Discrimination

By: Voces Staff

By: Voces Staff

By: Voces Staff

Jaime Chahin is an advocate for educational equality in Texas. He was the lead witness in the LULAC v Richards case in 1987 that dealt with educational inequality in the South Texas/Border region. He is now a Dean at Texas State College; he has spent his life encouraging, inspiring and prompting minority men and women to live beyond their expectations and assisting them as they pursue higher educational opportunities. 

By: Voces Staff

By: Voces Staff

Carmen Danna was born in San Antonio, TX and grew up in Devine, TX. As a former elementary school teacher she experienced different forms of discrimination throughout her life. She reflects on her experience growing up in a small town and the importance the role of education had on her. Danna discusses the many disparities she experienced in the education system and why she still believes that education plays a vital role in our lives.

By Carlos Devora

From working as a lawyer to serving as president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund to being appointed ambassador to Argentina, Vilma Martinez has been a trailblazer.

Her work has helped bring down discriminatory laws and expand the political power of Latinos.

She has accomplished this even in the face of racial and gender discrimination.

By Brigit Benestante

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, Alfredo Santos was ashamed of his ethnicity.

“I didn’t like being a Mexican,” he said. “I was embarrassed, I guess, to be a Mexican.”

By Chris Touma

Two years before Sergio Porras received his draft notice to serve in the Vietnam War, he was marching in the streets of Uvalde, Texas, with hundreds of other Mexican-American high school students.

It wasn’t war or the draft they were protesting. The students of Uvalde High were fed up with discrimination in the town’s public school system.

Uvalde, 86 miles southwest of San Antonio, was divided by railroad tracks. Whites lived in the northern section of town; the Hispanics, south of the tracks.

By Voces Staff

In the spring of 1970, Olga Charles was a senior at Uvalde High School in South Texas. With just a few weeks before graduation, she was preparing to follow her mother’s career advice: Go to business school and become a bookkeeper, like her Aunt Julia.

Alberto Lara Rojo heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor the day after it happened.

“We didn’t know about it; we lived on the wrong side of town,” recalled the Mexican-American Navy veteran.

On that Monday, the Sunday attack on the American naval base in Hawaii was the talk of his high school in Marfa, Texas, where he was a freshman. Outside the school, other Mexican-American students told him, "It’s a gringo war. It does not affect us Spanish people."