Thread: Former LULAC president's niece supports Minutemen

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Local news Friday, October 7, 2005

Former LULAC president's niece supports Minutemen

Louie Gilot
El Paso Times

The Minutemen found an unlikely ally in Gloria Deverick, the niece of the first president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC.

Deverick, 81, will speak Sunday at a public meeting in Las Cruces organized by the New Mexico Border Watch, a Minutemen-type group patrolling the border between Sunland Park and Columbus, N.M.

In a telephone interview from her home in Mineral Wells, Texas, Deverick said she supported the Minutemen's taking a stand against illegal immigration.

"I don't think we should be supporting Mexico's millions who are coming here. It's not fair to the citizens. Those coming here are depriving the people here, even the Hispanics," she said.

Her appearance is seen as somewhat of a coup for the Minutemen who were vilified by LULAC.

According to the Minutemen, they are volunteer, civilian patrols who report sightings of undocumented immigrants to the Border Patrol. They will be patrolling along the border during a monthlong operation in October.

LULAC has called the group's efforts "xenophobic."

Deverick is a niece of Ben Garza of Corpus Christi, who at a time when signs saying "No Mexicans Allowed" were seen in public, sought to unite Mexican-American organizations. Garza became LULAC's first president in 1929.

Deverick, a retired social workers, said her father, Joe Garza, was also involved in the early days of the organization.

In Las Cruces, she will share her view that LULAC has changed for the worse.

"It's gotten very radical," she said. "There was discrimination in those days in Corpus Christi. But now, it's reverse discrimination and my dad would never agree with that."

Hector Flores, current president of LULAC, said the reality is that while things have improved since Ben Garza's time, problems like workplace discrimination and racial profiling by police continue.

It becomes much harder to get the general public to accept the Latinos as regular fellow human beings. People claiming to be Latino leaders are also trying to get them accepted as being diffrent uniquely entitled to be immigration cheats.