luncheon, met him again, you know, good friends. He wasn’t president then. He had run for president, but he wasn’t the president. So it’s a way that many foreign leaders, often adversarial leaders, understand the workings of the American system, change their ways and become good friends to the United States.

That seems like a huge shift from what might have happened in the forties. Was there an ideological shift as far as the feeling that you could only have one kind of democracy in the world, and that was a U.S. kind?

I think it’s part of the U.S. policy to attempt to—we see that today in what is happening in the Middle East, how for many years we’ve supported and sustained relationships with some of the very people now that are being taken out of office in the Arab nations, people that we have supported because we had a self-interest in oil and security, and we’ve often gotten along with them, to the point that they have become so entrenched in their own societies and become belligerent to their people and oppressing their very societies, you know, and here we’re linked to them because we have befriended them. We have supported them. It’s always been a question that we ought to really not look at these individuals as friends, really, because they’re dictatorial. They’re fascists. Why do we do this? We just have to learn these lessons the hard way, as we’re learning now. This whole shift now being taken by the [Barack] Obama administration as to how do we deal with leaders and nations in the Middle East, for that matter, on the way we work with them.

That’s an important question, and when we talk about your time in Congress, we’ll probably get more into some of those issues, but I wanted to go back and talk about Paul Schrade, because you mentioned him and we didn’t get a chance to learn how you met him and what your relationship with him was and your work with him. How did that play out?

Well, Paul was really an interesting individual who came from a sector of our society that I would never have thought would have become the kind of trade union leader that he is. He’s a very progressive individual. He came from back East. He was a Yale [University] graduate. I believe his major was in chemistry. He came out to the West Coast. I’m not too sure why he came out. Maybe it was just a summer vacation. He went to work at North American Aviation and there became very much involved in sort of the grassroots movement in the plant, that major aircraft facility, and became very much involved in union activities and eventually worked his way up to where he became the president of the local, Local 887, the North American Aircraft Company. He was a new breed of labor leader, as we’ve known and read about labor leaders who become sort of dictatorial and become tyrants and political wheeler-dealers. Paul was a very sophisticated individual, an intellectual who was a new breed of labor representative, and he inspired so many of us that that’s the way labor should be, you know, progressive, really representing workers’ rights, being a part of society, being able to negotiate, to create better terms and conditions for working people, for the union. He brought into the UAW, as I said, the leadership that made him a candidate to become a regional director. He was from a local union. Just like I was from Chrysler, he was from—I was Chrysler Local 230. We had Local 506, 509. We had Local 887. He was a local union president, but from a big local that went through a very serious strike in the sixties, and was able to convene that strike with a greater agreement, contractual agreement for aerospace workers, and became a big hero.

He then launched his fight to become a regional director, against a lot of odds, because it’s a very tough organization to be a regional director. You have an administration that really supports you. The regional director is a member, automatic member of the UAW’s Executive Board. You’re up there at the top with the Reuthers, with the Executive Board members and vice presidents, and he wanted to be there because he felt that he could be the regional director here in nine western states and coordinate, regulate, give leadership to the unions in those states. And he won, became the regional director, ousted the old guard, so to speak, and brought in some very progressive programs into the region. We had these summer schools that I think I mentioned to you, where I had gone in earlier times. He would convene these summer schools, like at the USC-Santa Barbara campus, during summer. He would take all the shop stewards and committee men and union leadership folks there and put them through some terrific programs, you know, in collective bargaining, in history, in government issues, and political action. He would bring in speakers that were just tremendous. He’d bring in President [Walter] Reuther himself. I remember him bringing in Upton Sinclair to talk about his writings and what he did as an author, talk about social justice and the importance of all that. Paul was a very progressive leader, so progressive that in time, the opposition to him—there was an opposition—was able to take him out of office. But it was a very terrible fate that befell Paul Schrade, because he was so progressive and so involved with community, with building a movement, a real labor movement.

Once he was a regional director, he went to Detroit. He had served a while, as I recall, as an administrative assistant to Walter Reuther. Reuther being, of course, a progressive himself, had this kind of man by his side, and that’s when I think Paul decided he would come back and run for regional director; did a great job. But he had opposition within the Labor Movement itself. Paul became very involved with making sure that many of Reuther’s ideas were injected into the work of the union, the progressive aspects, taking contact with the progressive and liberal issues across the board, making sure that our political action programs really worked on behalf of those people that could represent us in government and be friends of labor. He befriended people. He became a great champion of Cesar Chavez. I mean, he is really the one that went out and convinced Walter Reuther and the UAW that here was a new type of organization that was coming into the historical labor arena that had to be supported, because the AFL-CIO was doing nothing to support Cesar Chavez. And so Paul Schrade went outside the AFL-CIO, brought in the UAW to provide not only financial but physical support to the farmworkers. He went out of his way, with the demise of the Watts riots and the assassination of Martin Luther King [Jr.], to build a sense of community spirit in Watts, and brought an international representative out of the Ford Motor Company, Ted Watkins, to head up that organization called the Watts Labor Community Action Committee. And in the community, people took issue. What about Latinos? What about the Eastside? What about Latinos in general? Why weren’t we getting the same kind of treatment? And some people lobbied him. “How come you don’t have Latinos on your staff?” I remember my wife, Arcy, telling Paul Schrade, “How come you don’t have a Latino working on the staff?” They kind of lobbied him and we left it at that. He later appointed me as an international representative on his staff, so he and other Latinos came on the staff as service representatives or organizers, Latinos. He built a really progressive organization in the region here, and, of course, then he suggests that I might go to Washington to work with Victor to send me to Argentina. He’s, in a way, giving me an opportunity to do this Inter-American venture, and it was later, as I worked my way through my Latin American experience, I had the chance to get Paul Schrade to go to Mexico City. In my work as an IMF organizer, UAW, one of the quests that the Reuthers wanted to do, because they had a relationship with Fidel Velásquez, who was the head of the major organization in Mexico, trade-union organization, the idea of creating an Automotive Council in Mexico. They would bring together all of the auto workers in Mexico, and there were many factories, Volkswagen, Ford, General Motors, agricultural-implement companies, motorbus companies, put them together in an auto union, because they were in different unions in Mexico. But if you could put them into a council, letting them keep their affiliations but putting them into a council so they could benefit by the technical assistance and the collective-bargaining process that we go through in the United States, along with the Canadians, we could have a North American UAW, United Auto Workers of North America. It would still be international, but we would now have Mexico, and all the Mexican auto workers would be part of our union.

So that became a task for me and other UAW organizers who I was able to coordinate to work in Mexico in the creation of that council. Fidel Velásquez agreed to it. It was a big step in Mexico’s autonomy. The Mexican labor unions being what they are, Mexican government, for that matter, not wanting U.S. assistance in anything, agreed that we could do this. We had good ties through Fidel Velásquez to allow the Mexican labor minister and the unions and everybody to agree to this council. So that was my job and the organizers of the IMF in Mexico City, and we had the big convention that took place in Mexico City to inaugurate this new council. We had already agreed on where we would locate it, with offices and officers. We had already agreed on the affiliation and a broad scheme of integrating the Mexican auto workers into our own union. Now, people questioned that. They said, “How would you do that? You mean to tell me that the Mexican auto workers would be earning the same amount of money per hour that the American and Canadian worker—?” Well, no. It would be done to what we always felt was a wage harmonization. Given their economy and given their economic—because they did have unions, but we could integrate our concepts and enhance theirs by being part of a larger organization. And, of course, the industry saw that as a great threat. My god, you know, Canada, the U.S., and now Mexico? This is a North American auto union, you know. But we saw great hope in that. So we made plans for a convention to inaugurate the council. We invited—Paul had thought it was important to bring Cesar Chavez to that convention. Cesar had no contact with the Mexicans, you know. Paul wanted Cesar to meet the Mexican leaders and for them to meet him. We brought in representatives from the U.S. to this great convention, including Walter Reuther and Victor, and we inaugurated this great undertaking.

So Paul knew that I had some real organizing skills, and so when I’m back in Washington, and he’s organizing all these things with Cesar Chavez and Ted Watkins, Walter Reuther is talking about these community unions. If you read the [Jacob] Javits-[John F.] Kennedy legislation that created the economic-impact zones in the country, how you could impact on society by creating these kinds of community organizations—Paul right away thought of me. He said, “I’m putting together a committee. I’d like you to really come and head it up.” My labor colleagues said, “No, don’t do that, Esteban. You’re already moved. You’re in Washington. You’ve got this big territory, you know, Latin America, and you’re working with the IMF. You’re traveling to Geneva and Europe. You’re working with the Spanish underground. You’re working with everybody. Why do you want to come back to little old East L.A.?” But, you know, I really felt a commitment that it was important for me to do that, given all the things I had gone through, and I figured that I would probably do it for Paul Schrade. He wanted me to do it. Now, Paul was very supportive of [Robert F.] Bobby Kennedy. He was a great friend of the Kennedy family. He was a member of one of the Kennedy family foundations. He was a board member. He took Cesar Chavez and myself to visit one time with [Edward M.] Ted Kennedy at his home there in Washington, D.C. We had a small breakfast meeting. We talked about various issues. Later in the day, the Kennedys were having some kind of a big party. Bobby Kennedy’s family was having a big party up in their home in in Hickory Hill, McLean [Virginia], so we were invited. So there we were like flies in the ointment, you know, with the Kennedys, all these kids running around with their dogs, the Kennedy family up in Hickory Hill, was the name of their estate. Paul was just progressive that way.

So when Kennedy decided that he wanted to be the next presidential candidate, well, Paul was right there with him. He was organizing, and he brought Kennedy to meet with Cesar within these historic fasts of his, his nonviolence teachings and experiences. Bobby Kennedy became very close to Cesar Chavez. So did Ethel Kennedy. I remember when Cesar was in prison in a jail up in San Jose someplace, we went up there to march and do a night vigil for Cesar. Ethel came, Paul, myself, Rafer Johnson, and other union members went up there, and we held a night vigil around the jail and finally got Cesar released. So they were very, very supportive of Cesar, Paul. Again, he got ridiculed by the larger opposition in the union, saying, “Hey, he’s paying too much attention to these communities, to these fledgling labor leaders, and not paying enough attention to our national-international negotiations with North American, with Chrysler, with General Motors. We need him at the bargaining table. Why is he—,” you know. And, of course, Paul was aware of that opposition, but he knew that he had to do both things, and he had to support Bobby. That was his commitment. And he was with him on the stage at the Ambassador Hotel and—

Can I just stop you for a second? Because I’m afraid that the battery is going to go out, and I want to be able to get this. [Recorder turned off]

Okay, we’re back. You left off with a story you were going to tell about Paul Schrade and Bobby Kennedy.

Well, Paul was on the stage with Robert Kennedy that night at the Ambassador, along with Dolores Huerta and Jesse Unruh and a lot of political leaders, when Bob Kennedy said, “We’ve won the California primaries and now we’re on our way to Chicago,” and instead of going into the crowd, they decided to go by way of new security through the pantry of the hotel, and that’s where, as they were walking through, the assassin fired the shots at Bobby Kennedy and mortally wounded him. Paul was hit in the head by one of those bullets, and he fell to the floor and lay dying there. I remember I was living in Washington, and I got a phone call from some of my labor colleagues here, saying, “Esteban, are you watching TV?” I said, “Well, no. Why?” He said, “Well, Bobby just announced he was off to Chicago.” But then that was midnight my time. I was already in bed. They said, “Well, turn on your TV and then look and see what’s happening.” So I turn on the TV and, sure enough, the press was reporting the assassination, and there’s Robert Kennedy lying on the floor, with that young busboy holding his head up in the pantry there, and there’s Paul Schrade laying on the floor, too, bleeding. And so the whole thing was, “Paul’s dead. You’d best not come to—.” They knew that I wanted to go back. They say, “You’d best not come, because your supporter is lying here on the floor. He’s going to die.” I said, you know, to myself, what do I do now? I promised Paul I would go. So it was a big question in our mind, my wife and I. She had agreed to return with the kids. We were coming back to L.A., East L.A., but Paul wasn’t going to be around. What do we do now?

But I had already made the commitment, and I figured, well, since I made the commitment, I guess I have to do this. And, of course, I learned that he didn’t die, that it was a superficial wound but serious wound to his head, and that he was going to survive. And I said, “Okay, I’m going to go.” So, of course, I told Victor that I was returning to East L.A., and he already knew because Walter, his brother, had told him that Paul had requested that I go back. And so I came back. He recovered and he went back to work, but then the rumors continued. “Not only is he not servicing the union, he’s involved in all these other aspects,” you know. The opposition saw a door where they could really come after him, and the rumor machine started working that he had been mentally impaired by the wound, that he probably wasn’t able to continue in any kind of leadership capacity. Paul issued a letter to all the union affiliates and members. It was a letter issued by his doctor, that he was well and alive and able to continue what he was doing, but the opposition used that as an issue and went after him, and succeeded in his losing the regional director position. It was a sad commentary, of course. Of course he continued working with me, with TELACU [The East Los Angeles Community Union] when we set up the organization. We put our board together. We went out for the kinds of grants and financing that would help the fledgling community union survive. To this day, of course, he continues to be a very progressive leader in many areas. He’s been unsatiable in trying to determine exactly who killed Bobby Kennedy, because his analysis—and that has been carried on by technicians and scientific proof—has shown that none of the bullets that Sirhan [Sirhan] fired hit Bobby. They hit other people, including Paul, but none of those bullets that Sirhan fired killed Bobby. Bobby was killed by a bullet from behind him, killed by another gun. There are thirteen bullet holes in that pantry, and Sirhan’s gun only held six. Where did the other seven come from? So Paul is running that down. He’s done substantial investigations with scientific people and experts. He told me at my last meeting with him that they knew who the individual was. They have proof of the weapon, where the weapon’s at and where the individual’s at, and he was looking for collaboration from the LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] and the District Attorney’s Office to really unfold this mystery.

That sounds similar to the Ruben Salazar mystery, and around the same period, in the sixties.

Yes, yes.

So just getting back a little bit to what you said earlier regarding his ideology, you mentioned it was progressive, but I was just wondering if you could give me some maybe specifics, some details, because what I think is progressive might be a different idea that you have or that he had.

Well, he was what we call liberals, but liberals, to me, really aren’t liberals. They’re liberals in a certain sense, but when it comes down to the hard issues, they flake out on you, the liberals. Paul is not that kind of a liberal. I mean, he is a person who commits himself to a cause, and it’s usually a cause that’s one of social justice and fulfills it. If he were to be anything, he’d be a democratic socialist, I guess. But he’s very much committed to the causes of social justice. He’s always been involved with groups like the ACLU, with progressive organizations and the writings. He’s that kind of individual who, as I said, is amazing that coming as a chemistry graduate out of Yale he would end up this way.

That’s interesting, because in the book that you recommended I read, Eastside Landmark, they talk about his relationship with Cesar Chavez and how it was actually the UFW that started some of these kind of combination labor-community connections.

Exactly.

Looking at the whole community, not just the worker as an individual, but the family.

Exactly.

So was that some of the opposition, that people didn’t want to dilute the movement? Or how would you describe it?

Well, to be sure, that was certainly a strategy of the farmworkers, but a lot of it came from people like Paul, who understood the necessity of putting into effect the Javits-Kennedy legislation, putting into position the programs of the UAW. We did this in many countries by sponsoring health clinics, by putting together pharmaceutical—how would I say—supplies to people who had no access to these kinds of drugs and medicines. The UAW had a program called STEP, Social Technical [and Education] Assistance Program, STEP, and we would refurbish medical equipment, x-ray machines, operating tables, everything a hospital had that in this country they throw away once a new model comes out. UAW would refurbish all this. We had a huge warehouse in Detroit that would refurbish these things. I myself, on behalf of the UAW, flew down a mini-hospital or mini-clinic to a city almost at the end, the tail end of the Republic of Chile, up in the Andes, whose hospital had burned down, and the Chileans asked us, “Would you, through your STEP program, provide us some alternative equipment?”

I remember flying a DC-3 through the Andes and the valleys down in southern Chile to a place where a plane can only land three times during the year. During the summer, it’s the only time they can land, because it’s so high in the Andes. The village is called Coyhaique. We landed and brought in this huge airplane full of medical equipment to refurbish the little hospital. We did that in Africa, we did it in Turkey, we did it in various parts of the world; medicines. So Paul learned from all this that we could do this in our own communities by just building grassroots organizations. He knew that I had been working with the Venezuelans in worker banks and worker housing. All the things that many of the organizations, the labor unions, don’t practice here, they were practicing in Latin America and even parts of Europe. Many of the unions are very self-sufficient in other parts of the world, as opposed to ours, which depend mostly on the dues structure to sustain themselves, but rarely go outside of their realm to do these humanistic type of projects. UAW did this, and Paul knew all this and he wanted to make sure that Cesar took advantage of these things and that people like Ted Watkins and myself could build these community unions in our own backyard, and so that was the thrust.

Well, next time maybe we can talk a little bit about the opposition to him. We’ll stop now, but if you could think about maybe some specific targets that they had when they decided to bring him down, and I’ll stop it now.

Okay. [End of interview]

This is Virginia Espino and today is March 7, 2011. I’m interviewing Congressman Esteban Torres at his home in West Covina, California. Last time, Congressman, we talked about your experience with some very important leaders within the UAW [United Auto Workers], Paul Schrade and Walter Reuther. I was wondering if you can comment a little bit or whatever you feel comes to you about their leadership and what kinds of leaders were they and what were their strengths and possible weaknesses.

Well, I believe that in commenting about those specific individuals that I had really high regards for a person like Walter Reuther, who was a major international figure. He was a man who was a very articulate and committed labor leader, who grew up, of course, in a family, with his brothers Victor [Reuther] and Roy [Reuther], who were also his compatriots in the building of the Labor Movement, the UAW, but also very much involved with the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] in the early days. These were men of great fortitude and great commitment to social justice and economic justice for workers, and they played a strong role as well in international and national politics, advising presidents of our republic and major political international figures, prime ministers and presidents of other nations. They were heavily involved especially in the postwar Second World War period. There’s been a lot of people—Walter Reuther was looked at by many, by the opposition, so to speak, within the union, as really a tough-minded left-wing leader who wanted his way and no other way. You know, he wanted to guide the UAW in a certain direction, and, along with his brothers, he manifested that approach. He was a very strong individual that kept the union together, ousting many of his opposition members who contested his leadership. But this is like any political system where you have leadership and you have opposition. He played that type of role.

As to weaknesses, I can’t recall that I knew of any really weaknesses. He was a teetotaler, a real straight-type individual. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke. The attempt on his life injured him, almost ripped his arm off. He was shot by an assassin through the window of his kitchen, and just his strong physical attitude, he resisted the doctors from removing his arm. He just demanded that they put that arm back on, and through the years I remember his hand was sort of crimped because of the injury, but he built his own house. He built his own summer house, using a hammer and saw, because he wanted to rehabilitate himself. He was that kind of an individual, and he treated people that way. He wanted people to be strong and tough, and he was really liked by his followers, his brothers, essentially. Paul Schrade, who was, as I mentioned, a young Eastern-educated liberal individual, came to the UAW really to work on the West Coast and became very much interested in the Labor Movement. He began to move into leadership positions at the North American Aircraft facility in West Los Angeles and eventually became the president of the local union, and eventually became an important figure in the international union, becoming an administrative assistant to Walter Reuther and eventually being elected as a regional director for the UAW. Here again, a man with strong social liberal commitments, progressive, I might say, and much more than just liberal. He was very progressive and led his union and the region into tremendous strides and advancement for UAW people, for UAW members.

Of course, working with other elements of the Labor Movement, he was very close to Cesar Chavez. He was very close to the black community. He was a person who would go to the South and march with the Selma marchers. He’d go into Montgomery with Martin Luther King [Jr.]. He was that kind of individual. Faults, weaknesses, I really can’t think of any. He was a mentor to me, as well as the Reuthers. I learned from them, and everything I’ve done really has been in concert with their ideas.

Do you think that you had an influence on them?

I think I did. I think my family did. I know that my wife [Arcy Torres] knew them. My wife knew Walter and Victor and knew Paul Schrade. My wife is very—she doesn’t hold back. She has beliefs on certain things. She is very committed to social, economic, and political views, and she manifests that to people like them, and they listen. She and I very much told these people what was happening in our own community. They were really remiss about Mexican Americans or Chicanos. They didn’t have the slightest notion of what we were all about, so we educated them. We did, and they were fast learners, and they began to understand that we had immense problems socially and economic and political, and they committed themselves to correct these inequities.

Do you recall some of those early issues? I think you’re probably talking about like the late sixties, early seventies right now.

Early sixties.

Early sixties. What were some of the important issues for you at that time that you wanted them to be aware of? 0:07:17.4

Well, there was tremendous movement in the Mexican American community for correcting many problems that had beset our community, whether it was in education or political representation, the whole idea of our participation in the workforce. When we were members of the union and we met with people like Paul Schrade or Walter Reuther, we espoused those inequities and they listened very attentively. They began to understand that there was an important struggle in our community that was very much akin to the black struggle, and they took note. Consequently, we saw a change take place in our union towards increasing our numbers. I was one of the first representatives to come into the international union as a staff person because of how we made them understand that we were important, that we had things to contribute, and as a consequence of that, others began to get appointed as service agents, as international representatives servicing local unions, as organizers, as people that became administrative assistants to Walter Reuther himself and Leonard Woodcock, the president later who succeeded Walter Reuther. Henry Lacayo, who was also an aircraft aerospace representative here in the West Coast, was a very political individual, and he made sure that Woodcock and Reuther and Schrade listened to our grievances. He became eventually an administrative assistant to Leonard Woodcock, went to Detroit with him, was president of Local 887, the same local union that Paul Schrade had been at, and so there was movement. There was a whole change of leadership that took place within the UAW, and other unions began to emulate that process. Whether they were Steelworkers or Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the Meat Cutters Union, they began to pay attention that there was an abundance of leadership in our community.

Did you see the same inequities in the union that you saw in the larger society? Is that what you’re talking about?

Yes. The unions principally started out with white leadership, Anglo-Saxon leadership. It was the early leaders in the Labor Movement. Historically, that’s a fact. Workers were, in large part, depending on what part of the country you were, were Irish or Italians or Polish. On this side of the country, there were largely Mexican Americans, but devoid of any leadership possibilities or involvement in the Labor Movement. They were usually ostracized, you know, until, I would say, post-World War II, when Mexican Americans, who were not ostracized by joining the army, are going in to fight our adversaries. They came back with a wide understanding of the world around us and what we could achieve as individuals. They came back and went to work in the factories, but no longer being subservient to another class of workers. They wanted involvement, and this is where we had the largest growth of Mexican Americans really clamoring to become union members and participating in the leadership. Of course, with the advent of the G.I. Bill, it gave many of us the opportunity to go to college, to go to universities, and we made demands on society. We saw our first lawyers and doctors and professionals. We saw our first small but important lawmakers coming to be, and eventually that whole movement grew and grew. But I really credit the Labor Movement for really motivating this whole attitude on the part of the greater society, that we were important factors.

Last time we talked a little bit about TELACU [The East Los Angeles Community Union]. So that seems to be an organization that bridged those two constituencies, the working people and the larger community. Can you talk to me a little bit about your involvement in that organization? You talked last time about the founding of it, but I guess I’m interested in how you decided what would be the focus or what would be important to address at that time. This was, we’re talking 1969, correct, or 1968?

We’re talking ’68. It came about because of this resurgence that was taking place in our community, but, moreover, Mexican Americans, in fact, saw the indifference, if you will. There was still some. Things weren’t exactly resolved for us. We still knew there were lapses in the attitude towards working people, Mexican Americans. But people like Schrade and people like the Reuthers saw that we had tremendous leadership potential, that we had done things that could bring about change in our communities, and a political issue began to take shape, especially around the War on Poverty. [President Lyndon Baines] Johnson, who was, of course, very much involved and responsible for the War on Poverty, was providing large segments of federal dollars into areas of poverty in the United States. But being the nation that we are, there was more attention being placed really to black African Americans. This was considered the poverty sector, you know. Yes, there was poverty in Appalachia as well. There was poverty in the Indian country, and there was poverty in our Southwest among Mexican Americans. As the political process evolved—this is my vision of what took place—there was a movement to promote a greater sense of political leadership for America, and this was espoused by people that believed that Johnson wasn’t doing enough, that the legacy of John F. Kennedy, who started having a sense of a greater justice for communities, was not being taken up, and his brother, Robert [F.] Kennedy, became the sort of successor to that sentiment. He traveled throughout the United States, looking at the whole question of poverty and who was impacted by it. I think in the genius or wisdom of a person like Robert Kennedy and his supporters, they devised a way whereby they could enhance this whole War on Poverty and use it as a political tool, if you will, to eventually promote himself into the presidency of the United States. I mean, this is political. This is what people do.

It was the advent of Robert Kennedy as a senator, and Senator [Jacob] Javits, a Republican in New York, that conceived of the Kennedy-Javits legislation, which created in America economic-impact zones and gave the right for pockets of poverty to be able to come together and promote within their communities a sense of self-determination, give them, through a legal process, the ability to lobby the federal government for the types of grants and infusions of capital to build their communities by self-determination. This is where Walter Reuther and Paul Schrade seized upon this. Jack Conway, who was a principal assistant to Walter Reuther, had now been appointed to a presidential position in Washington. He was working within what we call HUD, the [Department of] Housing and Urban Development agency of government. He had this whole notion that we could build, along with Walter Reuther’s concept, that we could build across the United States community unions, very much following the model of how you organize an industrial union, ringing the factory with organizers, moving within the workers’ families and surroundings, telling them of the benefits of being organized into a body that could bargain collectively with their employer for better wages and benefits and working conditions. That’s the way you organize an industrial union.

The same could be done by doing that with a community, a barrio community, organizing people that didn’t have a voice and giving them a sense of power by simply putting them together in a union of sorts, and building a structure that could collectively bargain with city or county or state governments for better housing, for better sidewalks, lights, getting the police off their backs, you know. Many of these communities felt oppressed by local law enforcement agencies. If you had an organized community that could confront these issues, you could build upon that and move on to build an economic infrastructure, a political structure, and eventually have a great sense of power to the people. That was the whole notion, and that’s where we were chosen, some of us, to come back to our communities, where we were raised and were recognized and people knew of us, to give leadership to the building of a community union.

In my community, the Mexican American community, union workers felt that the Eastside, so to speak, Mexican Americans, were not being looked at or considered in the same vein that the government looked at African Americans. They were getting a large part of the federal grants and subsidies, etc., to build community unions, and we were sort of on the wayside. But people like Schrade and Reuther felt that we had the same potential to build upon so that these community unions eventually, black and Native American and Hispanic American community unions, could become the base, the political base to elect a Robert Kennedy to the presidency. It was a political network that was being worked out. That’s the way that we started to build on the Eastside, by a committee, something called the East Los Angeles Labor Action Community Committee.

Action Committee?

Action. It was sort of a tongue twister, East L.A. Labor Action Committee, and if you tried to spell out the acronym, it didn’t sound right. I remember Paul Schrade telling me, “Well, we’re a community union.” I said, “Well, why don’t we just call ourselves a community union, The East L.A. Community Union.” And it has an acronym, T-E—we use “the”—T-E-L-A-C-U, TELACU.” And that’s the way they made the first check that they gave me to set up the organization. They brought me back from Washington, D.C. I made the move with my family back to the community that I was raised in, and we started out a little storefront with a $5,000 check made out to The East Los Angeles Community Union. But since we weren’t incorporated by that name, I couldn’t cash the check, so we had to change the paperwork and call ourselves TELACU so that we could cash the check and get our phone set up and get our secretary paid and pay the rent, and that’s how the organization came together. Like any type of formation of an entity in this vein, we went about to create a board of directors that was representative of the people that lived in that community, you know, the local housewives, the small businessman, the schoolteacher, the union persons, mostly people from the union contacts that we had, the Meat Cutters Union, the Steelworkers, the Auto Workers, the Amalgamated Clothing, the Ladies Garment Workers. That was our committee. That was the TELACU union, and we started building that under that framework. Little by little, by making official appeals to the federal government, we put in for grants to provide us with the wherewithal carry out the programs. Whether they were in education, whether home weatherization, whether it was in urban planning, whatever, we were on the road to building this kind of a union structure, giving power, giving voice to the people.

Did you have specific instructions? It seems like it was a pioneering organization. It was on the vanguard, in a sense. Did you have a plan, or did you come up with it as you went along?

We had a plan. I had come back from Latin America in my work, and I had had the good experience to have worked with Latin American unions and fledgling organizations in Latin America, and they were, in a sense, ahead of us in certain things, building co-ops, food co-ops, building housing co-ops and workers’ banks. Many of the unions in Latin America are very sophisticated, owned hotels. They owned businesses that provided resources and capital to operating their union. So some of these ideas I brought back and incorporated them into the community union, and, of course, the principal part was to let the people, let the barrio people give us their ideas of what they wanted to see. It wasn’t up looking down at them, but rather they looking down at us and telling us, “Here’s what we want. Here’s what we need.” That’s that gave us the wherewithal to operate without—you know, historically, many of the unions were looked at that they come into a community, East L.A. as an example, during election time, and the union will set up a headquarters in some part of the community and start canvassing the precincts, the political precincts, putting out leaflets, putting together phone banks and calling people to vote for a specific candidate or a specific proposition, and then when the election time was over, they were gone.

People felt sometimes shortchanged on that. They’d put in so much effort, and they got so enthused, only that when the election took place, everything sort of just disappeared and you didn’t see them again till the next cycle. We had to overcome that kind of cynicism on the part of the community, that we were there to stay and that they were a part of what we were putting together. And that’s what gave us really a tremendous amount of loyalty from the community, that we could, in fact, build upon.

Did you use those parliamentary procedures for your meetings? Because we’re talking about a time when people were redeveloping what is an organization, what is a group, how do you operate. Consciousness-raising and all those sorts of things were starting to emerge.

Well, we did precisely that. The community, because it was a poor community, immigrant community, people that had no sense, really, of what is a labor union, how do you operate politically in another society here, yes, we brought our notions of organization to the table. We adopted the Robert’s Rules of Order. People said, “Who’s Robert?” “Well, this is a system that’s used to maintain order in a meeting, procedure. It’s a way to democratically recognize everybody with order, with good demeanor,” and people learned from that. To many that was a tremendous tool, to be able to quell a disorderly crowd or a disorderly member who wanted to only speak and not let anybody else. With Robert’s Rules of Order we were able to contain that individual or that group. It worked, and people learned from that. The Kennedy-Javits legislation really created what was intended as sort of a corporate understanding of what we were doing. We were called community corporate development organizations, with sort of a corporate attitude of how we were going to run things. We were going to run things by audit committees, by a governance committee, by a nominations committee, by making sure that people had a full report of all of the activities that were taking place, nothing hidden under the table, everything aboveboard. And that gave people confidence that we were for reals and we weren’t just some very temporary thing. They knew that this was something permanent that they could build upon, which we did.

When I hear corporate, just today, you know, when I hear you say that, it reminds me of the idea that you want to make a profit, versus the nonprofit. So what was the idea of using—I mean, you just explained part of the reason, but was profit also part of that?

Yes. We were a nonprofit organization. Under the laws of putting together corporate organizations or organizations, you have the nonprofit groups are set up to provide a social and economic welfare process to the community, to the members, but nonprofits can make profits to sustain their operations. My whole idea of building TELACU was to create a model that I had seen, as I said, in Latin America, where the people owned the means of production. They owned the small factories they had or the small farms, and it was a matter of a co-op, cooperative agreement, that we could put together a credit union that was run by the members of the community union, and that the credit union would be made up of members of the community. They would vote to issue a dividend at the end of the year. If there was a profit made, there would be a dividend paid out to the consumers that put their money into the credit union. We could build a commercial venture, as we did at TELACU. We took people that had certain talents and we built upon those talents. One of our first talents, we put together—we did a field survey. What could we make here in the community that people needed and could use and we could sell commercially to other entities outside the community and make profit on it? We were able to design a bedding company, making mattresses and bedding facilities, and we employed people that knew how to do that work from the community, and it became the TELACU Mattress Company, and we began to engage in the product of mattresses and to retail them to hospitals, to hotels and things like that.

All the profits that were made from that came back into the community union, and eventually the whole plan was that all the members of the community union, those that signed up and wanted to be members, would be the stockholders, and everything that we did, in the end they would receive a benefit, a monetary benefit. See, it was something that I knew the Latin Americans were doing. Why couldn’t we do it here and instill a sense of worthiness, of capital formation, if you will, and use that capital to build upon other entities? We began to buy gas stations and operate gas stations in East L.A. We began to engage in weatherization programs that the government had, and building upon those, we could buy a roofing company and buy materials to roof houses, and the profit would come back to the community union. That was the whole notion. We were able to succeed in selling that process to the federal government, to the War on Poverty, and we filed for a major grant to give us the capital needed to do that. One of the first grants that I negotiated was a million-dollar grant to TELACU. We qualified as a Community Development Corporation, and then what you could do, we did something that is done in commerce, you create a holding company. You create a holding company that is not a nonprofit. It’s a profit-making company where you produce items, you make profit, and you use that profit to sustain the organization and eventually get yourself away from the federal dole, that you’re not dependent on a federal grant or—

Soft money.

Yes, exactly. That was a good thing to do, you know. That’s what we did. Now, I have to say this, that when I left the organization some eight years after my leadership role, I decided that my organizing efforts had now been completed. I would try, based on the things that we had done, my record, that I would run for a contested congressional seat. I thought I had the wherewithal to be able to be a viable candidate, and so I ran for an open seat that had been created. Another congressman decided he would enter the race, and given the fact that he was an incumbent [George Danielson] and it was during the [President Richard M.] Nixon administration that this took place, and at that point Watergate broke out, and this particular congressman that had entered the race was a member of the House Judiciary Committee, and so a lot of his time was taken staying in Washington and working on the Watergate judgment trial, impeachment aspects. He had access to television and he had access to a lot of media, saying that he couldn’t come to the community and campaign because he was working to defeat—he was working to see whether Mr. Nixon was culpable or not of his actions, and so he was not able to be out in the campaign trail. But I was, you know. But I didn’t have access to his incumbency, his franking privileges by mail and things, so he was able to defeat me. I lost by 5,000 votes. Somebody else also entered the race from our community, so that cut my vote in half there, and he won, the incumbent won. It kind of left a bitter taste in me about running for politics. I said, it’s tough, it takes a lot of time. My whole family was involved with me, a lot of my followers, my sympathizers, my community union and other people that I had made alliances with. They supported me, but it wasn’t enough to beat an incumbent.

Who was the person who ran from your community?

It was a man by the name of George Sanchez. He was a councilman in the City of Pico Rivera, which was part of the district. In the end, he said he would drop out. People talked to him and said, “You know, you’re splitting the vote.” And he said, “Well, okay, I won’t run.” So he took himself out of the race. But this was a couple of weeks before the election, and how do you get the word out that there’s only one candidate? So that made it difficult.

Yes, that’s a tough, tough situation. So when you decided to run—I think that’s jumping ahead a little bit too quickly. Maybe we can go back to TELACU. I don’t know if you remember those early days, if you remember what a typical day was like or some of the typical issues. I mean, you talk about economic development, but were there any other issues?

Well, this was during the period of the Vietnam War, and our community was very much concerned about this war, because it appeared that Mexican Americans were being used really as cannon fodder to fight this war in Indochina and that we were losing our youth to this war in a disproportionate number. So this gave rise to young people in East Los Angeles and Los Angeles—not just Los Angeles. This was a national issue in the Chicano community, and you had people like Corky Gonzales in Colorado, I believe, and you had the Raza Unida Party in Texas, and you had people here at home. At UCLA we had Rosalio Muñoz, student-body president, becoming the head of the Chicano Moratorium Committee. This was an amalgamation of all kinds of Chicano groups coming together to protest the war in Vietnam, and East L.A. became the sort of hub for this kind of action and activity, protest. You had the rise of the Brown Berets, who were part of this coalition. They were demonstrating that we had to bring the troops home, that we had to end this illegal and unfavorable war that was taxing our community.

I was very much against that war. The UAW was against it. And because we were a community union and we had the sophistication of organization and communications and technology as an organization, we sort of became the communications center for participating in this protest, and I became the leader in a non-TELACU organization that would amalgamate all the organizations in East L.A. and in Los Angeles County, Mexican American organizations. They were mostly of the same conviction, but not all of them. So this had been an organization that had been on the books but not really active. It was called the Congress of Mexican American Unity. And so this whole clamor around the war and about leadership and about our feeling an important cog in American society to protest a war mobilized the Congress into a large organization, and people felt they needed a leader. They would have a convention and bring all these groups together in a big hall and elect a convention with a program of how to lead this Congress. Well, I felt it important enough that using what I knew about organizing, together with my union colleagues from other unions, that we could lead a successful effort in organizing the Congress. I ran as its president, and I became the president of the Congress. I fought against a—I didn’t fight, but I was another candidate against another person who had been a very important figure in the Civil Rights Movement in the Mexican American community, Bert Corona, and I beat Bert Corona for the presidency.

So we organized the Congress very much along trade-union lines, creating the kinds of committees and the kind of hierarchy that an organization needs to really be able to stand up and speak out. So the Congress was a tremendous vehicle for doing this, and we were able to—at the same time, we had to be careful that we didn’t utilize those parts of TELACU that were federally financed or federally tied into the federal government to enhance the Congress, because then you were sort of using federal money to—but we could use our bodies, we could use our minds, we could use our intellect to provide leadership. We could provide our nonprofit funds to do things when we did all those things. So TELACU became a leader, along with the Congress, in the whole moratorium issue.

That’s a lot of information. So I’m going to pick out one little thing and then we’ll try to dissect, because there is a lot of information in that last statement that you made. First of all, what was it like running with Bert Corona? Were you friends or were you adversaries? Did you have different perspectives on how to run the Congress?

There was no animosity. He and I knew each other. It was a new type of awakening for young people in the community, and they felt very much that Bert Corona, who was an old tiger, you know, he was a MAPISTA the past with Mexican American Political Action Committee, and they didn’t want those kind of politics running the Congress. They wanted new faces, faces that had a lot of energy and had an organization behind them, TELACU, and I was that candidate.

The young Turks, if you will, the Brown Berets and the moratorium people, Rosalio Muñoz and all those felt that here’s this, not a new guy, you know, he’s from our community, but he’s not of the old—what do they call them—the dinosaurs. This is a new guy and he’s bringing in some really good ideas. He’s bringing in the Labor Movement. He’s bringing in all these resources that we can use to really make our organization strong. And based on that, in the secret ballot election I won. And, of course, Bert, we’ve always remained friends, but that was one election he just didn’t win.

Members of the Congress would be the Brown Berets, the Chicano Moratorium Committee, and who else? Did you have the Chicana Welfare Rights?

Yes, Alicia—what was her name?

Escalante?

Escalante was a member. We had a lot of church people, Father Luce, and we had all those people from Lincoln Heights. We had at one count something close to three hundred organizations.

Wow.

Countywide.

That’s a lot.

Yes, teachers and teacher groups, Julian Nava. It was just a great organization, and we would have these bona fide conventions and rallies, with Robert’s Rules of Order, and we had sergeant-at-arms. We had a man, a big burly man that walked around with a big cape and a big hat. They called him Karate, and Karate would walk up and down the aisles and he maintained order, you know, and everybody was very orderly. I mean, we had parliamentary procedure. We had committees that took action and reported out, and it was structured.

Did you meet at TELACU? How would you fit all these people?

Well, no, we wouldn’t meet at TELACU. We had no hall to meet in. We would meet over in the Boyle Heights area. There was a Jewish center where we would have big meetings on Soto Street. It was a Jewish—I guess it had been a synagogue, and they had like a hall there. We would meet in there. We would meet in a church that was on Euclid and Whittier Boulevard. Tony Hernandez was the reverend there, and he had been a great part of this organizing as well, so we used to use the church. We used to use Father Luce. He was a Presbyterian minister in Lincoln Heights.

Episcopal?

Maybe Episcopal. I thought he was Presbyterian. We would use his church to have our meetings. Yes, it was exciting. It was taxing. I was so busy, you know. I engaged my family. My kids were involved in all this. We’d go picket someplace. They’d go on picket lines with me. My family has been always very supportive of what I was doing. I couldn’t have done this without their support.

So that was the key issue in the late sixties, the antiwar position.

Yes.

Did you help to organize the actual march?

Yes.

What was the role that you played or that the organization played?

My role in the Congress was to allow for orderly meeting. I remember meeting with the various groups that wanted to do the moratorium. They felt that because we had the clout to do this that we could apply for the license to march, so I applied for the license to march on the moratorium. I participated in the meetings. They didn’t know who the marshals were going to be, you know, the marching marshals. We wanted, above all, to have this a peaceful march, so we had marshals to make sure, monitors to make sure that people stayed in line, to make sure that there was no vandalism, that we kept an orderly thing, because we knew we were going to be watched and it’s going to be watched by everybody. Any kind of ruckus was going to create a bad issue for us, which, unfortunately, it did when elements came into the march, including the sheriffs that created the police riot, you know, which precipitated all the events that took place after that, the killing of Ruben Salazar and the inquest and all those things.

Did you have a chance to meet with the police beforehand, like directly?

Yes. Rosalio and I met with Chief Davis to make sure that his people were—whatever we did, that the LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] was not getting involved in any action that would create a riot of sorts. I remember meeting with a very young lieutenant at the Sheriff’s Department about trying to help us keep order, for them to keep order and keep order for our people. This young lieutenant was named Leroy [Lee] Baca. Today he’s the sheriff. I met him from those days. We always remained friends, because he knew what we were doing and he told us to be careful not to engage in any kind of situation that would cause them to react. And I guess things did happen, not on our accord, but they did happen, the whole incident on that liquor store thing.

It sounds like the police and some people in government were suspicious of the Chicano Movement and where it was going to lead, and they were suspicious of certain characters, and the whole anti-communism comes back.

Absolutely.

And also the fear of revolution, you know, the riots. And then you have the Brown Berets, who were a paramilitary organization. Did you have any reservations about having them be involved?

No. You know, we live in a country where you have First Amendment rights, and they had the right to protest. They weren’t armed or anything. They didn’t carry weapons. They were paramilitary, but they were feeling their oats, you know. And why not? Let them protest. But they also were orderly. They also wanted to be part of a process that they themselves could keep order and not be detrimental to the march.

Did you speak directly with any of the leaders of the Brown Berets? Did you have meetings?

Yes, David Sanchez. Yes, he was very much involved. I was with him and many of them. To this day I see them sometimes. I was surprised where they all ended up, you know, ended up professionals, you know, working at Xerox and being teachers. It was a moment in their lives, I guess, that they’ll always treasure, but that’s where they were.

So during those early meetings, I’m just assuming that it didn’t always go smoothly.

No, no, there were problems. At that time there was a group that formed, that came together. It was called LUCHA, you know, lucha, combat. It was lucha, struggle, lucha. They were all ex-convicts. They had just come out of prison, a lot of them, and they sort of decided they were going to be the security for the moratorium. They all were bikers, you know, on motorcycles. And we let it be known that they were part of an organization that was protesting and that we weren’t going to be tearing down, shattering windows, and beating up people or anything. I mean, it was really handled as a very peaceful type of entity. This is the only way we could see our way that society would look at us as a protest movement.

