http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercuryn ... 093450.htm

Posted on Sat, Jul. 09, 2005

Ernestina Garcia, voice for South Bay Latinos

ACTIVIST STARTED CAMPAIGN IN MILPITAS SCHOOL DISTRICT

By Edwin Garcia and Mack Lundstrom

Mercury News

Ernestina Garcia fought many battles for nearly four decades in the South Bay and became a tireless voice who took on the establishment in the name of Latino rights in education, employment, housing and health care.

But she lost her final battle, with cancer, and died Sunday at age 76.

Her evolution from homemaker to activist began in 1968 when her eldest daughter showed her a copy of her Milpitas High School yearbook. Garcia was outraged by what she saw: Instead of printing the usual phrase to cover blank spaces -- ``photo not available'' -- the yearbook published a caricature of a sleeping Mexican next to a cactus.

Garcia, born to parents of Mexican ancestry, soon discovered that the high school, and other campuses in the South Bay, lacked sensitivity because they hired few or no Mexican-American teachers. So she embarked on a persistent, in-your-face quest to persuade school officials to hire Latino teachers, and that mission evolved into her becoming a fiery advocate for a broad range of issues affecting Latinos.

``Ernie's presence really brought a lot of sincerity and passion to the activities and concerns of Chicanos for the whole region here,'' said Jose Carrasco, the retired chairman of the Mexican-American studies department at San Jose State University.

Garcia died in the Milpitas home built by her husband 38 years ago.

Born and raised in Arizona, one of 17 siblings, Ernestina Arce Hernandez Zamora saw inequity up close and personal as a schoolchild in the 1930s.

``We were not allowed to ride the same bus as the white children even though we went to the same school,'' she wrote in a 1994 Mercury News letter to the editor, responding to the anti-illegal-immigrant Proposition 187. ``Their classrooms had gas heaters for the winter time and we had a wooden pot belly stove to warm the room. Many of our Mexican children were hit by teachers for not speaking or understanding English.''

The daughter of migrant farmworkers, her parents moved in the 1940s to Decoto, which later became part of Union City.

She was married to Antonio S. Garcia, a warehouseman who died in 1996. They had five children, one of whom, Teresa, died in a fire at age 4, and another, Diana Garcia Masangcay, died seven weeks ago during childbirth.

Not long after moving to Milpitas, Garcia took on school districts and city halls to fight for la raza, which refers to ``the people,'' a popular term in the 1960s during the political and social Chicano movement.

She founded the Confederación de la Raza Unida, a grass-roots political organization advocating civil rights, health, housing, economic and educational rights for farmworkers, students, the elderly and Chicanos -- Mexican-Americans born in the United States.

The group searched San Jose for poor Chicanos in desperate straits -- soliciting funds to send the body of a car-crash victim back to Mexico, digging into their own pockets to pay the rent for a penniless family of seven living in a car.

``When one of us is down, we give him a push,'' she said in a 1976 interview. ``Then we expect him to help someone else when he can. It's like a chain, making this a better world.''

But Garcia's way of improving the world often clashed with power brokers opposite her side of the table.

Her comments were sometimes considered to be inappropriately divisive, she was told, but she continued to use words such as ``racists'' to make her points during public meetings.

``Mom was a no-nonsense kind of person,'' said Doreen Garcia-Nevel, the eldest of five children, ``and if she did not like what you said, she would tell you. She would not hold back.''

Garcia continued to stand up for Latinos in her later years, though in a more low key fashion. When she learned several weeks ago that Taser guns were used by police against children in Florida and Illinois, she took her concerns to La Raza Roundtable, a monthly gathering of Latinos and Silicon Valley political leaders.

``Like her usual self, she gets up and speaks loud and clear, very frustrated, angry, because that's her style, that's the way she came across,'' recalled La Raza Roundtable Chairman Victor Garza. He reassured her that police in San Jose weren't shooting children with Tasers.

She called the Mercury News earlier this year in her unsuccessful attempt to prevent a developer from building homes on a Milpitas site where remains of American Indians had been discovered.

Throughout her activism, she was almost always ready with a contrary view:

In 2000, on the Mexican American Community Services Agency: ``MACSA now is just a money-making machine that no longer represents the community. It went in the direction of government money and now it's gimme, gimme, gimme.''

In 1996 on the increasing use of the word ``Hispanic'' in place of a lexicon she preferred, ``Indigenous,'' ``Chicano,'' ``Mejicano,'' ``Mexican-American,'' ``Latino'' and ``Raza'': ``According to our dictionary, `Hispanic' means Spanish and Portuguese culture; it is European. We did not change our ancestry; we are still indigenous. Europeans came to the Americas as a result of conquest, which was imposed on our population. . . . Hispanics might be a convenient term but it is totally inaccurate. Some of us have a fierce pride of our Indian ancestry and do not want anyone to Hispanicize us.''

Her critics didn't seem to faze her.

``They say I'm too radical,'' she said in a 1994 Mercury News interview. ``I don't think I'm a radical. I tell it like it is.''

Ernestina Z. Garcia

Born: May 19, 1929, in Tolleson, Ariz.

Died: July 3, 2005, in Milpitas.

Survived by: Daughters, Doreen Garcia-Nevel of Tracy and Martha Garcia of San Jose; son, Anthony Garcia of Discovery Bay.

Services: Viewing from 1 to 5 p.m. Tuesday at Machado's Hillside Chapel, 1051 Harder Road, in Hayward. Vigil at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Our Lady of the Rosary Church, 703 C St., in Union City. Funeral Mass at 10 a.m. Wednesday at the church.

Memorial: Donations may be made in Mrs. Garcia's name to Latinas Contra Cancer, P.O. Box 64, San Jose, Calif. 95109.
Contact Edwin Garcia at egarcia@mercurynews.com or (40 920-5432.