http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=442566

Convention aims to inform, empower Latinos
Discussion, rally on immigration to be held
By GEORGIA PABST
gpabst@journalsentinel.com
Posted: June 26, 2006
In 1929, a group of Mexican-Americans formed the League of United Latin American Citizens in Corpus Christi, Texas, to make a stand for equality and first-class citizenship.

Today, the organization, better known as LULAC, continues its mission to educate and empower Latinos. The organization is holding its convention, which began Monday and will run to Saturday, in Milwaukee at the Midwest Airlines Center, where an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 are expected to attend.

The convention will feature a series of workshops on issues such as immigration, civil rights, education, jobs, health, youth and women's issues. There will also be career, college and job fairs along with information on home buying and a health fair, all of which are free and open to the public.

Speakers include Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Democratic Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, of California, will be the keynote speaker on Friday night. NAACP President Bruce Gordon and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao will be among the speakers at the workshops.

The convention is being held as immigration and efforts to reform the nation's immigration laws are hot topics. In addition to a discussion on the subject Friday morning, there will be a rally Saturday to protest the House bill sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) that calls for strict enforcement efforts only and to support the Senate version, which includes a path to citizenship and provisions for a guest worker program.

League officials attended a town hall meeting held by Sensenbrenner on Sunday in Thiensville and again asked him to discuss his bill at the convention. "This is one of the most punitive immigration bills to come out of either house in 50 years," said Brent Wilkes, national executive director of the league who asked Sensenbrenner to attend the convention. "We felt he should come to speak to those who will be most affected."

Tom Schreibel, chief of staff for Sensenbrenner, said Monday that league officials had been told that Congress is in session this week and that Sensenbrenner has other events to attend.

With the growth of the U.S. Latino population, political parties have increased their efforts to court the Latino vote.

It wasn't always so. At the time the league was founded, Mexican-Americans in Texas and some other states were either not allowed to vote or had to pay a poll tax. They attended segregated schools and were not welcome at restaurants and other facilities.

The league's founders set out to change that. In 1930, league members worked to desegregate restaurants, drinking fountains, restaurants, hotels, barbershops and beauty shops.

In 1931, the organization sued to end segregated "Mexican Schools" in Texas, and in 1936, the league pressured the U.S. Census Bureau to reclassify people of Mexican descent from "Mexican" to "white," a change that was made in the 1940 census.

Soon, league organizations spread throughout the country. Today, it's in about 45 states and Puerto Rico, with an estimated membership of 115,000.

In 1946, it filed the lawsuit that ended 100 years of segregated schools in California, a case that became a key precedent for the historic Brown vs. Board of Education suit that rejected school segregation in the nation.

"Historically, LULAC is a very important organization - the Mexican-American equivalent of the NAACP," said Benjamin Marquez, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wrote a book about the league.

But from its earliest days, it has been seen as politically moderate, he said. As the Latino population has grown, other Latino-based organizations have sprung up that are more sophisticated and better funded than the league, he said.

In Wisconsin, activist Dante Navarro helped form league councils in 1956 in Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha and Waukesha. "We wanted to be part of a national organization that would fight for the community," he said.

Locally, the league has matched money for scholarships raised through Mexican Fiesta. In 2004, when WISN-AM (1130) talk show host Mark Belling made a racial slur about Mexicans, the league's state director, Yolanda Santos Adams, joined other organizations throughout the community to stage protests. The station suspended Belling from his show for one week.

Santos Adams said the league council in Kenosha has been active in trying to revamp bilingual education in the Kenosha school district and has partnered with the NAACP on redistricting and minority recruitment in city and county government.

"LULAC has stayed low key and on the conservative side, but in the last couple of years and with the immigration issue we've been rallying the troops," she said.