LEARNING OUR HISTORY: HEROES AND LEADERS OF OUR TEXAS PAST

 By Juan Montoya

Years ago, when one could still travel unhindered to Boca Chica Beach and back, it was the custom of locals to take off Friday afternoon after work and take the leisure drive out to the Gulf to unwind from the week's labors.

It was still acceptable at the time to drive out to the desolate beach on Highway 4 quaffing the dregs wrapped in a brown paper bag, so to speak. About three-quarters of the way out, one could pull off the road near Palmetto Hill and relieve a full bladder watching the river flow out to the beach.

It was during one of these Friday afternoon jaunts that I and a friend of mine drove off toward the river on Palmetto Hill Road. We stopped at an abandoned structure that I have since learned was the old (Prax) Orive homestead and we stopped there. Peering in among the ruins of the small wood-frame house, I discerned numerous objects still cluttering the inside of the structure.

Being an incurable bibliophile, I spotted several tomes within the wreckage. I clambered inside and picked up a few of them. There was an old copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales, some Sears catalogues and a paperback in Spanish that caught my eye.

It was a copy named En Defensa De Mi Raza written by someone named Alonso S. Perales. Now, being from the generation of Cesar Chavez, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Reyes Tijerina, the Brown Berets and others, it immediately caught my eye. I remember I even used to wear a denim jacket with a black blocked eagle with "Chicano Power" stenciled on the back. Naturally, a title like that caught my militant eye immediately.

Little did I know that the gentleman in question, this Alonso Perales, was a pioneer whose efforts in the struggle for equal rights foreshadowed that of those men mentioned above.

Perales, I later found out, was born  born on October 17, 1898, to Susana (Sandoval) and Nicolas Perales in Alice, Texas. He was orphaned at age six and worked while still a child.  He finished public school in Alice and graduated from the Draughon Practical Business College in Corpus Christi. He was drafted into the United States Army during World War I and received an honorable discharge.

Now the story of this remarkable person gets better.

This orphan from South Texas took the civil service examination and moved to Washington and worked for a year and a half in the Department of Commerce. He graduated from the Preparatory School in Washington, studied a year in the Department of Arts and Science at George Washington  University, and received a B.A. from the School of Economics and Government at the National University. In 1926 he received his law degree.

In the 1920s and 1930s he went on thirteen diplomatic missions to the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, Chile, and the West Indies. In 1945 he served as legal counsel to the Nicaraguan delegation at the United Nations conference. He also served under the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration.

His Texas Online biography notes that he was a major political leader from the 1920s until his death and was one of the most influential Mexican Americans of his time. Perales saw himself as a defender of la raza, especially battling charges that Mexicans were an inferior people and a social problem. 

In 1923 he wrote to the Washington Post to complain about the film Bad Man, which portrayed Mexicans as bandits. He was one of the founders of LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens) in 1929 and helped write the LULAC constitution, along with José Tomás Canales (of Brownsville) and Eduardo Idar. He served as the organization's third president and formed Council 16 in San Antonio, a rival to Council 2 and Manuel C. Gonzales.

In 1930 Perales testified before a United States Congressional hearing on Mexican immigration. In the 1940s he worked to introduce a bill in the Texas legislature prohibiting discrimination based on race. Perales was an intellectual who firmly believed in the law. He wrote about civil rights and racial discrimination, which he argued “had the approval of a majority.

One of his books was the one I found. It was really a two-volume set titled En Defensa de Mi Raza, which includes his essays, letters, and speeches along with other intellectuals' essays on racial discrimination in Texas. 

In 1927, when his letters to two Texas governors about the assassination of Mexican Americans in police custody in South Texas were ignored, Alonso S. Perales wrote to President Coolidge, asking for the Justice Department to conduct an official investigation into their deaths. Perales believed US citizens of Mexican descent had an obligation to their country, “including offering our lives for this Nation when necessary.” He also believed adamantly that the United States had a duty to protect the rights of all its people.

Originally published in Spanish in 1936 and 1937, it contains articles, letters and speeches written by one of the most influential civil rights activists of the early twentieth century. When Mexican-American veterans of World War II were denied service in a South Texas pool hall, even while wearing their uniforms, Perales wrote about the incident for The San Antonio Express. He also exhorted his community to secure an education and participate in civic duties.

Perales was also a member of the American Legion and the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce and a columnist for La Prensa and other Spanish-language newspapers. He was an articulate public speaker, and his written and spoken Spanish was impeccable. He was greatly admired by the Mexican immigrant community.

He died in San Antonio on October 21, 1960. In 1977 the Alonso S. Perales Elementary School in the Edgewood ISD was dedicated on the west side of San Antonio, and in 1990 the national LULAC convention in Albuquerque paid tribute to him.

When I worked for the San Antonio Light, I worked alongside Frank Trejo, a pioneer Hispanic journalist who knew San Wilmas like the back of his hand. He said that late in his life, Perales embraced religion and would accost people on the street to preach the Word.

Felix Almaraz, a historian at UTSA, said that the collection of his works and papers were tied up in probate disputed by his descendants and was unavailable to the public yet. Carlos Guerra, the late Express-News columnist down Broadway, said that copies of his works were rare and hard to find. That I had a copy of one of the volumes of En Defensa De Mi Raza was extraordinary, he said.

"He wrote others, but it's a miracle if you can get them." he told me then. "Hold on to the one you have."

Unfortunately, the copy I found in the old Uribe homestead was loaned to a school  principal I knew in Saginaw, Michigan, and as often happens, when he moved to Washington, D.C., it disappeared with him.

Now, after doing a little digging, I found out that the entire trove of Perales' papers has been acquired by the The University of Houston and Arte Público Press through the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Program, the Special Collections Department of the M.D. Anderson Library, and the UH Law Center and are available for scholarly examination. 

A translation into English – In Defense of My People, by Emilio Zamora, a professor of history at the University of Texas, is now available for English-only readers.

Whereas many scholars place these origins in the late 1920s, especially with the events leading up to the 1929 founding of LULAC, in Corpus Christi, Texas, the Perales papers and materials reveal roots to predecessor groups and to events from the 1910 Mexican Revolution, the end of the Porfiriato, and the early 1920s.

These family-held papers, now searchable in microfilm format from the University of Houston, promise to fill out the record on the structured role of Mexican American men and women in these mutual aid societies and civic organizations, as well as the behind-the-scenes role of lawyers—in this instance, not primarily as litigators, but as civic leaders and elected officials"

Who would've thunk that the Orives out at the ranch were reading this man by the light of a lantern in their home along the banks of the Rio Grande?