Southwest. His name was William Velasquez but everyone knew him as willie. It is a name synonymous with democracy in america. To the organization he founded, the southwest Voter Registration education project, he nearly doubled hispanic Voter Registration at increased the number of latino elected officials in the station. His appeal to the Hispanic Community was a simple, passionate, and direct. Your vote is your voice. We will talk about the records of the southwest Voter Registration education project. They are the oldest and largest nonpartisan latino Voter Registration project in the country. The collection contains the first 20 years of the organizations existence, they are still in existence today. It is a deep and wide collection if you are interested in learning about what registration, particularly in minority communities. The organization was started in 1974 by willie velasquez. He is from san antonio. As a young man, he was heavily involved in the chicano movement. In college, he was one of the founders of the mexicanamerican utah organization which was involved in doing what registration drives at local colleges. Also involved in high school walkouts. This was in the late 1960s, early 1970s, the height of the chicano movement. He was interested in butter registration and getting in Voter Registration and getting the Latino Community to vote. Register to vote and to realize that they have a voice. And by voting they have a voice. The motto is, your vote is your voice. In 1974, willie was able to successfully apply for 503 c and became the organization became a national nonprofit. We have the articles of incorporation. He would sit down and start calling, argue register to vote . Did you know tomorrow is election day . The organization expanded to not only covering texas, but all of the southwest. Arizona, new mexico, california, utah, colorado, nevada, and they grew to have a fulltime staff, they had a board of directors. They have a lot going on they still have a lot going on. There were three main departments, the field organizing department, the legal department, and the Research Department. The field organizing department focused mainly on Voter Education and training. They hit the pavement not only in san antonio, not only texas, but came up with a whole system for identifying coordinators in the various regions, different counties, although by the southwest all over the southwest and create a detailed training manuals for how to put together a butter registration drive. Everything you need to know. It was start with a field coordinator. Here, you can see, they tell you what you need to prepare for a Voter Registration drive. You need to know your state election laws, you need to be able to answer these questions. If you dont know the voting law or election code, you dont look as informed as you should be. They are telling the field coordinators, you need to know your stuff and that the whole principle of this, organizing campaign, is unity. You need to get the community to gather, organize the community and be united in this effort. All of this, the coordinators manual tells you what you need to do. You need to get local politicians on board, talk to local churches, talk to everyone in the community and say this is what we are trying to do. Once you have all that together, that they had a program where you could apply for a grant. You would have to fill out a form that said how you were going to do the drive, how many volunteers you have been able to secure, what your budget is, the dates, everything had to be figured out ahead of time. They would send their application, it would get approved, then they would get the training. Here is the Field Training manual. It tells you everything from simple canvassers, contact sheets, it has information on the media and how to deal with the media at what to say to the media. Procedures and administration of a Voter Registration project. Everything you need to know to have a successful Voter Registration drive. These Regional Planning committees, the files that we have, there are hundreds of them. By the 1980s, they were organizing on average 100 Voter Registration drives a year. For all those planning committees, we have one from arizona and rehave hundreds and we have hundreds from counties all over the southwest. What is cool about this one is we have photographs, they sent in photographs when they sent in their information about the registration drive. What is great about these is i often get asked for photographs. Really . Considering how about the collection is, we dont have that many photographs. I asked the current president about that, she has been involved with the organization for a long time, she said, we were too busy to take photographs. We were busy organizing and registering voters to take photographs. It is great to be able to see what they were doing in arizona. Some of the Regional Committee reports from the various counties do have photographs, but i think this one has the most. Here is another example, this one is from texas. Here, you can see their reimbursement form for every thing they did. Their office supplies, kickoff rallies, everything was accounted for. We have examples from the Research Department. The Research Department was prolific, they did a lot of work to collect research, conducted their own research, and published research reports. The collection contains a lot of census data, a lot of Election Results data, and they conducted exit polls, opinion polls. They were gathering as much data as they could to get these reports out. In 1985, because this wasnt such a huge part of the organization this was such a huge part of the organization, they parted the research arm called southwest for research institute. We have hundreds and hundreds of reports. You can see, they would do things like a political demographic analysis. For hispanic political participation. They were polling mexican americans to find out what are the issues you face . What are your voting habits . To find out how they can read more mexican americans, how they can produce training materials and workshops to make mexican americans feel like they have a voice and that they can participate in the democratic process. In san antonio, some of the issues were basic services, such as roads, sidewalks, education. From that, this is influential and how willie got involved with Voter Registration. Sadly, in 1988, willie passed away from kidney cancer. His funeral, there were more than a thousand people. It was covered on local news, national news, the New York Times had an article about it. Even Michael Dukakis was at his funeral. A lot of national politicians, when they heard the news, they make statements about how important he was to the political process and getting minorities involved in the political process. In 1995, president clinton posthumously awarded willie the president ial medal of freedom. Here, we have the invitation to ms. Velasquez for the ceremony, awarding him the president ial medal of freedom. The organization is not only important to san antonio, not only to the southwest, because they did work across the southwest, not just texas, but it is important nationally. What they have been able to do in terms of increasing mexicanamerican Voter Registration, also an influence on how politicians how many mexicanamerican politicians we have in office, they have made a huge impact on getting out the vote to minority communities. Our cities tour staff travel to san antonio, texas to learn about its rich history. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] you can watch this and other programs at cspan. Org cities tour