The LUCHA guys were tough. They were really tough guys, I mean, and they kind of kept order, though. They sort of saw anybody acting a little bit funny, they would sort of move in. We didn’t kind of like that, and we would tell them that this wasn’t San Quentin or it wasn’t Corcoran, you know, “Take it easy,” and they tried to abide in every way they could. They later had some shortcomings of their own. Many of them were killed, and they ended up that some of them were really still involved in some criminal elements, and some of them were killed and assassinated and stuff like that, but that wasn’t part of our thing. We had to just guard that we—there was a big fight between the black community and our community, where there was fisticuffs. People were going to meetings armed with two-by-fours and they were going to battle the blacks, and the blacks were going to fight us, you know, over the monies, over the grants that were being provided. This was not in the moratorium context. It was a part of the time that it was taking place. There were some problems with Chicano gangs, Chicano gangs that were opposed to this moratorium thing. “Who are these hoodlums that are coming into our community and marching around? We’re for the soldiers. We’re for the army.” We got rocks thrown at us by them.

That day of the march?

Well, that day and other times when there were protests by the Chicano Moratorium. They had the gangs being antagonistic to us. They didn’t believe in that.

I didn’t know that.

Yes.

That’s interesting. There are a lot of elements that you’re dealing with. I mean, some people look at the Mexican American community as homogeneous, and you have so many factions and ideologies and beliefs. How did you manage to keep all these groups under one umbrella? Like the Congress of Mexican American Unity, what was the unity that kept people together?

I think we didn’t just speak about the war. For instance, the Congress said, “You know what we need? We need to gather funds. We’re just splinter groups, but we need to gather funds to be able to—first of all, we should have a way of communicating with each other. We ought to set up a communications center where everybody can reach us and we can reach everybody, but we need the technology to do that. We need people that know how to do this, but we need to raise the money to do it. Nobody’s going to give us money just to give it to us.” So we came up with the idea that we would have a big fundraiser at the L.A. Sports Arena over on the south side of town, or the west side. And what were we doing to do there? Well, let’s invite the contingent of Mexican American actors who we know, we see in the films, singers, people like that, and have them perform that night, and we’ll have everybody buy tickets to go. It’ll be at the Sports Arena.

So we were able to, through our connections—even had a neighbor that was a business agent for Anthony Quinn. So he went to Anthony Quinn and he told him about what we were doing, and, unbeknownst to me, Anthony Quinn had been a militant at one time in his youth, before the pachuco days and all that. He had fought in some kind of—I think actors had been involved in some kind of militant march or something, something to do with some injustice that took place in their industry, and he was involved in that. And so he agreed to be a keynote speaker. We got Vicki Carr to sing, come and sing and perform. We met with her. I remember going to the home of—I saw him not too long ago. He was not a Mexican American. He was a Hungarian Jew who used to play the role of José Jimenez. Do you remember that? You don’t remember that. You’re too young. Used to be a comedian called José Jimenez, and this guy was a real comedian, sort of like George Lopez. But he would come off as a Mexican and that was his name, José Jimenez. In a way, he was sort of—people didn’t like that, because he wasn’t a Mexicano, you know. But he had a home in the Hollywood Hills, and I had a friend that knew him, and he said, “Well, I’ll get Anthony Quinn and I’ll get Vicki Carr, and we’ll get Gilbert Roland.” Do you know Gilbert Roland?

No.

He was a big movie actor, Gilbert Roland. “Ricardo Montalban, I know him. I’ll get Eddie Cano.” Eddie Cano was a big musician in those days. “We’ll get these people at the meeting at my house, and we’ll plan for this entertainment and what you guys are doing.” So we had the meeting. I have photos of all this stuff.

Oh, my gosh.

Yes. We met at the house up in the Hollywood Hills, and they all agreed to do it. Vicki Carr was a little demanding. She said, “I need to have a twenty-one orchestral backup. I don’t sing unless I have twenty-one backup.” So we had to agree to that. So we put on this big extravaganza. We publicized it and people came. We filled the Sports Arena, and we raised a big bunch of money for the program. So we were able to do things like that, see, and it was a great spirit. People were really—“This is great, what’s happening.” We used that money—actually, we never built a communications center. That was our whole notion. But the moratorium came on top of all that, you know, really quick, and we had to use a lot of the funds for the contracting to do certain signs and to provide for megaphones and all kinds of things and, well, printing needs that we needed to advertise the moratorium.

That’s something you don’t think about. Where did the megaphones come from that Rosalio—I mean, you see that picture of Rosalio with the megaphone.

Yes, we bought all those things.

But you don’t think, you know, how did that get into his hands.

Yes.

And you had posters printed up at TELACU?

Not at TELACU. We had people that printed posters for us and leaflets and things that we could put out.

Who would write the slogans, do you remember?

Just all our artists, all our friends. It was a collective. It was a collective of everybody participating. It was a great time.

People were against the war for a lot of different reasons. Personally, not as a union member, not as a leader of this Congress of Mexican American Unity, but as an individual, as Mr. Esteban Torres, what was your—

Well, I thought of the war—we were, again, in a far-off place where people were fighting for a certain issue. The issue there was anti-communism. I guess it all started with [Dwight D.] Eisenhower making some commitment to the Vietnamese, the southern Vietnamese, that they would back them in fighting with the French, who were there, against the North Vietnamese, and somehow Kennedy committed some tactical forces to the French to help, to the Vietnamese people. It was a very small number of U.S. aid, military advisors. Then that whole thing grew and grew, and the whole idea that really the South Vietnamese government was corrupt, and the French couldn’t hold onto it, they wanted out. They left and left us to take over, and we took over with a corrupt regime, and it got worse and worse and more committed, and before you knew it, we were fighting that war in South Indochina. That didn’t bode well with a lot of us. There were allegations that, again, this battle was over certain natural resources that were in the South China Sea there, and we wanted to exploit that, and if we let the communists have it, then they’d have it over us. The North Vietnamese were being supported by the Chinese and the Russians, and there was that war all over again. So I wasn’t in favor of it, and a lot of us weren’t. Then the whole idea that all our young kids were being recruited and drafted and going over there, it was disproportionate. I mean, the figures were there. It was disproportionate, Mexicanos dying in the field for this very unjust war. That was my concern.

Did you know anyone who was fighting abroad?

Yes, I knew people that went. I knew people that came back, and it was the old story when they came back. Nobody really considered them as patriots or anything. They were really denigrated as military people. It was a very sad commentary on our part, as a government.

You have a son, correct?

I have a son, yes.

How old was he at that time?

Oh, he must have been—

Too small to—

Oh, yes. He was ten or eleven. I mean, he was young.

I think it’s different when you have a son that might go.

Yes, sure.

You really reflect. But it sounds like your son was too young. Okay, so we have about an hour. Do you want to do ten more minutes?

Let’s see. We started at ten-thirty? I have half an hour.

Half an hour? Okay, great. So then did you actually march at the moratorium?

Well, I marched in a number of marches. The one march, that one march I did not march. My father had passed away sometime before, way before that, but I had been told that my grandfather was still alive and that he was living in Sinaloa. So we had made plans to go to Sinaloa to visit with him. He was elderly now. And it just coincided with the same time that we were having the march. I mean, my plans had already been made. I couldn’t break them because of the family. They were out of school, and we had to go. So I left, oh, at least a week before the march we were down there.

On the way back, we were coming back, and at the border—we were coming back through Arizona—I went to get a newspaper, and I saw in there Ruben Salazar getting killed. Wow. I called in immediately, you know, “What’s going on?” And they told me, “You’d better get over here fast.” He said, “We’ve got some real problems.” So we come back into town that day, and they’re already having these emergency meetings because there’s people in jail, there’s people concerned over the Congress and what happened and the march. They had set up a bailout entity for people that had been incarcerated, so we had to work to get them out, and we had to organize real quick, we had to organize kind of an inquest committee. What is this? We formed a blue-ribbon committee made up of community leaders of our community to, first of all, pressure for an inquest and then for us to be part of that inquest. So we did that. But all this was logistical and there were a lot of people wanting to get involved and some people that we weren’t aware of wanting to get involved, and you have to sort of figure out who’s going to be part of that committee, you know, commission, we called it. So we picked the folks we thought should be there. We had the meeting, the inquest hearing at the Hall of Justice in L.A. At that time it was the old Hall of Justice Building. That’s where we first heard the reports by the sheriffs, the guy who fired the canister, and the district attorney there and everybody, and it became in inquest not about them but about us. The inquest, they turned it around and made it that we were the responsible party, and it was so much so that we just said, “We’re walking out. This thing is a sham.” We were saying that.

The press said, “Why are you walking?” “It’s a sham. Can’t you understand what they’re doing?” And so we walked out of the inquest hearing, and they tried to get us back in, you know, and all that. We said, “No, we’re not going back in until we have this whole thing corrected.” That’s all reported in a book that Jesus Treviño wrote about—I don’t know if you’ve seen that book.

He was with you at that time?

Yes. So it was a lot of sad commentary.

When you found out about the violence, were you surprised?

Yes, because we had gone to such extents not to create any kind of situation. I mean, I knew that I wasn’t there, I wasn’t going to be able to speak because I wasn’t there, but I knew Rosalio was—he was the guy that was the moratorium head, and he could handle things. They handled it well. We had good monitors, good provisions. We had the license, everything.

Well, thinking about 1968 and the walkouts and the police abuse of the students, were you worried that the same thing might happen with the moratorium?

Well, yes, we were, but like I said, we’d had discussions with them, that they respected our right to do this as long as we were orderly and we had legitimate documentation that authorized us to do it. That was the whole idea. But you’re always on guard that they meet their word.

When you met with the police, did you find that they were open to your position, to your situation?

Well, not exactly. They were argumentative that this was not necessary, but we argued that this was our right to do. “This is a fundamental American right, and we’re doing it with great justification, and we’re taking the precautions to make this an orderly thing. We’re not armed. We’re not going to riot. We’re not going to do anything that’s going to do that.” And, of course, they said, “Okay.”

How did things change for you afterwards? How did things change for the organization, for what you were trying to achieve up to that point?

Well, I think people realized the role we had played, and I don’t think we lost any prestige. We maintained our right to continue protesting. I remember the sixteenth of September [16 de Septiembre] parade was coming up, and we said, “We want to march in the parade. Everybody else has floats and all that, and we want a contingent of the moratorium to march in the parade.” The Comité Cívico Patriotico, who runs the parade, said, “No way you guys are going to march with us.” This is a very conservative Mexican organization. They said, “No. You guys are unpatriotic, and you don’t deserve to be marching in a parade where the grand marshal is the Consul General of Mexico. We have all these civic organizations. Why should you be marching with us?” So we went. I remember going to the Comité’s meeting. They had a big meeting, and we made our case, Rosalio and I, that, “Hey, you know, this is America. We have the right to protest.” You know, we gave all the justification why we marched, and it wasn’t our fault that it became a police riot, and we won them over. They said, “Well, okay, you can march, but you have to march twenty yards behind the last float, but you can march.” And so we did.

I saw the picture the other day. Rosalio Muñoz has a—I don’t know if you visited the exhibit he has, the pictures. There’s a picture there where he and I and Richard Martinez and Max Avalos were marching at the head of the line. I’m going like that [demonstrates], you know. [laughs] I have a copy of the picture somewheres in my collection. So they let us do it. Some years later, I’m in Congress and the Comité Cívico tells me, “This year we elected to have you be the grand marshal.” So how things change, you know.

I can’t imagine how they put you at the end of the line.

Yes.

At the end of the protest.

The route.

But at that time it is very soon after—I mean, the sixteenth is like just a couple of weeks from August twenty-ninth. You’re talking the same year?

I think it was the same year, yes. Yes, it must have been the same year, because they were very adamant, “No way are you people going to march in this thing, even ask.” But I remember that Rosalio and I went to the Cívico’s—they had their organizing meeting. We made a plea to them and put all our points forth, and they agreed.

It sounds like he wasn’t hindered from the violence. I think some people who experienced that retreated from the movement and were afraid of ever marching in the streets again.

I suppose, yes. I think a lot of people felt genuinely involved in a parade like that, and to have that kind of atrocity take place, where kids, your kids, your families, and people got really roughed up, you know. I mean, nobody got beat up marching. It all happened at the park.

Yes, that’s true.

The whole riot took place at the park.

How many people did you have in your contingent in the September sixteenth, do you remember?

We must have had, I would just say, top of my head, twenty-five, thirty people. We had a big banner with us.

But just in hindsight, do you think that after the moratorium, after the 1970s violence, that the movement started to wane a little bit, shift, change? Or do you think you gained more power and more momentum because people were angry and outraged?

I think the enthusiasm began to fade. Everybody went back. Corky [Gonzales] went back to Colorado, and people that had come in from Texas and all that. It was a bad experience. I remember Rosalio trying to keep the momentum up, and we all wanted to make sure that we didn’t dissipate the action that we’ve taken, you know. But it did, it had that effect on people. As I said, I didn’t see the militantism that transpired at that time, I didn’t see it later on. People were much more subdued in their demonstrations. But it had an impact. I mean, people knew about it. People sensed how we had really brought forth this great argument against the war and the use of our young people, and that changed things.

It is also the one time that East L.A. saw that number of protestors in the streets.

Yes.

I don’t think that ever happened again.

No. We had a couple of incidents after that where we gathered in Belvedere Park, I remember, and sort of the aftermath.

Just a second. I’m going to pause it for a minute. [recorder turned off]

Okay, we’re just going to stop it here and then we’ll pick up on that the next time. Thank you. [End of March 7, 2011 interview]

This is Virginia Espino and today is March 21, 2011. I’m interviewing Congressman Esteban Torres at his home in West Covina, California. Congressman, last time we talked a lot about the Chicano Movement. Well, maybe not so much the Chicano Movement, but the Chicano Moratorium, and I wanted to ask you some questions about ideology and philosophy and not so much about the events, but about what you thought of the movement or what you thought of the moratorium. For example, the whole question of patriotism came up around the Antiwar Movement, and you had spoken earlier about your involvement in the military, with the government and protecting U.S. interests. So how did you feel about your country at that time in the sixties, when the Antiwar Movement was starting to emerge?

Well, I felt very strongly about my country, but I felt that my country was wrong on the issue of the Vietnamese War. I think that we had been pulled into that war. It was, as we now know, as we look back into history, that it was a war that really was going nowhere, and we were just continuing to provide for a regime that was not really representative of the people there, and that there was a division in that nation, North and South, and that we were fighting with people who didn’t have the best interests of the Vietnamese people, and to allow our young men and women to engage in that war almost as cannon fodder, as they call it, was something I could not support. So I felt very badly about that policy, and I was vocal about it. Yet at the same time, it was my country involved, and I had been witness to all of the problems that ensued from that. I remember I was with the UAW [United Auto Workers] back East. I was on my way to Kent State University to lecture students when the whole Kent University issue broke out, and that left a very bad taste in my mouth about how U.S. soldiers would shoot down students, American students, and all of these things calloused me to fight against that.

My leadership, the people that I followed in the union, Walter Reuther, and Martin Luther King [Jr.] outside of that, and many members of the UAW were against that policy. We made our voices heard. It was a tough time, obviously.

Some people criticize those who were against the war as being unpatriotic. How would you respond to that?

Well, I think that anytime you react against your government, that conservative forces, patriotic forces will say that you are against the well-being of America. I know that in my own community, when I was at TELACU [The East Los Angeles Community Union] and I was supporting the moratorium, that there were many individuals and groupings in Los Angeles that looked at me as a traitor, someone that was against my country. And here I was running a community organization with federal funds, with all of the aspects of our government assisting us in community development at the same time here I’m crying out against the issues that the United States was engaged in that Vietnamese question, and it was hard going. I took a lot of criticism. I know that there were many people who were ready to give up on me. In fact, there were, as I recall, hit squads ready to take me on. [interruption]

Okay, we’re back. So you were mentioning that there were some people who were, you were saying, take a hit on you. You mean death threats?

I had learned that there was a group in East Los Angeles who had raised money to put a contract out on me. The allegation was that I was aiding and abetting the enemy, that I was running an organization that was really going to bring about the destruction of East Los Angeles, as opposed to the development, which we were working at. I was warned that I should be careful where I went. So it was tough, a tough time, you know. You have kids. My kids would go with me to meetings, and there were people out there who were provocateurs attempting to create chaos, and we did not engage with those folks. We wanted to stay away from them because we knew what they were trying to do. I had enough experiences in my career to know who was trying to do what. But it was a tough time.

How did your wife respond to this threat?

She obviously was very concerned about the family, the kids, where we lived. I recall one time I was running for congressional office. I’d just taken a leave from TELACU to run for congressional office. We had hired a skywriter to ride up in an airplane, write in the sky “Torres for Congress.” This was told to me by a friend of mine who went to an afternoon barbecue at a police officer’s home. The police officer, an LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] sergeant, was the person that was having this barbecue in his backyard. It was a weekend. They looked up in the sky, and the skywriter was writing “Torres for Congress,” and the police officer said, “See that guy up there? We’re going to get that guy. He’s raw meat and we’re going to get him.” He then later came to me and said, “Be careful. This LAPD individual is gunning for you.” We later learned that that same police officer had violated police ethics and rules and was building a file of people that they considered troublemakers and people that were out to do exactly what he thought was create chaos.

Years later when I was elected to Congress, the police department called me in, the LAPD, and turned over the file to me and said, “This man violated our rules and he should not have been doing this. He had this tremendous backlog of dossiers on individuals, yours among them, and we have taken those and we’re giving it to you so that you don’t hold any malice toward us. We didn’t authorize this.” So he handed me a file with my profile and news clippings and all kinds of crazy information about me that was false, but he was using it as an instrument to obviously target me. So, you know, that was the risk you take when you stand up for what you believe in and when you fight for a sense of social or political justice. You become a target.

Some people would back away from the issues with threats like that. What kept you going? What kept you involved?

Well, I mean, that was not the first incident. As I said, in my career working in the Labor Movement, working as an organizer, working in areas that you’re going to be confronted by either people that management hires to block your efforts—we call them goons—or when you go to Latin America and work in countries where there’s oppression, you have the police and the military and the military juntas who don’t want those kinds of folks around, and you become a target. So you take risks. You’re confronted with those kinds of situations. But if you believe in the cause, you keep working.

What was the principal issue for you at that time in the late 1960s, when you started to develop TELACU? What were some of those key issues that you thought were so important you would take the death threats and keep going?

Well, first of all, I agreed with the moratorium issue that our young Mexican Americans, Latinos in this case, were really being used as cannon fodder. The deaths of Latinos in Vietnam was disproportionate to our numbers. Great numbers of our young people were over there fighting, and that concerned me, because growing up through and with discrimination, I could sense that. So the moratorium was really an effort to call on that issue, and I felt strongly about it.

Were there any other issues that were of importance for you?

Well, of course the whole issue that—my mission, of course, was to look at a community that I had been raised in, and I saw the discrimination both in social and economic terms, was a community left in the backwater of our economy, a community without voice, without power, without any kind of self-determination. And when I had the opportunity, given to me by my own union and later by government, to try to enhance the quality of life for that community, I took it on with great vigor. Let’s organize our community so that we can have a voice, so that we can have the ability to deal with the issues at hand, whether they be sidewalks or streetlights or crime or police brutality or just the economic question at hand. That was the driving force, to build the community union, which, by the way, had tremendous results once it was done and once we were able to harness the wherewithal to bring about that measure of self-determination. Today East L.A. is a better community perhaps because we started that, and I look back on it and I feel good about it.

Was that idea of self-determination considered radical at the time, or was it something that everybody was talking about?

It was radical, you know. Even the people themselves in East L.A. didn’t really take to it. It was a new emphasis coming into the community, especially by labor people who had come in before. They’d come in at election time and gather votes and campaign, and then once the election’s over, they sort of disappear. And people were sort of suspicious of labor people coming in with the talk of building community and self-determination. They looked at it with some sense of suspicion, you know, what was our goal to begin with, you know. So you had to talk to people and really sit down with them and express what you were trying to do in large crowds and small groups, whatever. It’s an organizing effort, and we had a lot of help. A lot of people, especially—this was a labor initiative, and labor people are cognizant of these inequities, and so this was what held us together. This was the glue that held us together, and we had to be very careful that we didn’t have disruption within our own ranks, which usually happens in our community, and so we ran a very tight ship, so to speak. We just have to look back at history and think of the colonization, if you will, of the Mexican American community here in California, how we were, as a community, sort of relegated to a particular barrio or a section of town or section of the county or the state and usually really confined to that colony, so to speak, and that’s where life took place, in that colony. You were cut off from the mainstream. We saw it happening in East Los Angeles when the freeways came in and cut the communities in various types of quarters so that you really didn’t have a cohesion of community. Why did they put the freeways there? Because it was easy to just ride over the residents and say, “This is where the freeway is going, and you’re out. Here, take this. Move on, move to another part of town,” or the county, whatever. We saw the displacement of people in Chavez Ravine because they wanted to build a baseball stadium. We saw the politics that ensued in doing that, and we saw it in East L.A., breaking up the communities and creating little colonias, you know. If you think about it, very much what transpired in the colonization of Latin America and Mexico and now here in the United States.

We thought that there was a better way and this was a way to do it, to organize ourselves and work for this sense of power within our little barrios and communities to change things. We were a change agent, and that’s what gave us heart, and people saw that. People began to realize that we had a goal to meet and keep, and it gave us a tremendous amount of confidence with the people.

How did that sync, that idea of self-determination and the critique or the colonialist theory, Chicanos were living within a colony within the United States, how did that sync with your Democratic principals and your involvement? I don’t know if you were still involved in the Democratic Party at that time, the Young Democrats.

Well, yes, we were involved in the Democratic Party, and we often took umbrage that the Democratic Party was really not fighting for that equality, that they were somewhat elitist and looking at “That’s the way things are and it’s the way it’s always been, and the Mexican Americans aren’t going to change. They’re going to want to live the way they live, and so be it.” [interruption]

Okay, we’re back. You were talking about the Democratic Party and the challenges that you faced.

Well, yes. We were beginning to be recognized by the party as a viable political entity. We had formed, I recall, an East L.A. Young Democrats Club, and we began to attend the conventions and attend the various gatherings of the Young Democrats. We were all young and energetic and thought along very liberal, progressive lines, and I guess they took note that we were serious about changes in the party and changes in leadership, and that’s how we called attention really to our community.

The party began to accept those principles, but always I felt they were sort of going along with us because it was the thing to do, sometimes not taking it too seriously, and so you had to, in a way, become an activist, almost militant, so they would really listen, stand up and shout and make your voice heard.

Do you remember any of those episodes where you had to stand up and shout?

Oh, at any number of events that we attended and conventions and gatherings. You break up into committees. We had learned. We had learned good lessons. I always look back on the cutting of my political teeth, so to speak, by having joined a union and the union making me a spokesman and a defender of workers’ rights. I just carried that over into a public-sector issue, and many of my colleagues did the same and we all worked together. You know, we made some changes. Sadly, I look back now on a lot of this and, yes, there are a lot of our young men and young women who today are in political office, and I think they learned from those early lessons that we went through. They learned how to also navigate in this enormous sea of politics, and so we have a lot of new political leaders, men and women, Latinos, which are making a dent in the process.

So in those early days with the Young Democrats, what were your goals at that time? Did you have the goal as electing officials, or did you have a platform that you wanted the Democratic candidate to address, or what were some of the—

Well, initially we supported the Democratic flag-bearers, you know, the current assemblymen that were in office, who were friendly to us, so we supported them because we knew that if we did that, they could act on our behalf in Sacramento, or if we backed up a candidate for federal office, we knew that they would be responding to us. That’s what gave, really, in those years, the tremendous surge of political activity on behalf of the Kennedys and on behalf of Hubert Humphrey and many of the other national political figures, and they began to notice that we, in fact, were viable, we could deliver votes, we could deliver on their behalf, and they also had a mission, then, of course, to reciprocate, because we had helped them win elective office. So we became very political. At TELACU, I remember the young people working with us, volunteers. Mostly young people were not cognizant of a political process, how you work in a political campaign, so just by being involved and asking them to be volunteers in the process, they began to learn how a precinct works, and what does a precinct captain do, and how do you fundraise, and how do you bring about issues, and how do you communicate those issues, how do you articulate the problems that are happening and taking place? I look back and see many young people today who are very successful statespersons, elected officials who learned from those lessons.

Do you have any examples?

Well, one can speak of Gloria Molina, who worked with us at TELACU. She was a volunteer who gave her best in working with youth at the time, with youth at risk. That involvement led into her becoming very political and wanting to someday move on and become somebody that could really articulate on the issues.

Hilda Solis, who was not at TELACU, but later Hilda Solis worked with me in the White House when I was a presidential assistant. She was part of my staff. She went on to become a very savvy political woman, being elected to the State Assembly in California, the first Latina senator for the state and later a congresswoman, and now the secretary of labor. All the other people that flourished in the political process, in the state office, Richard Alatorre and Art Torres and Gil Cedillo. I could just go on and mention names of people that started out young with this whole vigor about the new politics and the way that we could be represented in high office.

You’re talking a wide chronology, because some of these individuals are younger or older than—like, for example, Gloria Molina would be one of the oldest of this generation that you’re talking about?

Well, now she would be. She’s a senior person as a county supervisor, having gone through the legislative process in Sacramento as a representative, as a representative on the Los Angeles City Council. She was a White House deputy assistant to the president, later coming back and becoming a county supervisor, an important figure in California politics and national politics. This is, to me, a tremendous advancement by just one woman and how she has influenced other women to move in the same direction.

The idea of self-determination that you talked about earlier, some people looked at it as a separate identity, let’s separate ourselves, let’s have our own political structure, let’s have our own government. I think Gloria Molina shared your idea of democracy in the U.S. system. But how did you maneuver those two different ideas? Because La Raza Unida Party was also emerging around that same time.

Which party?

La Raza Unida.

Yes, right.

How did you understand that?

Well, we felt very good and very competent about being Chicanos and working towards the fulfillment of some measure that would give us social justice in our community, economic justice, political justice. And we were cognizant that we were Americans as well and that we could work within the system, and the only way that we could change things was to work within the system. We couldn’t be something separate and apart. We had to take advantage of what this country is all about, and as citizens and as activists, we worked hard at trying to correct what we saw as sort of flaws in the systems and the injustice that prevailed, and by working within the system, we could change it. We could make enhancements in it and never denying that we wanted to be separate and above, but rather a part of.

Were you attracted to the idea of a third party, the La Raza Unida Party?

In a way it spelled a way to show that we could be successful in creating our own self-determination, our own destiny, so to speak. I saw the growth of the Raza Unida Party in Texas, their first election in Crystal City as a major movement of young people, Chicanos in that sense, who were able to capture a city council and change things there, and obviously I felt that that was good. I mean, the numbers were there, the people’s thoughts were there, and they had the votes. They could vote, and they brought about change. Now, they perhaps were a little more, I would say, stringent or perhaps more attracted to the whole notion of being separate, as opposed to inclusive, and I didn’t see that as a way to move ahead.

We were asked by many veterans in our community, old people that had been through the mill, so to speak, they asked me to consider to become the chairman of a new move to incorporate East Los Angeles as a city. They saw the workings of TELACU as part and parcel of that effort, that if we could create a community union that was calling attention to our issues in East Los Angeles, why couldn’t we use that instrumentality to work for a higher level of creating a city and having real self-determination, not being apart of the United States but being a part of the United States as another city, the largest Mexican American city in the United States, the largest concentration of Mexicans outside of Mexico City. Of course, a lot of people saw that with fear. What’s happening? Mexicans are going to create their own city here in L.A. County? We thought that was an important thing to do, and so we organized and created fundraising and created public awareness that we should become a city, and we went through the hoops, as they say, of dealing with the Los Angeles County Land Formation Agency, to give us the right to apply for cityhood, complying with their prerequisites of creating studies that would show that this colony, so to speak, could really sustain itself as a city. Did we have the tax base? Did we have the economic wherewithal to sustain ourselves as a city? And we were able to prove that we had it. Given all the income and the ownership and the taxes that that colony accumulates, we could really be a city. When it came down to the voting day of people voting for that city, we had the strange phenomena of La Raza Unida saying, “Well, we want to be part of that city, and we’re going to run for office.” That then had a turn of events, because a lot of people saw the militancy and the aggressiveness of the Raza Unida as a detriment to really getting the votes out by the community, who was suspicious to begin with, of all these efforts. But here comes a new party with their vigor and their activism, wanting to become the city council and become whatever, and people saw that as a threat.

Were these L.A. Angelenos who were part of the Raza Unida, or did they have transplants?

No, they were L.A. They were people from L.A. You know, it was a justifiable effort by people who felt very committed to Raza Unida principles, that why not run for the city council of the new City of East Los Angeles? Of course, that created a whole fear campaign throughout the process. There was the other element that it was TELACU that was really running this whole movement for incorporation, because Esteban Torres, the head of TELACU, wanted to be the mayor, and all his cronies, so to speak, at TELACU were going to be the city councilmen, and they were going to run for office, and the city would be a TELACU city. Many people took fear with that, too, you know. What are they doing here? Of course, the adversarial elements began the propaganda machine, and you began to see the letters and mail going to people’s homes, telling them that the whole effort was going to raise taxes on their property, that they would become beholden to this new city, and they were going to go under. That scared a lot of people, especially the older persons who owned their homes and had retired and lived in East L.A. They really felt that this was not in their best interests. So you had all these elements focused in on this cityhood drive, and eventually on election day, we lost the effort. We were never able to recover until of late. There’s a new drive to do the same.

Who were your original opponents? Your opponents at that time, were they in an organization? Were they individuals?

Well, as I recall, I believe Raul Ruiz was actually a candidate. He was with Raza Unida. There were other very important, sharp, intelligent people running on the Raza Unida ticket. We had people from TELACU running on it. I remember we had Richard Polanco running for a council seat. Any number of young people who wanted to be part of this effort. Women, too, as well. But as I said, the whole turmoil that ensued created a defeat for the incorporation.

But who would be the one or the group that would send out those letters?

Well, you had a large business community in East Los Angeles. That was always our argument, that East Los Angeles was really owned by outside investment groups, you know. Whittier Boulevard were all absentee landlords, so to speak. They had their companies, their businesses there. A lot of the real estate were absentee landlords who didn’t want to see this new entity come in. The county supervisor at that time, Ernest Debs, was very much opposed to incorporation, because by becoming a city, it would take away the county’s authority over East Los Angeles. Of course, what was the great threat was that if we didn’t incorporate, the surrounding cities around East Los Angeles would begin to take pieces of the area and incorporate them into their own cities. Monterey Park, Montebello, the City of Commerce, the City of Los Angeles, they were just looking at this big huge pie in the middle sitting there, that they begin to really start lopping off pieces. They already had. But if we didn’t incorporate, they would just move in and take over and leave just a small piece that they didn’t want.

Eventually, when we lost the incorporation effort, no sooner had we lost the effort than Monterey Park incorporated that part of East L.A. where the college is at and all that neighborhood, nice middle-income homes. Montebello, on the other side, moved in and took a piece; City of Commerce. They left just a small little island of really small businesses and neighborhoods that probably didn’t have a tax base to speak of.

Looking back, do you think that you could have done something differently to win that incorporation?

I think so. I think one of the things that we didn’t really do, we didn’t provide, I guess, the capital necessary to mount a real campaign. We were, as I said, hampered by suspicion by many people that the effort was not really going to bring about the goal of a city, that, in fact, there was going to be raising taxes and creating the kinds of ordinances that would move people out or move the people about, and we didn’t have the funding to really put on a public-relations program, a political public-relations program that could have really had greater influence. I look at that.

Were you at that time receiving funding from the government?

Yes. We were still a community union. We had contracts with the federal agencies that provided funds to us. I would say the federal government didn’t provide an obstacle for us. In fact, we had thought that at the time there was an aspect where there was a revenue sharing, where cities that were already incorporated could apply to the federal government for additional revenues, and it was called revenue sharing, and we would have been able to partake in that effort, receive funds to enhance whatever the city needed. I think we lost a lot. There’s still an effort, as I say, in trying to bring that about, but to me it was a defeat. I never got over it.

Was this after the moratorium or before the moratorium?

It was after.

Did you find that your work in the moratorium, in other projects, did it gain support for these other—this kind of cityhood drive?

I would have thought it would have, because we were so involved in all aspects of that community that I didn’t think that anything we had done in the past had taken away from it. Rather, I always thought that we were at the forefront of change and progressive movements to bring about a better day for East L.A., but there were a lot of other forces at play that impeded that effort.

Did you have any forces against that effort within your own community, within the Chicano community, or were they more outside business interests?

No, I think everybody was pretty much for the idea. I think the idea had a lot of outside support. Imagine East L.A. being a major city next to Los Angeles, it would have been a tremendous—what would I say—jumping-off point for the leadership of that city to move into other higher-level forms of politics. As we did, many people came out of our leadership, but this would have greatly enhanced that whole effort.

What do you think would have been the greatest impact? Do you think it would have been on education or jobs or politics?

I think it would have been economically. The economic would have been the best thing for the city. I mean, you would have been able to build a real infrastructure of a city, and you would have had the agencies within the city to deal with the many other aspects that you needed to do economic development, leadership in all forms, enhancement of the educational system, obviously a control over law enforcement and how that was applied to the community, the city. You could have had your own police force, your own fire department. Or you could have contracted, but at least you would be the manager of those efforts. But it didn’t happen.

That’s unfortunate. Imagine today what would have ensued. Well, during this time, then, we also have the UFW [United Farm Workers] and the boycott of grapes; Cesar Chavez. I was reading a little bit about just your role in TELACU, and it mentions that you took a trip to Mexico with Walter Reuther and Cesar Chavez in 1966, I believe. So this is before—yes, it was 1966.

Yes, that’s right.

Can you tell me a little bit about what was the purpose of that and what role you played?

Well, as I’ve said, the Labor Movement especially—and I’ll direct my comments to the auto workers—we had set about on a worldwide effort to stem the growth of taking our automotive jobs offshore to Latin America, to developing countries where they could get cheap labor, where there were no unions, no labor standards, produce a product low cost and create great wealth, profits. So that was having an effect on American workers, seeing our jobs eroded. So the effort was to create a worldwide auto workers union, so we went to the countries. We had representatives assigned all over the world to go to these countries and help organize those unions where either they weren’t unions or they were working for auto makers, especially American auto makers. That was my job in Latin America, to go there and work with the workers in those countries that had automotive fabrication.

Mexico was an example of a country that General Motors and Ford had been there for fifty years already. This wasn’t the new outsourcing. Mexico was producing all these automobiles already. But their workers were greatly underpaid, and that’s why the company could operate in that fashion. But other auto makers were coming to Mexico to fabricate: Volkswagen, some of the Italian makers, Fiat, as I recall. In Mexico you had all of these auto unions in different what they call Mexican labor federations. They weren’t in one big organization. But the overriding organization in Mexico where General Motors and Ford, Chrysler were involved in was the Confederación de Trabajadores de Mexico, CTM. They were the major union, and the head of that union was Fidel Velasquez, an old longtime warrior in Mexican labor, and he and the Reuthers were good friends. They knew each other from World War II, the fight against the communists and the fight against those kinds of international labor issues. Velasquez also knew George Meany, who was head of the AFL-CIO. There was a good relationship. So the Reuthers said that we should go to Mexico, UAW should go to Mexico, but not as UAW per se, but we should go as part of our international trade secretariat, the International Metalworkers Federation [IMF]. We should go to Mexico and through their offices, which were located in Mexico City, we should start organizing an Auto Workers Council, and eventually the notion of organizing that council, bringing all the automotive production efforts into a single body and affiliated to the International Metalworkers Federation, that would give us tremendous political-labor power to deal with the manufacturers of automobiles. Fidel Velasquez agreed that the CTM would support that effort and that he would call upon all the other federations and unions to become a part of that council. But organizing the council obviously would take a lot of work, a lot of negotiations and a lot of discussion, and it was my job to work with the IMF—it was called the IMF—in Mexico City, and we would make the rounds of all the unions and talk to the leadership and have all these accords drawn out. We would formulate a constitution, a charter, and all of these elements to bring together all these auto workers together in one central place where there would be discussions and strategies about how auto workers would deal in Mexico.

So the Reuthers, of course, were very positive about the effort, gave me and the IMF all the support we needed to do this organizing. Fidel Velasquez cooperated, getting his people to participate, and, of course, it begins to get very political. The various political leaders in Mexico then want a little piece of the action, you know. They want to be part of this council. There’s going to be officers, there’s going to be representatives, and nobody wants to be left behind. So that takes a lot of doing to make sure that everybody’s base is covered. So finally we reached the day where we would hold a national convention in Mexico City to bring all the parties together and put this council on the ground, turn the keys over to the new president of the council, whoever that would be, and we would inaugurate this office, which would be a functional office. A big undertaking. I was working down there, of course, and going back and forth, and Paul Schrade, who was very active with Cesar Chavez, and, of course, he was a UAW regional director, suggested to the Reuthers that we should take Cesar Chavez to Mexico, because the Mexicans didn’t know him. They had some animosity against Cesar Chavez, because Cesar Chavez didn’t really understand the nature of migrants, you know, coming here to work and breaking his union strikes or breaking his boycotts. The growers would bring in Mexicans, and they would disrupt the boycott process.

So we felt, the Reuthers felt, Paul Schrade felt that it was important to introduce Cesar to them, to have them know what his goals were and that they would then work out an arrangement, an agreement of how workers could cross the border and come in. Obviously, the idea was that if you’re going to go to the States and work, join the union, join Cesar’s union. That was the whole idea about taking Cesar to Mexico City, to meet with labor, to meet the secretary of labor in Mexico so that they got to know him. Cesar had never been to Mexico. He was born in Yuma, Arizona, and they lost a farm there during the [Great] Depression, and after that they became migrant farm workers. But he never went to Mexico. And that was the whole idea about that, building a solidarity between his union and the Mexicans and the rest of the labor forces.

Did you spend a lot of time with him while you were there?

Oh, yes. We were already good friends. As part of our solidarity effort, we invited Cesar and his wife, Helen, and the Reuthers took their wives, and I took Arcy [Torres], my wife, and it was that kind of family setting that we could all enjoy this new council coming together. I remember one afternoon Arcy, my wife, and I told Cesar, “You’ve never been here, right?” He said, “No, I never have.” I said, “Would you like to go visit the pyramids?” And he said, “Yes, I’d really like that.” So we hired a taxi and we went out to Teotihuacan, where the big pyramids are, and I know as the taxi was approaching the pyramids, they sort of loomed up before us.

Cesar’s eyes just opened up. He said, “My god, I never thought they were that big.” So just as we were getting there, the taxi driver tells us, he said, “I’m going to pull off the road here.” And we wondered, why is he doing that? He pulls off the road and he goes into a field in there, and he says, “They’re doing some diggings out here, and I’m going to let you off here. You scavenger around these diggings and see what you guys can find.” And we said, “Oh, okay.” So he let us off. He said, “I’ll be back in half an hour.” So, sure enough, we got off the car and we started looking around, poking the dirt where all these mounds of dirt were. I remember Cesar said, “Look! I’ve found a little head. I found a little head.” And sure enough, he’d found a little clay head, a pre-Colombian piece of pottery. And, yes, pretty soon we all started digging up little beads and pieces of pottery, you know, pots, pieces of statues, and it was really like, my god, you always read about this, but here we are. So we gathered them up and, sure enough, the taxi driver came back in half an hour. He said, “Well, did you find anything?” “Oh, yeah, we did. We found a lot of stuff.” He said, “Oh, well put them in the trunk, and we’ll go visit the pyramids.” And we did. He had some newspapers there and we all wrapped them up, our treasures. Then we went on to see the pyramids. We climbed the pyramids. We had a really nice time there. We came back from that excursion back to our hotel, and Cesar couldn’t wait to tell everybody about his find, you know. [laughs] We were there meeting with a lot of labor people in the lobby, and he said, “Hey, we were out there by the pyramids, and I found a bunch of little pieces of pre-Colombian art.” And they said, “Oh, really?” He says, “Oh, yes. What a deal.” We were all excited.

And they said, “Oh, those things are planted out there. They plant them out there for the tourists to find.” Cesar says, “Oh, no, I don’t think so.” “Yeah, they do. That’s what they do here. Did you guys give the taxi driver a big tip?” “Yeah, we did.” “Well, that’s why they take you out there.” So anyway, we held onto them. I remember going to La Paz one time to visit Cesar, and I said, “Do you remember our digging up in Mexico at Teotihuacan those little pieces of pottery?” “Oh,” he says, “I still have mine.” He opened his desk and he had a little plastic bag, still holding onto them.

Now they’re historical artifacts.

I’m sure, yes. [laughs]

I mean, they might have been planted, but because they passed through his hands and the story that you tell about it, now they’re valuable historical artifacts.

Exactly.

That’s so interesting. Yes, it still happens today. I lived there for many years, and every time we would we go there—“I just found this, dug this out!”

Yes, right, right. And we have the vendors come around and selling them to you.

Well, I know from my own experience that when I traveled to Mexico, I realized how American I was. Were there any conversations like that with you and Cesar—it was his first time there—about being Mexican, about being Mexican American, about being a U.S. citizen? Do you remember any conversations like that?

Well, yes, we had those conversations. He talked about his family and how they struggled, and how he had never been to Mexico because the opportunity was never there, but now he understood. You feel close to your roots, you know. You go to Mexico City and you go to visit the pyramids and you visit the Museum of Anthropology, and you realize the great culture that you’re from, you know, the pride you take. Both he and Helen were very appreciative of having been invited and gone there, had a whole different sentimental feeling about Mexico.

What about his perspective regarding the migrant workers?

Well, obviously, that changed very much, and they made a substantial effort to organize them and represent them. Even though they weren’t citizens, the union represented them.

Did you ever have conversations with him about his position? Do you remember his exact sentiments?

No. His general position, as I recall, was that in a way they were strikebreakers, because the growers would bring them in, and they didn’t want anything to do with an American union or organizing effort. They didn’t understand it, you know. They understood sindicalismo because they live with it in Mexico, but these were migrant workers who were generally field people in Mexico coming to do field work here, and they didn’t feel that—why should they be part of a union, you know? But all of that, I think, changed the pattern of how the farm workers felt about migrant workers.

Do you think that that trip to Mexico had a fundamental—

I would think it did, yes, absolutely.

What about your own position regarding the undocumented?

Well, I always felt that they had a right to be here. I mean, I adhere very much, of course, to the legal aspects of coming to another country. You have to provide the wherewithal to come in. But you come in illegally, you’re breaking the law. But I feel great anguish for migrant workers because they’re at the mercy of unscrupulous employers who hire them because of the low wage they can pay them, and they can discriminate and not even pay them. They get no benefits, they get no protection, and I think that’s unjust and that shouldn’t be.

Did you ever have to deal with that issue during your early work with TELACU?

