Files kept on Latino activists must be released
During the civil rights movement, the FBI surveilled the activities of the late, great Rev. Claude Black of San Antonio.
His file contained more than 800 pages.
So, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility to suspect that if the federal government monitored a local clergyman involved in social justice, it also surveilled someone like César Chávez of the United Farm Workers union, whose federal commemorative holiday is later this month.
Both show how much U.S. agencies misused their powers to watch, discredit, disrupt and harass civil rights leaders labeled as extremists, communists, socialists, subversives and more.
Too little is known about the information the FBI and CIA gathered on Latino civil rights leaders.
It’s time we learned how these agencies responded to those fighting for the rights of racial and ethnic minorities to gain full access to the ballot box and for fair, just representation.
This week, U.S. Reps. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio and Jimmy Gomez of Los Angeles asked CIA Director William J. Burns and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to share their records.
In a letter to Burns and Wray, Castro and Gomez, members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said they were motivated by “a profound sense of duty towards ensuring transparency, accountability, and the protection of civil rights and civil liberties in our nation’s intelligence operations.”
They cited the agencies’ disclosure of Black activism, noting their files on Latinos were “much less robust.”
The disclosure needs to be more thorough — not just for scholars and historians but the public, to account fully for what federal agencies did against their own civilians, who had every right to question their government and demand better of it. They need to hold their records up to the light.
La Raza Unida, a now defunct but legitimate political party successful in running campaigns and electing local officials throughout South Texas, wasn’t the only group the federal government targeted.
The group was progressive, but federal agencies equally surveilled the far more conservative American G.I. Forum.
At the time, federal officials saw civil rights and anti-war activism as somehow connected to the Soviet Union, Chinese and Cuban communists, which is especially rich given former President Donald Trump’s relationship to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Castro and Gomez asked for materials spanning a half-century. During Tuesday’s hearing, Castro asked Wray and Burns directly if they’d “commit to working with me to improve the historical record and ensure that U.S. intelligence agencies can correct the mistakes of the past with regard to surveillance of Latino civil rights organizations.”
History will assess their solemn, but affirmative responses. They seemed ready for a PBS documentary.
Burns said, “Yes.” Wray said he would “see what we can provide.”
UFW president emeritus Arturo Rodriguez said the release of records is critical.
“We always heard and believed that we were being watched, because of what was happening to Martin Luther King,” the San Antonian said.
Rodriguez said similar tactics continue among the powerful, attempting to taint the credibility of those who challenge them.
The union tried not to be “paranoid.” Nor did its leaders focus on suspected spying.
“We had to do our work,” he said. “We knew we weren’t doing anything wrong.”
Longtime civil rights activist Rosie Castro said La Raza Unida leaders believed government agents were monitoring them.
Castro is the mother of the congressman and his twin brother, Julián, a former San Antonio mayor and Obama Cabinet member now leading the Latino Community Foundation, the nation’s largest Latinoserving foundation.
“It was a constant thing” at La Raza Unida’s office on Gen. Mcmullen Drive on the city’s West Side, she said. But the biggest “infiltration” was at the party’s El Paso convention, which drew the nation’s top Mexican American civil rights leaders and activists.
“We know from the Henry B. Gonzalez files that the police were taking pictures” locally, too, she said.
“We just kept on doing what we needed to do,” she said, recalling the harassment they experienced, including calls to their homes in the middle of the night and threatening letters.
The latter were composed with letters cut out of magazines, she said.
Releasing the records will fill out the historical record, providing a fuller picture that then can be shared with current and future generations, she said.
New data gleaned from within and outside government agencies will give scholars a chance to study, write and rectify the nation’s history books and official texts.
“Kids will be able to look at the history of the struggles for Latinos and, in Texas, for Mexican Americans, and realize what it took to get the right to vote,” she said.
They’ll learn “what it was like when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo wasn’t adhered to and when their grandparents were subjected to punishment when they spoke Spanish,” she said.
Hopefully, the release of government surveillance data will help the cause of Native and Asian American activists, she said.
So they, too, can better tell their histories.