Changing the face of American politics
Hector Galán has devoted his life to telling stories.
This is why he’s a filmmaker. With his latest project, he wanted to educate about a man who doesn’t get a lot of attention — Willie Velasquez.
Velasquez was a Mexican-American political activist who launched a grassroots movement that forever changed the nation’s political landscape.
With his rallying cry of su voto es su voz (your vote is your voice), Velasquez quickly rose through the ranks.
“I got involved with the project because I’m the only person who had footage of Willie,” Galán says. “I had interviewed him in 1983 at a gathering in San Antonio. It’s been in the archives all this time. He was doing something great with his life.”
Galán’s documentary, “Willie Velasquez: Your Vote is Your Voice,” premieres at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 6, on New Mexico PBS and then repeats at 9 p.m. on Oct. 9.
Through his nonpartisan Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, Velasquez launched over 1,000 voter registration drives in 200 cities, creating a movement that has continued to grow in power each year. “Today, there are over 27 million eligible Latino voters,” says Sandie Viquez Pedlow, executive producer and executive director of Latino Public Broadcasting. “By encouraging Latinos to become invested in the democratic process by registering to vote, Willie Velasquez and SVREP paved the way for the continually increasing power of Latinos at the polls.”
Throughout American history, Latinos were often kept from the ballot box through the use of poll taxes, gerrymandering and outright intimidation. But drawing inspiration from the Civil Rights movement, César Chávez and the farmworkers movement, and the protests against the war in Vietnam, Velasquez’s Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project would change the face of American politics by harnessing the power of the Latino vote in unprecedented ways.
Velasquez’s group also was at the forefront of several court actions that banned the gerrymandering of political districts, and at-large voting in cities and counties that prevented the election of minority candidates.
Following the project’s successes in Texas, New Mexico and Colorado, Velasquez’s organization was training its sights on California.
“Willie and his group did everything by going door to door,” Galán says. “It was important to get Latinos to vote. It’s still important to this day.”
Velasquez was born in San Antonio, attended St. Mary’s University and spent two summers as a Congressional intern in Washington, D.C., working for San Antonio’s pioneering Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez.
Velasquez came to the realization that the only true path to empowerment would be to engage Latinos in the political process.
With the founding of SVREP in 1974, Velasquez’s army of community organizers set out to register one million new voters. Velasquez died at 44 in 1988. “Seeing what he was able to accomplish, one could only wonder if the White House was in his future,” Galán says.