Yes, we did. In fact, part of the whole TELACU effort as it started was because the notion was that someday automation was coming to the fields, and those workers, whether they were American citizens or migrant immigrant workers, were going to be displaced by machinery, and because they were here, they would start moving into the cities, into the urban centers, and that Cesar’s people, who would have been part of that, should have a place to really come to and be a part of America, and that the community union would provide a sort of base for those farm workers who were coming from the field and adjusting to barrio life, and that the community union would be a great place to provide for them. So I thought that was a noble effort. So Cesar always regarded TELACU, Dolores Huerta for one, as a refuge for their folks. We, in turn, provided the bodies and the people, the young people for their boycott, and that was a big effort on our part.

So we talked earlier, and you mentioned that for the moratorium you provided things like the blow horn. What about like photocopying and phones?

All that.

Give me some more detail about exactly how the TELACU was used for these different campaigns.

Well, we were a communications center, if you will, for these kinds of issues and programs, protests, demonstrations. We were part of a movement, and we felt that because we were a sophisticated technical type of entity that we could provide everything from a telephone or a mimeograph machine or print leaflets or make political contacts for them, even arrange for and work with attorneys for pro bono in cases where people were jailed or something, could get them a bail bondsman and things like that. We did all those kinds of things. So we were looked at as a friendly organization helping out the movement, helping out farm workers.

How did you determine how to pay your employees? It sounds like you’re activists. You’re getting paid for being activists.

But remember, we were federally funded to run an organization and the management and the organization that we were doing, but we were a nonprofit organization but also had profit-making entities, so we had a separate accounting system for not using federal funds for any kind of protest that was against the government or things like that. So we were able to work off of two books. You use your self-earned profits to help do things that enhance community efforts and protesting and all the kinds of issues I’ve discussed, but you’re not using federal dollars to sustain that. And the federal government, when they monitor you, when they want to know your accountability, you don’t show anything on the books that you used their money to do those things.

What did you use their money to do, specifically?

Well, we would hire people. We would hire competent people to work with us in whatever technology we needed, and we would pay salaries. We would pay fees. We would undertake whatever cost to sustain the organization in its goals, its contracts that you fulfill with the government to carry out.

What was your objective then, at that time, for economic development? Because I’m assuming that was what the federal government was giving you money to promote within the organization.

Well, economic development really means taking people who are already in business, or people that are wanting to go into business, and setting up a mechanism for them to understand the elements of running a business. So we created a large economic development machinery, so to speak, hiring banking people, people that understood finance, understood business development, and everybody that wanted came to our office at no cost—no cost—and they got instructions, they got assistance, they got negotiators, how to deal with the Small Business Administration, how to go to the banks and negotiate the loans that they needed for their business, and we put thousands of people through our doors doing that, hoping that many of those would stay in East L.A. and run their businesses and hire more people.

We contracted with the job-development agencies of government to train youth in various categories, various trades and things like that. That’s where Gloria Molina worked then. We did job training, on-the-job training programs. We had classrooms. We hired VISTA [Volunteers In Service To America] volunteers. This was an organization, VISTA, to come and work with us in planning, development, barrio planning, how we could build plazas and shopping malls. We wanted to make a part of East L.A. and build a zocalo like they have in Mexico, a big town center, and we had chosen a park, Belvedere Park, to do that. So we were able to contract with UCLA and with the urban-planning people there and bring in the urban planners. See, all this cost money, and we were running all these things. We were running weatherization programs, going into the community, in the barrio, and weatherizing properties, you know, putting in doors, ceilings, and new roofs and all those kinds of things that’ll help people conserve energy. Taking young kids after school or in summertime to summer camps up in the mountains. There was an area that we used to contract with up in Saugus. We would join with the Watts Labor Community Group and take our kids up there and we’d give them an exposure at a summer camp. We bought buses to transport people. That was all the federal money we were using. We applied for a large federal grant. The government recognized that we could possibly apply for a major program under the Office of Economic Opportunity. OEO at the time it was called. We won that contract, and I remember bringing in the first million-dollar grant.

Wow.

Yes. The Labor Department funded a lot of our programs. Small Business Administration was involved in helping us with the business-development people. We set up our own industries that were privately owned by TELACU, the mattress company, the gas stations. We tried our hand at many different things.

How did you decide where and how you were going to negotiate all of these different issues? I’m wondering what those meetings were like, those decision-making meetings and how smooth or how tense did they get.

Well, it really would depend on the area that we were targeting. We had onboard as TELACU staffers, we had an attorney who was full-time. He was our legal head. He had interns working with him, and we had a mandate of providing pro bono assistance to people wanting to incorporate their organizations. Any contract that we went into, any negotiations, our lawyer was there to make sure that we fulfilled all the conditions and that whoever we were dealing with did the same. We had to run a very tight ship, a lot of transparency. I was a stickler on that, coming from where I came from. I wanted to make sure that there was no hanky-panky, you know. People criticized me for that. A lot of people criticized me for not being more liberal with our funds, you know, give more money away or whatever, and I said, “No. We have to live within our means. We have to do what we have to do to satisfy the government mandate.” And that’s the problem. When you’re working with the government, you have to provide all that, and they hamstring you. They don’t allow you to do everything you want to do. That’s why the whole notion of TELACU someday will be to the point where we can pay our own way and we don’t need the government, the federal government, telling us how to spend our money. We will pay our own way.

That’s what it’s doing today. The organization continues today, not in the fashion that I wanted it to be, but they operate that way. They have their own industries, they have their own banks. Some of it is subject to a lot of chicanery going on, a lot of deals being cut with political entities, but that’s them. That’s not the way we were doing. We’re doing it different, you know.

So in those early days, did you have the ultimate veto power? Did everybody defer to your ideas and your opinions? Or how did you manage to have a democratic organization?

Well, we had a board. We had a board that was representative of that community. Every entity that was—not every entity, but we were a board that had representatives from seniors, representatives from the educational sector, from the business sector, from the unions. The unions were all part of the board. We were running a union operation, you know, democratically, voting, committees that would decide on different issues, bring them to the board, discuss them, vote on them, and that’s the way they were carried out. There was just a lot of accountability.

Did you use Robert’s Rules of Order?

We used Robert’s Rules of Order. We trained all our board, who were barrio people, how to deal with that, how to read profit-and-loss statements, how to read a financial report, how to work within a committee and subcommittee. We were operating in corporate style, corporate style, hoping that someday we would be a corporation. We were legally a community-development corporation under federal laws. The [John F.] Kennedy-[Jacob] Javits legislation had been put forth, was the mandate we were following.

Things changed after I left. The board is pretty much still some of the same people. I just saw them. The attorney I talked about, Carlos Garcya, he just passed away a couple of weeks ago and we attended his funeral. Some of the same board members are still at TELACU. What was it, 1968? How many years is that? Since 1968, some of those same board members are there.

That’s a long time to be involved.

Yes.

I would have to read up on that later period to be able to ask you something about those issues. But you weren’t there at that time, so it doesn’t have too much relevance for what we’re doing today. But I guess the question would be, how do you feel about where the organization has gone?

Well, they’ve progressed. I’m not happy that they didn’t fulfill the dream that I had, the plan that I had. They have become more or less a family organization. It’s run now by people who succeeded me. There’s nothing wrong with letting your family run an organization, but that’s something I tried to avoid, having my family intimately involved with the administration of an organization and its accountability and all that. It’s now really a corporate entity operating very much in a capitalist mode, you know, and I think, sure, they employ a lot of people to be able to sustain their industries. A lot of it they’ve been able to pick up on this political aspect that I used to pressure political people into paying attention to us and doing things we wanted to do. I think that in what has happened now that there’s been a lot of wheeling and dealing in all aspects of political endeavor that makes them sometimes suspect, creates problems for them.

They were in a tough battle there with the federal government after a while that put them on a blacklist. They came out of it. I think they sustain their social well-being by having a large scholarship program that deals with students. That’s commendable and I don’t knock that, but I don’t think that the personal enhancement, I think, by the leadership is what I would have done.

It seems like in those early days the connection to the grassroots was very close and that that has changed a little bit over time.

Yes, it has. It’s no longer a notable community organization, so to speak. It hasn’t changed the nature of the economic process that I would have believed they could have done as a community organization. Yes, East L.A. is a better place today than it was in those days, but I don’t think that they have contributed to that enhancement.

What do you feel that your biggest successes were with that organization?

Well, I think the biggest success, if anything, is just the awakening of a community and building a spirit of how people can move and lift themselves up and become leaders and become shakers and movers in a society. We set an example for other communities. I mean, we were an example to people in the Inland Empire in the north and in Texas and Arizona and many places. We had those ties. We had affiliations with everybody. We were affiliated to other CDCs [Community Development Corporation] nationally. We had a power structure that we could really wheel and deal with the government. Now we don’t have that. It’s dissipated and, by and large, the CDC Movement is at this time not where it used to be. Other administrations, governmental administrations have taken care of that so that you don’t have that kind of viability any longer.

You’re talking Community Development Corporation, CDC?

Yes.

Would you call that a movement, like the Chicano Movement or the Women’s Movement or the Labor Movement?

Yes, yes, it was.

Can you explain why?

Well, we incorporated ourselves as a movement. We took advantage of the Kennedy-Javits legislation that fomented the Community Development Corporations, and we built a national body around that with affiliations and had representatives. I was at one time one of the officers of the organization, and we had Alaskans and Native Americans and Chicanos and Pacific Islanders as part of the CDC Movement. They all did well, but some fell by the wayside and some have survived. TELACU is continuing to survive from that early beginning, but there’s no longer, that I am aware of, a national CDC Movement. Other organizations took on the idea and attempted to do it, but, of course, a lot of it had to do with government funding, financing, and it didn’t provide for that. All the cutbacks and budgetary cutbacks, it kind of did away with that.

This will be the last question. Actually, it’s been an hour and eighteen minutes. Why did you decide to leave TELACU?

Well, there were two reasons. One, I had made a run, while I was at TELACU, for the Congress. I should say that when I came to TELACU, I came as a UAW employee, and I was during all that time a UAW employee. They provided my salary, and I continued with all of the benefits of my union providing for me. I didn’t tap any of TELACU’s money. I wouldn’t do that. Other CDCs do that. You can become pretty wealthy doing that, getting—what do you call it? I forget the word. Double dipping. So I was on my UAW salary and I was on loan to create this organization, and after all this building and organizing, the union saw that my efforts had paid off. So I said, “Well, I’d like to take a leave and run for this congressional office against George Danielson,” who was also going to run in the same political race.

And they said, “Okay, well, we’ll let you run for Congress. If you make it, fine, you’ll be a congressman. But if you don’t, you should consider now coming back to your job in Washington as an Inter-American representative, which you were doing before with the IMF,” and all that. So they sort of put the order in to me to do that. And the other was that, well, you know, I had succeeded in organizing, bringing this organization together. My mission really was fulfilled. I tried the incorporation when I was at it. I tried the congressional; I didn’t make that. So what do I do? Do I stay at TELACU then and continue building on it, here forever, you know, building a career here and being on the TELACU payroll? Because then that would be the TELACU payroll. And I figured, no, I’d best go back to fulfill my union commitment, go back to Washington. Victor Reuther, who was the Director of International Affairs for the UAW, had now retired, and Walter Reuther had been killed in an accident, in an airplane accident, so the Reuthers were no longer there. Paul Schrade had been defeated, and he was no longer the angel that we could count on, you know, being a part of the UAW. So I figured it’s time to go back to—oh, and then in the absence of Victor, the new president of the UAW [Leonard Woodcock] said, “You’ve got to come back now. You’ve fulfilled your mission. Victor is gone, and we want you to take his place.” So I’m not just going back to my old job; I’m going to be Co-Director of the International Affairs Department. So I decided to go back and take on the battle of Latin America again, and I continued in that vein.

While I was deciding all of this, Carter was running for office, and as kind of a freebie, I was sort of freelancing. I worked on the campaign, the Carter campaign. Given all the alliances that we had built up at TELACU and all the connections and all the people, we all got together one day and we went off to the desert and we held a retreat, and we said, “Look. Things have now changed. There’s a new president in place, and we ought to make demands on that administration about us being in government, our people there at the table.” So we brought out what is called the Plum Book. Are you familiar with the Plum Book?

No.

It’s a book that denotes 1,500 positions that the president can appoint to, the plums. That’s why it’s called the Plum Book. But everything from the presidential assistant, the chief of staff, everything that the president can name is called a plum and has a salary and it has a category of you’re part of the general government of the White House. So we all said we should have so-and-so be on this position, we should have somebody in the Labor Department, we should have somebody at Justice. At this retreat we just said, “That’s where we should all be.” Not all of us, but some of us, whoever wants to. They selected that I should, and because I had the wherewithal and the knowledge, that I should be the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America. So we sent in our list to the transition committee in Washington that the president picks. The transition committee then begins to figure out who in the Plum Book is going to be where. And so, yes, I was selected. “Hey, Torres can be the—yeah, I think he’s competent. We should use him there.” So there I said, “Wow. I’m being thought of that way,” you know. So better to go back to Washington. I’m going to end up there anyway. So we moved back to Washington. I was the Co-Director of the International Department. I continued my labor activities, a lot of stuff going on.

I remember in Latin America [Juan Domingo] Perón had come, and he ruled. My old friends brought him back, got him in the presidency again. He ruled. He died. His wife became the President of Argentina, Isabel Perón. That was his second wife. There was a whole new regime and then she was kind of overthrown by the junta and there was a lot of turmoil down there, a lot of people dying, and dirty war was on, and I got involved in that because a lot of friends were down there. Some of my labor friends, the head of the auto workers union was assassinated, and Vandor had been killed, the UOM chief. The new chief, Miguel Lorenzo, was put in prison, and these were our affiliates. So I had to go to Argentina and lobby the junta, the colonels and the generals, to let these people go, you know, that we were supporting them and we didn’t want to see them disappear. That’s when I was getting a lot of other public—Olga Talamantes, a young woman from the Bay Area, had been picked up because she was a student agitator, and they were torturing her and had her in prison, a Chicana.

In Argentina?

Yes. And so the family asked me and others to help negotiate and bring her out. When you do that, when you tell them that, they know that you know that she’s there and that she’s being mistreated and all kinds of atrocities taking place. They released her.

They released a young man who had been a missionary down there. They had him in prison, tortured him because they considered him an enemy. He was a true liberal, because he was a missionary or whatever he was doing, and we got him out. He later became the head of the Latin American Human Rights Committee. He would always say he owed his life to me, that I was able to get him out of there. So I was active. At that time [Orlando] Letelier, the Chilean ambassador, was assassinated in Washington, D.C., and I knew his family, I knew him. There were a lot of things happening in Latin America. And then [Salvador] Allende was eventually killed as well. Just a lot of turmoil. All of a sudden they start having the hearings for this assistant secretary of state, and people were on my side, Senators Hubert Humphrey, Alan Cranston, Senator Cranston, a lot of folks on my behalf, and I didn’t make the cut. They called me in. The White House said, “Look. We really wanted you to do this, but we have agreements with these governments that they have veto power, veto signoff on whether they’ll accept ambassadors or accept people who are part of the State Department dealing with them, and you’ve been ruled against by the military juntas in Latin America. You were too much of a progressive down there, and they wouldn’t want to see you in a position of—.” I would be the supervisor of all the American ambassadors in Latin America as the assistant secretary. So they said, “We have to go along with them. But we would like you to serve in the administration, but perhaps in another capacity, another ambassadorship. Would you like to be our ambassador to U.N. in New York?” One of the ambassadors, because the Chief of Mission in New York at the U.N. organization was Andrew Young, Andy Young, who was Martin Luther King’s lieutenant. He was already appointed to be the chief ambassador. But they have five ambassadors in New York for different agencies. I almost did that. I was already back East. But people said, “No, don’t go to New York. I mean, that’s tough there for your family, I mean housing and schools and all that. It’s really tough and very expensive. Hold out for something else.”

Well, Mexico was already taken and some of the big embassies had already been called for, so they came up in creating a new ambassadorship. “Would you be our ambassador in Paris to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, UNESCO,” which I had always followed, “but with the rank of ambassador?” There was no ambassador there, but they would create an ambassadorship. I talked it over with Arcy, my wife, and the kids, and we agreed, “Let’s do that.” So that’s where I ended up.

Incredible. Well, it seems like you didn’t get several different positions or win elections because of your politics. Do you ever regret having those politics? Do you think that if you would have had different politics, been a little bit more conservative, that you would have been able to get some of these?

Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure. I would have made the cut, but I wasn’t going to sacrifice my principles and my faith in pursuing a progressive agenda just to satisfy those ambitions. No, I did what I had to do, and I’m proud and happy that I did. And I lucked out. I mean, these positions that I took were very gratifying to me and my family and myself, and I covered a lot of ground, covered a lot of ground. But I have no doubt that if I had had a more conservative stance that I would have benefited by it. But I benefited anyway.

Well, it seems like in some circles you were too progressive, but in other circles you weren’t progressive enough or you weren’t radical enough. I’m just getting that sense, and I’m not sure if it’s true. It’s just an instinct. I was reading recently Dr. Rudy Acuña’s first edition of his Occupied America, and he doesn’t mention TELACU and he doesn’t mention you. And it seems like just having this conversation for the past hour, it sounds like you were a very important, dynamic organization. Why do you think that he wouldn’t—

I don’t know. There is a book where he does mention TELACU and mentions me. But in all the readings that I recall, he fashions me to kind of, well, a sellout organization, that we were capitalists, we were vendidos, you know, we were working for the government, and that TELACU was the enemy of the people, wasn’t really doing what—and I took issue with that, especially when I worked so hard to have him—how would you call it—accredited, when he was being questioned as whether he should have tenure or not. I jumped on his bandwagon and said, “Here’s a man who’s worked very hard, and I know of his service.” But people said, “Well, he is not considered a real scholar. He doesn’t tell it how it is. He makes up what he thinks and that’s the way it is. He doesn’t really research his work. He doesn’t look at an issue objectively. He just sort of has a feeling about something and he writes it that way, and that’s why we can’t consider him a scholar, and we will not seat him in the position that he was.” So then I understood, well, maybe that’s why he writes about me that way, or as you say, he doesn’t write about me. I think I have a book there. Which is the one you read?

It’s the very first one. It later became Occupied America, and I’m trying to remember the title now. But it’s the very first edition that came out in the mid seventies, and it’s Chicano Liberation, something like that.

Yes, yes. I read one where he does discredit—he doesn’t discredit; he doesn’t write truth about the organization and about me. Now, that wasn’t true what happened, but he wrote about it. And then I later said, “Well, gee, I mean, thanks a lot.”

He definitely had many editions after that. It’s a very popular history textbook for Chicano Studies. So maybe later on in the later editions he started—because it’s true that he was criticized about not inserting women’s roles, so in the later editions, he does put that in there. But I’m just curious what that relationship was at that time, because he was also involved in the Chicano Movement as well. You must have traveled in some of the same circles.

I never saw him in the circles when I was involved. I mean, I attended a lot of demonstrations and a lot of picket lines and sit-downs, and I never knew of him until—I never really knew about Acuña until that issue about his professorship, you know, and I was at UAW then. I was in Washington. I remember writing a letter to the—I don’t know who it was, the chancellor or something, protesting that they were denying him this.

And this was when he was at Northridge?

Evidently, yes. No, no, I think he was at Santa Barbara.

Okay, so this was in the nineties we’re talking about. When his tenure came up, it was in the nineties. And you didn’t know him during the seventies?

I didn’t recall knowing him, no.

That’s interesting.

I saw him later. When Bert Corona died, I was kind of like a pallbearer at Bert’s funeral, and I saw him marching. We would greet each other, but I always kind of felt a little bit funny about him.

That’s interesting. Well, next time I’d like to talk a little bit about the definition of Chicano. You talked earlier about when your name changed from Ed to Esteban, and I’d like to just get your sense of how did you understand that whole movement and what was the purpose of it. I’ll stop now.

Okay. [End of March 21, 2011 interview]

This is Virginia Espino and today is March 28, 2011. I’m interviewing Congressman Esteban Torres at his home in West Covina. Mr. Torres, today we’re going to talk about the Chicano Movement period, and I would like to ask you, how would you define the term “Chicano”? If you could write a dictionary definition of it, what would it be?

Well, it’s a term that, although it came in greater force during the Vietnam War period, it really became a war cry, so to speak, but I had dealt with that term when I was a teenager. I remember we called ourselves Chicanos. I remember joining the military service and going overseas, and I remember distinctly meeting a fellow soldier in southern Germany. I was on a reconnaissance mission and he was a soldier from another unit, and we happened to run into each other. He looked at me and I looked at him and kind of gave each other a nod like that, and he said, “Eres Chicano?” I said, “Sí, Simón.” He said, “Hey, where you from?” and we started exchanging. But even that far back, and that was in late ’49, early 1950, that far back I always used the term. We used it in high school with my colleagues and my friends, and I never thought anything negative about the term. Later, as it became more pronounced and I began to note that Chicano was a word that was being used by young militant people, kids, you know, and in my work in the union and in community development, working with Texans and working with the people from Arizona and the different Mexican Americans, Chicanos was a very common word that we used. We used it with distinction, so to speak. I remember an organization that we were allied with, Chicanos Por La Causa, in Arizona. It was a common terminology. I believe, if I could explain it, it’s really a kind of badge of honor, that you’re a Chicano, you’re Mexican American. I always felt that Chicanos were the people that were of Latin Mexican extraction being born in the United States. You were a Chicano. Because the Mexicans didn’t use the term. They call you pocho or other terminology, but they never called you Chicano. In fact, my elders would indicate, “Why do you use that word? Why are you Chicano? That’s not a proper word.” But we said, “Why not? It identifies us. We’re a class of Mexican Americans that were born here in the United States, and it’s a new terminology maybe that we use as a badge of honor.” It became a political term. As I worked in the community and I worked in the Labor Movement, it was a terminology that I accepted and other people accepted. Maybe it was a sense of rebellion, you know, that you could call yourself that and feel you were somebody. That was my whole attitude about the Chicano comment.

There was also an element of social activism implicit in that term when people called themselves that during the seventies.

Yes, indeed.

Possibly this is different from what you’re talking about in the earlier period. So during that time, what do you think people hoped to achieve that was different in the seventies than with that term then in the earlier period?

Well, I saw different themes that came out of just calling yourself Chicano. I saw the whole artistic movement, you know, the artists in the community, the young Chicanos beginning to promote their art and calling it Chicano art. I saw it very prominent in the work of the farm workers. They used the term very readily.

I think that being a Chicano became a new type of movement in the United States by Mexican Americans, with this political-social thrust involved in that word, and I felt proud to say I was a Chicano. Even when I was elected to Congress, going into the House of Representatives, and people would say, “What are you? Who are you? What’s your background?” I would say openly, “I’m a Chicano.” They’d say, “Oh, yeah, you’re a Chicano, yes.” Now, I had members of Congress who were Mexican Americans who disdained the terminology, said, “Oh, why do you use that? I won’t even call myself a Mexican American. I’m an American.” So we had those kinds of dialogues with members and people working in the administration, in the White House and in Congress and in Washington in government.

Would you say you’re the first Chicano congressman to be elected?

I would say I was, yes, because I don’t think that my mentor, so to speak, Edward Roybal, did consider himself Chicano. He was very proud of being a Mexican American, but I don’t think he would term himself as a Chicano. Marty Martinez didn’t either. I did. I said I was. My colleagues in Congress, some of them, would say, “Yeah, I am too,” but not very many.

That’s very interesting, and we’ll get more into that as we talk about your role in Congress. At the time that you’re immersed in Chicano Movement activism, with TELACU [The East Los Angeles Community Union] and with the moratorium, and I believe you were also a member of the Mexican American Commission on Education, or Education Commission.

Yes.

What do you recall as your desire for the community? What were your hopes? What did you want to achieve?

Well, I had grown up knowing, feeling that Mexican Americans were discriminated in this country, and I wanted to see Mexican Americans begin to have a greater sense of equality as a people, as a community. Everything that I did was framed in that perspective, that I was going to be myself as good as I could in whatever I did. If I was an organizer, I wanted to make sure that I organized around that principle, that I wanted to see equality, both social, economic, and political. That was always my—how would you say—my banner. That’s what I wanted to do. When I was a legislator and I was invoking legislation that affected all Americans, I wanted to make sure that it touched on Mexican Americans, that it touched on disadvantaged people of color, and I felt that Mexican Americans fit that category. So I did a lot of things that were tailored to benefit that community. Whether it was in the environment, whether it was economic, whether it was political or social, I wanted to make sure that my community, my ancestry, my heritage was somehow connected and involved. It was, as I said, a banner that I waved.

We talked previously about your role in the East Los Angeles Community Corporation, and I was wondering if you could reflect today about your biggest successes with that. What are you most proud of that came out of that organization?

Out of the incorporation movement?

Yes, out of that.

Well, I think the most important thing that came out is that we created an aura of unification, of people realizing that to be sure that as Mexican Americans living in a colonial setting, if you will, could move beyond that and become self-sufficient. You could achieve self-determination both in political and social-economic terms and be like the rest of the United States. If the incorporation effort would have been successful, I’ve commented that it would have been the largest Mexican American city in the United States outside of Mexico City, given its populace. But that was the goal, and I think even though it was not a success by measure of votes, it instilled in people a sense of, “He’s right. The incorporation movement is the right thing to do.” But, unfortunately, politics being what they are, money was involved in it and great amounts of funds were used to defeat it, along with other factors. But that whole movement, that whole thrust by Mexican Americans to incorporate, I think left a lasting feeling that has been replicated in other parts of the country or in other situations, not just dealing with cityhood.

When you were immersed in that, were you—you talked about the movement, the Community Development Movement. Were you involved with other L.A. organizations like the Watts Labor Community Corporation?

Watts Labor Action Committee. Well, they were our sister organization, so to speak. They were organized under the same umbrella that organized us, the United Auto Workers [UAW]. They were the sponsors of bringing blacks and Latinos, in this case Chicanos, into a greater sense of development, both economic and social. The people that headed the movement in Watts, Ted Watkins was a Ford auto worker who came out of the shop, was an international representative, UAW, and he headed up the Watts organization.

Latinos, when they saw that happen as a consequence of the Watts Riots, figured that the Labor Movement, the United Auto Workers, ought to be looking at Chicanos in the same vein and said, “Look. We, too, are a community of poverty, of inequality, and we deserve to have some assistance in putting ourselves together.” That’s when people like Paul Schrade and Jack Conway, a UAW person, and the Reuthers began to sense that that’s right, we should be doing the same thing for Chicanos. Then they figured that, “Let’s put the committee together in the East Side. Let’s put labor folks together to bring about the organizing of a committee, and once we have a committee and a focus and objectives, let’s look for a leader to lead it. We need somebody who has some management skills and organizing skills to pull the whole thing together.” And that’s when they called upon me to do this. At first I was reluctant. I was already living in Washington, D.C. I was the Director of the Inter-American Bureau for the United Auto Workers, working in Latin America, already had a good handle on the works of Washington, D.C. and its many elements there, and I felt that maybe when coming back to East Los Angeles, where I was raised and where I initially organized in union matters, that it was maybe a step backwards. I’d gone up. I was uptown already, you know. Why go back?

But my inner sense told me that it was something that I’ve always cherished, those of us that make it have a commitment to come back to our communities and do something. When I was able to negotiate with the auto workers, “All right, I’ll go back, but I need to have some guarantees that you’re going to support me, that you’re not just going to have me go back with an empty bag and not have the sustenance to make this organization work, I won’t do it.” But they agreed. They said, “No, we’ll help you in any way. The UAW will back you with funds. We will help you with the organizations that are now forming or have been formed to help you raise additional funds, the Ford Foundation, the Center for Community Change.” The War on Poverty was also an organization. “We have federal contacts. We’ll make sure that we help you with grant writing.” I was promised all the tools that I needed to make it a successful venture, and on the basis of that, said, “Okay, I’ll go back and I will work at it.” So that was how I came back to East Los Angeles.

Did the UAW influence you in any other decision making, or were they simply a support system?

Well, they wanted to do this very much because at that time they had begun to support Cesar Chavez’s Farmworker Movement. The UAW was involved very much in helping the farm workers financially and with political support, and I had been asked on a couple of occasions to come to California while I was in Washington and march with Cesar Chavez. I remember marching during that Sacramento march that he had. I remember a second march that we left Delano and marched up to Sacramento, and I was in company with other UAW and AFL-CIO organizers.

The whole thrust of the UAW helping Cesar Chavez was, “Let’s work—,” because they considered him a community union as well. They said, “Let’s work with him and build other community unions, because someday automation will come about and a lot of his people will be dispersed. They’ll come to the urban centers, and we need to have something there for farm workers to adjust to in a new type of community setting,” and beyond that it was a political move. They knew that people like Robert [F.] Kennedy was going to run for the presidency, and they wanted to have a mechanism, they wanted to have a network of community organizations, both black and Chicano and otherwise, ready for that presidential thrust. Many of the people that were tied to the Kennedys, to Robert Kennedy, were very much involved in the support for TELACU, because they saw it as an important urban organization that could promote the candidacy of a person like Robert Kennedy. Unfortunately, he was assassinated before that took place. He was assassinated during the process that I was considering coming back to East L.A. When I saw Paul Schrade laying on the floor, bleeding, I figured, well, maybe my commitment is no longer valid, because he’s the one that’s really supporting me and behind me. Am I going back to East L.A. without any support? And people called me that very night and said, “Look at TV and see what’s happening. Do you really want to come back now?” It was a tough decision, because I’d made the commitment that I would, and just because he was laying there I felt I had to still continue with that commitment. Fortunately, he survived and he was able to fulfill his commitments to me, and that’s how we started.

You told me that story a few sessions back. It’s gripping. But I was wondering if there were other people involved in bringing you back to East Los Angeles besides the UAW. Did they have people in East L.A., Mexican Americans, Chicanos who were also trying to get you back?

Yes. The committee, the organizing committee were made up of Steelworkers, Meat Cutters Union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the Ladies Garment Workers of America. No Teamsters were involved. But they were all union people. It was strictly a union organizing committee. They knew of me because I had worked in past campaigns, both congressional and local governmental campaigns. I was a political action activist and they knew who I was. They had always said, “Hey, there’s our friend Esteban Torres. He’s big-time now. He’s in Washington. He’s the head of the Bureau for Latin American Affairs. He’s big-time. If we can talk him into coming back and leading this effort, we would be very happy.” So they did. They appealed to me to come back and work with them.

Anyone specific who you worked closely with?

Well, one of the persons that was the head—in fact, he was the chairman of the organizing committee, and he’s a co-founder—all these people are co-founders of TELACU. They’re the ones that really were the organizing mechanism that committed their unions and committed their resources to helping found the organization. I came in as an administrator, as a manager. But the chairman of the organizing committee was a gentleman by the name of Glen O’Loane. Glen O’Loane was a former resident of New Mexico. The O’Loanes are a family of New Mexican background. That sounds like an Irish name or Scottish, but they’re Chicanos, and he was very much involved in talking to me about coming back. He said, “I’m the chairman of the committee, and I want to speak for them in telling you that it’s important that you come back.”

I had people on the committee that remembered me from my residence in East L.A., my work in the union and the Steelworkers. People that I worked with on congressional campaigns also prevailed upon me to come back. I had a lot of pressure to get back here. My wife wanted to come back. Arcy [Torres] wanted to also come back to East Los Angeles, where her family was here. My kids liked the East. They liked the seasons. They liked the community where we lived. They liked the snow, the fall, and they liked things back East. They weren’t exactly happy to have to come back because they didn’t grow up here; they were growing up back East. But my wife wanted to come back, and she said, “Look. This is an opportunity. You want to make me happy, let’s go back.” So there were a lot of factors.

That’s an important one. So then getting back to the original founders of TELACU, it seems like they came from a variety of different kinds of unions, different kinds of issues, I’m imagining. Did that play into some of the dynamics within the East Los Angeles Community Union?

Well, yes, because many of them were people that had been raised in East Los Angeles. They were Chicanos, men and women who were now very loyal and strident members of the union, of the Labor Movement. They thought that the fact that the UAW, in this sense, was committed to doing the same for the East L.A. community that they had done for Watts. They felt that that was an important role to them and to having me come back, so there was a lot of collaboration by them to make TELACU a successful model. Because in the Labor Movement there is a sense of solidarity, members tend to unite around an issue, around issues. They’re highly politicized because they’re involved with political affairs, knowing that there’s a relationship between the ballot box and the bread box. They felt that they could develop an organization but keeping it highly disciplined. They were privy or aware of other organizations that were non-union who often squabbled over issues and fell apart, or organizations where opposition within would destroy them. So they felt that as disciplinarians, the way that the union people were, using the elements of Robert’s Rules of Order and how to run meetings and how to keep meetings together, that they could hold an organization together without people opposing. That’s what built the organization, was that unity and the fact that all of them were in some way committing resources to the establishment, and it prevailed.

My great sorrow is that when I left, many of the new administration at TELACU really purged a lot of the union elements, and TELACU developed, in my absence, as a really non-union organization. I mean, even in their contracts and contractual issues of building or constructing, they were opposed to any kind of union agreements. People were very critical in that sense, and I don’t blame them.

When you describe the union versus non-union, could you give me a little bit of an explanation of what you mean by that? Like what would typify a union? What are the interests of the union versus the non-union interests?

Well, if you’re dealing in a community such as East L.A., dealing with barrio elements, the residents of a community like that do not have, generally speaking, the sophistication of organizing and of administrative matters, of dealing with reports and dealing with P and L [profit and loss] statements and understanding the nature of some kind of corporate structure, and so sometimes when some people don’t understand that and you impose that, you start bringing in elements of that kind of administration, they’re disgruntled. “Hey, what are you talking about? I don’t understand what you’re doing.” There’s tensions that are created.

I know that, well, I had a lot of criticisms from barrio people saying to me, “Who are you to come here and tell us what to do?” I mean, these were new arrivals to the East L.A. community. They’d come from Mexico, or they’d come from—mostly from Mexico, and they came with different notions about how people act in a community. Possibly in their country, in Mexico, I would say, there wasn’t too much allegiance paid to unions. Most people either didn’t belong to a union or didn’t really relish the way their city council worked or their representatives, if they had any. In Mexico it’s different. The union is a powerful force within the government which often is in league with the government in the way that society works. Not so here. And often they saw us as part of the government, that we were trying to impose things on them that they didn’t relish to have. And they were outspoken about it, and often that created a tension within an organization. That’s why it was important for us to make sure that we organize an organization with a lot of discipline, a lot of, I would say, solidarity among us, so that we wouldn’t have that kind of break-apart organization opposition within, which would lead, as we’ve seen in many instances, to the destruction of an organization. So that was what I meant by anti-union—not anti-union, but a union organization versus someone who’s not.

That’s interesting. And also the unions that were involved, you have one that was primarily woman-centered, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

Yes.

Did that ever come to play in the decision making? For example, the 1970s were a time when Chicana feminists were emerging, where the Women’s Rights Movement was taking hold. Were there different issues that pertained to women in that union?

Well, yes. That was really a beginning of the Feminist Movement, if you will. But we had women on our board of directors. They were members of the board of directors. But as union members, we respected the feminist role in the Labor Movement. I mean, that’s a given. So we didn’t have any issues as an organization over that problem. We made sure that women were involved in all aspects of the leadership, that we had women in charge of departments or committees or whatever administrative posts that we had.

How about priorities?

The priority was really enhancing the economic well-being of the community. We wanted to see that we could build on those aspects that would create jobs, that we could bring in programs that would create jobs, that we could have job-training programs that would develop young people and people that were unemployed into some employable situation. I mean, that was the thrust, economic and social development. Of course, along with that we worked very hard at political development, at making people understand, again, that there was a relationship between the ballot box and the bread box, and that the way that that all is affected is by being unified in terms of selecting representatives in government from a city level all the way to a congressional level, making sure that you had the right people there that would deliver on your goals and objectives.

Of course, that gets very political. Before that, our community didn’t understand what a precinct was, what was a congressional district or an assembly district, who ran what. East L.A. was unincorporated to begin with, so they had no city government. They had a county government. No one ever saw a county supervisor. There was just no real knowledge of the way government works and affects people’s lives, and we wanted to make sure they knew that and that they had a role to play. So voter registration became a very important factor in our device.

Just getting back to the original question, I’m still wondering if, for example, something that is typically woman-centered, an issue that is typically woman-centered would be childcare. Generally, men don’t advocate for childcare facilities because it’s historically been the responsibility of the woman. Was that ever something that came up that you recall? Or a push for something that women were saying, “But we need this,” as opposed to some of these other things?

Well, not for TELACU to undertake, say, the development of a childcare center, of course being cognizant that there was a need for that. So we always worked close with those organizations that were doing that. They were welfare rights organizations, women who were much involved in that, and we always supported them, and wherever they needed our political backing or whatever resource we could provide as a community development organization, we worked with them.

You had a relationship, then, with, for example, Alicia Escalante from welfare rights?

Yes.

Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

Well, we knew her. She was an activist. She was a very militant activist. In all of the marches and events that we had with the community, we always respected her and she respected us. We had good relationships. I don’t recall a specific project that we might have been involved with her, but I know we were. We did things with Alicia Escalante, and, yes, we supported her.

What was your position on the welfare rights issue?

Well, we were supportive. We thought that was an important aspect of what government could do for people in poverty, especially for single mothers and people who had children, if that’s what you mean, the welfare aspect, yes. No, we felt that was important. One of the things that we had that helped out in all that endeavor was through our political organizing and imploring government to let us play a role, we set up a Food Stamp Center, and we handled thousands of clients through our Food Stamp Center. So we had one in East L.A., we had one in La Puente, we had another one, I believe, in another part of—we had a couple, I think, in East L.A., and people came through those centers. We were able to hire people to work in the centers, to distribute the stamps in exchange, and that all played as part of the role of our making sure that the community was enhanced by that type of government support.

It was a controversial issue at that time.

It was, yes.

There were some factions within the Chicano Movement who disagreed with Alicia’s position and who advocated for not necessarily taking away those kinds of benefits, but not struggling, not putting your resources into that movement but putting your resources into job training, childcare facilities. Did you have critiques of your role with the Food Stamp Centers?

No, we were very successful at it. We really were able to modernize the effort so that people felt good coming there. Everybody was bilingual. We could deal with the community. It was an important element. There was the WIC [Women, Infants, and Children] program, if you recall. We were very supportive of that. It all tied in. Our mission was, as I said, to make sure that we enhanced the community from an economic sense, knowing that it was a poor community, knowing that there was a War on Poverty, and to whatever degree we could provide access to people to that program, we were there. Now, we had a lot of criticism because there were other organizations, obviously, wanting to either do the same thing we were doing—there was competition. There were people saying, “Well, you folks want to do everything. You want to be the miracle folks for everything, and you can’t be. You’ve got to let us have a role to play.” In those kinds of situations, we agreed. “All right. You do that and then we’ll do this.” We were always having—not a confrontation with the Mexican American Opportunities Foundation, MAOF. Dionicio Morales, who also came out of the Labor Movement. He came out of the Ladies Garment Workers Union, and he organized MAOF, who became very pronounced in the job-training programs. We had a Job Training Center, and we also vied for job-training programs and funds. We sat down with people like Dionicio and said, “Look. We know you’re doing that, but we’re doing it too. Why should we fight over—they throw a bone out there and then we start fighting over it. Let’s just agree that you will handle a certain part of the region with it, and we’ll just stay in East L.A. and do our part as a community union, the East L.A. Community Union.” And we had that agreement, and he was happy and we were happy.

He branched out into other communities statewide. He went up to San Joaquin Valley, he went up to Northern California, but we stayed in East L.A. We didn’t venture outside our jurisdictional area. But it was competition, but we were able to work out agreements so that we weren’t fighting each other.

Who else did you need to work out an agreement with? What are some of the other agencies that you dealt with? Did you deal with the Chicana Service Action Center, Comision Feminil [de Los Angeles]?

Well, yes. We worked with Comision Feminil. We were active in their support as a support group. I remember many of the organizers, the founders there, Gloria Molina being very involved in that, and Lillian Aceves, a lot of folks that we knew, that knew me. That’s where relationships really came to play, that we knew people and we could trust each other and work with each other. We knew we had boundaries, that we had lines that we didn’t want to cross because somebody else was doing that. We incorporated, I would say, dozens of organizations that sparked up during that period that wanted to become 501(c)(3)s. They would come to us because they knew that we had done it for someone else. They’d come and ask, “Can you help us incorporate?” We had an attorney on hand who did that. He did nothing but pro bono work in incorporating organizations.

What you just said reminded me of the Brown Beret Clinic and also the café. Did you a role in helping them establish any of their programs?

Not that I recall. Not that I recall. I know they had that, but I don’t recall we had a role in that.

How about the Euclid Foundation with Reverend Tony Hernandez?

Yes, we worked with Tony. He was very much involved with his ministry and his foundation. It was working with Tony, I had known him from another endeavor that he had, which was the Cleland House, which was an East L.A. Presbyterian program. I remember some of my relatives were members of his congregation and activity in his Cleland House activities, and he worked very much with the gangs in the East Maravilla area. So we worked with Tony there and then I remember working with him at the Euclid Foundation. It was there that he became then involved with—I believe he became involved very much with the Southwest Council of La Raza. He was sort of leaving local issues and he kind of wanted to move ahead. He had been in charge of, as I recall, getting the pitch from some of his people that since he wasn’t going to be active there any longer, there was a move to resuscitate the Congress of Mexican American Unity, which he was very much involved with during the Julian Nava campaigns for the school board. That’s when they asked me if I would consider running for the chairmanship of the organization. He mentions the battle that TELACU and the Congress had with the Chicano youth, and I don’t recall that we were ever fighting with—as I was the president of the Congress, and as I told you, TELACU was a separate organization. I was wearing two hats and being very careful that I didn’t commingle funds or commingle any kind of administrative aspects, because that would have been a violation of contractual issues with our funding sources, federal. But I remember distinctly having a very good relationship with Chicanos, you know. We were all Chicanos, and TELACU had no battle with the Congress, because I was wearing both hats. So I don’t know what he means by that.

That was probably the mid seventies, or ’72?

No, no, it was earlier. I would say ’70.

So right around the time of the Chicano Movement.

Yes.

Then during that period the Congress had both older-generation activists and younger-generation activists.

Yes.

Can you talk to me a little bit about the composition of that?

Well, it had a lot of old-line organizations that had been around for a long time. Some of them had dissipated but they sort of came back, saw the Congress as a place where they could come back and work with the new movement of younger people. We organized it. We wanted to organize the Congress, which had been defunct, I guess, really. We were now on a movement to really open it up and make it inclusive for everybody. I remember a lot of organizations from the San Fernando Valley and downtown L.A. and the harbor area all wanting to be part of the Congress. At one time, if I recall, we had a roll call of something like three hundred organizations that considered themselves part of the Congress. It had an impact on the outside society, you know, “Wow. The Mexicans are really coming together.”

Did you actually meet together?

We met. We would meet in convention. We had conventions. One convention that we held was to elect the president, the chairman of the Congress, and that’s when I think I indicated to you that it was Bert Corona and I became the candidates. I won the election, and Bert remained, of course, very active and we’re friends forever, but we were both candidates. We held conventions and had committees and organized along trade union lines. We wanted to make sure that we had divisions of responsibility, and we functioned well. During the moratorium period, it was a good element to have.

Then after the moratorium, did it become defunct like it had in the past?

It began to dissipate. After the moratorium there was a lot of groups that sort of, because of the turmoil and because of all the problems that were taking place, a lot of groups just dissipated. They probably didn’t want to participate. They thought it was not beneficial to them to be involved in this Antiwar Movement and anti sort of government posture, so the Congress began to dissipate. And eventually I left the Congress as well. I think I had pressures to leave, from the TELACU perspective, that it was playing too hard a role on wearing two hats, not attending to one organization, which was the main goal, and I began to leave the Congress.

Did you feel those were accurate observations?

They were. They were, yes. There was a lot of stress and a lot of pressure both family-wise and commitment-wise. You had to balance two things, and it was very, very tenuous.

Do you have any regrets about leaving that organization?

Well, no. I think I left everything—I never left anything just undone, just disappear. I made sure that when I left something, I left it in good hands and that it would work, the same way I left TELACU, you know, feeling that I had picked a good successor to my goals, but, unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way.

Well, tell me about that, leaving TELACU and finding a successor. I’m not clear on the chronology. You left TELACU. Was that to run for office?

Well, I took a leave from TELACU to run for a congressional office, which I thought at the time I had reached a peak of activity. TELACU had already brought in, as I said, my first big grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity, and we were meeting our goal in terms of being a bona fide Community Development Corporation under the legislation that had been developed for that. So I figured this is a good opportunity for me to run for this political new district. There was no incumbent because they’d changed the district lines. But in creating that new district, they had to do away with another congressional district and do away with another congressman, and that congressman said, “Well, I’m not going to leave Congress. I’m going to jump into the new one.” That was George Danielson. He was the congressman that decided he was going to run. I was, of course, the new challenger, not being an incumbent, and there’s always an advantage the incumbent has, because he has access to—he has franking privilege. He can mail. He can get television time. He can do a lot of things. He has a big campaign bank, you know, and I was starting out from scratch. I was able to get one of Cesar Chavez’s key lieutenants to become my campaign manager, a terrific organizer. Leroy Chatfield was his name. He took a leave from Cesar and came to work for me in my campaign, and he brought along his farm workers. A lot of the farm workers came along, including Cesar. He participated in my campaign. [He often stayed at home with us and his close aides, including his dog, “Heulga.” Our daughters Carmen and Rena gave up their bedroom.]

But then the element that sort of soured the campaign was another Chicano decided he wanted to run. He was a councilman in the City of Pico Rivera, and he jumped into the race, and that kind of divided the Latino component. Consequently, I lost that congressional race. So in coming back, I’d taken the leave, I figured—and my union said, “Look. We also allowed you to run for Congress while you were on our payroll.” So I said, “Okay. Well—.” He said, “You’d better decide whether you want to come back home or not, back to Washington.” I said, “Okay, I’ll be thinking about that.” At that same time, the incorporation was in heavy process, you know, so I got into that, and you know that story. Finally I said, “Well, okay, I have a choice to make, either stay here, be bankrolled by TELACU, be a staff person there, or go back to the union,” where I was at in Washington. They had promised me that if I came back, I would be a co-director of the Department of International Affairs, because Victor Reuther had left that position. So I figured, well, okay, it’s a promotion, it’s an enhancement, and I need to go back to Washington, which I did. [Eric Reuther, Victor’s son who had joined me early as an aide and organizer decided to leave and move on.] In the interim, I worked on the [James Earl “Jimmy”] Carter campaign. He was running for office. I think I disclosed that story to you, going back to Washington and staying on in the International Affairs Department for a while. Then I got the bid from the administration to consider an administration job. [This after the push by Chicanos to lobby the new administration for inclusion in Carter’s administration.]

So, you know, everything followed in some good course, and I didn’t regret leaving. I thought I left TELACU in good hands. There were a lot of members of the senior staff who thought they would succeed me, but I made another choice. I had picked a young man who was a really good organizer. He had street smarts. He’d been very much involved with the gangs in Maravilla. He was a gang worker, and he had helped me very much with the gangs in federalizing them and bringing them together as a large component, and we were able to prevent a lot of warfare between the gangs. We were able to rebuild the Maravilla Housing Project because of that, and so I thought that that was a good marker that he displayed, that he could succeed me in administrating TELACU and really keeping the movement, our goals together. So I prevailed upon the board to have him appointed as my successor. At first there was resistance. They didn’t know why I would be picking someone who was kind of a diamond in the rough, as opposed to some of the other senior members, but I felt he had the best leadership qualities, and he got the job. But then he changed everything.

Can you talk to me a little bit about some of those discussions, those early discussions and the reservations that the other board members had? Do you have any specific—do you want me to pause it for a second?

Yes. [recorder turned off]

Okay. Do you remember what we were talking about? We were talking about the reservations that some of the board members had towards the new candidate that you were—

Well, they felt that he was kind of a Johnny-come-lately. He hadn’t really been involved in the organizing and all the battles that we’d gone through, and they felt that there were more deserving people to take my position.

The financial officer for the organization was a financial officer for Cesar Chavez. He had been there, and he left the farm workers to come and work with us. He felt that he had a vested interest in really being a successor. Everybody felt that, “Hey, if you’re leaving, think of me,” you know. Then I had other staff people who felt that they had a role to play in the organizing and building the organization and that maybe they should be considered. But it was a question of personalities. I knew everybody. I knew their weaknesses. I knew their strengths. But this other individual, David Lizarraga, was a newcomer. He was new, but he’d been around. He really had a sense of the community. He was politically a novice. He didn’t have any political knowledge of things. That didn’t matter. What mattered was being able to run an organization like he ran his community program, so that’s why I chose him.

Did you have to vote on it? Did the board vote?

Well, the board eventually authorizes. Then I explained my position to the board, and they knew him, and some of them just—you know how it is. They said, “Well, why him?” and kind of hemmed and hawed, I explained. I gave all the reasons, and I said, “I want you to take my recommendation. That’s my recommendation.” So they voted on it. They agreed they would take him. He was very—he’s smart about it. Some of those board members are still there today, what, thirty years later, forty years later. He knows how to run the organization. They got in trouble, they got in a lot of trouble. He tells a lot about it.

Rudy Acuña.

Yes.

Well, did he want the position, or were you choosing him?

No, he wanted it. He asked me. He said he would want to lead, you know, he could do it, and gave me all kinds of good reasons why, and I agreed. I’d come to know him. He was working very, very—he was a very astute guy. He could move a lot of things that the others didn’t. There were sort of desk jobs, and he was a field person.

But how about the initial—the organic component of TELACU, the union element? Was he ever a union organizer or labor organizer?

No, he wasn’t. I tried to instill on him the importance of the movement and why I was there and why I had done what I had done and why we had organized, and that it was an important component to, as you say, the organism. He agreed with everything. To me it was, I think, a sense of betrayal when I started to learn that he began to sort of purge the union folks out, or they became sort of disgruntled and just, you know, “I don’t have to put up with this,” and took on a very corporate—brought in people with a lot of corporate know-how, I mean capitalist, corporate ideas, something that I would not have done. My whole notion was, again, to create a people organization, not a corporate organization with a miniscule family-type operative sense, but open it up. I wanted the community to be the owners of this organization. It’s what we were striving for. But he didn’t do that.

What do you think, looking back, what does someone learn from being involved in the Labor Movement? When you have, say, for example, yourself as one kind of organizer, versus this person—how do you pronounce his last name?

Lizarraga.

Lizarraga, who has not had that experience, who’s a youth gang organizer but who doesn’t have that union, what are some of the differences between those two experiences, the union versus the non-union?

Well, he comes from a religious background. His father was a pastor. He’s very committed to his religious faith. I don’t knock that. He’s entitled to that. But it’s, I think, different from the kind of cohesion you need in an organization where you’re going to bring all kinds of elements together, not necessarily religious, but different types of components together to do work. But in his mind, I guess he felt that the building up of capital and resources was the most important thing, and he had to set aside any kind of grassroots type of approaches to building an organization, but making it have more of a vertical organization. I mean, it’s just a mentality, I guess, that he either grew up with or adhered to, and he brought in people that put that together for him. He was criticized for bringing in West Siders to build upon this extravagance and luxury and things that they did, but, you know, it put a good face on the organization for a while there, and while it was not—it was political. I admit that we were creating a political organization. That’s important from a union standpoint. But he began to collaborate with city councilmen and people in government, both Republicans and Democrats, and became a political figure, which the dollar sign, I believe, was the most important factor that you had to try to achieve. So today the organization is very wealthy, I guess, in monetary terms, but I don’t know that it’s looked at as a real builder of community. What’s there? A nice big building and a big park. That’s all good, but where has it served the community in a greater degree? I don’t see it there, and people are critical of it. [The rubber stamp Board of Directors; the Mercedez Benz vehicles; the ritzy opulent eater, “Tamayo’s.”]

Well, just getting back to the original question, when you look at what’s happening in Wisconsin and other states, trying to strip collective bargaining and people saying that unions were important way back when but they’re not so relevant anymore, and just comparing yourself to your successor, what do you think the Union Movement gave you? What do you think that you learned from it that was beneficial to the larger community when you were organizing?

Well, because the Labor Movement did teach me that people that work, there’s a value to people that work, and that people ought to be rewarded for what they produce, and the whole idea that you can exploit people’s labor by paying them lower wages or not providing them with the benefits of the products they manufacture, whatever they produce, is unjust. That is not a just system. I learned from the union that in order to reward the people that produce things, you have to provide them with the benefits that equal their productivity, and all too often the employer and the stakeholders or shareholders feel that the dividends and the profits should be the thing that is paramount in the success of the company, and the more you can get from profits, the better. So you find all kinds of ways to diminish the wages and diminish the benefits and diminish the workforce if you can. I mean, squeeze this turnip, you know, to the point that there’s no blood in it, and that people have to be rewarded for what they produce, and that’s what’s built in this country the middle-class, is that people are rewarded for their productivity, and even the non-union companies that don’t want the union around because they don’t want to share, they believe in management prerogatives, that they own the company, they run the company. “We’re not going to have the union intruding in our management,” so they’re independent.

But in order to keep the union away, they will pay their workers the same as if they had a union, with some minor differences, of course. They don’t have a grievance procedure. They can fire at will. They can punish. They can do whatever they want, but then they know how to measure it so that they keep the union away. Because when a union comes in, it means that both of them have to sit at the table and say, “Look. This is wrong,” or, “This is right. Let’s correct it. Let’s have some kind of in-between that benefits you and benefits us.” That’s collective bargaining. That’s what’s built the American middle-class. Without that, you go back to the 1900s, where management has the whole say, and before you know it, there is no equity for the people that are working. Now, an individual who I’m sure had some good notions, he’s religious, he obviously believes in the gospel and all the things that it teaches you, and that’s what he believes is the best way to go, and that’s the way he’s going to provide for his community or whatever. I mean, I think he believes he has good intent, and he does, to a degree, but not to the scale that I see as being really beneficial to the community.

Your perspective is unique in the sense that you have that labor background and you were in circles with politicians in the White House. Do you feel that you were an advocate for those issues, and how influential do you think you were?

Well, I was an advocate, and in most instances where I progressed in my own career was because the people that took me on believed that I had some merit, given that. I mean, they may not have been in true concert with me, but at least they felt that I could be helpful and useful to them.

I mean, President Carter, when he called me into the White House, said, “I want you to be my special assistant. I want you to consider that because I don’t know anything about Hispanics. I just know they discovered Georgia. I’m a peanut farmer. I grew up with black people, black kids, and I never met a Hispanic kid in my life.” Can’t believe that, but he said, “And I need to understand. I don’t even know the difference between a Mexican American or a Puerto Rican or a Cuban. I don’t have a sense. What are their needs? They’re here in America, but I don’t know anything about them and I need to, because I’m going to run for reelection, and I want to be able to benefit that community. So you have been recommended by many people as the individual who has this kind of common knowledge and a commitment to them and all that, and I would want you to come and be my special assistant, to guide me and my cabinet and my agencies in how do I help that community. I’m going to do the same for the Jewish community, I’m going to do the same for the black community, but I need someone for the Hispanic community.” So, see, he needed me, and I went into collective bargaining with him. I said, “Well, I would consider that if you’ll give me this.” “Well, what do you want?” I said, “I don’t want to come here and be your special assistant with a half secretary, you know, someone who’s here part-time answering the phone for me or something, or writing a memo or a proposal. I need a staff. I mean, I have a staff in Paris. I’m an ambassador. I have an embassy staff. In all the work that I’ve done, I’ve had staff.” “Well,” he says, “you can have staff. How many do you need?” I said, “If I’m going to represent those categories of people, I would want somebody that’s a Puerto Rican, somebody that’s a Cuban American or a Central American. I’m a Mexican American. I understand them. Give me people that—.”

“You choose them,” he said. “You pick them. You have my authority to pick your staff. Check with Hamilton Jordan. He’s my chief of staff. We can recruit people from any agency of government and have them come work in the White House.” “That’s another thing,” I said. “What about the White House? I don’t want to be housed down here on F Street, because when people come here to solicit from the White House, from your administration, I want them to come to the White House. I want them to be here.” He said, “You can have an office here, then.” “Good.” He says, “Pick an office. There’s plenty of offices around. Pick one here in the White House.” “What about the furnishings? I think that’s important.” I said, “You know, somebody from East L.A. coming here, somebody from New Mexico, I want them to come into the White House and it’s like the White House, with nice carpeting and paintings on the wall.” “Whatever you want. You can have whatever you want. I know you don’t want to leave Paris. You like Paris, your wife likes Paris, your kids like Paris. I’m asking you a big favor,” he said, “but I need you.” I said, “Okay.” He says, “And you can keep your title. You can be called Ambassador Torres on my staff, and you’ll have everything that my cabinet has. You’ll have a chauffeured car. You can have security, whatever you need.” I thought it was a big deal.

Huge.

Yes. So I said, “Wow.” So he called a big conference of Latinos from all over the country, invited them to the White House, they came, and he presented me to them. It was a key role, really, and I opened a lot of doors to Republicans and Democrats and anybody else. That’s where we started really having an impact on government.

How did you feel about that? Do you remember that day, your sentiment?

Oh, yes, fond memories, pictures and things. Yes, it was a great day. Anyway, unfortunately he didn’t win reelection, so Ronald Reagan came in and when he came in he said, “Adios, amigos.” [laughs] We left the White House. That was great, a good job.

Sounds incredible. Do you remember, then, thinking about where you came from, did you ever imagine yourself in the White House, with an office?

No, I didn’t, but I had wished that someday I would be there, because I loved Washington, D.C. I went there as a young person when I was in the army on my way to Europe, and I studied at the Fort Belvoir Engineer School in Virginia. That’s where the army sent me for training. It was just a few miles outside of Washington, D.C., and every weekend I would come into Washington and visit the monuments and the museums and all that, and, you know, you really fall in love with a city like that. I said, someday I want to come back here and work, be here. So it’s always in the back of your mind. Subconsciously, you’re wishing for it, you know, and every step I took, somehow it translated itself to eventually being in Washington.

Where did you muster up the courage to ask for so many things from—

You know, I learned that as a disadvantaged person when I was young. My mother and my grandmother were very strong women, told me, “You have to stand up for yourself and you have to ask for things. You have to speak up. Don’t ever be afraid of that. Never deny who you are, where you came from, what your roots are. Never deny you’re a Mexican. Always speak up.” I was kind of shy. I was kind of—not be heavy handed on folks. But the Labor Movement taught me that if you want to achieve something, you have to stand up, and if you have something to offer, like the president was offering me something, you have to have something in exchange for it. You bargain. If he wants you that bad, bargain for what you need. Yes, I was leaving a prestigious post in Paris at the United Nations, a nice home, ambassadorial residence overlooking the Seine River there. My kid’s in College of Paris and a high school there. To come back to Washington, you have to have some compensation, I felt, and I asked for it, and he delivered.

We have about fifteen more minutes. Do you want to keep going, then? So we haven’t talked too much about your time in Paris. There are a couple of issues I’m sure that you were involved in that you might like to speak to now. You explained to me a little bit before about what you did as ambassador to UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization]. I’m just wondering if there’s more you want to say about that.

Well, it was an important mission. It always has been, the UNESCO mission. It’s really something that is not very well known in this country, but it is a key player in those particular aspects of society, world society. When you think of education and you think of science and you think of communications and culture, that’s all embodied in UNESCO. It is an agency of the United Nations that deals in those specific fields of endeavor by grouping together all the members of the United Nations in one city, Paris in this case, and so all those nations send an ambassador to UNESCO to debate those questions that affect those issues.

So education is really a world global issue, that UNESCO sets the standards for the way education is taught in different countries in the world, different regions, different standards that should be met. There’s nothing mandatory, but the standards are set by the wise men at UNESCO, and the ambassadors that are there speak for their nations and debate these issues in conference. You debate scientific issues, tsunamis and earthquakes, and you talk about outer space, and you deal with questions of all scientific matter. In communications you deal with all aspects of communications, the spectrum, the broadcast spectrum and how it affects nations and how it affects the world, how communications is a focal point, as we know today by the use of the Internet and how the Internet has affected different regions of the world. There are laws, and each country has laws that regulate communications, be they Internet, newspaper, television, whatever, radio spectrum, broadcast spectrum. These are all very technical issues that are brought up at UNESCO and usually these issues are translated by sets of resolutions that are eventually then adopted by the ambassadors, with consultations with the State Department, in my case, with the White House, or with the agency that deals in that particular question or issue, whether it be education or dealing with the scientific community or dealing with the cultural community. In terms of culture, well, UNESCO, as you know, is the organization that tries to bring together greater knowledge of the world, the global cultures and how they impact on each other, the preservation of historic and cultural temples, palaces and lakes and villages, anything that will enhance the quality of a country’s heritage, so to speak, and you can protect it from exploitation or the environmental qualities or whatever.

It’s very interesting. When I went, I went because there was great tension between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Arab states, over the treatment of temples in Israel. There was a very tense battle going on about the infringement on holy places by Israelis on the Arabs and vice versa. As a consequence of that, the United States had withdrawn its dues to UNESCO because this issue was not being dealt with. So we withdrew from UNESCO, did not pay dues. We stayed in Paris, but we didn’t pay any dues to the organization because they were not confronting this problem. So when I went, it was a commitment by the United States government that we would reenter UNESCO if UNESCO would bring resolutions to those holy places’ issues. Our part of the bargain was that if they did that, we would reimburse our back dues, which were substantial, in the millions of dollars. So they agreed that they would ameliorate those problems in the Holy Land, and they did. And then the United States said, “Well, okay. Then we’re going to send an ambassador to you, because you’ve done that.” Myself. There was no ambassador before. They created the ambassadorship as a bargaining chip with the UNESCO organization and with the Arab and the Israelis to settle the question. So that’s how I got there, with a check of some million dollars, I think it was seventeen, that were in back arrearages. So when I went, I went with that back payment.

What did it feel like, a Chicano from East Los Angeles negotiating this?

That’s what I mean, see? Here I was a kid in high school thinking about dropping out, because they weren’t teaching me the things I wanted to learn, but graduating and eventually wanting to be a teacher, because a teacher helped me graduate, and ending up in an organization that deals with these kinds of issues. It was a great feeling. Chicano, again.

Do you think that once again your background in the Labor Movement prepared you for that kind of negotiation?

Absolutely.

Or do you think your role in the political arena—

Well, it’s all combined. It’s all a question of understanding how they all relate to each other and how you can use that knowledge to bring about resolution to so many questions and issues. I guess it’s the School of Hard Knocks or something. You just learn by doing and use that to your advantage.

Do you remember that first meeting, that session where you first met these leaders of these two adversarial countries?

Well, you meet the Director General of UNESCO, which was a gentleman who was from Africa. He was an African, Sub-Saharan African. Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow was his name. He was a very strong and powerful leader at UNESCO, kind of dictatorial. That was his sort of background. He was tough, tough, a tough man to deal with, and he’s really the one that convenes the sessions and brings in his staff, brings in the Israeli ambassador to UNESCO, brings in the Arabic representatives, and it’s all worked out there. You’re representing the United States government through the State Department in all these transactions, and you’re the president’s man there. It’s all very exciting.

It sounds like it. Sounds like it. So was it an easy discussion or was it a tense discussion?

Well, it’s tense, but, again, it’s the whole question of collective bargaining. When you sit people at the table and you discuss the issues from their perspectives, you’re kind of sitting in the middle, trying to decide and trying to think through who’s at fault, if there’s any fault, who’s violated protocol agreements or Memoranda of Understandings or whatever. You’re coming there from your government’s perspective to provide the resolution to the problem. It’s all done through a lot of paperwork, a lot of receptions, and all of us calling back to our capitals to get permission to do certain things. It’s a long process. It’s not done in one setting. It’s a very deliberative form of negotiating and carrying out solutions to the world, and it’s done in every case. I had the good fortune of being elected by the Geneva group of ambassadors that were working on the establishment of a temple, the rescuing of temples in Egypt. The Aswan Dam was going to be creating a flooding of a plain where there were many Egyptian treasures, temples, and the whole idea was to build an island so that when the water came in and flooded the plain to create a huge dam, all these treasures would be above water, wouldn’t be underground. And that took an immense amount of money from various governments and the Egyptian government and UNESCO and the United States, and I was the chairman of that group because we were the biggest contributor to that effort. So on the inauguration of the temples, I was supposed to go to Egypt and be representing the United States. It was at that time that Mr. Carter called me to the White House and said, “Look. I know you like Paris and the work you’re doing. It’s great. You’re doing a lot of good work for us, but I need you here.” So I made a decision to come back to Washington and leave Paris, and I never got to Egypt.

You’ve never been to Egypt ever?

Didn’t get to Egypt ever.

Well, there’s still time.

I know.

Well, do you want to cut it there? I want to ask you next time just maybe if there’s a few more examples of some of your work with UNESCO, and then we’ll move on forward from that point. Thank you. [End of March 28, 2011]

This is Virginia Espino. Today is April 4, 2011. I’m interviewing Congressman Esteban Torres at his home in West Covina, California. Last time, Congressman, we finished off with a beginning discussion of your role as the ambassador for UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] in Paris. You talked to me a little bit about some of the activities that you were involved in, the role you played, essentially. I was wondering if you had any more to add, some of the important diplomatic—well, you were involved in cultural preservation, patrimony. Do you want to talk to me about some other—

Well, Paris, as you may understand, during the Cold War was a sort of crossroads for many of the adversarial powers in the Cold War, both, of course, naturally against the U.S. and the Western allies. There was a lot of play going on. My mission had gone there to resolve some Israeli-Palestinian questions on the holy places, and we resolved that in good accord. But UNESCO, much to our chagrin, was an organization that was being used by elements in the Cold War. The Soviets had very successfully intervened and infiltrated the organization. Their mission, the Soviet mission at UNESCO, was rife with agents who moved around freely with diplomatic titles, but their whole role was to spy on the U.S., spy on the French, spy on everybody else, attempt to recruit people for their side, attempt to influence the doctrine of UNESCO and its mission to their benefit. So it was a hotbed, and one had to be careful of what you said and where you went and what you did.

Did you know that at the time?

Well, I had been briefed in the initial briefings before going overseas that I should be cognizant of these issues and to, of course, be very careful. As in any diplomatic mission, you have a constant cable traffic taking place where you are informing your government of events that are taking place and how they are affecting you in your position, how your staff’s being affected, and how U.S. policies are being affected. So, yes, I was cognizant of the dangers involved here, but when you’re there on the scene, they become a reality. The Soviets, as I said, were very much involved in all aspects of world activities, because UNESCO is a world organization. In fact, when I got there, the very day that I got there I was not received by my chief of staff [Stanley Warvarin], who was not present at the airport to receive me and my family when we arrived. I asked his substitute, “Where is he?” He said, “He had a problem. He went on a mission to the Soviet Union to a conference and he had a problem there. He’s back now, but he’s under some constraint, and he wasn’t able to come out and meet you.” I learned later that the reason why was that he was at a conference in Tbilisi, a city in the state of Georgia, attending an educational conference with delegates from all over the world, dealing on the question of education. This conference took place, of course, in the Soviet Union, Soviet state of Georgia, and he was approached by Soviet agents to attempt to recruit him for their side. Now, why would they approach an American to undertake that mission? They disclosed to him, as we learned later, that he was of Ukrainian descent, was a Ukrainian American, and we learned later that the allegation was that when he was a young man in the Ukraine during World War II, he and his father had been sympathetic to the Nazis, to the German Army. Since the Ukrainians were very much against the Soviets, many Ukrainians took the German position, and with the Germans invading the Ukraine, many of those people went along with the Germans in trying to disassociate themselves from Soviet oppressors, as they called them. So they alleged that he was one of those, that he had been involved in a mass execution of Russian soldiers by the Germans, but they were complicit in that, and now they had this information against him and they were going to use it against him if he didn’t come on their side. They were going to expose him.

So he later told me—he recounted to me the story as I’ve just told you—they told him that he had just hours to make a decision. So in his capacity as an American representative, he went to the head of the conference, which happened to be related, I think, at that time, to Mr. [Nikita] Khrushchev, the Soviet Prime Minister, head of the Soviet Union. They didn’t want to get involved in the question, so they took him from Tbilisi to Moscow, to the safety of the American Embassy, and the American Embassy flew him back to Paris. So the whole issue was quelled, but he was now in Paris sort of recovering from this experience, which I would say was rather devastating to he and his family. So later on as time went on, the State Department, of course, wanted to check into this and what had happened, and there was a lot of conflict with my chief of staff because of this allegation. He thought it was dangerous for him to remain in Paris, so eventually he was reassigned back to the United States. But this goes to show you the kind of intrigue that takes place and how people become compromised by their previous lives.

But you did mention before that you’re vetted before you even get those kinds of positions.

That’s true, but I guess in the vetting process they weren’t able to really get into that issue. I mean, like so many after World War II, there were thousands of refugees fleeing their countries. After the war they became what they called displaced persons, and many of them sought refuge in the United States or other parts of Europe. He took refuge in the United States. He came to the United States, got an education, went to university, applied for a job in the State Department as a former displaced person, and he was eventually hired. But you never know about someone’s background in that kind of condition.

And are you expected to disclose that? Are you expected to disclose those kinds of things?

Evidently he didn’t.

But that is your responsibility during the vetting process?

Well, sure. You’re investigated. You’re interviewed. You have to display and answer any questions that are going to affect you in your career or going to affect the mission that you’re taking. Very stringent, but evidently he—we don’t know to this day whether it was true or not, but it happened.

I see. Okay, I understand. Then that was the beginning of your career in Paris. Did you think about having second thoughts about coming back?

No. It was a consequence of the Cold War. This was an experience that beset me, but we were able to recover from that. We had a new chief of staff [Russell Heater] come onboard, and we continued our work, following the mission directions and keeping our mission in Paris on track.

You mentioned that the Soviet Union had insurgents, had spies within the organization, that they were not necessarily promoting the ideals of UNESCO, but promoting their own country’s.

Well, they were trying to infiltrate other missions with their approach and their policies, everything designed, of course, to confront the United States and the Western powers. They had a mission worldwide to prevail upon, and so it happened that UNESCO was, as I indicated for sake of a better word, a hotbed really of intrigue and espionage, where many forces were at play trying to be on the Western side or the Soviet side.

What do you think the balance of power was within—it’s an organization that’s an international organization.

Well, it’s an agency of the United Nations. It’s the largest of the United Nations’ agencies, and that’s why they are represented by delegates or representatives, as I was from the United States, with the rank of a diplomat, an ambassadorship, U.S. Permanent Representative.

But one would think, if this is an international organization, that the balance of power would be equally distributed among the different nations represented. Is that how you found the organization?

Well, it is. It’s supposed to be that way. You’re there representing your nation. During my tenure, there were about 156 nations represented at UNESCO, with representatives and staffs and missions. It’s a large organization with world and regional offices and staffs scattered throughout the globe, so it’s large. Its mission is large. So as you mentioned, it’s equalized, but, of course, when you have a United States mission there, as opposed to the mission from Bhutan or from Nepal, you know, those small countries are almost insignificant, but they’re there and they have representatives and you work with them. You attempt to work with them and fulfill the mandates of the agency, the organization.

Coming from a labor background and having been involved with people who are interested in a more democratic, a more equal society, when you represent a powerful country like the United States against these other smaller, less powerful countries, did you feel at that time that your own personal interest conflicted with what your mission was as a U.S. representative? Was there ever a time that you had that kind of conflict?

No. You go there representing, in my sense, a government that’s very large and very powerful, but you don’t want to go there and act in any aggressive or oppressive way. You don’t want to push your weight around. You want to make sure that you represent the best of your country, that you are dealing with reason and with commitment to the ideals of the organization, but you’re putting your government front and foremost in every aspect. You’ll run against criticisms. People will criticize the United States. The adversarial groups will do that openly, as would happen at UNESCO. There would be people who would take a different approach to the mission, accusing the United States of overpowering or overspending or pushing their weight around, and you’re there to attempt to dispel those kind of notions among your colleagues, who are your counterparts. It’s a juggling job that you have to represent. The critical factor in the end is that every nation has a vote.

What are some of your greatest achievements while you were in Paris?

Well, I recall, as I said, being a member of—in fact, I was a chairman of a group called the Geneva Group. It was a group of states that were involved in the financing of the saving of the temples in Egypt that were going to be inundated by the construction of a large dam, and so the Geneva Group were the nations that were involved in the funding process: Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Asian nations. There was money that was being allocated for that whole endeavor, and because we were the biggest contributor at the time, it made the ambassador there the chairman of that particular group. They called it the Geneva Group. It was sort of an advisory group that worked with all the elements to make sure that that particular project came off and was successful.

Unfortunately, I had to leave the organization. I had to leave UNESCO because I had taken on a commitment to return to the United States and serve in the White House as a presidential assistant, so I never got to go to Egypt to celebrate the opening of the temples.

Yet that was a great achievement. You did talk about that in the last interview. How about some situations where you feel like you could have done better? Did you have any experiences with some failures?

No, I think that we carried out the mission well. We had a good staff in Paris, a good mission staff. Heretofore, we did not have an ambassador at UNESCO. I was the first one. There are many others before me who were there in a lesser rank, as ministers, as State Department ministers, and I was the first ambassador. I was the first ambassador to be elected to the UNESCO Executive Board. Heretofore, there had been no member of the U.S. delegation sitting on the Executive Board, so that was a first and something that we carried out well. There were many issues at UNESCO that really people are not privy to in dealing with worldwide questions. For instance, there was a strong effort at UNESCO, because of the magnitude of its membership and its delegations, to look at a new issue that was called the new world economic plan, so to speak. There was an effort to attempt to bring to UNESCO the furtherance of the new economic order across the world, and many nations, of course, took sides on this question. You know, third-world countries, the uncommitted, and the developing nations of the world had a different notion of how that should be. The developed nations had another approach to it.

You had to sit down and try to resolve these efforts that were being held at a major world conference, and often they led to frayed situations vis-à-vis your colleagues there. You had to fight for your side and they would be fighting for their side, and, of course, these were all questions that were worldwide in scale. They were not regional problems. They were worldwide in scale, and you had to represent your country. The one issue that I recall that confronted us was another one, the issue of the new world order on communications, the lesser developing nations attempting to sue on the issue of communications, to have a more and favorable approach to the way communications is handled in the world. Third-world countries were concerned that all too often the major means of communication were controlled by Western powers and by the United States, by France and by Britain, to their—how should I say that—to not taking them into account, and they wanted a resolution to that. They wanted a partnership, if you will, with the Western powers and the broadcasting and the communications, the agencies, to provide for them equalization of how—because communications was such a powerful tool, and the way it was used, it made many developing countries, many third-world countries, appear to be rebellious or to be inferior or to be backward, and they wanted to make sure that they were treated fairly in the airwaves and in the way of communications. So UNESCO became the trial ground to try to eradicate that image about the third-world. They wanted to change the rules and the way the rules are played out in the way the spectrum, the broadcast spectrum is allocated, in the way that why is it that the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] can transmit over Angola, Angola airspace, and doesn’t Angola have a say-so about that? Shouldn’t Angola receive some type of gratuity for that? The BBC was making money on that issue. There was an economic factor involved. Shouldn’t Angola receive a percentage of that? I mean, these were the issues that were being raised.

Those are very serious issues and have longstanding impact. So were you involved in those kinds of discussions?

We were. Yes, we had to be involved. The United States had a role to play in this. We had a delegation at the conference, represented by people from the communications industry and people who dealt with those kinds of issues, the Voice of America and all those types of U.S. organizations that transmit to the world about different issues. We had our representatives there making the case for the United States. We had a very vociferous voice from Mexico. We had the former president of Mexico, who was my counterpart in UNESCO, President [Luis] Echeverría [Álvarez], who at one time had been the President of Mexico, and when he left office he chose to go to Paris to be the Mexican representative at UNESCO. So he became a good friend of mine, because I was a Mexican American, he was a Mexican, and he was very much involved in those talks, because he favored the new world economic order, he favored the nuances, the grievances that the third-world had against the Western world in communication matters. So we would have to debate these issues on the floor of the conference along with our delegation. Very interesting work.

But it seems like it’s not necessarily simply political that you would have big business lobbying you for some of these new world economic plan, new world order communications. It seems like you would have big U.S. corporations and probably European corporations with a vested interest. Did you have experience with that?

Absolutely. Well, everybody’s at the table, but everybody doesn’t have a role to play. It’s an international organization that is listening and carrying out the issues at hand, and has to vote and agree or disagree or change or whatever. In the end, you come out with resolutions and a standard that will affect the whole universe, so it’s a big bargaining table.

Did you feel any loyalty to the smaller third-world countries, considering your background as an organizer for the underrepresented, as an advocate for economic justice and social justice?

You certainly have the feelings, because you can understand their cause. There’s an injustice to be said about the way that they’re treated and the way that they are hampered and sometimes don’t have the same equity that larger powers have. So in my sense, I had an empathy for their cause. But you are mandated by your government to put forth your position, your nation’s position, and you may attempt in that process to deliberate and perhaps create the kind of agreements that will give them some satisfaction and not just leave them in the cold. I mean, you have to attempt to placate them in a way that is reasonable and justifiable, given their situation, economic, political, otherwise.

In hindsight, some of these decisions that were made during this period seem to have ramifications today. This is me not really knowing a lot about this history. But looking back, do you see that any of these decisions for this new world economic plan have had positive or devastating effects for the world economy today?

Well, certainly. I think that that was a period when there was a large outcry by lesser developed nations to somehow attempt to fit into the economics of the globe. Things like what they call the General Agreement on Tariffs [and Trade], the so-called GATT treaty, were not exactly into place at the time. There wasn’t a World Trade Organization. These came after, but they came after because of the surge of complaints that were being received at the U.N. level, whether it was at the General Assembly in New York, or whether it was impacting the agencies of the U.N. like UNESCO. There are other agencies of UNESCO that have their particular assignments. There’s the World Food Organization. There’s the World Health Organization. They’re all impacted on those questions of poverty and need, and one has to really weigh and try to attempt to mollify those grievances by hoping that your government can play a role in attempting to rectify those nuances, of course. It’s difficult. Now, given to your question, I think that in looking back, we can see many ramifications of what has happened today as opposed to what was happening then. I recall the Atomic Energy Commission or agency, which has an oversight on nuclear power around the world. We’re seeing the play of that today in Japan, when Japan has just gone through a very tragic situation where its nuclear plants are being compromised right now by that tsunami and the earthquake that took place, at a great danger to the Japanese and the area, the region, and even to us. What lessons can we learn from that? What lessons can the Atomic Energy agency that oversees that rectify in order to prevent these kinds of accidents from happening? So there’s always a consequence. There’s a consequence of what is happening today in the world in terms of food and poverty, the issues of water. Hydrology is an important factor in the way that these nations can sustain themselves, and if they don’t have a commodity like water available, it creates all sorts of consequences. So this is the nature of the United Nations. This is the nature of the agencies that it has under its jurisdiction to attempt to resolve these questions. As we can see, they’re never really resolved. They’re always continuous. They’re happening.

With so many issues at stake and so many different problems that especially the smaller countries, the more underdeveloped countries face, how did you prioritize what would be your important projects to work on?

Well, a lot of it is based on instructions from your own government. The United States State Department and the agencies of the United States government collectively provide the list of issues that have to be dealt with, and when they come up in a world body like that, then you have a response from your government as to what priorities you have to argue and debate and move on, vote down or vote up, rectify in some way, adjust them in some way. You’re the spokesperson there. You’re just a representative, so you’re really fulfilling the mandate of your government, the Congress. What the Congress votes on and appropriates, you have to carry out.

Did they have a special committee within Washington that you dealt with specifically on the issues?

Well, of course, you’re dealing with the State Department. That is the mission that you are representing, because it is the State Department—the secretary of state is the—the organization has the jurisdiction over its embassies and over its diplomatic missions. But, of course, the State Department is coordinating with Congress, is coordinating with the White House and all its agencies, and in Congress you deal with the Foreign Relations Committee, both in the Senate and the House side. They will call you in for testimony and as a witness, and you come prepared to present your case, the case which is dictated to you by the State Department. So there is a line of authority, so to speak, that you are mandated to represent.

Well, let me ask you this. Did you feel powerless, then, in some respects?

In some respects, yes. You really are not a free agent. You can’t just go abroad and carry out a diplomatic mission based on your own whim. You have to follow an instruction, and, of course, you’re asked to comment on it and to provide the kind of information that’s necessary to have the government give you a go ahead or a stop or don’t go. In that case, if you win your case, you feel good about it. If you don’t, you know that you’re not as powerful as you thought you were.

How did that experience compare to the experience of running an organization like TELACU [The East Los Angeles Community Union], where, essentially, the power is in your hands?

Well, that’s true. But in a relative sense, you’re doing—at TELACU, yes, I was following my own vision, my own feelings about what I should do, but, of course, I always had staff assistance. I didn’t conjure up things on my own. I had people surrounding me to advise me in, “Let’s do this.” “Let’s do that.” “No, don’t do it. It’s going to affect this. It’s going to affect that.” So it’s magnified when you’re in government and you’re doing it again with consultations from around you and direction from a central point, in this case the State Department, your government. But it’s all-inclusive. You’re really participating in a process that you hope in the end, as I did, will have a good result for everybody.

Was it a difficult decision leaving? You mentioned last time that it was. You were very happy there. Your children were happy. Was it a position that you felt was gratifying?

Well, it was very gratifying, living in a very terrific city such as Paris, its surroundings, being based in France with access to neighboring states that you could visit. Often I had to make calls on Germany and in Italy and Switzerland. I had planned on first really getting to know the French situation, being in that country, and eventually venturing out in my later years—it was a five-year appointment—then in the later years I would begin to take the assignments to other parts of the world, Asia, the Middle East, Africa. That didn’t come about because it was cut short by the request by the president [James E. “Jimmy” Carter] to come to the White House and work with him. So it was some disappointment leaving that very adventurous situation to come to work back to Washington, D.C. But you have a sense of loyalty, again, to your president, who appointed you to the post and is asking you to come back and help him out in his reelection and help him out in making sure that—as he told me in my case, he didn’t know anything about Hispanics, and he wanted someone who had an intimate knowledge of our community to be able to guide him and his cabinet and his agencies in how to rectify problems that they had and create programs that he should be looking at. So it was a tall order, but one that I was willing to take.

You brought a book to the interview. Do you want to talk about the hostage crisis a little bit? That’s something that occurred right before you left Paris.

Yes. Well, as I’ve told you before, labor’s had a long history of being involved in international affairs, both the central labor organization in this country, the AFL-CIO, and, of course, many of the unions in the United States that belong to what are called trade secretariats. We were an affiliate of an international trade secretariat called the International Metalworkers Federation, which is based in Geneva, Switzerland, and that trade secretariat, as they’re called, has a worldwide mandate to organize and to assist its membership, unions, in their programs wherever they’re at, whether they’re in Japan or whether they’re in Spain or Italy or South Africa, the United States. The United Auto Workers was an affiliate, so we worked through that organization throughout the world in any such situation where our assistance was required. That’s how I got to work in Latin America, and I worked in other parts of the world through that agency.

The AFL-CIO, as I had mentioned earlier, had people doing the same work in other parts of the world. They had a person very much fulfilling the role that Victor Reuther had had during the post-World War II period in helping the Western unions, the French unions, the Italians, the Germans, recover under the Marshall Plan. The AFL-CIO was doing the same. A lot of the work was really directed at combating the influence of what was called the Warsaw Pact nations, the so-called Soviet Union’s organizations, so there was always this fight between the Western and Eastern powers taking place in Europe and around the world. They had a man called Irving Brown who was stationed in Paris doing very much of that work. He had been a founder of the French union called Force Ouvriere, [FO]. It was a right-of-center labor force very much involved in combating the left-of-center unions in France. But his job was really to fight the Soviet Bloc efforts [WFTU]. I was approached by an Argentine attorney who was in exile, living in exile in Paris when I was there as the ambassador. He had been working with the forces, the Iranian political forces in exile, in their attempt to get rid of the Shah of Iran and install an Islamic leader in Iran or Persia, as it was called, now Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini and others that were working to perhaps lead a revolution in Iran and install the Ayatollah.

Somehow this Argentine lawyer, who knew of me, I guess because he had read or knew that I had been involved in Argentina with the Metalworkers down there, and now here I am in Paris as an ambassador, U.S. ambassador, he approached me to see if I could facilitate a meeting with some of the Ayatollah Khomeini people in Paris, because there was a move to begin to stave off the Shah and prevent him from—if he was going to be overthrown, they wanted him out of the way. So he wanted to see if I would arrange for a meeting with the U.S. State Department in paving the way for their revolution to take place. This was quite a request, you know, that I couldn’t make a judgment and say, “Yes, I’ll meet with them. Send them to the office. I’ll talk to them.” I immediately said that I would take it under consideration, but I would have to have some consultations, which I did. I consulted the State Department, my post, and they told me that it was not advisable for me to arrange for that meeting. Evidently they knew something I didn’t know, but they didn’t want me involved in that. So somehow the attorney went to Irving Brown, who was in Paris, still in his old job of fighting off the communists, the Soviet Bloc, and he arranged for somebody in the U.S. government [probably the CIA] to attempt to meet with this party, with this group. I don’t know if they did or not, but I understand they didn’t, which once the Iranians established a revolution, they did succeed in getting rid of the Shah and installing Khomeini as the head of state there, then we couldn’t talk to them, because we had sort of rebuffed them in the beginning. So it was interesting how Paris, again, as a hotbed of intrigue was touching me, you know.

Do you think that was a mistake that the government made by prohibiting you to be involved in that?

It might have been. It might have been a mistake. It might have forestalled the kind of situation that transpired afterwards. I left Paris in November of ’79, and it was just at that time that the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was taken over by rebels, revolutionary rebels, and the hostage crisis took place. Mr. [James E. “Jimmy”] Carter gave refuge to the Shah by arranging him to be settled in Panama at the time, and that received a lot of criticism from many sectors. The president did not want to campaign in his reelection. Because of the hostage crisis, he didn’t feel it was equitable for him to be on the road campaigning while Americans were being held prisoners in Tehran, which he received a lot of criticism for not campaigning, and, of course, he lost the elections, one of the factors, I suppose, that was responsible.

Well, let’s move on then to something that you had mentioned before, unless you have some further comments about that, that, one, in hindsight, it seems like something that government has learned today and something that I remember from the [Barack] Obama campaign was that you want to have a dialogue even with your enemies. You want to keep some sort of discussion open to avoid those kinds of tense encounters. But I was reading [John] Chavez’s book The East Side Landmark [:History of the East Los Angeles Community Union, 1968-1993], and he has a statement here, and I wanted to read it to you because I would like to know what you feel about it. It is about the same time where you decide to go work for President Carter. He says that you returned to Washington to serve as Assistant Director of International Affairs for the UAW, and you continued in that position for the next two years, and then you became involved in the Carter campaign for presidency. Then it says that during these two years you remained in close touch with TELACU and East L.A., and since you realized that a local base would be important to your own political ambitions. I don’t see any footnote here, and so I’m wondering how you interpret that kind of overview of your perspective, of your experience, of your history, that decisions that you made were based on your political ambitions.

Well, I would express it in this way. I failed in my first attempt to make a run for Congress, and I had pressure from my union to either leave—I had pressure from the UAW to leave TELACU or remain there. I felt that I had given, I believe, eight years of leadership there, building the organization. It was on sound footing. I had brought in substantial grants now from the War on Poverty programs, and I felt that I had to move on, that as an organizer my mission had been complete. I opted to go back to Washington to continue in what I had done previous to that, involve myself in international affairs. It was something that I really enjoyed. I thought it was important. I thought that I really didn’t any prospects for even thinking of running for politics again. That was not in my mind. I wanted to go back because I had fulfilled my mission and I wanted to continue my other life. Of course, in that process, as we now know, I was asked, because I had been involved in the Carter campaign, I was asked to consider a post in the administration, which I didn’t get, Assistant Secretary of State for Hemispheric Affairs, but the White House opted to grant me with an ambassadorship to UNESCO, which I took. I thought it was part of my role in moving forth. So it was a new experience, and I could partake in something that I had great interest in, was in Europe and international affairs and world affairs. I wanted my family to experience that with me, going to France, going to Paris, so I did that.

Then it was cut short by the president asking me to work in the White House and work on his behalf as his special assistant, which was, to me, an important move again, in terms of the things I wanted to do. And it was there that, yes, in the White House and when I was an ambassador, I did keep in touch with TELACU. They prevailed upon me. They knew that I was involved in high places, and would I support them in certain aspects as a government administrative official. I would attempt to assist them in some of the projects they were working on, but I wasn’t at TELACU. I mean, I was certainly just putting in a good word for them wherever I could, as I was doing for other Hispanic organizations. Then, of course, Mr. Carter lost the election and I was out of a job, so to speak, because I chose not to return back to the UAW. I would have to replace somebody who had already taken my place. In a seniority system in the Labor Movement, when you go back to a spot where somebody’s at who’s of lesser seniority, you’re bouncing them out, and I didn’t think that was fair. I figured, well, I don’t think I want to go back to the International Affairs Department. At that time there was new redistricting taking place in California, and as a consequence of the Latino growth in the state, there was a new congressional seat established. I had good friends in the Labor Movement and good friends in the Democratic Party that said, “You know, we didn’t design this for you to run, but this is a good position, this new congressional seat, for an Hispanic. With your background, with your contacts, and with your ability to politic, raise money, raise funds, you could probably win it.” It was again opening the door to another adventure for me. I was always taking risks. I was always at the right place at the right time, and I said, “Why not?” I mean, that is something I didn’t think I would do again, given the previous defeat, but this time I have all the components at hand that can help me win that election. 0:52:05.5 So I came back and I talked to people in California and Los Angeles. The district that they created was in my own hometown, so that was that was my address. And everybody said, “Do it! Do it!” And the TELACU folks said, “Yeah, we’ll help you.” The farm workers said, “We’ll help you.” The Labor Movement was behind me. The Democratic Party was behind me. People who I had known and grown up looking at them as mentors, Edward Roybal, George Brown, Sen. Alan Cranston, Sen. Ted Kennedy, these were people in Congress already, said, “We’ll back you up.” And they were able to get me the California delegation endorsement. The members of the California Democratic Party in Congress endorsed me. I had all the elements to get me to win. I had a good campaign manager. George Pla was a former TELACU employee who was very, very adept at political issues. I asked him if he would come on as my campaign manager and he did, and we won. We won. We were able to join Edward Roybal in Congress, and Marty Martinez. We became the three Latino congressmen from California.

That’s wonderful. I want to get more into that campaign and then later on what was it like to be in Congress, but it seems that what I just read you, it speaks about you as somebody who has self-interest.

Yes.

But then when you speak of your experience, it’s a different twist, almost like you fall into these situations. They’re not necessarily positions that you’ve been working toward to achieve.

No. That’s why I say I was at the right time at the right place, whatever they call it, fate if you will, that these opportunities transpired and I took advantage of it. It was an opportunity and I took advantage of it, and in most cases they worked out well for me.

How would you describe your ambition? How would you describe what drives you, what motivates you?

Well, I guess my family, of course, the closest to me, my children, my wife, tell me that I am ambitious, that I want to go places, that I want to be somebody. That’s what I aspired when I was a kid. My mother, my grandmother, who raised me, always telling me to stand up for my rights, be proud, be articulate, look people in the eye, shake people’s hand strongly, you know, never give up, never give up. And I just grew up with that concept in mind, you know, that whatever happened, I was going to get my way. Now, I’m told that that’s being egotistical. “Your ego is too big.” Well, perhaps it is, but how else can you proceed and build and work hard? It’s rewarding for me to see success take place in other people because I know that somehow I had a role in it and somehow I had a role in my own success, you know. Whatever I could work for to benefit my family and my surroundings and my people, I just would go all the way out. That’s the way I perceive myself. Maybe it is egotistical and ambitious, but that’s who I am.

When you overlook your career, much of what you have done has been in the public service.

Yes, it has been.

It hasn’t been in a corporate industry, so I think that speaks for itself. And it also seems like, and what I want to talk about is some of the mentoring that you did. Maybe you can talk to me a little bit about some of the people who—like, for example, last time you talked about David [Lizarraga], your successor. During those first few years when he became responsible for TELACU, did you have a close relationship with him? Were you in a mentoring role with him?

I would say I was. He was, as I said, a dynamic young man, very aggressive. He had his talents. As a street-smart individual, he knew how to organize young people who were at risk. He was a gang worker. He was a fundraiser for projects to attempt to eradicate the gangs in their violence and in trying to build a better life for them, and I thought that was commendable, but I knew at hand that in the beginning he didn’t have an understanding of political issues or questions or terminology, etc. He learned a lot at TELACU, how it all works, and he became a political leader as well as an entrepreneurial leader, which he is today. Perhaps his vision was not akin to mine in sort of a social-political situation. His train of thought went another way. It’s been successful as far as he’s concerned, but it wasn’t my way.

Was he instrumental in helping you win your congressional election?

Well, he’s very supportive. He started out being very supportive. Then he had, of course, the problems that ensued at TELACU under his leadership, which began to impinge on me. I wasn’t involved with the problems that beset him, and I was getting a lot of criticism from the opposition press and my opposition. I told him, “It’s best that we sort of part ways here, because I cannot take money, funding from TELACU or fundraising or political support, because as it is, I’m being accused of attempting to build a TELACU in the San Gabriel Valley.” This is that the editorial said, that, “Esteban Torres is part of the Taco Mafia, and his whole quest is to bring TELACU to the San Gabriel Valley and control things.” You know, the San Gabriel Valley, where it was a whole new change of demographics, many Latino people moving into the San Gabriel Valley, many Anglos still here, you know, non-Latinos, who would look at comments like that in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune or even the L.A. Times saying these things that my critics said would affect me. So I had to say, “Look. Let’s disengage,” and they did.

So that’s almost ten years after he had been in the directorship of TELACU, when you won election. So he takes control in 1974, and then you’re running for election in ’82, ’83?

Eighty-two.

That’s not quite ten years, but almost ten years. Did it change that much? Did that time that he took the helm transform the organization that drastically, that now you’re receiving negative press versus positive press, or the organization is?

Well, there was an element of opposition from the beginning. There’s always this “Who are these folks coming in here and talking about Community Development Corporations, and the enterprise group coming in and going to rebuild East L.A., and self-determination? These guys are just taking over.” And then we did. We knew that as an organization that we had to play in the world of politics. We had to build alliances with people who would respect us. We had to look towards government officials who were supportive of our community, the George Browns, the Ed Roybals, the Alan Cranstons, the people in the Assembly who would—there were no Latinos other than Roybal. We were asking non-Latinos to support our cause in the barrio, and they were happy to see that. People who saw that and felt maybe a jealousy or that we were competitive with them, began to really kind of bad-mouth us, and we got the title of the Taco Mafia.

Who—can you give me—

I don’t know who termed it.

You don’t have the name of someone who—

No, I don’t, but that’s how it came about. We had solidarity with people, and we had solidarity with the Latino people wanting to move into the political framework. They saw maybe that as a threat, so they said, “That’s a little Mafia moving in here, and we’ll call them the Taco Mafia.” Well, we just built upon our record and what we were doing, being involved with the government programs, knowing that someday we could not be dependent on them and we would be on our own. We called it self-determination.

So that even happened before you left. That was even a criticism before you left.

Oh, yes, yes, that was. Sure. That was.

Then these later criticisms that you’re talking about, where you had to part company with the organization during your campaign, those were different. Those were criticisms of a mishandling of funds, that kind of thing?

Well, that was painful for me to do that, but it put—what do you call it—a jacket on me of being part and parcel of this Taco Mafia wanting to take over the San Gabriel Valley. We talked about it in consultations among our campaign and the TELACU people and said, “We can’t afford this.” So we parted ways there. Now, the East Side Landmark talks about that debacle, what happened there, and they rectified it. They had ways of being able to dispel the whole notion that it was a corrupt organization. I guess the L.A. Times really led a big thrust on that. But they came out of it. David came out of it, probably, I want to say, somewhat disheveled. I mean, he was a pariah to many people. I felt sorry for him.

I felt so sorry that in Congress we organized the Hispanic—when we went in, we were only five of us, and we organized the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in Washington, D.C. Then we organized a Hispanic Caucus Institute, a nonprofit, where we could raise funds and we could hold fundraisers and use that money to provide scholarships to bring young people to Washington as interns and work in nonprofit ways, not political situations. But the nonprofit group, because we spun it off as a 501(c)(3), had to have a board of directors non-representative of the Congress. Well, we were board of directors as well, but we had them bring in counterparts. A majority had to be public persons, not policy makers. So, seeing of David’s demise as what he had gone through, I nominated him to be a member of the board of that. So he came to Washington to—well, he didn’t relocate or anything. When we had board meetings he was there, provided the kind of leadership that he was able to do in building the Hispanic Caucus Institute.

Was he instrumental in that?

He helped. He helped a lot. He had good vision, he had good ideas, and he was there for a number of years doing that.

So you were able to maintain your relationship with him despite that—

Well, no. The whole issue had tempered our acquaintance and our relationship, and we weren’t the same. I felt some disappointment that he had gone in another direction, as opposed to what I had started. Maybe symbolically, he and his advisors took a position where they said, “This is your organization. You have to be the thrust of it. You can’t have Esteban’s image here,” you know. They named a street for me in their big industrial park. They got rid of a mural that had been painted in one of our old offices, getting rid of all the symbols that I had come about with. They got rid of the logo that I had created. They changed the organization. They made it into a non-Chicano, made it into a modern corporate organization and didn’t want to have anything that contained things of the past, our labor thrust, our labor organization, our rebelliousness, our ties to the Mexican Congress and to the moratorium. “Hey, that’s past. We’re now a new image.” And that hurt, you know. So for that reason there was a parting of the ways.

How did you keep those ties yourself once you were elected to office? Or were you able to, the ties to these grassroots kinds of—because it never ends. I mean, even—

Well, they’re constituents, you know. They’re people who you help. You were there and you stay loyal to them.

I mean as far as some of the newer—like I was speaking to a student from UCLA who was part of the hunger strike, and he said that you were very much one of the supporters of the Chicano Studies Department. So maybe you can talk to me about some of those, how you maintained your grassroots connection like you did when you were the Director of TELACU, when you were involved in the moratorium, when you were involved in some of the labor activisms. Were you able to do that as a congressperson?

Absolutely, yes.

Maybe you can talk to me about some of those.

Well, you know, this was the element that I was organizing within, doing TELACU but having a great sense for civil rights, for making sure that our community had a role to play in this country, that we had some equity in terms of how wealth is developed. Some people may criticize that approach, but that was one that I harbored even as a congressman. You know, “Hey, this doesn’t stop just because I’m in Congress. In fact, if I can help it, I will.” And whatever legislation came up that related to that whole question, I was on top of it. I was speaking on the floor of the House or I was voting for the legislation. This was my role as a congressman, to speak for those folks.

Do you have any examples of any legislation that comes to mind that can explain?

Well, the whole immigration question during the amnesty process. I spoke very highly that immigrants were here like everybody else came to this country as an immigrant, and that many people came illegally, as we term violating the terms of immigration. You come without a visa or whatever, but you’re here and you produce for this country. You work. You’re a farm worker or whatever you’re doing, you’re providing production for this country. You’re paying taxes. Sure, you violated some rules, but maybe there’s a way that you can be compensated for that. Maybe you can win citizenship if you do certain things. When the whole amnesty question came up, I was very strongly in favor of it. You know, my own father, who had been an immigrant and was here illegally, was drafted into the military service and then he served this country, and he was awarded citizenship because of that, so that was an amnesty that was provided for him even though he was illegal. I felt that the same could take place for people who had given not wartime contributions, but to our society, to our economy. Why not? And I voiced that in Congress. I talked about my father’s situation. I didn’t sing it, but I spoke about Woody Guthrie’s song about a deportee. I don’t know if you know that song.

I don’t.

About a deportee, and I spoke on it on the House floor and had people really breaking down listening to that. People still meet me and say, “I remember that speech you gave.” So I never lost touch, you know. Whatever else confronts you in Congress in terms of legislation, whether it’s fair housing, whether it’s economic development, whether it’s the way that women are treated, whether it’s the environment, whether it’s issues with Mexico or with Latin America, I was there. I was a champion against the School of the Americas, which brought in military men from all over Latin America to train them by our military on how to go back to their countries and be able to further oppress their people, you know. “Close down that school.” The graduates of that school are all the guys that were involved in all these assassinations and massacres of people in Guatemala and in Salvador and, you name it, in Latin America. Those are the people we trained how to suppress people, you know. So I fought against that school staying open. We almost won out, but it’s still in operation. Obviously it’s been probably revamped to avoid that kind of criticism, but they’re still there.

What brought your attention to that school, do you remember?

Well, people that were against it were asking members of Congress to stand up against it. My work in civil rights, human rights, I was in touch with that all the time, knowing about the atrocities that were taking place and that we were financing that, training people.

Who was your opposition, do you remember?

Well, opposition were some of the members of Congress who represented the state of Georgia and benefited by having that school there, and people who were pro-military, very strong military advocates who felt that we had to train people to act in that way, as we get criticism today for training Egyptian Army officers and other Algerians and foreign military people. We train them at the schools, and they are some of the people that are taking the heat today in this Middle East revolution.

It seems like you’re dealing with very dogmatic individuals when you’re talking about supporters of a school like that. So what would be your strategy for trying to sway them over to your side, and did you have any successes with some of those very staunch supporters of a school like the American—

Well, as I recall, there were two of us who were really involved in that—in fact, we had some disagreements over our leadership roles—was [Joseph Patrick] Joe Kennedy [II], [Robert F.] Bobby Kennedy’s son, who was a colleague of mine in Congress. He was very much opposed to the school and so was I, and I believe I had introduced legislation or co-sponsored legislation because the group, the Caucus had elected me to be the spokesman on the floor on it, and somehow he wasn’t picked. I guess he didn’t have the seniority. He had the name. We got into a big imbroglio, you know, who was going to be the lead on that, that kind of thing. He wasn’t an adversary. We were together on this question. The people that were against this were right-wing members of Congress, people that didn’t want to de-fund that school. I don’t have the records in front of me who they were, but they’re easy to get.

Yes, of course. My interest is—because it’s something that all Democratic presidents face and all Democratic congressmen, I’m sure, and officials face when you want to change something that’s been in effect for so many years and something that’s so powerfully connected to what is considered the U.S. interest, what is considered the patriotic responsibility of the government. How would you approach a negotiation with the opposite side? Do you have like, for example, backdoor meetings or a letter campaign or—

It takes place in many fashions. You always attempt one-on-one with a colleague, to try to explain to him what is happening. You try to use whatever information you have that’s credible, you know, photographs, videos, maybe have him meet with somebody that’s been the victim of one of these situations, invite him to a conference. You try everything to influence their attitude. Many people support an issue like that simply because they feel it’s patriotic to do so, because they feel that we are about to be invaded by the same forces, that we’re going to be overrun by Sandinistas or we’re going to be overrun by the people in Peru or Mexico. Always a threat that the Mexicans are going to do this, you know, there’s going to be an invasion by them and rebellious. So they believe that, and they figure, well, the best way to prevent this is to instill in some of their people a way to stem that. “We’ve got to protect our borders. We’ve got to protect our nation, and if we don’t, we’re not true Americans.” They don’t understand or know about the intricate issues that are affecting the people in those countries. I mean, they just believe what they read, and they’re given a lot of propaganda, obviously, to make them believe that. And so you have to work very hard to dissuade them from that posture.

That school trained so many harmful military officials in Central America—

Yes, indeed.

—so I wanted to elaborate on that, because it’s important to the people who are living in the U.S. today, people who had to flee those countries because of the dictators and the military regimes that were put into place.

Caused a great deal of suffering and a malice towards us as a nation, because the people see us supporting that and put us in league with the oppressors, and that’s not right.

What was the biggest challenge? Was it the fear of—I mean, even if it might not have been a true fear, but communism? Was it a Cold War mentality that kept that school running?

Partly, partly that, and then just the propaganda that the people in power down there—I don’t mean the national governments, but some of the American interests that are in those countries, the oil corporations, the United Fruit Company, the many capitalist groups that are in Latin America that have something to fear if they’re deposed or if they’re rioted upon or whatever. They depend on that protection, and so they’re part and parcel of the support for that.

So you add the economic question to that. It’s not simply a political—

No, no, it’s economic. That’s the whole thrust. The related interest between an oppressive government or military down there who’s in concert with our corporate interest prevails upon this.

How close did you say you got to winning your position?

I forget the votes exactly, but, again, that’s a matter of record. But there was a point where we very narrowly came to defeating the school, but we didn’t.

That’s unfortunate. Well, I think we’ll stop here. It’s a good place to stop. I’d like to ask you if you can possibly give me for the next time some other legislation that you brought forth that we can talk about.

Sure.

Because we can’t talk about every single act that you were involved in as a congressperson, but we can talk about a few key ones, like that was really important, and maybe some others that you think are relevant to discuss.

Sure.

Thank you. I’m going to stop it now. [End of April 4, 2011 interview]

This is Virginia Espino and today is May 9, 2011. I’m interviewing Congressman Esteban Torres at his home in West Covina, California. Today is May 9th, and this is for the video camera. Before we move on to some of your work as congressman—that’s about where we left off the last time—I wanted to go back. After reviewing some of the interviews and talking to some other people about the Chicano Movement period of the late sixties and early seventies, I found that there was a question regarding what became of the Congress of Mexican American Unity, since it was such an important organization. One of my interviewees thought that possibly the questions of subversive activity after August 29th, after the violence of August 29th and then later on there was another demonstration where violence broke out, which was January 31st, and the question of challenging police brutality led some political officials to believe that there was subversive activity going on and that some organizations, such as the Congress of Mexican American Unity, dismantled or changed their perspective. Can you speak to that? Were you still as heavily involved in that organization in 1971?

Well, it was my recollection that we were. As I’ve indicated, we’ve always had to be, at that time very sensitive to the issue that those organizations that were engaged in the War on Poverty and were recipients of federal grants and foundation grants and federal money would not become tinged with what they called using those funds to give any kind of support that had the message of being subversive or anti-American or engaged in some nefarious political aspect. So we were always careful about that. The word I wanted to use was “commingling,” the using of funds that commingle private with federal or state monies. So to that degree, yes, we were always cognizant of that and we didn’t want to cross that line, because we knew that it was going to impinge on the organization, and possibly you’d be in violation of the federal aspects. But I don’t think, in my estimation, that that had any effect on the Congress and its eventual demise, so to speak.

I talked to Rosalio [Muñoz] about that. He mentioned that the other day that I was talking to him, and I kind of wondered what he was talking about. It was sort of cryptic. He said, “It’s funny that everything went crazy and then before you knew it, we had that problem.” There were a lot of people around and we couldn’t really discuss it for me to say, “What are you talking about?” I heard him say it and I wondered. It stayed in my mind. I wondered, what did he mean by that? But to my recollection, as I recall, we kept operating. Yes, there was a lot of furor. There was a lot of excitement. There was a lot of activity going on during those crucial days and weeks and months, during the Chicano Moratorium, during the issue of civil rights, but always we stood our ground firm on making sure that our company was being heard, that we had a right to do what we were doing as long as we didn’t violate any of the rules of the funding sources. Eventually, the Congress did sort of fade away and we couldn’t get big audiences, because the clamor of the moratorium and what we were engaged in really began to subside, and then, as I recall, the activity just died down.

How did you feel about the focus after the August 29th march and repression? How did you feel about the focus to curtail police brutality? Did you feel that that was an important issue to be putting energies towards?

Yes. We continued to combat that attitude, and it took a lot of meetings. I remember Rosalio and I meeting with LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] Chief [Edward M.] Davis. We wanted to do a subsequent march, and we were going to be doing it on L.A. proper territory, not L.A. unincorporated. He was setting the rules and saying that we had to abide by certain statutes and certain rules to do that, and we said we would, that we would have the monitoring personnel to do that, we had people that were going to respect the law, etc., etc., and we went about, as I recall, carrying out a march like that. We did a subsequent march in L.A. County during the September 16th celebrations. Rosalio and I went to the Patriotic Committee that puts the event on, and they didn’t want to let us do it. We had to make a strong appeal that we had a right, you know, we were Americans but we were also Mexican Americans, and we felt that the moratoriums issues were a correct issue, and we wanted to march in that parade, and they denied us. Eventually, we were able to sit down with them and negotiate with them. They said, “Okay, you can march, but you have to march separate from us. You can march behind us.” And we did. Subsequent to that, we had another march that was peaceful, carried out in East L.A., but we never relented. We just kept up the pace and eventually things did simmer down. It was ironic that years later when I was in Congress, elected to Congress, that I was invited to be the grand marshal of the Sixteenth of September parade, which was ironic, because to begin with, I was vilified as a communist, as a subversive, as a person that was trying to burn down East L.A., and subsequent to that, when I was a federal official, I was the marshal, parade marshal.

Were you at the January 31st march where it did get violent? There were two marches in January and then apparently, from my understanding, thousands came out to the January 31st march and then the police also. Well, I think violence ensued and then the police.

We were at a rally in Belvedere Park, I remember, subsequent to the moratorium issue, and there was a lot of anger. There were a lot of feelings on the part of the community that we had to maintain our position. The rally at Belvedere was just to say that we were going to continue demonstrating, that we were going to be loyal to the effort, but we didn’t contemplate a march. I don’t recall having a permit. I was usually the one assigned to retain a permit to do that. What happened as the rally disbanded, people crossed the freeway. There was a causeway that went over the freeway, and people started to cross that. We never anticipated like blocking it or putting some monitors there. People crossed over and started marching down towards East L.A., towards Whittier Boulevard. On the way there, because we were in Belvedere Park, we passed the sheriff’s station, and it was my first encounter with Lee Baca. He was standing behind the gates of the police station and I was walking by, and I said, “Look. This is not a march that any of us sanctioned. People are doing this on their own.” He said, “Well, you’d better stop them, because they’re going to get in trouble down there.” So I said, “We’re trying that. We’re trying to do that.” And we were. I was telling people, “Go back. Don’t go down,” and to a witness, Lee Baca saw us doing that, so he knew that we were trying to prevent the crowd from going. But a lot of people went. And as I later heard, yes, they got all the way down to Whittier Boulevard and there was an altercation with the police, with sheriffs. That might have been that January one that you’re talking about. I don’t have a record of that.

I think that’s the one. That is the one where apparently after that, the city officials were saying, “No more Chicano Moratorium marches. We need a moratorium, not moratorium marches.” Do you remember that, that they were asking Chicano leaders to stop demonstrating, to stop marching?

Well, they always were asking that. They were always wanting to impede any kind of a march. That was always just the force of the people coming from out of state, from other communities to the gatherings, and us going before the officials and saying, “These are peaceful demonstrations. We have the right to do it, and we’re asking for a permit.” I recall on the moratorium, the initial moratorium, the one in Laguna Park at the time, we had to get a permit to march down Whittier Boulevard, which I obtained on behalf of the Moratorium Committee. The Congress did that as an umbrella organization. But there was always both city officials or people in the business community and a lot of Mexican Americans saying, “Hey, let’s dispense with these demonstrations. They’re causing havoc. They’re causing vandalism. Let’s stop it.” There was always that resistance. But eventually, as I said, the whole issue with Ruben Salazar, his death and the subsequent hearings that were held, there was still a lot of anger and a lot of anguish, and people said, “We can’t stop.” So we continued, but little by little, things subdued.

Do you remember making a statement—and this is another little tidbit that came from one of my interviews—that some factions of the Chicano community supported that for the time being there were going to be no more marches, and then another faction, they were very upset that you would say there were going to be no marches. Do you remember that?

That I said there would be no more?

That you said, yes.

I don’t recall that, no. I don’t recall that, no. I would say, just in retrospect, that after a continued series of marches and demonstrations, that we began to make our point. This became national news. This became an historic event that took place, that showed that we as a community were going to resist the war and demonstrate on behalf of the many Chicanos that were being used as cannon fodder, as we said, and that at some point we had to begin to subside. It was an acceptance that we had a righteous cause. Perhaps in that sense I might have said—I don’t recall, but I figure that how long can we go on demonstrating just for the sake of demonstrating? But I don’t recall making a speech as such.

Did you feel that they were becoming less and less effective?

Well, it started to—as you continued, I felt that it was having a damaging effect on us, yes. It was having a negative effect on us. At first there was sympathy. “Wow, they did it.” It was big news, and it had an effect. But then, as I recall, when it kept going, it became sort of backfiring on us. People were being jailed. I remember their having to put together a Defense Committee, raising money to post bail for people, things like that, and there was only so much you could do. You could spend all your energies just doing that to no avail, I mean, just for the sake of demonstrating. Some people wanted to demonstrate forever, and we know that there were many people in the crowd and behind the scenes, provocateurs egging on that situation, so we were cognizant of that as well.

Did you think at that point, or if you can recall back, what would be your next move after that second episode of violence on January 31st?

I felt that all those events had given impetus to a greater sense of unity in our community. People realized that what we were doing as a Congress or what we were doing as TELACU [The East Los Angeles Community Union], as an organization fighting for self-determination, fighting for economic and social progress in our communities, that this was the right time to begin to think about the incorporation of East Los Angeles as a municipality, where we would have self-government, elected officials from our community to put together the largest Mexican American city in the United States. That was sort of the next step, which we took on.

We talked a lot about that a few interviews back, but did you do that through the Congress of Mexican American Unity, or through some other affiliation, or as an independent?

We formed an independent committee that would put forth the incorporation efforts and began to raise money for that from outside sources. We began to use TELACU as a resource, a kind of a research organization. They were in the community. We had a right to think of building beyond just a federal grants program, that part of the mission would be to consolidate our community into a political entity.

What about your role with the Democratic Party? Did this become something that you kept on the sideline or were you still heavily involved? Because from our other interviews, it sounds like you had been involved with the Democratic Party since the early fifties.

Yes, I started out as a Young Democrat, My wife and I, Arcy [Torres], joined the Young Democrats. We rallied around legislative issues. We supported legislators who were supportive of our East Side community, and eventually, because of our activity, because of my activity at TELACU and as an organizer with the United Auto Workers [UAW], I was involved with the Democratic Party.

At the point after the moratorium, after all the issues had subsided and we began to work on the incorporation efforts, I also thought about the possibility of running for Congress. There was an opportunity and I jumped into the fray. As I’ve discussed earlier, I was not successful in that first effort. Then came, as I said, the request from my union to consider leaving the union—and they were the supporters of my ability to be at TELACU—leaving TELACU and going back to the union or staying at TELACU. I felt that I had done all I could to serve the community in organizing TELACU as an organization, which was well on its way to major federal funding. I was able to get the first million-dollar grant, I recall, and I felt now that I didn’t make the congressional picture, I fulfilled my mission at TELACU, the moratorium was behind us and the incorporation was behind us, I would go back to my work in Washington, D.C., with the United Auto Workers in the International Department.

That was in 1974?

That was in 1974. Actually ’75.

Well, can you talk to me a little bit, before we move forward, a little bit about the role, if any, the Democratic Party played in some of these Chicano Movement organizations and activities? For example, the UAW seemed to have played a role in helping to establish TELACU, helping to support this community.

Yes.

So did the Democratic Party play a role in encouraging you to run for Congress, or in supporting you in your efforts, or maybe the more veteran Democrats of East Los Angeles or of L.A., were they advising you? Did you meet with them?

Well, to some degree you had to if you really considered doing that, but it was an initiative on my own that I decided to do that, and once you decide that, then you have to start making the right contacts and talking to the political leaders, both Latinos—and there weren’t many, they weren’t very many—getting people in Congress. I couldn’t get—the rule in Congress usually is that members of the Democratic Party usually do not endorse another Democrat that’s running against an incumbent Democrat. So that was very difficult. Other than the fact to speak of, I did obtain a couple of Democrats to support me against one of their fellow colleagues, George Brown, who was a congressman at the time. I had helped him win his congressional seat. I had worked on his campaign and we had become good friends. When I said I wanted to run for Congress against George Danielson, his colleague, he said, “I’ll support you.” So he did. I had, as I recall, another congressional person who I had known as a Young Democrat, Phil Burton, who became a powerhouse in the Democratic Party in Washington, he agreed to support me. I tried to get [Edward M.] Ted Kennedy, who was very supportive of the TELACU Movement, of the Community Development Corporations that his brother had coauthored in the Senate. I tried to get Ted Kennedy to support me. I knew the Kennedy family. I knew him through Paul Schrade, and he knew me through Cesar Chavez. I tried to get Ted to endorse me, and he said he couldn’t. I kept pressuring to get his endorsement, and he finally said he couldn’t because George Danielson had been a good friend of the family, and he didn’t want to do that. So I recall going to Washington. It was a last attempt. I said, “I’ve got to go to Washington and try to convince Ted Kennedy to endorse me on this very important venture I’m going into.”

His aide told me, “He’s not going to meet with you. He’s not going to do that.” I said, “Well, I’m going there as part of a Community Development delegation that’s going to meet with him, and all I want to do is take a picture with him.” He said, “Well, he won’t take a picture with you, because you would use that in the campaign.” And I said, “I won’t use it, but I do want a picture with him.” And he said he wouldn’t do it. So we’re at the conference and met with Ted Kennedy. Of course, he went around shaking hands with everybody. At that point I reached out and grabbed his hand, and they took the picture. I have that picture, and he’s not happy that he’s shaking my hand, so that wasn’t a good endorsement picture. I wasn’t seeking to use it as an endorsement, but it wasn’t a good picture. But that’s the kind of support I sought.

Well, I was going to ask you, how do you, in the age before cell phones and email and the Internet, how do you seek an endorsement? What was your strategy? You explained a little bit about Ted Kennedy, but what was your strategy with some of these other individuals?

Well, you write to them, or on occasions I would go to Washington on behalf of TELACU to lobby, to meet with one of our revenue sources, which was the Center for Community Change. It was an organization, still active. They were big supporters of ours, and they would hold major conferences to bring what they called the Community Development groups together. We would go to Washington and go through reviews of our activities and projects, and eventually we’d go up on the [Capitol] Hill and we’d lobby like anybody else, lobby members of Congress for certain bills, for certain positions. When you’re doing that, you collar a congressman or a senator or the president, whoever you can get to talk with you. I mean, that’s the way we did it.

Interesting. After your first meeting with Ted Kennedy during that period when you shook his hand and he was unwilling to shake your hand back, what kind of relationship did you have after that?

Very good, very good. Eventually I ended up in Congress and he was a good supporter of mine. He was very friendly. I remember small things but important things. I remember being at the Kennedy Center one time for an event, an afternoon event, and Ted was there with his mother. He called me over and he said, “Esteban, I want you to meet my mother Rose.” So I met his mother, Mrs. Kennedy. I visited his home one time with Paul Schrade and Cesar Chavez. We had breakfast with Ted Kennedy at his home in Washington, D.C., and things like that. His nephew, [Joseph Patrick] Joe Kennedy [II], was a colleague of mine in Congress and we were close friends, and he knew that. He was a good friend of Art Torres. I remember he always mentioned Art Torres. He said, “Are you guys related?” I said, “No, we’re not.” He said, “Oh, I like Art.” And every time he’d see me he said, “How’s your cousin Art?” He was a good friend.

How do situations like that repair themselves, or how do you repair them once you’ve taken a different side from a colleague? It could be like in this situation where you’re running against—

George Danielson.

—George Danielson, who was a friend of Ted Kennedy’s. But you’re all in the same community. How do you get over those conflicts?

Well, that’s part of the story of how I got to Congress. I had already left the White House as special assistant to the president, and I had to decide, do I leave the White House now and go back to the union again? After the experiences I had with the U.N., living in Paris and traveling all over the world, coming to the White House and being the president’s aide and working on his behalf, and now the president’s lost the election and Ronald Reagan’s coming in, and Ronald Reagan is telling us, you know, “Goodbye.” So I’m deciding, what am I going to do? Then just about that time a reapportionment takes place in California based on the 1980 census, and there is a new seat created in Southern California, here in the San Gabriel Valley. I said, Well, my goodness, that’s my home. That’s where I came from.” I was living in La Puente then. And I said, “I’m going to run for that seat.” Actually, it wasn’t that way. I had run in Monterey Park against George Danielson, but with the creation of a new congressional seat, people approached me saying, “Look. Why don’t you consider coming back to L.A.? We will work hard with [Edmund G.] Jerry Brown [Jr.],” who was the new governor, “to have him nominate George Danielson to the State Supreme Court,” or Superior Court. Maybe it was Superior Court. They said, “And he would like that, because he’s always wanted to be a judge. And in his absence, his leaving, you can run again in Monterey Park.” So the TELACU people and a lot of other Latinos said, “Do it, do it.”

So I talked to Latino leaders like Richard Alatorre and Joe Montoya, Senator Montoya, and a lot of other folks, and they said, “Well, you’ve been away a long time. We don’t know that you’re going to able to handle this. As a matter of fact, we’re thinking of running.” So what am I going to do? Some of the people that I mentored and worked with and got them elected now are saying they want to run for the position. So I said, “No, I’m going to run.” because I had been told by others, “We’re going to work on getting Jerry Brown to nominate George Danielson to the court, and there will be a vacancy there. So just make up your mind you’re going to run. Forget what they’re saying, that they want to run.” So, lo and behold, I do that, and then I get the news that Marty Martinez, a state assemblyman, has said, “Hey, I’m the assemblyman from Monterey Park, and I’m going to run for that seat.” So we’re in conflict there. Three of us are already saying we’re going to run for this position. So we start making phone calls to each other and saying, “Look. We’ve got to resolve this, because it’s going to be a bloodbath here, and everybody’s claiming their right to that seat.” Richard Alatorre was saying, “I’m the member of the Assembly who drew up the lines, and I had very much an intent on making sure that I had a shot at that.” Okay, that’s what politicos do, right? Joe Montoya was saying, “Well, I think I’m going to run. I’m in the State Senate and I think I can maneuver my way of being in that jurisdiction.” Everybody had that seat as a target, so we said, “We have to have a meeting.” The people backing me said, “Let’s all get a meeting together. Let’s talk this out. Let’s try to clear the air. Let’s all come together and not have a bloodbath.”

So we all agreed to have a meeting at Steven’s Steakhouse. It’s an East L.A. eatery. We said, “Okay, let’s do it,” and we picked a Saturday to have this meeting. We said, “Who’s going to chair the meeting? Who’s going to really make sure that there is a sense of decorum at the meeting, that we’re not fighting, that we listen to each other?” They said, “Well, let’s get Congressman [Edward] Roybal to act as a sort of mediator here.” So we called his office and he said, “Okay. I don’t want to see you guys all fighting, but let’s do it and I’ll help serve as a mediator.” And he did. He came to that meetings at Steven’s Steakhouse. We all got into a big shouting match, you know, “Who’s going to run?” Everybody had their candidate there. Art Torres was there and he was pushing for Richard [Alatorre], and they had people there pushing for Marty Martinez, and I had my people pushing for me, and we were all at loggerheads. Then it dawned on everybody, “Well, listen. What about this new seat that’s been created in the San Gabriel Valley? Why don’t we think of one of you guys running there.” Of course Marty said, “Well, no. I’m in Monterey Park. Why should I go over to Norwalk and those cities? I don’t know those cities, Santa Fe Springs. No, I’m not going to go over there.”

So they said, “Esteban, why don’t you back Marty for Monterey Park, and, Marty, will you back Esteban to run in Norwalk and Santa Fe Springs and Cerritos and those communities in that new congressional seat which includes La Puente?” Marty said, “Yeah, I’ll do that.” Then Joe Montoya said, “No, but I have a candidate that’s going to run there.” So we voted. We said, “No, let’s vote.” So we voted, and it turned out that I accepted the San Gabriel seat, the new seat, which I didn’t know those parts of town, Norwalk and Santa Fe Springs. I knew La Puente, I knew El Monte, South El Monte and those, and I said, “Well, okay. We’ll build a committee around that district.” And that’s the way I was able to take that new seat. Now, that created a problem because at that time there had been a group of women that had wanted to run for Congress and somehow they found out about that steakhouse meeting, but they weren’t sure where it was at. So they got really upset that they had been kept out of the process, understandably. But just the way it worked out, they never got to the meeting and we had made the decision, and that became a cause célèbre. In the newspapers this was called the “golden palomino meeting at Steven’s Steakhouse, where these Latino males cut the pie, the political pie.” So Monty got Monterey Park and that whole district. George Danielson got his judgeship. They pressured—“pressure.” They lobbied Jerry Brown. Jerry Brown did it. He appointed George Danielson to the court and it left the seat open for Marty, and I took the other seat. So it was the politics of the time.

Did Art Torres get anything out of that?

No, he was just backing Richard.

And what did Richard get?

Richard decided not to run. So there was a lot of give-and-take between different people.

Do you remember the rationale for that?

For what?

How Richard decided not to run for anything.

I’m trying to think. It’s described in books I’ve read. They had some kind of alliance in the State Assembly where they were going to be choosing a Speaker or something, and Richard and Alatorre and Art lined up with Willie [Lewis] Brown [Jr.]. That cast a shadow on other people who were backing Marty. They called it the Berman-Waxman machine. They were backing Marty, and all those politics got involved in this, and that’s why Art and Richard didn’t get into it. Later I think Richard [G.] Polanco got involved into the process somehow, and— [recorder turned off]

Okay, we’re back.

So those were the dynamics of that political process there and how I eventually ended up in that congressional seat. Then, of course, I had opposition, because in creating that new congressional district, it took out another member of Congress by the name of Jim Lloyd, who had been the mayor of West Covina. He was also now a congressman. When they shift the lines like that, they sometimes dispossess a member of Congress—he loses a seat—in order to make another district.

There had been a big fight in Congress, in the House, on the speakership—not the speakership on the Majority Leader fight between Philip Burton, my friend and backer, and [James] Jim Wright, a Texas congressman. Jim Lloyd had lined up with Jim Wright and voted for him, and so Phil Burton lost that position by one vote of being the Majority Leader in the U.S. House, so there was a clash between Lloyd and Philip Burton. So when the new congressional seat was created, Philip Burton said to me, “That seat is made for you.” He said, “A person like you, Esteban, with your background and your involvement with the unions and with TELACU and the community efforts, the party likes you, you’re a good guy, you’ve been a good Democrat, they would back you in running for that, and I’m going to go before the California delegation and get you that endorsement. I will get the California delegation to endorse you.” I said, “What about their colleague Jim Lloyd?” He says, “That guy, I’m going to get even with him, because he’s the one that lost me the Majority Leader position.” He said, “I will not endorse him. I will endorse you, and I’ll fight not to get him reelected.” So that’s the way the Democratic politics played out. So I eventually got the California delegation to support me. Philip Burton got Ed Roybal to become one of my sponsors. Ed, he knew me from TELACU, he knew me from my political activity, and he said, “You’re going to have to prove to me that you can do this by raising the right amount of money and by getting the right kind of endorsements, because this is important.” So I did. I was able to garner a lot of endorsements from labor and Democrats and community people against his own colleague, Jim Lloyd, so Ed went to bat for me, along with Phil Burton and the others.

Who did you have in your camp individually, those individuals that you took to that Steven’s Steakhouse meeting? Who were your mentors and advisors?

Well, there was the TELACU guy, out of the TELACU ante. George Pla became my campaign manager. He was a very bright young man. He was a technician. He was a USC [University of Southern California] graduate and very, very able, and he took a leave from TELACU and came on to be my campaign manager, the first time he ran a campaign. Ed Roybal said, “How can you pick somebody from TELACU who’s never run a campaign and expect to go to Congress?” I said, “Well, I just have faith in him. He knows how to do it.” He said, “Well, you just have to prove to me that he can do it.” So George very ably began to build up endorsements and was able to go to Washington and lobby for me. He was able to get the Kennedys. He was able to get the right people to put together a campaign with me with the right kind of mailing, campaign mailings and literature, and we had all kinds of campaign rallies that he engineered, and he built a team. He built a team of people, research people and campaign workers. My family, Arcy, my kids, everybody got involved in this, and we won.

That’s incredible.

Yes, it was, really. We beat a former incumbent.

The people that he built in his team, are any of them people who later on would enter the political field themselves as candidates?

Which team? My team?

Yes, your first team. Because I’m thinking this is the beginning of Latino, or Mexican American in your case, political power after Roybal.

Well, yes. That whole process led to a turning point in the Chicano community. I became then the third. Three of us, Roybal, Martinez, and myself became the three congressmen from California where heretofore there had only been one. So we had this tremendous notoriety about us. My team, of course, the people there, George Pla and others, really got involved in the politics. They had been always involved with TELACU or with the union, and they began to run for office. Gloria Molina had been a TELACU employee. She had worked with me as a job developer. She was interested in becoming a political personality, and she was disgruntled, of course, understandably, when that group of people didn’t back her for a State Assembly seat. They picked Polanco, and she wanted to run for that seat. But then she went on to politics, you know, to work with Art Torres as an aide to him, and she worked for Willie Brown and eventually cut her teeth on those California politics, and then she became an assemblywoman.

Was she one of the disgruntled—like you called the women who felt they weren’t invited to that first “golden palomino”?

No, she wasn’t. There was another woman. I forget her name. Her first name was Olga [Moreno]. I can’t think of her last name, Olga. She was a real estate broker, also a very bright woman, and somehow she was going to enter that race, but—the signals, she didn’t know where the meeting was at, so she never got in there.

Other women’s names come to mind?

Not offhand. It’s been too long.

Francisca Flores or—

No, Francisca was, of course, involved in the—what was it, the women’s organization?

Comisión Femenil.

Comisión Femenil.

Yolanda Nava.

No, no. They weren’t vying for political positions like that. But as I said, that was a famous meeting of males that women were upset about.

This period was when women had already established themselves as equal players in the sense that they were trying to bring attention to equal rights, feminism. Were you self-aware at that time that there were no women present? Was that something that you would have been thinking about?

Yes, I was, but they weren’t there at the meeting. It was a Saturday thing that we had to decide that day because Tuesday was filing day or whatever, or Monday, whatever, and the die had to be cast there. We got to the meeting and who was there was there, you know. But we later heard about it, you know. People were unhappy that it was all males. But given that, because I knew Gloria, I broke with Alatorre, Richard, Art Torres camp, so to speak, and began to support Gloria. Gloria was an important person that I had known, and it was true, you know, to me, she had a lot of potential and I just went with her, to this day.

What did she say to you? Do you remember how she approached you about supporting her?

Well, let’s see. When I learned that Gloria was interested in running for political office, I naturally endorsed her, went along with her, became vocal with the community and political circles that that was the person I was supporting. And eventually we ended up in the White House together. She became a senior staffer in the White House, and I was a member of the senior staff and so we were good colleagues.

Well, you earlier described the intensity of when you’re trying to get an endorsement and what you attempted with Ted Kennedy, going to see him, almost—not ambushing him, but in a way you were trying to put yourself in the same room with him.

Yes.

Did anybody do that for you when Gloria Molina was going to run? Did they try to sway you not to endorse her and to endorse their candidate? Like you were saying, the Alatorre-Polanco—

Well, Polanco had been a TELACU employee. He had worked there and I knew him as a young man. He had done a good job in the Maravilla Project area and obviously he wanted my endorsement, but my mind was made and I was going to endorse Gloria. Yes, that’s been pretty much the way it’s been.

Were there any repercussions for you, any political consequences?

Well, yes. I had a break. You know this. I had a break with the TELACU management, based on different principles of organization and things like that, and, of course, Polanco was very tied to David [Lizarraga] and the TELACU management people, and, of course, the Alatorre-Torres machine, so to speak, so there was clearly two camps, people that operated in L.A. politics.

It’s interesting to me to note that you didn’t feel you needed their support. Do you recall thinking about what you wanted to achieve in the long run and if you were going to be able to achieve those things without having them on your side?

When I was already in Congress?

Yes.

Well, when I was in Congress, I supported them. They were still an entity dealing with Community Development things, and whatever I could do in the White House, as I did with everybody else, I had an open door. Anybody could come—Republicans, Democrats, Independents—to the White House and see me and I would listen. If they had an issue, a piece of legislation that was a good one and that really spoke to the need to enhance the community and build Latino economic power or social wherewithal, I would support it. I would make recommendations to the president and his staff. I would make recommendations on ambassadorships and staff appointments and things like that. That was my job. So I never really shut the door on anybody. But on some situations I didn’t touch something. I knew what was behind it and I knew that I wasn’t going to get involved with endorsing somebody or some aspect of their endeavor just because I had an open door.

Well, as you know, this weekend I was with the Justice for Janitors campaign.

Yes.

And when you talk about union politics, when you make a split and you take one side over another when you’re talking about two different unions or unions merging or not merging, people don’t talk to each other after that. Did you find that in politics as well, if you take one side on an issue, that you have drawn a line that can’t be erased?

Well, yes, I still do. There are some people that I just—I may gesture to them or nod to them, but I don’t have an involvement with them because of some treacherous act that they participated against me or against my colleagues or something. I draw the line. You know, I’m not going to engage in any kind of support on their behalf or anything. I mean, you do that in any situation. But generally speaking, I’m open to most people, but when they’ve crossed the line and really betrayed you, then I know where to stop.

In this situation where you endorsed Gloria, do you think that someone like Alatorre and Torres and Polanco felt it was a betrayal?

I’m sure they did, but, you know, you build loyalties with people. I mean, I speak to Art Torres and I know Yolanda Nava from their marriage and I know their kids. I know Richard. I see him. I just saw him recently and, well, we talk. We say hello, but I’m not involved with them. I’m not in their business and they’re not in mine. That’s the way that you operate as an individual.

What was it about Gloria that you felt she would make a good political official?

Well, you know, I have four daughters and my wife, they’re very pro-feminists. They’ve always told me that I have to respect women and stand up for them and things like that. When you have someone that works with and works for you and is a good, loyal supporter, you simply reciprocate. Gloria has always been a very good supporter of mine and vice versa, you know. She’s a strong woman. She has some vision about certain things and, well, that’s Gloria, you know, but she’s never been antagonistic to me or my family, so she’s somebody I can support.

Do you remember her qualities in those early days? Does anything stand out to you as far as what she brought to the organization?

Well, she was caring. She cared for that barrio that she was involved with and did her best to make sure that the kind of grant that we had, the program that we had, that she fulfilled the requirements, the federal requirements, and did her job in trying to build job opportunities for young people. She was strong and well spoken, and you could tell that she was going to be a leader. So you support people like that, because you’ve always seen the other side. You know, people are timid or they don’t care or they’re just fancy-free and just want to have a good time. Gloria was a very serious person, and you just know that there’s leadership quality there, and you support that.

You don’t recall her asking you directly for support?

Yes, yes, oh, absolutely.

Do you remember that conversation?

Well, “Esteban, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. Can I count on your support?” “Absolutely.” “Will you speak for me on this occasion?” Or, “Will you come to this event and talk on my behalf?” I’ve done that on many occasions. So, no, that’s just the kind of relationship I have with a person like her.

That’s interesting. That would be her 1983 election?

Eighty-three?

Or maybe I have this date wrong. That’s when you were elected to Congress.

Yes, right.

And then Gloria was elected to State Assembly, but I don’t have the exact date for that, but within that period that you were in Congress, between 1983 and 1999 is when she was—here, I have it, 1987. Oh, no, that’s City Council. So I need to get that date correct.

And I supported her for Council. I remember that.

Well, can you talk to me a little bit, then, about your—

Let me tell you about her support for supervisor.

You want to go up to that point?

Where are we at?

Okay. Sure. Sure, that’s perfect. Well, that’s a little later. That’s in ’91.

Oh, okay.

But I wanted to get back a little bit to when you were elected to Congress and then we can start talking about some of your legislation, but before, I would like you to tell me what that feeling was like, that victory, and how it affected your family.

Well, the family was tremendously involved as precinct workers, walkers, door knockers. Arcy, my wife, of course was always involved in the headquarters, being with me at all the rallies and showing her support for her husband in this capacity. Before I undertook any of these campaigns, we always sat down as a family and discussed the quest, and we got consensus. You know, “Let’s do it. Let’s do it.” Without that, I could have never done what I’ve done. So they’ve been very, very important in my trajectory politically and anything else. They’ve really been very supportive. They took on the assignments, grunt assignments, doing the things that are tough work, because they were my family and I could count on them. When we won, when we won the election after such a hard fight, it was just outstanding. I can’t tell you the exhilaration that we felt.

George Pla played a tremendous role, as I said, in bringing this campaign together. I remember the night of the elections. You know, you don’t know that you’re going to win or not. But I remember listening to the—he was calling me. I was home and he was calling me, telling me that the absentee votes were coming in, and the absentee votes were very high for Jim Lloyd, which is understandable. The absentee votes are usually Republicans who are away on vacation and they vote absentee, or they don’t come out to the polling place. A lot of them are seniors, and they stay in and vote by—I don’t think they had—yes, they voted, but they usually vote conservative. But that was the conservative vote was coming in, but I was even doing well there. I wasn’t on top, but I was doing well. So he said, “You’d better come to the headquarters now, because everybody’s here and everybody’s waiting for you.” So we went and, sure enough, the votes started coming in, and by eleven o’clock at night we had a victory, and, I mean, the place went crazy. We had so many people there that worked so hard and the unions and the community people. We got a lot of votes that normally wouldn’t have gone out to vote, people of Pico Rivera and Santa Fe Springs and Norwalk and Cerritos, people in South El Monte and East L.A. We just beat Jim Lloyd like he’d never been beat before, you know. So it was tremendous to reach that kind of a victory. And, of course, we prepared ourselves to go to Washington. We’d been there, of course, so it was just going back to where we’d been before.

That’s true.

But with a whole new, different outlook on our lives. It was good.

Did she have any advice for you, your wife?

Well, sure. She’s been a good advisor, a good fighter on my behalf. I remember some of the Town Hall meetings that we had even before we were elected. We’d go to a meeting at night with the campaign and with the people there wanting to see what our programs were. On one occasion there was Jim Lloyd and myself and a third candidate, and somehow the third candidate made an inference—we didn’t do that; he made an inference that Jim Lloyd was an alcoholic and he wouldn’t be a good member of Congress. He’d already been one, but with this kind of disability, you know, he wouldn’t make a good representative. Somehow Jim Lloyd’s wife thought that we had made the accusation, and she got up public in that meeting and started berating me, you know, that I was playing dirty and this and that. She was really upset. Jim Lloyd did have a disability. Whenever he got into a heavy debate or a lot of stress or whatever, he would have a physical reaction. He had something they called Bell’s Palsy. His face would twitch, you know. That happened that night, and I think that’s why that guy made that comment about him. He said, “Look at you,” or something, “You’re a drunk,” or something. And somehow the wife inferred that that was my camp doing that, and she got up to really berate me about playing dirty and my people doing this to Jim. But Arcy picked up on it, and she got up and she told that lady, “Listen. You listen here,” and just read the riot act to her and kind of shook her up. The crowd was going crazy watching this going on. But Arcy handled that so good, that sat this woman down and the lady apologized. I didn’t know it was going on, but she did.

Incredible.

Yes. Things like that, you know.

What about in situations where, for example, you had to decide, like, for example, Gloria Molina. Did she advise you on that? Or other issues that she might have weighed in on your decision, being the person closest to you, your most trusted. Do you recall any other times?

In what kind of decision?

Any decisions that you might have to vote one way or another way, to endorse somebody versus somebody else, or anything that stands out.

You know, Gloria was a high-level member of the Democratic National Committee. She’s one of the vice presidents, and on issues like that, yes, we would confer and talk, and she would say, “Esteban, can you do this or go this and that direction?”

I mean your wife.

Oh, my wife. I’m sorry.

Yes, as your most intimate—

Oh, I’m sorry.

That’s okay.

I thought you said Gloria, so that’s why.

Well, I guess I was talking about when you decided to endorse her. Did Mrs. Torres weigh in on that decision, that kind of thing?

Well, Arcy did, but Arcy had a good feeling about Gloria. My daughter [Carmen] worked for Gloria in her campaign, and Gloria still remembers that. So we always had a good feeling about Gloria, her family, where she came from, her roots and all that, and we championed, you know, a person, a woman being as strong and as articulate and as supportive of the kinds of issues that we were supportive of.

Do you remember any other situations where Mrs. Torres was influential? Any legislation, any endorsements?

Her and my daughters were always influential on those issues that dealt with social problems, things that impacted our community, legislation that impacted on the welfare of people, women’s rights, the issue on abortions and the right for women to choose, the right for women to be political leaders, whatever. They were always, “Dad, you’d better do this. Dad, don’t let us down.” Of course, Arcy, you know, always, “How are you going to vote on that?” I say, “Well—.” “Well, don’t forget, you’ve got to do the right thing here.” The wives are so important, you know. I mean, one doesn’t do this on their own. I’ve got to say that. And because of that, I’ve always respected them because they have been so helpful to me, because if it weren’t for them, I couldn’t have done all the things that I did. The long hours and days and weeks and months sometimes that I was away, Arcy was tending to those kids on her own, in a snowstorm, away on holidays. When I was in Peru somewheres or Argentina or Brazil or Mexico, she was minding the store, and I can’t ever appreciate the amount of appreciation I have for that. Good mother, good partner, good supporter, good advisor, good precinct worker.

So then once you get to Congress, you know D.C. already very well. Did you have any objectives or goals of some of the first things you wanted to achieve?

Well, part of the campaign was that people knew that I’d been a labor leader and a community leader and all that, and people felt that, “Yes, he’s traveled all over, he’s been all over Latin America and Europe, and he’s going to go into foreign relations and we’re not going to see him. He’s going to be always on the go somewheres. On the weekends when he should be at home, he’s going to be with some congressional delegation in some faraway country.” They made it plain that they didn’t want that kind of congressman. So they made me commit that I would not go on the Labor Committee, that I would not be on Foreign Relations, but that I would be on a committee that would deal with hometown issues, education, the economics of the country, of the community, the state, whatever. I took advisement from my colleagues, who were going to be my colleagues, and my advisors, and they said, “We think you ought to really target being a member of the Banking Committee, banking and small business, because a lot of the people in the San Gabriel Valley that supported you were small business people, and banking has to do with housing, it has to do with consumer affairs, it has to do with international development, it has to do with all aspects that touch on people, so that’s where you ought to be.” Well, that’s a tough committee to get on because of the nature. People want to be in that. It’s considered high-level economic-political organization. So I had my congressional colleagues in Congress lobby the Speaker of the House, [Thomas P.] “Tip” O’Neill [Jr.]. “Look. Esteban has this problem. He won because he committed to not go on Foreign Affairs and not go on the Labor Committee, but to really strike out at a place where he can really be reelected again. He won well. He beat one of your former guys, Jim Lloyd, but he’s here to stay. He’s a big strong Latino. He’s Hispanic, and he wants to go on Banking.”

So the Speaker had a lot to say about that. Other people wanted to go on banking—Barbara Boxer. “I want to be on Banking. I was a former stockbroker and I know the system and I know this.” And the Bermans were backing Barbara Boxer. The Bermans, heavy political guys. Roybal and the Latinos, “Esteban has got to get that spot.” And I got it. So that’s where I ended up. It was a very difficult place to be, because I’m not a banker. I’m not a capitalist. If anything, I’m a socialist. How am I going to be—you can be a socialist and understand banking, you know. So I had a lot of learning to do. You go through a lot of conferences and lectures and you go to a lot of schooling to understand the banking system and how it works and how it affects people, and that’s what I did. Eventually I became the chairman of one of the subcommittees in Congress, in Banking. I was Chairman of the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs and the coinage, monetary coinage issues. That’s when I did my—I told you about my credit-reporting thing, much against the system, but I was for the people, so I got the legislation passed and today you get your free credit report because of that legislation.

How did that idea generate, or what was the genesis of that?

Well, because on the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs I began to get letters from the consuming public, thousands of letters about the way that the credit-reporting system, which is a good system, but there’s a lot of abuse and a lot of error. People that paid their bills and were prompt and all that would get terrible credit reports. They weren’t accurate, and they couldn’t get mortgages or they couldn’t buy a car or whatever. So they would complain to the Federal Trade Commission, they’d complain to the Congress, and all that stuff would come to my subcommittee.

So I sat down with the consumer affairs advocates in the country. I said, “What do we do about this?” They’re the ones that came up and said, “We’ve got to amend the Credit Reporting Act. It’s not working for the public.” So you bring in the people that can write that kind of legislation. You get your staff, who understands the internal legislative process, and we came up with an amendment and we lobbied. We lobbied the Congress, we lobbied the colleagues, and we got it passed. That’s the way you do every bill. You have to build a consensus and a following. Sometimes you do and just the votes aren’t there, even from your party.

Before you started to receive those letters, did you have any idea that that was such an important issue to the American public?

In a way I did. In a way, I think I had, in my own instance, applied for a credit report. That’s one good thing about my wife. She’s just so precise on making sure that we’re never delinquent on anything. Because of that and when I would get a credit report that we asked for and had to pay for, it was an error, and we had been denied credit someplace because of that, and we knew for sure that that was just not true. But what could you do about it, you know? I wasn’t in Congress or anything like that. So you just didn’t get that product or you didn’t get that credit that you needed. So I had an idea. Then when I get on the subcommittee and I start getting the letters, and my staff starts telling me, “Look at this. Look at these letters that we’re getting, and the Trade Commission is sending them over to us,” we knew we had to do something.

Well, this will be my last question. I don’t want to keep you longer than twelve-thirty. But did you work with Ralph Nader or any of those high-level consumer groups, do you recall?

Yes, yes, we worked with Ralph Nader and a lot consumer groups. In fact, Ralph Nader was one of the persons that came to me and said, “Do you want to run for Congress against George Danielson?”

You worked with him even before you were chair of the consumer—

Yes.

Oh, that’s interesting. Can you talk to me about that?

In fact, I think if I check my letterhead on that campaign, he was one of my sponsors.

Can you talk to me about that relationship and how it developed?

Well, he knew of me because of TELACU and the things that we were doing as a community organization and working on people’s behalf. Then he was, of course, involved very much with the auto industry, as you’ll recall. And even as an auto worker and as a union representative, you know, I had issues with the auto companies, the seatbelt problems and auto safety and all that. I was an assembler. I knew what was going into a car. I would complain about it to the management, and they wouldn’t listen. Subsequent to that, you had flaws in the vehicles that were causing deaths and things like that. I remembered saying, “Hey, I remember we warned the company that if they didn’t put ten welds on that wheelbase,” they were only putting four instead of ten, “that that wheel was someday going to come off and there would be an accident.” But they wanted to get those cars on the line so fast, you know—it’s all profit motive—that they disregarded simple union representative’s comments about it.

People like Ralph Nader were aware of that, so when people started talking to me about taking on George Danielson, he was one of the guys that told me, “Hey, you ought to consider running against this guy. He is just terrible on these issues.” So they do that. So I said, “Well, Ralph Nader,” you know. So, yes.

Is there anything specific that you worked on with him later on, once you did get into office?

Well, later on any of these issues on banking, consumer affairs, he would testify before our committees. He’d testify before the full committee. He would write to us and we would respond. He knew that I was a good person. I never ended up in the electoral process endorsing him for office. I always thought he was sort of a spoiler, you know. I had my loyalties to the Party, to the Democratic Party.

Did he ask you for endorsement?

Oh, yes, yes. Sure. But they understand where you’re coming from, that you have a larger base to answer to and work with. As long as you were good on the issues that he was, he was friendly and all that.

Was that a difficult decision for you?

It is, because you admire certain people even though they’re out of the mainstream and they’ve got a mindset on certain issues of social justice and economic justice, and you appreciate that. You like that, you know. When you know they can’t be elected, and, in fact, they’re using their position to just maybe keep others from voting for the other candidate, you figure, well, he’s just being a spoiler. He knows he can’t make it, but he’s going to try it anyway.

If you would give him advice, say he does want a political office and political power, what kind of advice would you have given him as far as would it be not running, or would it be run for a different position? Because it sounds like he went straight to the presidency versus—

Well, yes, I would have thought that people like him, you know, they have a following, they come from a state that obviously has political representation, and people like that could use that very well, as a Ted Kennedy does or Barack Obama did, to elect themselves to the Senate and be a senator and fight for those things, and then shoot for the presidency. But to just outright do it, create a Green Party or whatever, yes, they have a national following, but it’s not big enough to really propel them into that presidential seat.

That’s interesting. I had no idea you had such a relationship with Ralph Nader. But before we end, you can’t recall any other specific issue while you were in the Consumer Affairs Committee besides the credit card? Was there something to do with health or insurance?

I’ll tell what I did that was gratifying. The World Cup people, the people that promote the World Cup, came to me and said, “We need to raise money for the World Cup, and we can do that by having you, as the Chairman of the Coinage Committee, introduce the legislation that would create a World Cup metal coin.” Coin collectors will buy it, because that’s what they do, they buy these coins. And here’s our committee. They brought a bunch of people around to lobby me. One of them, as I recall, was Henry Kissinger. He was on their committee. And they make the plea. “We need this. It supports the American team, and it’s an American coin and it’s sold worldwide. We want you to do that. It’d be good for our country,” and this and that, you know the speech.

So I figure you always don’t say “yes” right away, and then I got to talking to people that deal with this issue, and, “Well, yes, they make a lot of money on these coins, and you ought to leverage that. Yes, you’ll do it, but some of the proceeds, the profits of that, you should be able to designate a percentage, not to yourself, it’s not going to be money for you or your campaign or whatever, but to a cause that you champion.” So I said, “Like what?” They said, “Well, I don’t know. Maybe—.” The staff got together. I said, “What do we do?” They said, “Well, why don’t we propose 10 percent of the profits of this coin. It’s going to make millions of dollars. Ten million. If they make ten million, you propose that a million dollars come back to you to designate that that money should go to a charity.” I said, “What charity?” “Well, I don’t know. Let’s pick Hispanic scholarships.” “Well, that’s an idea.” “Don’t just pick one. A million dollars? Pick two or three.” I said, “That’s an idea. What should we pick?” “Well, let’s sit down.” So we went through it. I said, “Okay, let’s give $330,000 to the National Council La Raza for scholarships to poor kids. Let’s give 330 to the National Hispanic Scholarship Program.” Somebody lobbied me on that one. They said, “Let’s give $330 to the National Hispanic Business Scholarship.” So we agreed on that.

Then I negotiated with the World Cup people. They said, “Okay, you can have your million dollars. If we make ten million, you get a million.” And we did. So when it was all said and done, we were able to give a check to each of those three organizations for 330-some to equal out the million. So that’s a good deal, just by being a legislator and negotiating with somebody that wants a coin. And I did that for the White House. The White House wanted a coin to celebrate the cornerstone of the White House. “The White House needs refurbishing, all the rooms, and make it America’s house. We need a coin that commemorates the White House and its anniversary of its building.” So I fashioned a coin for them, and it sold big. The president and the first lady were very grateful to me and the committee, you know. Things like that. You do things. Pelé [Edison "Edson" Arantes do Nascimento] came to one of the events the World Cup had. Remember Pelé? He and I held up the World Cup, and I was part of that just because I authored a coin.

You wouldn’t think—because when you mentioned that, I’m thinking, well, what kind of impact socially could that have, and you just gave a great example, things that the ordinary person doesn’t really get a sense of.

Exactly. It’s all, so it’s going to go to a team or something. Actually, the money was for the teams, but the coin-collecting industry, they buy up these coins. I introduced also the dollar coin. The people that were promoting the dollar coin were talking about the uselessness of the dollar bill, it only lasts something like eighteen days and they wear out. Then they’re burned. Look at the amount of paper they take. Look at the amount of ink that’s used. Then they have to burn them. It causes pollution. You have a coin, it lasts forever, you know. Yes, you can have a bunch of dollar bills. They don’t weigh much, but a coin, it weighs a little. So ten coins with ten dollars is going to weigh more than just a ten-dollar bill. But they’re easier to use on machines, they’re easier for the public to handle, and they’re sought after, etc., etc. “It’s time to have a dollar coin.

So I introduced the bill. We did a lot of research on it. It failed a House vote. The opposition, the people that favor the dollar bills for use in currency, they have lobbyists that fight for that dollar bill not to be extinct, and so the dollar coin lost. But later on when I retired, somebody else introduced it and it passed, and now we have a dollar coin. Maybe you’ve seen them.

Yes.

But they all started there, see. In other words, what I did is I was a trial balloon. People saw, “Hey, there is an interest and there is a lobby and there is money to be made. Let’s do it.” So they put on a good campaign and they won. Everything is somehow touched by Congress, you know.

That’s a great place to start, because then we’ll talk next time about your work with the amnesty program and immigration. I’m going to stop it here. [End of May 9, 2011 interview]

This is Virginia Espino and today is May 23rd [2011]. I’m interviewing Congressman Esteban Torres at his home in West Covina [California]. Today, Congressman, we’re going to start with something you mentioned last time we were talking, and that was the different political maneuverings of the seventies and eighties, when Latinos were trying to gain a foothold in the political arena and trying to establish some, I would suspect, self-determination for their communities by having Latino representation. There was an organization that I was reading about recently, and it’s called Californios For Fair Representation. Apparently, they had a lot to do with getting people elected. Did you have any involvement with that organization?

Not directly. I recall them, that they were active in the issue of empowerment for Latinos in, of course, California. I’m trying to recall the name of one of the principal leaders in that organization. But I recall that that was their whole quest, was to bring a greater awareness to our own community, but also lobbying legislators and the people in Sacramento who would have an effect on the reapportionment process. Yes, they were involved, but I was not involved with them directly. I wasn’t a member of the organization nor did I attend any of the hearings. I’m sure they lobbied, but I wasn’t called to be a witness or anything. But I recall supporting the issue. I thought it was an important one.

Did they have any candidates that you supported, that you endorsed, or did they ask for your endorsement?

I don’t remember actually candidates per se. I remember the effort that there had to be a greater degree of representation at all levels of government, especially in the Assembly, in the State Senate and in Congress, and they were lobbying hard to make sure that Latinos were being heard and being part of a greater degree of empowerment for that community. As I recall, they were citing the districts and the way that the districts were gerrymandered so that they really did not allow for the Latino community not having—it was contiguous, but it was cut up so that they never had a majority of any district, and therefore they could never elect anybody. That was their whole issue.

Did you agree with their strategy and how they went about obtaining their goals?

As I recall, I did. They weren’t rambunctious or anything. They were very well disciplined in their approach, as I recall, very well informed about the whole issue of reapportionment and how it should take place. I recall that at that time, people that were in elected office, the Phil Burtons of the world, as I’ve mentioned already, already in Congress, Mr. [Edward] Roybal and others were cognizant of their appeals, and evidently that played well in the 1980 reapportionment.

There were a couple of controversial campaigns. One you talked about last time, and that was Gloria Molina, because she was running against a Latino at the time who was supported by other Latino political officials.

Yes.

And there was another candidate that I was reading about, and his name is Steve Rodriguez.

Steve, yes.

He was running against Art Snyder, and you endorsed Art Snyder versus Steve.

I don’t recall that I endorsed Art Snyder.

Is that an incorrect rendering?

I would think so, because I knew Steve. I thought he was an articulate and courageous young man, and for as long as I could remember, we thought that Art Snyder really should have moved on. The community was such that there should have been a Latino there. Although we courted Art Snyder for various issues that we needed a councilman to carry out some of our requests in terms of L.A. city issues, but I don’t recall endorsing Art Snyder.

That’s interesting, because that’s what [Rudy] Acuña says in his book, in the book that you lent me, Anything But Mexican. But that was an important election, but both yourself and Roybal endorsed or supported Snyder and not Rodriguez in that.

That’s interesting.

But you never lent your endorsement or support to Snyder?

I don’t recall. I’m sure the record would show someplace, but I don’t recall. The reason Steve comes to mind was because—do you recall that election, what year that was?

1983.

1983. Well, already—let’s see. 1983.

You were running, yourself.

Yes, indeed. I recall Steve because President [James E. “Jimmy”] Carter had been a houseguest of his when President Carter was running for office, and President Carter had the habit that when he was out in the field campaigning, he would not stay in big luxury hotels; he would stay in citizens’ homes. And somehow it was designated that Steve Rodriguez’s home was picked for Carter to stay at. I remember Steve going to all degrees of enhancing his home because the president was going to spend time there. He often joked about having to really install a new bathroom and spruce up the house, because, of course, the presidential candidate was coming. Steve and I have always been good friends, so I don’t recall that I would have ever endorsed someone else against him.

That’s interesting, because it goes against exactly what the argument is in the book, and it seems like that was an important election—

It was.

—because Art Snyder, you mentioned that you courted him. Was he a friend to Latinos?

Well, he had a large constituency. The reason that we, as I recall, dealt with Art Snyder was because I was a principal organizer of Plaza de la Raza. In fact, that was one of my ideas, to bring about that Cultural Center, and we needed Art Snyder on the City Council to provide the resolution that would give the organization the right to acquire the park for building that facility. We needed that councilman’s vote, and we went to his office, we talked to him about it. He was very supportive, and he gave the organization the wherewithal to lease from the city the park for a dollar a year, to build Plaza de la Raza. So that’s all the politics involved in getting that support from him. Other than that, I don’t know of any other area where I would have supported Art Snyder. I know that TELACU [The East Los Angeles Community Union], after I was gone, had a relationship with Art Snyder in terms of consulting or whatever, but I wasn’t around.

Interesting. Well, tell me a little bit more about your—I didn’t realize that you were one of the architects of the—or not the actual architect of the design, but— 0:09:10.5

Well, I’ll tell you how it came about. As you know, in my Latin American travels I worked for a substantial amount of time in Mexico, Mexico City, because that’s where the International Metalworkers Federation [IMF] had a regional office. The UAW [United Auto Workers] was an affiliate of the IMF, as it’s called, not the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, the International Metalworkers Federation. Much of my work outside the country would center around Mexico City, where the regional headquarters was at, and then from there I would branch out into Argentina or Peru or Brazil. In Mexico City, I had the good fortune to visit the Cultural Centers there. I once visited a locality called Bazar de los Sábados, and what it was an entire block of downtown colonial residences, an entire block that had been acquired by any number of artists. They had bought up these homes or leased them. In the center of the block, so to speak, was a huge courtyard which all the residences had access to. Well, all of these artists used these colonial homes as studios for their particular brand of art, painting, sculpture, jewelry, textiles, everything, and they used the courtyard to sell their wares on Saturdays, only Saturdays. You could tour their studios and you could go into the center courtyard where they had music and they had food, and it was really quite a thing. I suppose it’s still there today. So I always would ask people, “Have you ever visited the Bazar de los Sábados?” and some people had, some hadn’t. Well, anyway, to make a long story short, one day a committee of people from Lincoln Heights came to visit me at TELACU, and I can remember the names of those people. Ed Bonnilla was the head of that particular community group, and Frances Crisostomo, a local Lincoln Heights resident, a woman, came as well, and they posed a dilemma to me. They said, “Lincoln Park is really deteriorating.” And I remember Lincoln Park as a kid. They used to have a carousel there. It was a huge park and it was in the middle of the community, but I hadn’t seen it of late. And I said, “What’s happening?” They said, “Well, the lake has been drained. The lake no longer has water in it. There’s a boathouse at the edge of the lake, and the weather has taken its toll on it. The roof is caving in. It’s a beautiful brick building, but the roof is caving in and everything’s rotted inside, and we’re thinking as a community that we could rehabilitate that building by organizing labor people and community residents, and we could make that a Community Center.”

I said, “Well, what would you do with that building once you rehab it?” They said, “Well, we think we could probably turn it into a Mexican restaurant, and we’d like to maybe see if the city would fill up the lake again. It’s nothing but debris now, just a big hole with a lot of trash in it.” I said, “Well, you know, that’s a formidable undertaking, but let’s see what we can do.” So I assigned my staff. Joe Avila was the Director of Economic Development, and Tony Moreno was also a member of the staff. I said, “Why don’t you guys go out there, do an economic feasibility study to see whether, in fact, a restaurant and getting the lake filled up—they want to put boats back in it again. Let’s see if that’ll work.” So they went out and they looked at it. I went with them, as I recall, and it was pretty devastated. Then they started doing a feasibility study, talking to local merchants, to local community people. Questions, would they partake in a restaurant there? Would that fill their desires? They did a real economic study such that when it was off and done and finished, they said, “It’s not going to work. There’s not enough feeling for a restaurant there. The costs would be horrendous. How would they refurbish that building? It would need all kinds of enhancements, and they would need to work over a series of code statutes to make that into a restaurant. The lake, that’s going to be a lot of water, cleanup, maintenance. The boats run on batteries. That means they would have to have those batteries charged constantly to be able to make the boats work, and there’s no indication that people want to use these boats, so it’s not going to go.”

And I was saddened, because here I thought, well, that’s a good idea. So the committee came back for results and sadly I told them, I said, “Look. Here’s the paperwork. Here are the figures. Here are the numbers. Economically it’s not feasible. I’m sorry to tell you that.” So we discussed it with them, and they said, “Well, what else do you think that we could do there that would bring our community together? We could really make a real impact on our community in Lincoln Heights right there on that park.” It just came to me. I said, “Have you ever visited Bazar de los Sábados?” And they said, “No. What’s that?” So I described it. I said, “I’ve been to Mexico, and there’s,” as I just told you, “this group of artisans that gather every Saturday. I mean, they live there, but every Saturday they open up their courtyard to be able to expose all their artistic wares, and it becomes really a huge art gallery, with food and entertainment, etc., etc. I could envision doing that. In fact, imagine filling up the lake with water and maybe not having motor boats, because they take—well, we could have motor boats, but we would do them like they do in the gardens of Xochimilco, those little boats with the top on them that have feminine names, Carmelita and Diana and all those. Chalupas, they call them. We can have those,” I said. “We could have artists. We could refurbish the building, make it into a gallery where artists, local artists could come, Chicano artists, display their works. We could get, as you said, labor people to help us refurbish and to things to make it really cultural, really a Mexicano center, park, and we’ll call it Plaza de la Raza.” “Oh,” they said, “that sounds great.”

We had an architect onboard at TELACU, and I said, “Why don’t you do an architectural rendering of what that would look like and then we’ll show it to the committee and maybe they can vote on it. We’ll call it Plaza de la Raza.” So he did. He had this large architectural rendering about this big [demonstrates], with this lake and the boathouse, and they loved it. They said, “We’ll do it. We’ll do it. What do we need to do?” I said, “Well, first of all, we have to get you to get a lawyer to put your committee today.” What do you call it? You have to get a 501(c)(3).

Nonprofit?

Nonprofit designation by the state. We called our lawyer in, Carlos Garcya. He was sitting in on the meeting. I said, “Carlos, can you arrange to get the Plaza de la Raza incorporated?” “Yes,” he said, “we can do that.” So we got all that put together. We had a member of our Board of Directors at TELACU. He was an old trade unionist who dabbled in the arts. He liked the arts. He was married to a Jewish lady who very much was an art connoisseur, Ann Lopez, and this man was Frank Lopez. We said, “Frank, do you have contacts in that community? I know that you and Ann have a lot of contacts with the Hollywood people. Could you help us bring them into this?”

And he said, “Yeah. In fact, I don’t have a job right now. Well, talk to the committee. Do you think that I could arrange to work with them and be kind of an executive director, interim?” We said, “Yeah, why not? We need to help them.” So we started out. It was Frank who went to Hollywood, and I remember him telling me that he had talked to a lady, I think her name was Anna Bing, B-i-n-g. In fact, her son today is a multimillionaire, Bing. He’s in Hollywood. He’s a big producer of sorts. But he went to Mrs. Bing and tried to get her involved in Plaza de la Raza, and she said, “Well, you know, I’ll help, but I think a more appropriate person to really help you on that would be Margo, Margo Albert. Do you know Margo Albert?” Frank said, “No.” She said, “Well, she’s Eddie Albert’s wife, and she’s a Mexican. She’s from Mexico. She’s an actress and she played in the movie Zapata with Marlon Brando. She loves Mexico. It’s her country. She loves the arts, and I’m sure she’ll want to put some theater aspect into the plaza, maybe a theater of sorts. So why don’t you get her involved.” So Frank did, and Margo came onboard. We talked about her helping out. She was going to be a madrina, and, sure enough, she did a lot of work in building up the enthusiasm around the Plaza. In fact, most books or things that I’ve seen credit Margo Albert with being the founder of Plaza de la Raza.

That’s what I thought.

They don’t mention me or they don’t mention Carlos or any of those folks. They mention her. Frank went on to work with them, became a really good executive director until he died. It’s there today and it has its ups and downs, but it’s still there.

It’s an important, hugely important Cultural Center for the working class.

We got a team, I recall, of Mexican construction workers to come and build children’s slides and things that children could climb up on, and they built them like little mini-pyramids, you know, like little Aztec or Mayan pyramids. It was quite interesting. I haven’t been there for years. Suppose they might still be there?

The pyramids?

Yes.

I don’t recall. But can you tell me what it was like? Were you there when they first opened, when they had their first classes?

Well, yes. In fact, I wasn’t the first; I think Ed Bonnilla was the first president of Plaza de la Raza. That was the incorporated group and he was the president, and I was the second president. I played a role as the president of the board. It was very popular. Well, this is why we needed Art Snyder, see, because we needed that park. We needed to really have our 501(c)(3), have a legal basis for having that Cultural Center there, and it’s there still today, probably under the same lease agreement.

What was the response from the community once you opened? Did you have a lot of students trying to apply?

We had a lot of students.

Was it difficult getting them?

I remember building a big Board of Directors with important people on there. I remember California Edison and California Gas Company, the AFL-CIO, just tons of folks. Margo Albert brought in a lot of her Hollywood folks in, and these are the major fundraisers for the park operation. So there was a lot of enthusiasm. Then I recall the building of the theater. Margo was, of course, instrumental in that. I think they also built a communications studio, and I think they named it after Ruben Salazar. After I left, I didn’t have any more involvement with them. I know that they didn’t create—later on as I followed events, I would hear that they weren’t doing so well. As I recall, they had a government contract. They had a Child Development Center there under the—

Head Start?

Head Start. And that got in trouble. They had some financial problems and that created a controversy, and I think eventually they had to withdraw the contract. So it kind of went downhill. Then again I learned that it had come back up and it was struggling, and I’m not sure today of its development.

Well, you’ve been a part of some very important organizations that were innovative, that were visionary, starting from zero and creating it step by step. What do you think would be a recipe for success? Because some of these organizations later on went to have controversial reputations and mismanagement of money and not the kind of success that you witnessed when you were running them. Can you give me an idea of what you feel were some of the elements that made them successful endeavors while under your leadership?

I think basically it was discipline, that I always considered myself and the persons I surrounded myself with had to be terribly honest. They had to really display a large degree of integrity and not allow the fact that we were doing well or moving in a positive direction to take advantage of the situation for our own self-gratification or whatever.

I’ll say this, that most of the people that I dealt with were progressive people. They were trade unionists. In every instance, I always sort of moved in the direction where I could get the Labor Movement to support me, and since I was a part of them, to help me with the people that were involved in that movement. I always credit the Labor Movement for being righteous in their support for working people, for doing the right things in a social way and a democratic fashion and not letting it go to their head so that they took advantage of the situation. That’s why sometimes I look back and I think that the TELACU model failed when I wasn’t there, when once I left, somebody else was on and they took a different direction, and I don’t think that the same elements that I had surrounding me surrounded my successors. That’s my view on things.

Would you say that it’s a question of personal style that leads to a successful endeavor or an unsuccessful one, or are there dynamics of power that come to play within the organization that challenge one?

Well, you have to have—it’s interesting you say power. You have to have a sense of power, power you build through a sense of astute leadership. You demonstrate that you’re going to run an important organization that stands for something and has to proceed in that fashion, and you have to have the people surrounding you believing in that and that you’re not going to let anything alter that direction, and sometimes you have to do it through a very strong discipline, which becomes powerful. If you’re lackadaisical about issues, if you let people abuse other people, then you can have problems. I know of instances where someone on my staff, I recall a member of my staff one time telling a female staffer to go bring me a cup of coffee, and this female staffer said, “I’m not a waitress.”

The individual said, “Well, if you don’t do as I order you to do, you’re not going to work here anymore.” And this was unbeknownst to me. I didn’t order her to get me a cup of coffee, he did, and he threatened her for not doing it. She had been previously a United States Army sergeant. She had been a noncommissioned officer in the army, and she wasn’t about to take orders from some male telling her to get me a cup of coffee. So she filed a lawsuit under the government provisions against us, against the organization, so it looks like I did it, but I didn’t do it, and I didn’t tolerate that kind of performance by that individual, so I had to take action on it. So you have things that happen, and I would have never done that.

Did she win?

She won, yes.

Was there a financial settlement?

I don’t know. I don’t think it came to that. It was just a sorry thing to have to get into, you know, where you have to go and defend your organization and defend yourself for something you didn’t do. There are cases where, as I say, when you don’t take action on an issue like that, then that begins to move into the organization and disrupt your morale, the morale of the staff and women, men, and that’s when you have organizations’ internal strife. I always sought to not have that happen in my organization or anyplace that I was involved, including whether I was in Congress or in an ambassador position. I had to make sure that we ran a tight ship.

I’d like to compare a little bit of your experience with being a congressman and running these nonprofit organizations, these community service organizations, because it seems like in one area you have more power, more control, and in the other arena, as a congressman, it seems like there’s more negotiation, more compromise. Did you find that you had to negotiate and compromise within TELACU in the same way that you did later on in Congress and vice versa?

I think you always have to negotiate and you have to compromise certain issues, as long as you feel that compromise is going to lead in terms of a positive direction. I would never want to compromise or enter into such an issue that has a terrible negative impact on your organization, yourself, whatever. So, yes, I think in any situation you have to negotiate, you have to set rules, you have to play by the rules, and there are times when the rules are broken, but you have to take some kind of position where you’re not going to allow for rules to be broken. If you do, once you do, once you drop your principles, then you begin to have problems. But compromising, you know, in politics there are situations where that’s the art of politics, really, is compromising, trying to meet your goals and what you want to see done, as opposed to someone who has a different idea or a different way of doing it. You just can’t say, “Well, if you don’t do it my way, that’s it.” If you want it done, you have to somehow take into account the other side’s position and what will yield the best results to get what you want done.

Do you recall the Simpson-Mazzoli [Immigration and Reform Act] bill?

Yes.

On amnesty, immigration.

Well, I remember Simpson-Mazzoli, yes.

Was that something that you were involved in as maybe not necessarily writing the legislation, but were you aware of the discussion?

Yes, yes. That was the major issue in the immigration discussions at that time in Congress with Simpson-Mazzoli there.

That seems like an issue that would need compromise and political finesse.

Yes, yes.

Can you talk to me about that whole period?

Well, you’d have to be more specific on what particular issue, because there are many aspects of the whole immigration bill that I knew or people know that you have to draw a line. You have to know what is there. There’s immigration laws that we’ve enacted as a nation, and we know them to be in the best interest of the country. They’re there for a reason, and unless they are really such that they penalize people or—well, as we see today, we have immigration laws, and we know that we would not want to see some of those because they’re so rigid. But they’re there for a purpose, and when it comes to testing them, when it comes to making a decision, “Well, is that what you want?” you have to go on one side or the other and decide where you stand on them. I mean, some people will say, “Well, we need to have an open border.” Well, it’d be okay to have an open border if everything was equal, you know. But we know that we live in a nation that there’s a nation neighbor to us that is not economically equal to us, and therefore there are people that are going to spill over into our country, and we have laws that limit how that’s going to be done, and we have a process. And as long as the process appears to be fair and equitable, you can live with that, but they can be so rigid that they trouble you.

I mean I, for one, I’m the victim of seeing those laws enacted against me, in a way, my ancestors. My father was deported because he was not an American citizen, and like many people that are here today that are not American citizens, he was deported, and he was deported under the circumstances that these people were here taking away American jobs and they had no right to be here, although they were invited to come and work. When they were productive and the economy was good, it was okay, but when it got bad, then it wasn’t good to have them here, so you get rid of them, and you use different guises to get rid of them. I think that the Repatriation Act that was promulgated by this country was a terrible, terrible thing to do, send people back, citizens included, because there was an economic issue in this country, the depression. So there are unfair issues that beset that you can’t quite agree with, that being one of them.

Apparently you took a strong stand against an attempt to bring a guest-worker program back.

I did.

Can you talk to me about that?

Well, I just saw the abuse that employers played upon guest workers. It was almost a form of servitude here in this country. You bring in people because you need them, but then when you’re here, you abuse them. You pay them unfair wages and you don’t provide benefits for them, or you bring them in under a contract supposedly that’s going to provide for their welfare and their well-being, with the agreement that after a certain amount of time they can go back or they will go back, but while they’re here, you abuse them and you use them for the employers’ sake of cheaper wages and, in a way, intolerant conditions. So I don’t subscribe to that type of guest worker, and I know that that’s what growers and employers and producers do to these people. They also debase the principles of being able to organize workers, because employers bring them in to offset organizing efforts where people demand better wages and conditions, to bring in a guest worker who won’t complain and you can abuse. So I was against guest worker programs.

What’s the situation like when you have a bill that comes up and you’re not the author of it, but you have a position on it? Do you have lobbyists approach you on both sides? Can you describe a situation where you would have to decide on something and you have people coming to you to speak their case, something that’s really important to you? Did that occur with the guest-worker legislation?

Absolutely. Yes. You have employer groups, you have Chamber of Commerce, you have growers’ organizations, associations, you have all types of employer groups come and make their case that it’s important for the economy, it’s important for the wherewithal of a community or a state or an industry to have that kind of a worker partake in the production of their goods and services, and they make the case for it. You have to make the case that you understand that, but you understand also the pitfalls and the things that they do. Of course they say, “Well, we don’t do that. We wouldn’t do that.” But that’s all good well and said, but it’s not the true reality. And then you have the people on the other side that come to you and say, “This is not the way that we should treat our working class, our people that are here struggling to make a living with their families, and the employers are using this to exploit them, exploit the guest worker against our best interests. After all, we’re citizens. We pay our taxes. We have organization. We believe that we should have a better way of life than being laid off because they’re going to employ somebody that’s going to be earning less wages and benefits than we are.” So they make their case, and you have to decide where do you stand.

Who would those people be? Would they be from unions?

They’d be from unions, they’d be—

Would they be social services?

—sometimes even small business people, who feel that, you know, that’s not fair. They’re family-owned businesses that feel that that undermines their particular way of operations, the way that they employ people. I mean, you have both sides, and you’re in the middle. You have to make a decision where you’re going to stand.

In that kind of situation, do you ever receive gifts or say, “We’ll do this for you,” or get kind of a way of encouraging you through, I don’t know, “We’ll support you on this if you support us on that”? Is that part of the negotiating?

Well, that always comes into play. There’s always a quid pro quo. There’s always, “Look. We can’t be with you on this one, but on the next one we will. But do this one for us, and the next time when you are pushing for something, we’ll be on your side. We like what you’re doing.” You can be tempted to say, “Well, okay, I’ll do this time, but the next time when I’m vying for something, I want you to support me.” It’s—what do they call it—log-rolling or back-scratching or whatever, you know. But if you really believe in an issue and a principle, you don’t succumb to that. On issues like that, unless somehow you—and, sure, there’s cases where a member may feel the way I just described, but in the long run he may be part of a family business that has an interest in that way, and he may feel that in the long run, he is going to support that effort. He has a vested interest in seeing that, “Even though you don’t agree with it, but in the long run, I have a vested interest and I want to make it, so I’ll go along with it this time.” It’s an individual decision.

How important was immigration, the issue of immigration during your time in Congress?

Well, it was important. It was important. It was a serious issue, I mean, that we allowed, as a nation we allowed to fester, because we allow the unscrupulous people to take advantage of the situation and bring people in, entice them to come in, make promises to them, and people that are hard struck for economic well-being will certainly—if I were them, I would be doing the same. I would come for a better life. Of course, once you’re here, that doesn’t always prevail. And so we allowed that to happen, and before you knew it, we had more people here than we had bargained for, and they have an economic impact on the country, you know. It affects all of us. So when you try to rein in what you’ve done wrong as a nation and then you want to correct it, then you have to create certain alternatives how to rectify what you’ve done wrong. One of the things that you rectify, of course, is you find a way that you can’t just deport everybody, because that would have an economic impact, and it’s not righteous and the right thing to do, divide families based on who’s born here and who’s not and divide families, set them asunder. So what’s the best way to do that? Well, you say, “Well, those that have been here and paid taxes and have lived here for long periods of time, educated their kids here and bought their homes, we’re going to set a timeline for how long you’ve been here and what you’ve contributed to the well-being of the country, and if you meet certain conditions, you can stay.” Then it’s amnesty, and I think that’s—why not?

I mean, if you think in historic terms, that’s the way people came to this country from the beginning, seeking a better life, seeking certain freedoms and rights. They came and they stayed, and this is the way that our nation grew. It was a real melting pot, as they say. It troubles me when there comes a time when a particular class of people are not welcome in the same way that the others were, that you feel, wait a minute, why now? Why do you now want to get rid of all those folks, and that you have to say, “Well, look. You have to seek that alternative.”

Did you find that hostility or that feeling that we needed to close the borders to stop immigration from Mexico, did you find that sentiment a powerful one when you were in Congress, as we are witnessing today, or was it not so—

I don’t think it was a rigid and as—I mean, there’s a frenzy now on this whole issue. I don’t think there was a frenzy at that time. It was something we had to correct, and, yes, we had created certain conditions for that, but we could rectify it. Now it seems like we are just going to build a wall around ourselves and we’re not going to tolerate this anymore, but we still do it. We still have forces in this country and people who want to exploit people, and they cause this to happen. We can’t negate the fact that Mexico—and we’re talking about Mexico and other countries, other countries as well, people are escaping their economic condition or their political condition, social, and they want to come here. Through hook or crook, they’ll find a way to do it. Again, in that instance, the laws should prevail. Okay, you can come here, but you have to come under certain conditions. You can’t just sneak in. If you did that, everybody could do it. You have to set limits.

But now it’s such that we really look at our southern border as the vulnerable entry point, and I don’t understand why we don’t look at—there’s only a few number of states, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, that are on a frontier with Mexico, but on our northern border, we have ten states that have no walls or fences, and people can come through there. But we don’t seem to make a big issue of that. We only seem to make an issue of our southern entry border against the people of the Southern Hemisphere.

How would you understand that?

Well, I think it’s racist. It’s racist, yes. I think there are people from other parts of the world that come in, I’m sure, through the Canadian borders, but I don’t see the same type of surveillance and the same type of safeguards that we have on the southern border, probably because the northern border allows more Canadians, who look like Americans. I mean, I’m sure there’s tons of Canadians here, living in the United States, and there’s Europeans that come across the Canadian border, Asian folks. I think race is a big factor in it.

Can you give me a sense of your perspective on the DREAM [Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors] Act? When you’re talking about race and immigration and the founding of the United States and the Constitution, how do you interpret the DREAM Act?

Well, I think the DREAM Act is one of those alternatives that really speaks to fairness. When you have young people—we’re talking about them—who are born here through their immigrant parents, they’re American citizens. But what about those that are brought here as young children, infants, because for the various reasons I’ve cited, are brought here by either an economic need or whatever other social factor drives them here? They come here and they bring their children with them at very small ages, and those children are raised like other American kids. They go to school here. They do all the things that a citizen child would do. But when it comes to partaking in those other freedoms that they should be allowed to have as Americans have, education, they are prohibited because they’re the children of immigrants that brought them here. Those kids are penalized. So that’s a question of unfairness, totally unfair.

When you try to provide an alternative to that condition by saying, “Okay, well, we shouldn’t deny you that privilege that we deny Americans, but we’ll forgive that aspect that is not of your doing but your parents’, by allowing you to finish high school, join the army, do some social endeavor on behalf of the country, and that will provide you with the access of being an American, American citizenship that you won’t be denied.” I mean, that’s just fairness. That’s the way I see it. Of course, a lot of people disagree with that and say, well, that child, that individual, that student, he’s still an illegal, period. There’s very rigid thinking.

Did you see a trend or could you detect a change from the time that you won your first seat to the time that you left Congress, in the sentiment towards—I’m thinking the target has been primarily Mexican and Latin American immigration, or Central American, principally.

Yes.

Did you see a change in sentiment towards these policies?

Well, I think I saw them enhanced. I think there are some factors that may lead to that. As a nation, as we begin to really lose a greater sense of our world power, so to speak, as we see the diminishing birth rates by Anglo Americans, there is a frightening impact that plays upon those folks that we’re being inundated by people of the Southern Hemisphere, Mexico and Central America and Latin America, and that’s very threatening to them. I think that’s a factor, of course, is fear.

The others are developments in that part of the world, in the Southern Hemisphere. People are still harboring this bogeyman attitude about Cuba, you know, that Cuba’s a communist country and it’s going to take over. A lot of them, even though they’re Cubans and they’re here, the exiles that are here, they see them as a threat, you know. “They’re taking over everything. They’re big into our economic factors in Florida and elsewhere, and they’re impinging on the American way of life, but they’re here. They’re exiles. At least they’re not communists, but they’re here.” And there’s this Hugo Chavez guy. He’s very threatening. I mean, look at all the things he’s doing. All this is played up by the media, of course, and the elements that are antagonistic to his way of ruling his country. They see Evo Morales and how he’s teaming up with Chavez. Of course, they see the cartels, the Colombian cartels. They see that happening and they see the expropriation of some American rights in Ecuador, the taking over of the oil fields. They see Brazil as a huge giant moving into competitive position against the United States. They see Chile. “Hey, what happened? They’re being competitive with us now, and the Argentines.” That scares them. They’re afraid. So today, based on when I first went into Congress, there wasn’t that kind of fear. You know, we were friends with the ruling juntas that were taking positions in Latin America and keeping down the communist threat. We were the ones supporting the Contras. You know, we’re going to keep those FLNMs in line down there. We’re going to really put them down. And we had a good friendly government in Mexico that they’re not going to let communists come in here. Now they don’t know. It’s frightening. It’s frightening. So, yes, I think since I’ve left, the fears have gotten greater because of all those factors.

That’s really interesting, because there’s more Latino representation.

I know, but that’s not necessarily good for Anglo Americans, white people, who see these teeming masses of Latinos with so much power now, and not necessarily in a socialist way, but economically thriving and becoming more powerful, having greater voice in international trade issues and in the U.N., Brazil talking to Iran, and Chavez inviting [Mahmoud] Ahmadinijad here. That scares them.

Did you yourself witness any racism while you were in Congress, towards Latin Americans or any other group?

Well, yes. Simpson-Mazzoli and all the other acts that play down the role of Latinos. You as a member of Congress are not affected. They look at you as just another advocate for your constituency and they say they respect that, but you know that they don’t. I think we have a Latino—Hispanic Caucus [Congressional Hispanic Caucus] in Congress, but I don’t see them having any voice. I don’t see them having any real power, so to speak. When I went in, there were only six members of Congress that were Latinos, a Puerto Rican resident commissioner from Puerto Rico, three Texans, and then we came in, four Mexican Americans, and that was it. Now there’s, what, about twenty-eight, which is a substantial number of votes, not many. It’s still a small number compared to 435, but they can have an impact on legislation. That’s twenty-eight votes that could sway a piece of legislation, and yet we’re in a small number. We’re in a real minority.

You were the Chair of the Hispanic Caucus at one point.

Yes, I was.

What was that like? Did anything come up of significance while you were chair?

No, no. I think it’s a good element to have in Congress, that you can have an ethnic grouping, because you can raise the issues that impact on that ethnic community, and depending on the numbers, you have a small voice in promulgating legislation that will enhance that community. You have an impact, but not greatly. I mean, you’re still in a very small minority. That goes for blacks and Pacific Asian Americans. Today, as I speak, this week was the first meeting that President [Barack] Obama had with the [Congressional] Black Caucus since he’s been elected. He’s almost rounding out three years of presidency, and it’s the first time he meets with the Black Caucus, which doesn’t show that the Black Caucus can have that much of an impact. They can get a meeting with the president.

Did you ever work with the other caucuses while you were Chair of the Hispanic—did you ever work on something together in coalition?

Oh, yes, we worked in coalition. We worked with the Black Caucus, we worked with the Women’s Caucus [Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues]. There are all kinds of groupings in Congress, and they’re special-interest groups really. If you can rally around a given issue, you can drum up a major amount of votes that could make—

Is there an issue that comes to mind that brought this coalition together?

The war always does. I mean, voting on the issue of whether we go to war or not brings in—usually the caucuses participate, although in our own caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, there are many people there who would never think of voting against going to war. It’s always, it’s one of the things that we have to do.

Are you talking about the 1990 vote for—

The Gulf War.

The Gulf War.

Yes, things like that. Very few members of the Hispanic Caucus would vote against the war there, or even the blacks.

What was your position?

I recall voting against the Gulf War.

Can you explain why you took that position?

Well, I just felt that these wars are just perpetrated by certain American interests. I mean, I really didn’t see why we should commit American troops to going into the Iraq War against Saddam Hussein invading—what was it? I even forget the country now—when Saddam Hussein was a great friend of ours heretofore, you know. We were supporting him against the Iranians. And all of a sudden, because of a quirk in the oil issues, we were committing American troops to go to war, when diplomatically I think there were ways of resolving those issues. I would have voted against the Vietnam War as well, but I wasn’t in Congress at the time.

Did you find yourself in a controversial position as an opponent?

Yes, you do, but you take your licks. You have a right to express your feelings, and as long as my constituency, the people that I was representing, didn’t abhor what I was doing, in fact they said, “That’s a strong position for you to take, and we’re not going to vote for you because you did that,” you know, they didn’t say that, so you do it.

Can you talk to me a little bit about what the dynamics in Washington were around that vote? Were people coming to you trying to convince you otherwise? Did you play a role in trying to convince people to vote against it? Or how does it work in a situation with a vote that’s so important? We’re talking about resources and human life. 1:07:04.4

Yes. Specifically on that war?

Yes, on this one, the 1990.

Well, as I recall—it seems such a long time ago. As I recall, the greatest pressure you feel is from your constituency, really. And we would poll. We would send letters out to the constituents, posting that position that, “I’m opposed to this war for such-and-such reasons, and I don’t believe that it’s in our best interest for us to do this.” I would get some mail saying, “That’s not a good position. We have to stand united as a country. You’re an elected representative. You’re representing all the people. You’re not supposed to take a position like that on your own.” Yes, you get that criticism. You also have to tell people that you take that position because you have a conscientious reason for it. You don’t believe that going to war over a particular issue is well worth it, because of the lives that are being sacrificed on behalf of greater selfish interests that are taking place, and you feel that your conscience tells you to vote against it. Some people will say, “That’s good. I’m glad you took that position. I feel the same way.” So you kind of gauge yourself by that. Now, you have, of course, on the floor of Congress when you’re meeting on the issues, you have people, when you’re going to vote on the resolution for it, people voicing their concern that, “This is something we have to do to quell the insurgency that’s taking place, the fact that this dictator is invading this small country, and it threatens our economic process, our economic well-being, because it shuts off supply of oil and means that he is positioning himself to take over a port they don’t have. We need to go to war and show him that we’re not going to let that happen,” you know, arguments.

You have arguments on the other side, members getting up and saying, “No, I think that we’re rushing into a situation that is going to be disastrous for us. We will lose—we have people in the Middle East that will look upon this as us intervening into their affairs and we’re just concerned about Standard Oil’s position and Chevron, and we shouldn’t be there.” So you have all kinds of arguments.

Do you recall—I know it was a long time ago—who were the most eloquent speaking on this issue?

I think I remember Barbara [J.] Lee from San Francisco [Oakland, California]. You had people, I think, like even—well, you had [Ronald V.] Ron Dellums. I remember Ron Dellums was a very bombastic antiwar legislator, terrific on the left-wing side of things. But he was the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and he was saying that we had to go to war, that he understood all the nuances, but it was important for us to show that we had the might to put down this tinhorn dictator and go into this war. That was it. As I recall, that was my memory on it.

Those are the two people that come to mind as being—

Well, yes. I remember people like, I think, David [R.] Obey, who was a very liberal member of Congress from Wisconsin, being arguably vocal against it. God, it seems such a long time ago, so many wars in between.

That was one of the important decisions or votes, certainly had long-lasting impact.

Yes.

We kind of went into the war topic because you mentioned something that struck me, but I wanted to get back to the immigration topic and ask you about NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] and how you understood that legislation and how you viewed it when it first was brought to your attention.

NAFTA. Well, I should preface the whole notion of NAFTA, and perhaps it was my experience. I was assigned early in Congress by Speaker [Thomas P.] “Tip” O’Neill [Jr.] to—I made a bid to the Speaker to be a member of the Intelligence Committee, a very important committee in Congress. He told me quite frankly, he said, “You know, you’re just a freshman. You just came here. I have members of Congress who are vying to be governors of states. I have members of Congress, longtime members of Congress, who want to move up into the Senate, and the Intelligence Committee is a stepping-stone to that. You know, it’s a question of seniority and a question of the kind of people that are asking me to put them in that position, as you are. You just have to understand that I can’t do it. I know you have a lot of background that would be very useful, and I appreciate that you’ve been an ambassador, you’ve worked in other parts of the world, you’re a student of foreign policy, but I’m going to have to tell you I can’t do it. But I will want you to do this, if you’ll agree to it.” You know, here comes the compromise. He said, “I will assign you to the United States European Parliament Commission. It’s a very important body of work, and I think with your experience with the Europeans, this would bode well for you, and you will enjoy it.” He bought me off with that. He couldn’t give me the other, but he told me about that.

So I was assigned to this commission made up of Republicans and Democrats that meets regularly with the European Community. Europe has a Parliament, an actual Congress. It’s part of what today is called the European Union, the EU, which is all these European countries forming a union, and in forming that union they elect a Congress. They call it a Parliament, and they have a Congress then that is based in Strasbourg, France. The House, what they call the Parliament, is based in Strasbourg, France, and the Senate aspect, much like our own—and they’re called commissioners—are based in Brussels [Belgium]. That’s the European Community, they called it, Parliament. So the U.S. Congress, that’s our counterpart. We meet with the heads of all those country states and their Parliament. We meet twice a year. One time of the year we meet in Rome [Italy] and the next six months they meet here in Dallas [Texas]. The next year we meet in London [England], and then we meet in New York, and then we meet in Paris [France], and then we come back and we meet in Miami [Florida], and each time we meet, whoever’s district we meet in, you’re the host. You have to host the European Parliament in your city. So you really have this amalgam of statesmen and women, parliamentarians from Europe and from the United States, and the whole issue that you talk about is U.S.-European questions of trade, terrorism, narcotics, banking, every issue that impacts our two parts of the world. You have resolutions. It’s like a mini-U.N. You have resolutions. You have leadership from our side. They have leadership from their side. It’s really an interesting phenomenon that takes place. You travel to their countries and they host you. You’re there for three, four days, a week.

Then our leadership, beyond going to the Rome conference—this is done during your break time; you’re not in session—our leaders, our commission leaders would take us to Moscow [Russia], because they wanted to go to Moscow and meet with [Mikhail] Gorbachev. They wanted to talk about Soviet Jewry, the problems they’re having there with them, want to talk about security, want to talk about SALT [Strategic Arms Limitations Talks] agreement. Our leaders would take us to Budapest, a communist country, to talk about freedom of the people there and the issues that impact Hungary and the Balkan States. You get a well-rounded knowledge of what’s happening in that part of the world. The biggest issues that you’d talk about with the European Parliament was trade and how so much of our income, our income and our export has to do with the Europeans and how they were putting their countries together to become a United States of Europe. I started out as a freshman, when there were about eight European countries in the European Parliament. By the time I left Congress sixteen years later, there were about twenty-five nations that had come together, and now the European Parliament in Strasbourg had grown. They have a building. They have like a U.S. Capitol. More seats, more delegates, the Brussels group, more commissioners. The whole issues around when you unify nations—Germany, they did away with the borders. No more borders. You didn’t need a passport to go from Germany to Spain. You didn’t need a passport to go from Ireland to Romania. No more area codes. One central bank. I mean, they changed everything. It was becoming a Common Market, really, a Common Market. That was the whole idea, and it was really working great.

Spain was vying to become a member. Greece was vying to become a member. Portugal wanted to be a member, Ireland. But they were poor nations, and the way that they were able to join was that all of them built a fund, built a huge Development Fund, and changed the rules of the economy and the banking system so that the Spaniards’ level of jobs and income went up. They were able to meet the criteria to be a member. Greece did the same. Because of the Fund that was direct economic input to Greece, they were able to enhance Greece’s economy so they could meet the criteria to become a member of the European Union. Ireland did the same. Ireland was a poor country. The Irish were starving over there. But they got the advantage of the economic pool, and they were built up and they became members. And Portugal did the same. Now they just were going to do that. When the Soviet Bloc disappeared, when no longer was there a Soviet USSR, those Soviet countries, Eastern European countries, some of them wanted to come into the European Union. So there was a whole new thing happening. That taught me a lesson. I said, gee, why can’t we do this in the Western Hemisphere? Why can’t Canada and the U.S. and Mexico become a Common Market, so we can all—I mean, almost Canada is the same as the U.S., almost the same monetary levels, but Mexico isn’t and Central American isn’t. Why can’t we just develop a Common Market for the Western Hemisphere? A lot of people said, “Hey, that’s a great idea. We can build a Development Fund to be able to—Canada’s got it already, but we can build Mexico up so that Mexican wages can be—.” They can’t be exactly the same like American wages. An auto worker in the U.S. was earning twenty-five dollars an hour. The Mexican worker is earning six dollars an hour. So you can’t say now the Mexican worker is going to earn twenty-five dollars an hour, but what you do is you harmonize the wage level. You begin to increase his level to the point that you start to bring him up to the American level, and before you know it, the Canadian, the U.S., and the Mexican will be the same. That was the whole purpose of the Development Fund.

How could you do that Development Fund? How could you bring it about? Well, then comes this idea that Bush and D_____ and the Canadians dreamed about. “Let’s have a NAFTA. Let’s do a Common Market.” I said, “That’s it. It’s a Common Market. That’s the thing I’ve been doing, been learning with the Europeans, and that’s working. Why can’t we do it over here? It will enhance Mexico and Central America and make that a big Common Market. In the NAFTA agreement, which is a trade agreement, we’ll build a Development Fund to start pumping in to Mexico and eventually to Central America and build them up. That will resolve the immigration problem. Nobody’s going to have to leave Mexico to come and seek work in the United States. They’re going to have equal access. They’re going to have the same economic level, Central America eventually. It will all be a Common Market.” That was the whole idea about NAFTA and the NAD [North American Development] Bank. The NAD Bank was the Development Fund. Okay. So then everything was going good, except labor then said, “Wait a minute. We just think this is a scheme to allow multinational corporations to leave the United States and go to Mexico and start doing their manufacturing there, and to Central America, and that’s going to take jobs away from the Americans.” So I had to make a decision. What do I do? I really thought this was going to be the great thing. So when labor started prodding me for the NAFTA program, I say, “You’re right. I never took into account that that’s not going to happen right away.” The multinational—not the multinational—well, yes, the big corporations in America are going to go to Mexico, because that’s a cheap labor source. And labor say, “You’re crazy trying to bring about this Common Market. It works in Europe, but it doesn’t work over here.”

So I said, “Well, you’re right. I don’t think I can do it.” So then, see, the [William J.] Clinton people started saying, “Hey, we like your development idea. This could really work well. We could develop Mexico like you talked about, pumping up Portugal and Spain and Ireland and all. We can do that with the southern neighbors.” I said, “Well, that sounds okay, but what about labor?” “Well, you’re going to have to make a decision, but we’re willing to go with you on this. If you want that Development Fund, you’ve got to go with us, because we’ll incorporate that into NAFTA. We’ll make it a reality.” Then the Chicanos and the Latinos started to hear about this, and they came to me and said, “Esteban, you have to push your NAD Bank idea.” And I didn’t like the word “bank,” because it sounds like a bank, and it wasn’t a bank; it was a Development Fund like the Europeans had. But the Clinton people wanted to put the name “bank” on it. It had a better-sounding—it was more acceptable to Wall Street and the economic community and to the Mexican Wall Street, the people in Mexico. That bank was the thing they were—they said, “We’ll do the bank if you’ll do NAFTA.”

And the Chicanos and Mexicanos are telling me, “Do it. This is going to really enhance our people, especially along the border. All the maquiladoras on the border, they’re now exploiting people and they don’t do anything for them. Yeah, they wear clean uniforms, they eat in their nice cafeterias, but you ought to see where they live. You ought to see how they live. Go see how they live. Come with us.” So I went to the southern border. I went to Texas and Tijuana and all along the border. Yes, I saw the maquiladoras. I hadn’t seen them. And the degradation of the earth and the way the people had to live there, you know, the shacks, the cardboard shacks, and the way they bused in people, the young women and the young men, just a giant exploitation. They said, “We can’t allow that to happen. Look at how they’re degrading the border. They dump all the chemicals into the river. They dump cesspools and there’s no sewage. Look at the people.” I went to Juarez and it was a horrible thing. They said, “We have the NAD Bank. We could make that disappear. Look what it would do for El Paso. Look what it would do for Juarez and Brownsville and all those cities across the border. Look what we’d do to the Mexican industry. The people are unemployed down there.” Again, you have to make a decision. I said, “What about the workers that will lose their jobs in Minnesota and Detroit, the windshield company that goes down to Mexico to build the windshields? What about the folks in Ohio, the tool makers, the people that are making the axles for the car, for the Fords?” “Well, they’re already doing it in Mexico, but look at what they’re getting paid. They’re already building GM [General Motors] cars in Mexico. You’ve been down there trying to organize the GM workers. You’ve been in all those places where they’re building American cars already. Why don’t we create within the NAD Bank what we call a community window, where the workers that lose their jobs due to NAFTA, due to the move, they will be made well by the NAD Bank, which will, through the community window, provide the capital and the resources to retrain those people that have lost their jobs, give them new jobs in the new technologies. You’re compensating them for what their loss is.”

So I bought on. I bought on. I said, “That’s going to help Mexico. It’s going to help the border. That’s going to help our people, and the only way we can get NAFTA passed is to have that bank.” That’s the way it went, and it won because of that. It was a Latino thing. A lot of pressure from National Council of La Raza, from LULAC [League of United Latin American Citizens], from everybody on my back, saying, “Think of our people. We’re down all the time. Why can’t we now, with you there, why can’t we have a resurgence?” Other people started coming and saying, “We’ll help you put together the components. We’ll help you figure out the economics.” UCLA—what’s his name—[Raul] Hinojosa. Have you met him? He heads up the Development Center at UCLA that deals with Latin America. He got into the act and he brought in the technicians, and we worked out the economics. We brought in the Clinton administration. We got the secretary of the treasury buying on this. That was a former senator from Texas. He was a good friend of the Mexican Finance Minister, and he got into the negotiations. The Mexicans agreed to put half of the capital into the NAD Bank. It was truly a bipartisan Development Fund, Mexico and the U.S. It was a three-billion-dollar startup, but it was going to grow.

Because of all those promises and all what we were seeing as real development for Mexico and the U.S., for Raza, I said, “Okay, we’ll do it,” and I became a leader in pushing that. I took a hit from the Labor Movement. They disowned me. The Labor Movement said, “You went against our principles of safeguarding American jobs. You gave in to the multinational corporations.” I said, “I didn’t. This is going to enhance both of us. We have to grow as a nation and our neighbors next to us.” So they picketed me. My best friends, my best union friends from the UAW picketed me, my office right here in Pico Rivera. But as it passed and things started to look up, they forgave me. They said, “Well, we understand why you did it.” I’m back in good graces with them, but, I mean, I didn’t let down on my other trade union commitments. They felt that I had let them down on this one. So I came back with good standing. But I really feel that, I don’t know, if I had to do it over again, whether I would do it that way, because I see what has happened with NAFTA. NAFTA has had a negative impact. It had a negative impact on the farmers in Mexico, especially the corn growers, because the agribusiness folks went in right away and started monopolizing the corn growth, importing corn and beans. Imagine Mexico having to import beans. So there are some negative aspects to it took place. So far, people I talk to say it’s been a booming success. “Look where poor Mexico’s at.” But then I look at Mexico’s economy. They’re still hurting.

How about the NAD Bank? Was it able to achieve its objective?

NAD Bank is well and alive. It’s moving right now. It’s doing a lot of what they call border environmental programs. It’s created a whole series of environmental enhancement along the border.

When you say environmental, do you mean protecting the environment, or making it easier for these trucks to come across back and forth, that kind of thing?

No. That’s always been an issue. There’s always talk about, yes, this final agreement by the U.S., letting Mexican trucks come in. But then the unions have been a big stumbling block there, the Teamsters not allowing the trucks to come in, and it puts the treaty into violation. But, no, in terms of the environmental enhancement along the border, it’s put checks on emissions, it’s put checks on water purification. It’s building toxic-waste depository areas so you can’t just dump wherever you want. People were dumping—I remember going to Tijuana and a battery company was dumping the acid from the batteries right in the field there next to a dairy. I mean, that’s now outlawed. There’s all kinds of water-security systems along the Arizona border and a lot of problems down there. Sewer development. A lot of things that are environmental that were in horrible degradation of the environment are now being corrected by the NAD Bank.

It’s interesting. It seems like they set up a mechanism, through your efforts, to correct some of the problems that would be created by— [laughs]

Yes. The NAD Bank has allowed—there’s been now a foundation set up in Mexico. It’s a Mexican foundation made up of some of the top economists and wealthy corporations in Mexico, in league with United States partnerships. They call it the U.S.-Mexico Foundation, and we have Mexican Americans sitting on the Foundation board. What they have just done of late is they’ve created Mexican American Leadership Institutes called MALI, and the whole idea is to—in fact, they just met last week in Washington, D.C., in their first annual meeting, to make MALI then the organization that is going to be the—let’s say it’s emulating AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee]. Are you familiar with AIPAC?

No.

Clinton just spoke before AIPAC this weekend, when [Benjamin] Netanyahu was here. AIPAC is the American Jewish (sic) Public Affairs Committee. They’re the strongest Israeli American organization. It’s made up of Jewish constituents that lobby for Israel. They’re powerful. They’re the ones that turn the screws on, because of their power, on members of Congress to enact the kinds of laws that will benefit Israel. 1:39:17.9 There’s similar organizations. There’s an Italian American Foundation that looks very much to its homeland Italians to have better relations with the United States. The Asians have similar organizations, their country-of-origin organizations. They’re Americans now, but they look at their country and lobby the U.S. Congress and the White House for benefits for their countries. We have no such organization that does that for Mexico, and so MALI has become the organization that is going to now move into working in Mexico on creating what they feel are elements of organizing Mexicans into a greater participation in civic society. Mexicans don’t have any civic society organizations. That’s why the justice system runs rampant. That’s why there’s so much corruption, and the Mexicans don’t have any kind of voice to raise these issues with their government. As you read things, the judicial system is pretty well controlled by the top level, the judges. The judicial system doesn’t really work, and the human-rights violations are across the board in violation. The drug cartels operate almost willy-nilly. Corruption is rife and it’s felt, and this is what the U.S. government is now proposing. In fact, Hillary Clinton was the keynote speaker at the MALI conference last week, was that the United States government wants to work through MALI to enhance all those areas in Mexico, just like all these other ethnic groups do for their countries, and she feels that by working through Mexican Americans, the United States vis-à-vis Mexico, that Mexico will be in greater acceptance of the kinds of reforms that could be brought about through MALI, and pledges that the State Department and the U.S. government will play a role. They want to play a role, but Mexico, as you know, is always standoffish against the U.S. They don’t take AID money; they don’t take Agency for International Development money. They don’t take any big government U.S. grants to do anything in Mexico. The Mexicans have always been hands off, but through MALI, which will deal with civic society, they feel there’s a greater chance of working with the Mexican public and with the government. That was inaugurated last—I happen to be a founder. I joined with a group, along with a lot of Mexican Americans here in town. So we had the first Washington conference. I couldn’t go because of Arcy [Torres]. So that’s where we’re at.

Incredible.

The MALI group, the funds that were needed to create the foundation to begin to build the organizing efforts for the foundation, which is made up of U.S. and Mexican civic leaders, is coming from the NAD Bank. So there we go.

It’s an important contribution. [interruption]

I think we’ll stop it here.

Okay. [End of May 23, 2011 interview]

This is Virginia Espino and today is June 13th [2011]. I’m interviewing Congressman Esteban Torres at his home in West Covina. Today I’d like to go back a little bit and then we’ll move forward, but there were a couple of things that I wanted to ask you about your early time in Congress, and that would be when [William J.] Clinton won the presidency and what role did you play, if any, in his election.

Well, not a significant role other than we were happy that a Democrat like Clinton was aspiring to the presidency. He came to Washington to meet with the California delegation, I recall. We sat in the Speaker’s dining room, the California delegation, and spoke with him about the issues and how he very much depended on Californians really supporting him, and we all pledged that we were with him, given his policy projections. We were impressed, you know. This is a Democratic candidate, and it was time for us to really begin to feel close to someone that would come in with an agenda that we could embrace. Clinton, while he was president, managed to stay very close to the Congress. We would see him very often coming to the House floor, speaking to the Democrats or meeting with our Democratic Caucus on Capitol Hill, very personable. I, who like to sketch important figures, would do character sketches of Clinton. For one, when he spoke he would use his hands to express himself, and I recall sitting kind of in the front row of a meeting we were having with him, and I just drew sketches of his hand movements, different hand movements, and he had many. At the end of that I said, “Mr. President, here’s a little sketch I did of your hands.” He looked at them and says, “Really, do I do all that?” I said, “Yes, you do.” He said, “I’m impressed that you could do that, capture that.” So I said, “Would you sign it?” He said, “Sure.” He signed a little sketch, and I have it in my collection.

When we came to California, back home, and we got involved with the party activities, well, we were always with Clinton when he would come here. I remember him coming to UCLA to make a major speech there. We were part of his entourage, my wife [Arcy Torres] and I and others, and always very friendly, very open, and it felt good to really deal with a president that closely. I recall that a friend of mine [Federico Mayor], the Secretary General of UNESCO [United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization], a Spaniard, a friend that I knew since I’d been in UNESCO, he came to visit with me one time and he said he had a mission to discuss with me. I said, “What is that?” He said, “Well, I’ve just come from Cuba, and I had a long conversation with the Comandante, and he expressed to me that he really wanted to settle the score with an American president.” He was telling me Fidel Castro outlined a list of items that he wanted to discuss and get behind him, dealing with Cuban-American relations such as moving forth on changes that he was willing to make in order that the United States would drop the embargo. That was his quest. He brought in the number of items. He said, “We’re asking you to act as an intermediary because you know the president. You know me,” he said. His name was—the Secretary General’s name escapes me right now, but it’ll come back. He said, “But I would really want you to consider reaching the president and telling him that Fidel Castro wants to sit down and resolve all these issues, all of them.”

So I said, “Well, I’ll try, best way I can do it.” So I recall, how do I get to the president and raise this issue with him? It’s not that easy. So President Clinton, as was his custom, would often host an event at the White House, and he would invite members of Congress. In this instance he was rewarding policemen from across the country, heroes, a number of policemen that had been selected by their various chiefs and law enforcement administrators to go to the White House and receive from the president a citation for their valor. They do this periodically, and Clinton invited members of Congress to that event, and so I seized on that invitation and I went to the White House. He had this presentation of medals to these outstanding policemen, the LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] included. After that, as was his custom, after making the awards, he stood sort of in line—there’s a rope—and you could go up and congratulate the president or greet him and talk to him, take pictures with him as was customary, and I figured this is the chance I can get to get close to him. So as he came down the line, shaking hands with different people, I sort of managed to get right up front, and the Secret Service, who recognized me, knew who I was, didn’t push me back or anything; they let me stay up front. When Bill Clinton came up close to me, he kind of reached over me to shake hands with somebody behind me, and he said, “Oh, hi, Esteban,” and kind of patted me on the shoulder, and I said, now’s my moment. So I said, “Mr. President,” I said, “I have a message for you from Fidel Castro. He wants to meet with you. He has an agenda for you.” “Okay,” he says, “check with my office.” I said, I did it. I did it. [laughter]

In those few seconds.

Yes, I did it. So I went back to my office and right away I said, “Did any calls come in from the White House?” They said, “No, nothing’s happened.” So I waited anxiously that whole day. I figured at some point the president is going to go back to his office, and he’s going to tell his staff or somebody, “Call up Torres. What’s this message he gave me?” Well, nobody ever called. Finally I figured, well, I’ve got to do something. I mean, somebody made a request of me. I followed through, but the president isn’t answering, so I’ve got to get hold of somebody. So I said, I guess the best thing to do in this case is call the secretary of state and tell him that I’ve been in contact with a foreign leader who has made a request through me to the president. So the secretary of state at that time was—his name escapes me [Warren Christopher]—who was not at [U.S. Department of] State at that moment; he was in New York at the U.N. So they said, “Why don’t you talk to the undersecretary,” who I happened to know at the time. I had met him, and he knew who I was. So I called him up I described to him the message that had come to me from Federico Mayor. Federico Mayor was the Secretary General of the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization, a Spaniard who was serving in that capacity, very close to Fidel Castro. He had made friends with him many years before. I think Fidel Castro’s father and Federico Mayor’s father were from the same province in Spain, so they had that connection, and invariably he would come to Cuba and he could sit down and talk with Fidel Castro. They’d go over all kinds of issues dealing with foreign policy questions. This is how he came to me, telling me what Fidel’s request was.

So I told the undersecretary what was happening. He said, “Well, we’ve had a lot of people that Fidel does this with.” I think he did this with Diane Sawyer, the CBS correspondent who went to Cuba one time and did a documentary on Fidel Castro, and I think he pitched the same message to her. She came back and told State Department and told the President’s Office about this kind of request. So I wasn’t the first one to get this kind of message. So I said, “Well, but he seemed very serious. Federico Mayor told me that Fidel Castro was dead-bent on bringing this about. I told the president about it, but I haven’t heard back from him, but I’m telling you.” So he said, “Well, we’ll take this into account and we’ll find out what’s happening.” So I left it in their hands, and nothing happened. Nothing happened. I saw the president at a—there was a gathering of the Organization of American States in Florida, and there was a conclave of foreign ministers and economic ministers that came to Florida, and President [James E. “Jimmy”] Carter (sic) went down. In fact, I flew down there with him. I was invited by a member of his cabinet to join in that trip, so I went down to Florida and the president was down there. He made his comments to the Latin American foreign economic ministers, and in the receiving line, again the rope for the president, he was shaking hands and he came by, and I said, “Mr. President, you may recall I told you about Fidel Castro wanting a meeting with you?”

He said, “Oh, yes, I haven’t forgotten. You’re a good man, Esteban,” and he went on. So those are vivid vignettes that I recall dealing with the president and these kinds of issues.

How did you feel about that? Did you feel like he wasn’t taking it seriously or Fidel was toying with this UNESCO leader?

I took it very serious that this was a real opening. I figured, my god, after all these years, I may have a hand in having somehow passed on this message. But nothing happened. I was, during the Clinton administration, proposed to be the secretary of labor. There were a number of people that were considered. For quite a bit of time I was the frontrunner. I was going to be the next secretary of labor, and to me, being from the union and a labor man, that was a great significant event in my life, and, of course, I began to lobby various groups for the support, labor leaders and other political figures, my own delegation, the California delegation. A lot of people began to lobby on my behalf. I recall in newscasts and various press releases circling around D.C. that my name was being mentioned as a very serious contender, given my background and all that. So one day I had a meeting with the vice president, [Albert] Al Gore [Jr.], and he knew of this nomination. I hadn’t been nominated. I asked him, I said, “Would you consider supporting me?” He said, “Well, yeah, I would. The president is out of town, and when he comes back I’ll remind that we’ve talked and I think you’d be a good secretary.” So I was in anticipation, my staff, everybody, my family, that we were going to do it. You know, I’m going to be a member of the cabinet. As time went on, the list started to break down, and I was still at the top. I remember going to the White House. They called me to come in. You go through a lot of vetting, you know. You have to prepare a lot of paperwork for the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and the vetting people to look at.

Then I got a call from the White House by the legal counsel to go over my vetting process. So that’s the last step. And in so doing, we discussed the issue with him, issues, and he asked me if I had anything that the president would be ashamed of in case I was appointed, and I said, “No. I’ve served in the Foreign Service. I’ve served in Congress. There’s nothing—blemish on my record or anything like that.” He said, “Well, that’s good. Well, I can’t tell you, but you’re at the top of the list, so it’s a matter of waiting.” So I was waiting, and the other person that was also waiting for an appointment was [W.B.] Bill Richardson [III], who was a member of Congress, and he was being considered for the ambassadorship to the U.N. So he was sort of in the vetting circle as well. I would ask him, “Bill, what do you hear? What’s going on?” He says, “Esteban, I can’t talk about it. We’ve all been pledged not to discuss our particular situations, and I’m not asking yours and you shouldn’t be asking mine.” I said, “Well, okay.” So I was in anticipation then that any moment now the announcement would come by. Well, it never came. At the time, the chief of staff to President Clinton was a friend of mine, a Californian former congressman, Leon [E.] Panetta. I called Leon, or Leon called me, I believe, and he said, “Look, we’re going through the vetting process.” I said, “Well, what do you think? Is there anything you can do there for me? Is there any—?”

He says, “There’s really nothing. I’m just the chief of staff. You’re a fine candidate, but at this moment I can’t do anything.” But I thought I had all my ducks in a row, the vice president, Leon Panetta, talking to legal counsel, all the people who were supporting me, and in the end the president made a decision and he appointed an African American woman [Alexix Herman] to the secretary of labor position. She’d been a White House staffer, and the message I got was that Jesse [L.] Jackson [Sr.] and his crew had gone in and pushed hard on her, on the president to make her the secretary of labor, and he did. So I lost out. Well, you know, it was disappointing. I had worked hard during his administration, the whole NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] thing, the North American Development [NAD] Bank all of those things, he was lauding me all the time because of what I was doing. I was making his North American Free Trade Agreement look good, but then when the time came that he could reciprocate, he had to make another choice. So, another vignette.

Did he call you himself?

He didn’t. He didn’t.

What did they tell you? What was the official response?

Well, that they had looked hard and that—you know, there’s no explanation, just the president made his appointment and that was it. I was upset because in the announcement that they made about the lady who was appointed, the newspaper, as I recall, The Washington Post, said that Vice President Gore had played an important role in her support, and I was upset because here Al Gore was saying that he was going to talk to the president about me, such that I received a call from the Vice President’s Office—maybe that’s the way they did it—and he invited me to his home. He said, “Is it possible you can come to my house and visit with me?” which I did. It was up at the vice president’s residence on Diplomatic Row.

I sat down with the vice president, and he apologized. He said, “I’m really sorry that this happened. I know I told you that I was going to support you. I really wanted to, but the president came under heavy pressure to come up with somebody else. But I tried. Listen, I want you to consider, because we know all about you. We know you’re a member of Congress. You’ve been very loyal to the administration. There are some ambassadorial positions open. We have an opening in the Republic of Argentina,” which I know Argentina and I’d been there many times, and I’ve been to the U.S. Embassy there. It’s a nice post, but I wasn’t really in the mood for another ambassadorship as a reward for not getting the secretary of labor, so we left it at that. But I had the opportunity then to weigh in on the Castro thing with the vice president. He said, “Well, tell me about it.” So I discussed it in detail to him, and he was taking copious notes. We’re at his home, no interruptions, no phone calls, nobody coming in, just his writing down all these details and the conditions for the agreement. So, another experience.

And that’s where it stayed?

That’s where it stayed.

On those notes?

On those notes, and nothing’s happened.

Did that change your experience in the Clinton administration after that?

It did. You know, you become disappointed, and you realize that, well, that’s the political process and you’ve got to roll with the punches. There was so much enthusiasm built up around this cabinet position around me, and then when it didn’t happen, you just really feel down in the doldrums. But I took it as a political experience. That’s what happens.

When you’re looking at the different disappointments in your life, where would you rank that, not obtaining that?

I’d rank it very high, because I would have wanted to be the first Latino member of the president’s cabinet as the secretary of labor. I would have been the first. Which, by the way, one of my protégés, of course, is in that position now, Hilda Solis, so she’s the first, and that’s good, that’s good. So that’s one president and that experience.

It’s interesting that when you’re being vetted, they asked you is there anything in your background that would embarrass or shame the president, and in looking at Clinton’s presidency, some of the things that he was accused of and actually did—there’s evidence—was embarrassing to the nation. Was that something that you, while you were in Congress, something that you had to grapple with and talk about?

Well, there’s things you had to do, and you’re in the limelight because you’re a member of Congress, and you are making the decision to impeach him and what are you going to do? Is he guilty or is he not? How are you going to vote? There’s a lot of pressure builds up on that. But as many of us realize in the end, like we see “Weinergate” today, that they don’t always tell you the truth. I can remember the president succinctly saying, “I never had any sex with that woman.” Well, the facts are different. [laughs]

That was a shift in how the press covered a president, because there’s history that shows some of the other presidents had relationships outside of their marriage, but the press would never cover it. When looking at the issue from the perspective of what is your personal life and what is your public life, was that something that you thought about at that time, when you first heard of the accusations?

Well, yes, you have to take that into account. There is a personal-life aspect to all of this, and there’s a public life, too. But I think for a president to engage in that fashion is an act that embarrasses the country, the Office of the Presidency, and I don’t think it’s defensible. I mean, it’s an act that should not be condoned under any circumstance. Because you’re a public figure, you’re supposed to not engage that way. Sure, it’s your private life, but it’s outside the marriage. It’s outside the family process, and I don’t condone it.

Do you think that political officials should be scrutinized in that way?

Yes, I think they have to be. If they engage in that kind of fashion, they should be scrutinized. There’s a process. There’s an ethics process you go through. Whether you’re in Congress or an elected official or the presidency, you go through a process, and the process may result that you were innocent of the event. It could have been conjured up by opposition. It could have been people lying. I mean, there were so many other issues the president was then—and Mrs. [Hillary Rodham] Clinton were accused of, some of them really actions of the opposition to blemish their record, their lives, and I don’t condone that. With Mr. [Ronald] Reagan, I recall Mr. Reagan, I recall mostly in his foreign policy issues, the whole question with the Iran-Contra issue here again engaging in nefarious aspects dealing on foreign policy issues that were so critical to our country, and you have an administration working back-channels and carrying on nefarious activities. That I did not take into account, and the president always above, trying to be very righteous about it, yet his people were carrying on these acts in violation of protocol and international law, the whole Oliver North question, his demeanor and his operational intransigence in the White House.

I remember vividly, sitting in my office one day, and I was very much against the Contra war. My constituents felt good about my speaking out on it, and I didn’t feel good about it. I recall I had constituents in my office in Washington when a call came through. As some presidents do, they call you directly when there’s an issue at hand. People were in my office, and the secretary came in and said, “Mr. Congressman, the president’s on the phone.” So everybody kind of, “Wow. The president’s calling him.” So I picked up the phone and it was Ronald Reagan on the other line, and he said, “I’m flying across the country. I’ve got a list here of members of Congress who I’m lobbying hard to give me a yes on a Contra vote here. Congressman, I know you’re a Californian, and we have to protect our country, and this is a big item that I’m asking you to vote yes on. So will you vote yes for me?” I said, “Mr. President, I appreciate your call, but you know I have a constituent commitment and I’m against this war. I personally am against it, and I have to tell you that I cannot meet your request.” There was silence. He said, “Well, Esteban, I appreciate that. I just thought I’d call you personally and make the pitch to you. Thank you.” And everybody’s there to witness, you know. But that’s how close you come to the president sometimes. Yes, interesting.

Was that hard to say no?

No. I was committed. I could say no in all frankness.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the president and his illness, his Alzheimer’s [disease]. I once attended a meeting with the Speaker on this whole Central American issue with the president, and I can recall so vividly that Mr. [J.C.] Jim Wright [Jr.], who was the Speaker, would be talking with the president about an issue in El Salvador and Guatemala and Nicaragua, and the president would literally pull out of his pocket small little three-by-five index cards with an answer on them and read the card. I was saying, why would he do that? Why couldn’t he just articulate the answer? I was surprised, and I figured, well, maybe it’s too much to understand; he has to read a little card. So years later when I learned that he was having some impairment with his mind and thinking and responding, that maybe that’s why he was reading the little card. It was interesting.

Well, there’s that aspect of his personality and also his strong alliance to the conservative Republican contingent in Washington. When you denied his request, did you feel like there would be any repercussions? Were you worried about that?

No, no. I mean, these are decisions you make every day. Sometimes they’re good and bad decisions, but I don’t think that from a personal perspective, that kind of an answer to him was going to jeopardize any particular legislation that I was working on. He was polling members who could make the difference in his quest to get Congress to go along with him, and you have people that are willing to go and people that are not. No, I didn’t think he would—he probably wouldn’t remember that I said no. [laughter]

What was the morale like among the Democrats while he was president? We look at it, I mean as just a lay person, as a citizen, as a Democrat, as the dark years.

Yes.

What was it like being in Congress?

It’s difficult, because although we were the majority—it wasn’t a Republican Congress. We were in a majority, and we could feel good about our legislative progress and what we were doing, but at the same time, we had an administration that was dead-bent on a very conservative track, you know, path. But we were the majority, so it was always a question of compromising. I didn’t see it as a dark period for us in Congress. It was tough, but it wasn’t dark. It wasn’t as dark as when we were not in the majority and we had [Newton L.] Newt Gingrich as a Speaker, who was just atrocious. It was like something that might have been representative of [Adolf] Hitler’s early days as the chancellor, just muzzling the opposition in the Reichstag and not letting you be part of the political process. I mean, we were excluded from meetings, from mark-up sessions, from any kind of debate, really, because Gingrich and his people set the rules. They were in power and they were going to punish us Democrats after many years of being in the majority, but they came back in an almost vicious way to muzzle you and keep you out of the process. That was discouraging. That, to me, was the point where I said, well, why am I here? I can’t do anything. All you do is draw a salary, and I don’t feel good about drawing a salary when I can’t do anything. So there began a process where I was very disappointed being in Congress, where you were really sort of treading water.

That was under the Clinton administration, wasn’t it?

Yes.

Then those feelings, did they coincide with Clinton’s possible impeachment, or was that after or before or around the same time?

I believe that was after. Yes, I really felt very disgruntled, is the word, about the process in the House of Representatives. The rules changed completely. They changed the rules, and the things that we were riding high on, all of a sudden you were in the dark in the cellar. You didn’t have a chance to be part of the process.

So what did you do to resolve that, or did you?

I retired.

You did leave?

I did leave, yes.

Then before we go into what you did after, because I’d like to finish off with that, what you did after you left Congress, there was a period where you were the Democratic Whip.

Yes.

Can you describe—

Well, I was a Deputy Whip. There was a Democratic Chief Whip and then there’s the Deputy Whips.

Can you describe your role?

Well, you’re part of the leadership. It’s a select group of people that are elected by their peers to act as whips, the whip being—it comes from an old British terminology, I guess. As I was told, it was the people that egg the dogs on in the foxhunt, you know. They were the ones that were able to get the dogs to follow the fox. In the Parliament, I suppose, the British Parliament, they had people who prodded their peers to rally for particular issues in the House of Parliament, and the Whip process came to the United States as we developed our own republic and parliamentary process.

We were acting in that capacity, rallying our peers to vote on certain issues, and you do that by literally pressuring your colleagues to follow a process whereby you can get enough votes to pass a bill. There are people that are undecided about a bill. Some people don’t understand it and they feel that they’d rather not really get involved in the process. Their constituents aren’t really telling them how they should move on this question, and the Whip has the job of really propagandizing the issue on behalf of the Speaker and the leadership. You have to be a salesman and really prod your colleagues into moving in that direction. You take counts. You have cards, and you write down “Undecided,”, “Yes, he’s for it,” No, he’s ambivalent,” and you do a profile on the select group of people that you’re assigned to really push. So it’s interesting, but it’s tough. There’s the Whip meetings. You have to rally early in the morning, and the Chief Whip and his staff draw up the issues that are going to happen that day. “These are the bills. This is what we have to start doing, so we have to start talking about this question,” and you start moving around on the floor or by phone or by letter, by whatever method, to get people that you’re assigned to to take a position on the bill.

How did you get that position?

You volunteer. They look at you and they see that you have some—some people are very quiet and their demeanor is such that they don’t want to get involved. They’re congressmen, they’re congresswomen, and they’re there to do a job, but they don’t necessarily want to engage in any kind of action that’s going to put them out front and maybe even in confrontational matters with their peers.

But I was such that I wanted to be involved. I wanted to make sure that I was there in Congress, and I could take a leadership position like I did when I was a soldier, when I was in the army, when I was in the union. Why not in Congress? So you volunteer and then they pick you. They say, “Hey—.” But you have to be elected. You get elected by your delegation. You become a sort of like regional Whip. We have regional Whips for just California alone and the northern part, southern part, or Whip-At-Large, the whole United States. You whip the Latinos because you’re Latino, so you whip them, you know, and I did. It was great.

Were there any issues that you didn’t agree with that you had to advocate for because of that role?

No, not really, because I was following the party line mostly, and the party line was what I was assigned to do. Other than the positions I took on votes on the war, things like that, I had a personal position and my job wasn’t to goad other people into taking the position I had. So on that, you don’t lobby somebody else. Let their conscience be their best guides.

How about any issues that were really important to you? Do you remember whipping for those?

Well, issues, economic issues, civil rights questions, questions dealing with the economy, a lot of foreign policy questions that I felt strongly about, yes, I recall whipping on those. I could do it because I believed in those things and wanted to do it. And even if I didn’t agree, it was my job to whip based on what the leadership wanted, so you have to do that. Even though I wasn’t for it, you have to do that.

Did you ever feel like you had to put aside your own ethical beliefs?

No, no, I never got to that point.

So, generally speaking, when you look at the position of the Democrats in Congress, did you share a similar ideology, similar perspective on those questions, foreign policy, economics, civil rights?

Well, within your own party you have different positions. You have hard-line left and you have hard-line right within the party. You have middle-ground folks who can go either way. I always tended to be a leftist. People knew me in that sense. They had no question about it. That was my posture, and so I was strong on those kinds of questions. If they were legislative issues, I leaned to the liberal, what was called the liberal; I would say more progressive.

Interesting. Then the issue of the environment, that’s something that you’re known as a leader or an advocate for. Was that an issue that most people weren’t aware of at the time, or was it something that people really cared about?

Well, at the time they weren’t really aware. There wasn’t too much interest. I really got to Congress campaigning on an environmental issue that impacted the district I was running in. It happened in this town, really, here and the San Gabriel Valley. In this town, when I sought a congressional position in this new district that was created, a Republican [David Drier] came to me and said, “So you’re going to run for Congress in this new Democratic district, or this new district?” I said, “Yes, I am.” He said, “Well, one of the incumbent congressmen who lost his seat due to the reapportionment, because he lives in West Covina, and that’s part of the new district, he’s going to run for reelection in the new district. That person shouldn’t be reelected, because he has a bad record as an environmentalist. If you really want to win this election—”—this is a Republican telling me that—“you have got to project this incumbent as a person who condoned the dumping of toxic waste in West Covina, in a big landfill, which has affected the lives of a lot of people. As the mayor, former mayor, he licensed the landfill to accept that toxic waste. If you want a hot-button issue, that’s it. The people in West Covina are just sick and tired of that smell and the dangers that are inherent in that landfill. So if you want an issue and you want to win, this is it.” A Republican telling me that about a Democrat [Jim Lloyd]. Well, you know, when you’re in the political process, you seize on these kinds of issues, and I came to visit the landfill. I talked to people, the neighbors and the people who lived around the area, and they said, “If you go to Congress and you can resolve this, you’ll be our man. You’re our man, and we’ll back you.” So I based my political campaign around closing the landfill, and people took it to heart. They said, “You really are aggressive about this issue.” And I began to work with the people that were organized around the landfill issue, became integrated with them on their grievances on it and used that really as a political campaign issue.

It got in the papers, and people were saying, “Well, he’s just a candidate running for office. They all seize upon some issue, but he seems serious. He has promised that he would close it down if he’s elected, and that’s what we want.” Of course, others were opposed to that. They were saying, “We need the landfill. You’ve got to throw garbage somewheres. You’ve got to get rid of toxins somewheres. So we don’t like it, but we can’t smell it. But it brings in capital into our district. It’s a tax base. When you close it, what are you going to replace it with?”

So I based my campaign—I brought on people on the staff who could really educate me on the question of toxic landfills. If we close this one down, where does it go? Where do you take it? To the Mohave Desert? To the desert communities? Do you take it up north to other landfills like Kettleman Hills up there? You had to really know about all these issues. What about the water contamination? What was it doing to the people that can’t smell it but are drinking it with contaminated water wells in the valley here? Because it was doing that. It was leaching into people’s backyards, and there were people with high incidence of disease and cancers and things like that, blaming the landfill. So it became a big, big question, and I won on it. I won the election. I beat that incumbent who wanted to come back in and be a member of Congress. He’d been there. He attacked me from all kinds of different issues. I was bringing in the TELACU [The East Los Angeles Community Union] mafia to the San Gabriel Valley if I was elected, and the Tio Tacos and all these people. It got rough, got really bad, you know.

Sounds like it. He threw in the race card there.

Oh, yes, yes. But that’s what you had to fight against then. But, by golly, we had a good organization. We had good support, good labor support, good Democratic support. I was able to get the California delegation to endorse me over one of their own colleagues who had lost his seat due to reapportionment but wanted to come back in. I think there was only person that voted not to endorse me but endorse him. So we had a good campaign, good organization, and we won on that issue.

So once in Congress, I had to fulfill the rhetoric. “You talked big about closing it down. Well, let’s see what you’re going to do.” So in Congress I picked a subcommittee that would allow me to be able to leverage legislation to do that, to close it down, and, of course, that takes a lot of doing, too. You have to really research the issue. You have to hire people that understand it and help you draft the legislation. You have to hold hearings. I was able to, through that subcommittee on the environment—it was the Subcommittee on Small Business, which covers the Small Business Administration and all aspects of small business, but the Small Business Subcommittee had an environment component that dealt with things like landfills and polluted water or contaminated areas, and I asked the chairman of that subcommittee if he could consider holding hearings in my district. Since I was a new member of Congress and I played my politics right in Congress, I got close to the Speaker, and the Speaker told this chairman, he said, “Maybe you can help Representative Torres with his problem. He’s a freshman and he wants to make sure he stays reelected and all that. Help him out.” So he convened a congressional hearing right here in West Covina. He brought out the staff and brought out members of the subcommittee, and they had a hearing here in a local community near the landfill, and it was very exciting days. The hearings were maintained by members of Congress. In the process they had witnesses, of course, community leaders, business leaders, religious leaders, people that weren’t highly opposed to the whole nature of the contamination that was taking place. And based on those hearings and the evidence and all that, we were able to draft legislation to close down the BKK—it was called the BKK [Corporation] Landfill, and close it down to the dumping of toxic waste, because they were dumping toxic waste here. We were able through legislation to close that down, with an eventual timetable to close down the whole landfill, which today has been done. It is now a big shopping mall and baseball “field of dreams” and a commercial area. The area is being monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency to make sure that—there’s still leaching of contaminants. It’s landscaped to minimize the odors and things like that.

So it was my legacy, really, as an environmentalist, and that got me into the field of, well, there’s other things then that I have to do as an environmentalist. What about the water contamination in the valley here? That BKK dump is one thing here, you know, a big mound of hills. What about the water here in Baldwin Park and Covina and San Gabriel Valley? There’s a plume underground, moving, a toxic plume moving towards the Whittier Narrows area, which eventually will contaminate the water wells in Whittier and Montebello and all those areas, and that had to be stopped. So how do you do that? Well, you bring in the Environmental Protection Agency and you get the area declared under the Superfund Act, and then you begin to shut down the wells that are contaminated, begin the water-treatment policies, process the water filtering from the mountains and underground, treat the aquifer where it’s contaminated. All that took place, but it took place by legislating laws and rules, appropriations of money, agreements with the economy of the valley, all the businesses. There are a lot of people who are responsible for this contamination, people dumping. During the war, during the Second World War, when this was not developed as communities, there was a lot of fabrication that took place here, and the manufacturers dumped, willy-nilly, chemicals into the ground, into storm basins and storm drains, and all this leaches into the aquifer and then contaminates your water, and that’s how you obtain the carcynogens that kill people with cancer and other diseases.

Well, I got all that taken care of, I mean through legislation, and we were able to get the Environmental Protection Agency and the Superfund to clean it up. They’re still in the process. Through the whole environmental issue, I began to advocate the use of destroying these piles of rubber tires that exist in hidden areas where you’re not privy to them, but they are also sectors that contaminate, because when it rains, they fill with water, and mosquitoes breed in there, rodents and animals, and if they ever catch on fire, these piles of rubber tires, you can’t put them out. They just burn forever and the plumes of smoke and all that. So my whole idea was you take those and you set up shredding plants to shred the tires and turn them into crumb rubber, and they use the crumb rubber to make rugs or carpets. You can use it in asphalt to pave highways or airstrips and things like that. So we did a lot of that. This whole issue of batteries, car batteries being destroyed into some backyard place, some field or shop in an industrial area where they break up the batteries that they collect from the major stores that sell batteries. They take in your battery, but then they get rid of it, and they have a process where they break them up and all these acids get into the ground, the lead, and contaminates the aquifer. So we put in legislation that would do away with these things. You don’t do away with them, but you do them in a way that they don’t contaminate, or you have them carry out the operation where you don’t damage the soil, the environment. So I was Mr. Environment. It was a good title to have.

So some of your policies had impact on your congressional district, it sounds like.

Oh, yes, absolutely.

Then others had a national?

Well, yes, because you legislate. They become national law, national law.

You’re talking about the battery—

The batteries and the rubber tires, yes, and the toxic landfills and things like that. You know, a congressman doing that kind of legislative work can bring in the agencies then that monitor and clean up, and the clean-up process is something that it’s a standard where the business community and the manufacturing community, they’re all brought into this, because they are, in large part, violators of the process, and eventually they end up having to pay for it too. So it’s not just the taxpayer that gets punished. You pay taxes to have agencies do this work, but you have to have some penalties on the violators, so that’s all in the legislative process.

You write that in? You write what the penalties will be?

Yes, and, of course, the agencies that govern and monitor, it becomes part of their process. It’s interesting work, and I had some really topnotch people on staff doing nothing but that, just writing the legislation and doing the research. But then you become the spokesperson. You have to go out and debate it in committees. You have to debate it in the public. You become the spokesman for it.

I’m sure you made some enemies.

You do. You make enemies, people that feel that you are destroying their business. That was my whole quest in the North American Development Bank was to clean up the border, because the border had become—the advent of the maquiladoras, who were building these manufacturing facilities along the border, but with no safeguards to the environment, dumping willy-nilly into the streams and into the communities of the Mexicans and the people who lived on the U.S. side, well, the NAD Bank was supposed to clean all that up and prevent that from promulgating.

Was it successful?

Yes. Well, it’s working. You know, little by little, it’s still, as I understand, in process.

Those are important issues that today are still critical. But when you think about the interest, like, for example, in oil drilling, Alaska, and the green areas of our state that they are wanting to develop, how powerful is the profit motive of the business sector in maintaining their desire to continue to produce and exploit?

Well, that’s the whole question, is that the standard is the profit motive and damn the public or the environment. So that’s why you have the safeguards. That’s why you have the agencies that regulate. Of course, it’s a constant battle by the special-interest groups to offset that regulation. And as we’ve seen when different administrations come in, they knock out the legislation that you put in. They deregulate. They ban the legislation. They have people in Congress that change it to favor the special-interest group. So it’s a never-ending battle, and it seesaws back and forth. That’s why you try to educate the public as to the nature of the issue and hope that they will themselves police themselves, but also be wary of the violators and what they’re doing. It’s a never-ending battle.

It sounds like it. So when you left, how did you understand your experience, looking back?

Well, it was a phenomenal experience, really, and it fulfills a lot of dreams you have about change. You want to be a change agent. If you’re successful and if you have good staffing and you have good leadership connections with the administration or with the institution you’re in, the Congress, you can get these things done and that’s the great reward that you feel, you’ve been able to accomplish.

I really felt, other than my own personal shortcomings, not being a cabinet officer or secretary of labor and such, but the fulfillment that you get from knowing that the landfill got cleaned up and there’s legislation that monitors this and that you’re able to effect change for the better is rewarding. It’s the greatest job I ever had.

What made you decide to go into media after? How soon after you left did you—

Right after I left, I was approached by the advocacy groups who met in Houston, as I recall, at a major convention around the [National] Council de La Raza. But many affiliate organizations were at that meeting, and it finally dawned on—not dawned, but they finally decided that we needed a vehicle to be able to make us visible to the American public, because, by and large, media in all matters was black and white. It was African American and white Americans, and Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, were just not in the picture, and Asian Americans for that matter as well. We needed an organization or a coalition of organizations that could begin to pressure the media industry to make us a part of society. The absence of our not being on the television screen or the film screen leads policy makers to disregard us, because we’re not there. So whenever they legislate or whatever they do to enhance, whether it’s law enforcement or economics or education, it’s always to the class of people that are prominent and make noise and are heard, as African Americans were doing and rightly so, and nobody wants to take that away from them. But why weren’t they showing Latinos? If they showed them, why didn’t they show them in a favorable light? They were always the gardener, the nanny. They were always the gang banger, the drug addict, or the narco lord. Why can’t they show Latinos in a positive light, the lawyer, the doctor, the judge, the good American? It’s always the bad guy. So that has a negative effect on society. The absence of not seeing ourselves, our children, our young people, not seeing ourselves is psychologically harming to them. It harms them in who they are and what they should be and then believing in themselves.

So we said we need to begin a strong push on the industry to rectify that situation, and that’s what we’ve been doing for eleven years now. But it’s been tough. It’s a tough industry, and that’s an example. Something that is important to be seen, to be heard, they disregard, because we don’t make a lot of noise about it. We haven’t burned down communities or marched in great numbers, and so that doesn’t get any action. We don’t get any action on it. But we’re trying to do it in a sensible way, by sitting down and negotiating and bringing some pressure to bear. If they understand that we can pinch their pocketbook nerve, we can make a difference. That’s what guides them, is the economy. If somehow they feel that you’re pinching on their profit motive, that can bring change about. We’ve been trying to do that with NBC and CBS. We’ve signed memorandums of understanding with the major television networks and with PBS, that they have to correct the problem. We demanded—it’s a demand in the memorandum of understanding that they must have a vice president, say, at NBC, a vice president at NBC and CBS and NBC and Fox, they should have a vice president that deals with nothing but diversity and the application of real diversity in their industry, their network, and that that vice president not be a human-relations officer, but a vice president who is in charge of diversity for that corporation, reporting directly to the president, not to the HR officer or to some lesser individual, to the president of that corporation, and that by that standard, we will be able to push our issues.

And they agreed. They agreed to hire a Vice President of Diversity. The problem is that here we are pushing to enhance our community of interest. They hire an African American at every one of these vice presidents. Every one of the networks has a Vice President for Diversity who’s doing a great job. They’re doing great jobs. But it’s a great job for African Americans. And, yes, they take into account Latinos, but not in the kinds of numbers that we were working for. We made as part of the memorandum the importance of people behind the camera, in front of the camera on the screen, behind the camera, the technicians, the camera people, the wardrobe people, the electricians, the caterers, the people on their board of directors, that they should be, as a diversity, out in the field promoting the procurement process so that the goods and services that they buy are from people of color. We’ve got this working, but it’s so difficult because it’s proportional. Yes, they’re doing those things, but it’s so biased against us still. We’ve seen the increase of Latino-based documentaries or some films, family-oriented films, but we don’t see them for Latinos, very few. We see a lot of African American family-type programs, but somehow when you go to meet with the casting people, when you meet with the writers, they just don’t project us.

What do they respond, or how do they respond?

It’s always been my contention, because I come from that sector, that the only thing they respond to is not violence, but tough militant action against them by way of strikes and by way of demonstrations. It’s the only thing that really moves them, that you surround the studio with pickets and have a press conference about the way that the treatment that they mete out to a community, you know.

When you go to the advertisers and start demonstrating that, “The program that you advertise on is discriminating against us. They will not give us a job there, and here we are buying their product all the time. Well, we’re not going to. We’re not going to buy your product anymore, because they are not showing fairness with us.” But we don’t do that. We as a community do not engage in that kind of overt activity, overt action, so that hurts us in a way.

But I was trying to get at when you approach them about what’s missing from television and film, how do they respond? What’s their reaction?

Well, they’re always well-meaning that, “Well, listen. We don’t get any submissions of work from you.” “Well, why don’t you hire our writers? We have writers. Hire some. You don’t have any writers who could project Hispanic lifestyle, a family or an action film or whatever. But a writer can do that, and if he’s on your staff and he’s writing this material, then we’ll see it on the screen.” So, okay, they say, “Well, come up with a program.” “Okay.” So we come up with a writer’s program. “Will you pay for it?” “Yes, we’ll pay for it. NBC will put up a $50,000 program to get your talent to come and study to be a writer, a television writer, radio, whatever, film. Then we’ll hire them as writers.” So that’s what we’re doing. But it’s so difficult to get them in there, and our kids are there. Our writers are there but they need training, so we need to showcase them. We need actors. There’s a lot of kids that are in theatrics. We have a lot of independent filmmakers, Latinos, Latinas, making terrific films. We have an affiliate, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, NALIP, and we rally to get their stuff into studios. But it’s so hard.

Sounds like it. Well, in looking at what’s on TV now, how do you feel about the—I believe his name is George Lopez—is it George Lopez, the comedian?

Yes, the comedian, the comic.

How do you like his show, when you think about all these issues of representation and who we are and how we’re presented and what’s realistic?

Our organization, the one I head up as chairman of the board, are the people that got George Lopez in. He was, I guess, a comedian, a comic doing—what do they call them? Improvisation.

Stand-up.

And we were trying to get him into one of the studios to ABC. We know a person that sits on the board there, Monica Lozano. You know Monica?

I’ve just recently met her, yes, lovely person.

Her father sat on the board of [The Walt] Disney [Company], but Disney wasn’t buying George Lopez. They said, “People are not into Latino comics.” And we said, “Well, you haven’t seen any. How can you say that? How can people say that? We don’t see them.” So we put pressure on them. We said, “We’re going to start a boycott process on your films and on your enterprises and all that, because you’re not fulfilling what you should be doing as public media.” So then her father left, and we went to Monica and we told her the story, and we didn’t have to convince her. So eventually, we got ABC to look at George Lopez, and they were impressed with him. They said, “Well, okay, we’ll put him on for a season, but that’s it. We’re just going to put him on one season, and we are not guaranteeing a second season.”

So they put him on, and they loved him, and they wanted him for a second season, and look what he is now. He’s in film. He’s still doing well. He’s a little raunchy. I think maybe he has to clean his act up, but I guess people like what they hear, so who are we to make a judgment on that? But that’s how George Lopez got in, and that’s how a lot of the people that you see today in film are doing well. I remember the young woman—what’s her name? I can’t remember these names. She comes out. She’s a big actress, because we emphasized Latino, Latinas.

What film or movie or TV series is she in?

She comes on TV movies HBO and—what’s her name? She claimed she was Indonesian and Portuguese. She was a Mexican girl. She was claiming to be Indonesian and Portuguese, was not a Latina. So she was doing some parts. So we said, “No, she’s a Mexican American.” Then she started to see that that would help her, so she changed her ethnic background, and now she’s doing great. God, what’s her name?

I don’t know her name. I’m not familiar with that actress.

You would be when I tell you who it is.

If I saw her.

She does a lot of stuff. But anyway, we push people like that. A lot of people today—Tony Plana. Look at this young girl that plays Ugly Betty.

America Ferrera.

America, yes. We pushed her. We pushed Lupe Ontiveros and a lot of those folks. In fact, Lupe was trying to get a meeting with me because CBS just did a pilot of a Latino family and Lupe is in it, and Tony Plana and Tony Plana’s wife, and all of a sudden after the pilot, they didn’t want to do the series, and Lupe is concerned why aren’t they doing it. They went to all this—it takes a lot to make a pilot. It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop one, and then they stop it. They don’t put it on. So they wanted me to check into what’s the problem.

Sometimes it takes that, just hearing from the chairman of the board of the organization, and, “We want a meeting around this, and we’re going to issue a report card on you guys.” We do that. Every year we issue a report card, A, B, C, D, F, and if you don’t do some changes that are significant to the casting and the production and the direction and the writers, you’re not going to get an A or a B. You’re going to get a C or maybe a D, and we go public with it. We have a big conference and we call the press together, and they come, and we give out the grades, and they come out in the Times. And they don’t like that, because it exposes them.

Well, when you look at the Census, the 2010 Census results, pretty powerful.

Somehow it doesn’t hit them that the demographics are changing. They’ve changed. Somehow they cling to their notions of who the viewing public is. We’re the viewing public. I mean, 75 percent of Hispanics in this country speak English. And they think that because there’s Univision and Telemundo, that that’s all we look at, that our kids don’t look at ABC and NBC and CBS, you know. Where are the people on CNN? Where are the Latino commentators? We are pushing this constantly with people that can do this. They just turn a deaf ear.

But it sounds like you’ve been successful in making some inroads.

Yes, we have. It’s been incremental. Now you look at the credits and you see Flores and Dominguez and their little jobs on there, but they’re there. But they weren’t there before, see? Now we’re constantly recruiting and pressuring the casting directors and the comedy people and the drama people and the Diversity Vice President. “Hey, these are our people. Here’s what we’ve got.” We meet and they give us reports of who they hired, and who they’re looking at, who’s a regular. And the Screen Actors Guild [AFTRA] helps us, the Guild that works with us. So we’re doing this. I think it’s an important area to be involved in.

Do you think that the changes that we’ve seen over the past ten, fifteen years would have occurred without the—what is it, the National Latino Media Council?

No. I think it took a lot of prodding by us. One of our—I call them our secretariat. There’s another group here in L.A. Because the council is national. We have people from Florida and New York and they’re scattered. But one of our affiliates is the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Alex Nogales, and Alex does big fundraising, so he’s able to have a staff. He’s able to have attorneys on his staff, and they’re constantly in battle with the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] and with the networks, because he’s got the money. But every time we meet, I’m the chairman and I lead the discussion, and he comes in on it. He’s the one that has the writers’ workshop, because they’re the ones that give the money to his—but he’s the one who kind of runs our council because he has the wherewithal. He’s got the staff. I’m just chairman of the board of all the groups, and we convene the meetings. But he’s very good at pulling strings and negotiating.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for that, something unexpected. I was so focused in the early years, but it sounds really important what that organization has accomplished. So is there anything that you can think of right now that we might not have covered, anything you want to say, any final comments? We’ve covered a lot of your life history, but we can’t always hit every topic, so if there’s something that you might—

I’ve worked with the Native American organizations. I’ve always, as a kid, grew up having a lot of empathy for Indians. I come from Arizona and I remember Indians there. I always felt sorry for them, because I’d see little Indian kids, very poor, Navajos, Apaches, Papagos. In my development days with TELACU, we worked with the Yaquis in Arizona, helping them build community development, economic development. In Congress on the Banking Committee on Small Business, I was always very preferential to Native Americans so that they got a shot at the economy. I had an experience one day in Congress when I was asked by a group of Native Americans who were in town to meet with me, and, yes, I said, “Fine.” So we got a room, and there were about twenty national chiefs of different tribes, Seminole, Cherokees, Apaches, California tribes here. They all met with me, and I wondered what’s going on. The spokesman [Chief John James] said to me, “Do you recognize me?” I said, “Well, no. You look familiar, but I don’t recognize you.” He said, “Where’d you go to high school?” I said, “Garfield.” He said, “Well, so did I. Don’t you remember? We used to be in the art class together.” “Is that right? Well, I don’t recall.” “Well,” he says, “I’m John James.” He told me his name. I said, “I thought you were a Mexican.”

“Yeah,” he says, “we all look alike. But we’re here, and I got this group together to come to you because I knew of you and I know of you, and we went to high school together. We, as you know, are sovereign nations. Our reservations, our tribes are sovereign nations within the United States, and we have a notion that we’re tired of living off the government. We’re in dire straits in our tribal groups, and we think that one of the ways we can overcome that is if we can get a law that would allow us to have on our sovereign territory a gaming casino where we could attract people that like to play slot machines and Poker and all those things, and have casinos just like they have in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. That would really enhance our income, and we could be self-sufficient. This whole question of self-determination, economic self-determination, empowerment, we have our own schools, our own hospitals, but we need a law. Would you be willing to put a law like that together with other members of Congress?” I said, “Absolutely.” I mean, after what I read, the history about what’s happened to Indians, why not? He said, “Well, we have a friend over there in the Senate, [Benjamin] Nighthorse Campbell, who’s a Native American from Colorado. He’s a senator now. He used to be a congressman, and he’d be willing to be your co-sponsor.” I said, “Well, I’ll do it.” He said, “And can you get other members to do it?” I said, “I’m sure we can.” So he said, “Well, we’re here to ask that of you, to sponsor this legislation and bring it up for a vote.” So we did. We got all the technicians to help us put that kind of language together. What do I know about gaming, you know? This has got territorial rights and the rights of the treaties with the Indians, and, you know, while I appreciated Indians and their hardships and their history, I didn’t know all the intricate battles that they had with the Interior Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs and all that, but I started to learn.

Sure enough, we got the legislation through in the House, we got it through in the Senate, and that was a law. It was spearheaded by this tribe right here in Indio, the Cabazon tribal group. That’s their name, Cabazon, Cabazones. They’re an ancient what they call band of—see, when the Spaniards came in, the tribes were real big, say, in the Coachella Valley, and they were willing to fight. The way that the Spaniards dealt with them, they did what they did in Mexico too; they divided them up into small bands and they called them Mission Indians. They’re the Indians that built the little missions and all that up and down the coast, so they’re called Mission Bands. In the Coachella Valley, they’re the Cahuilla, Cahuilla Indians. Here in the San Gabriel Valley, they’re the Gabrielinos. Up in northern Oxnard and Ventura, they’re the Chumash. There’s a hundred tribes in California, separate tribes. So we passed this law giving them the rights that on their territory they can build a casino, a resort. Of course, Atlantic City and Las Vegas, right away their key operators put an injunction in challenging the U.S. government, Congress, “You can’t do that. You can’t give the Indians that right, because they don’t pay taxes. They’re their own people. You can’t do that.” Well, they took it to the [U.S.] Supreme Court. They took it to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court reviewed it. They looked at it, big intense study, and they finally voted in favor of the Indians and said, “They’re sovereign nations. They can do this.” So today, as you know, they’re all over the country with their casinos and their resorts. The one that headed up the whole battle was the Cabazons right here in Coachella Valley.

So when I left Congress, they were very grateful for what I had done. They were going to expand their—they had a little Bingo operation going. They would do Bingo and they would sell cigarettes. You can buy cigarettes there without paying federal tax, so people would go to their reservation and buy cigarettes and play Bingo. Now they were going big time with the casino. They built—they call it Fantasy Springs. It’s right there in Indio. Of course, all the other Indians did the same. In Palm Springs, Agua Calientes, they built their casino, and the other tribes up and around here. There are fifty casinos in California. There are a hundred tribes and fifty casinos. Fifty of them have casinos. Well, they were grateful that I had been that kind of legislator that promoted them and believed in them and all that, and they asked me to join their corporation, to be a member of their board of directors, to guide their enterprise. The Cabazons elected not to put any of the board members as Indians. The Indians had a lot of strife within their tribes, their familias, and they fight each other. A very destructive process, but that’s Indian country. So the Cabazons decided that they would have non-Indians run the enterprise for them as directors in authority. It’s called an authority. They’re the owners, but the authority is the people that guide the management, runs the place, and they asked me to be a member of that authority. To this day, I’m the chairman of the board of this big casino down there. It’s a spa; there’s a huge hotel there; there’s a golf course; and there’s a bowling alley and a casino and a theater and all that stuff. That’s all run by the authority. We’re the ones that dictate and regulate and monitor what the management does there. They have general managers and vice presidents, and we employ 1,500 people.

So it’s an enterprise, and that tribe sustains itself by the profits. I mean, they get a share of the income. Once all the bills are paid and all the investors are paid back, there’s distribution for the tribe and that’s how they sustain themselves. They have their own school. They have their own police department, and each of the tribal members gets a stipend for being an owner. So that’s the way they operate. Well, I’ve been with them since I left Congress, so it’s something I do every month. I’ve got to go to a board meeting and review the income and the operating expenses and I have a license. They issue a license to do this, the state does, and so those are things that I get involved with. I work with their community there. They’re an industrious community.

When you think about the history of gambling in the United States, it’s been very controversial.

Oh, yes.

So at one time illegal, and illegal in some places. So how did you feel morally, ethically, about that?

Well, I felt morally in a correct position, because I’m not a player. People like to play. They like to go to a casino and play the slots or whatever. As long as it’s not abusive, as long as they don’t—I’ve never run into a situation there where people are committing suicide or family breakups or whatever. Seniors are there and all kinds of folks, playing these machines, and everybody seems to like them. Look at Las Vegas. We have the same thing. You don’t have to go to Las Vegas. We have—what’s her name, [Whoopie] Goldberg? What’s her name? The actress.

An actress, Goldberg? Goldie Hawn? No.

She was just on last night at the Tony [Award]s, the black gal. She’s a comedienne.

Whoopi Goldberg?

Whoopi Goldberg. She’s there. She comes and does her show there. We have a contract with Oscar de la Hoya. He brings in his boxers now. The Mexican mariachis, these big guys come there. It’s a place for entertainment, you know. As long as I know that the profits from all that doing—these poor Indians who were in bread lines before and weren’t getting any medical attention now are empowered to do this for themselves. They have self-determination. They have their own entities that take care of their families and their education. I mean, I don’t feel bad about that. I feel I’m doing a service. And the gaming, the industry is heavily regulated. I mean, we have a very serious accountability to the shareholders, to the tribe. There’s a lot of security that there’s no nefarious things take place. We’re guardians for them to make sure that nothing goes wrong.

Well, that’s been a hugely important change for American Indians in the later part of the twentieth century and today.

It is, yes. It’s brought them back to a greater degree of economic progress. I mean, there’s still a lot of problems over the Indian country. Not all the tribes have casinos, but they have a process where the ones that have casinos pool their money together and distribute their winnings to the ones that don’t have casinos, so that’s enhanced the poor ones. It’s good.

Well, I think that’s it, then, unless there’s anything else that you—

You know about my cultural activities with Plaza de Cultura y Artes. I’m chairman there, and that’s been a thing I’ve always been very interested in, in promulgating our culture and making sure that people are aware of it. I feel proud of it, and I hope that this Plaza will have good success.

How long were you part of that? From the inception?

From the beginning, yes. From the beginning. About the year 2000, eleven years.

Well, that’s another institution that you don’t know yet what kind of impact it’s going to have.

That’s right.

But it sounds like the opening was hugely successful and some of your ideas for it will be realized in the future years. The first big event, was that Cinco de Mayo?

Oh, yes. I wasn’t here. I know that they had quite a festival there.

Then what was the goal of Plaza del Cultura y Artes originally?

Well, the goal is to—there is no entity in the city that really recognizes the development of Los Angeles as a city that was settled by Mexicans, Mexicans that were ethnic people. There were some African Americans, there were some Native Americans, there were some mestizos, forty-four families that came under Spanish rule and settled a colony there. The city grew and grew and became a major—what it is today. It’s an international city of great diversity. But even though they have the Asian Museum and the Armenian Museum and you have all kinds of museums celebrating ethnic groupings, there’s no one center that exposes the public to the history of Mexican Americans and what they have contributed to the region and to the area, and that’s the purpose, to show that they have, and their role in the building of the city of Los Angeles.

Hopefully, the center will provide a window for young people to really understand where they came from and what their ancestors are all about, so that’s why we have the Voces Vivas. It’s a documentary recording system where anybody can come and tell their story and the story of their ancestors and where they came from, and that’s all stored like you do, like the oral history thing. We’re doing that through a video process and, of course, all the other aspects that will expose young people to their culture, their language, and their attributes, make them proud, give them pride. That’s the goal.

Was that the goal from the very beginning?

Yes.[County Supervisor Gloria Molina had the vision to initiate the plaza as a county facility much like Disney Hall and LACMA. We as trustees would raise funds for programs.]

Who was deciding who was going to be brought into this process and what the focus was going to be, and were you going to be using universities or business people? How did you decide who would be part of that founding—

Well, we did it as a board. We started out as a small board to simply ensure that it wasn’t a large board that would have so many ideas and directions and wouldn’t be tugging and pushing and shoving against each other, which we’ve often seen as a destruction of any kind of organization. But let’s keep it small. We’ll bring in consultants. We’ll bring in people to give us ideas of what we should be in terms of the stated goal. How do we do it? We went through a series of people, historians and curators and managers of these kinds of entities, and out of that grew this whole process. Our latest hire was a professional historian/curator, so to speak, Mr. Miguel Angel, noted for his management of these kinds of institutions and very well connected to the Mexican government and very well connected to other institutions here in the United States. He’s worked for various museums and cultural centers and so he really is the sort of manager of the process.

He’s been on for—

About two years now.

So he saw the final—

Yes. He really brought together not just the artistic aspects, but all the elements that it takes to build an edifice like this, the contracting, the engineering, the monitoring and the administration of how it’s done, to make sure that the money and the allocations are correctly used and there’s no waste. He’s a very, very astute man. That’s what he’s doing. So it’s been great. I’ve enjoyed it.

It’s a beautiful place—

It is.

—and I look forward to going back and seeing more of it, because you can’t just go once.

Oh, yes. No, you have to go a few times.

You have to go many times, because there’s so much information there. Yes, it’s a wonderful addition to our city. Well, great. Thank you so much, and we’ll stop it here.

Thank you. If there’s any more that we need to follow up, I guess we could always do that, right?

Definitely. I’m going to stop it, and I’ll explain to you what the next step is.

All right. [End of June 13, 2011 interview]