Hector Perez Garcia

Was Tireless Civil Rights Advocate

by Richard Estrada, Syndiated Columnist,

      The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS - Hispanic Americans do not have their own Martin Luther King Jr., though some consider the late farmworker organizer, Cesar Chavez, to have come close. But an important figure in Mexican American history died the other day in Corpus Christi, Texas, and the American nation would do well to remember him. His name was Hector Perez Garcia.

Dr. Garcia, 82, was a man for all seasons. He was the devoted father of a fine and accomplished family, a concerned citizen, dedicated physician, beloved humanitarian and the most prominent Hispanic civil rights leader to emerge in the United States immediately after World War II.

When President Clinton recently placed a telehone call to the family and friends of Dr. Garcia to express his condolences, he was likely being sincere and politically adroit at the same time. But as Hispanic leaders laud Dr. Garcia's record, I suspect many of them secretly considered him to be a civil rights dinosaur, an anachronism in modern politics.

Where so many of those leaders have been overtly militant, rhetorically irresponsible and gratuitously confrontational, Dr. Garcia was merely self-assertive, steadfast and upright. Where they so often make demands by exalting their ethnicity over their citizenship, Dr Garcia sought only to hold America to its promises of ensuring a level playing field.

Throughout his life, Dr. Garcia worked for change from within. He forged alliances with elected oficeholders and mobilized voters on Election Day, as was the case in the presidential election of1960, when he formed "Viva Kennedy Clubs" and helped deliver the Hispanic vote for the Democratic nominee. He was vocal and insistent, but not militant.

The personal honors heaped upon him were a means to achieving even more for his people. President Lyndon B. Johnson named Dr. Garcia a delegate to the United nations with ambasadorial rank in 1967, and then tapped him to be the first Mexican American member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1968.

But it was Dr. Garcia's own record that was as important as his political participation. A 1936 graduate of the University of Texas, he earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1940. He served during World War II as an infantryman, combat engineer and a member of the medical corps in North Africa and Italy. There was no questioning his patriotism, nor that of scores of thousands of other Hispanics who also served with distinction.

But Mexican American veterans who returned to states like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California after the war often continued to face the same kind of discrimination they faced before the war. Even, sometimes, when they returned dead.

In 1948, four years after having been killed in action in the Philippines, the body of Pvt. Felix Longoria of Three Rivers, Texas, was transported home, only to be refused burial in an Anglo American cemetery. The Longoria family then turned forhelp to an Hispanic civil rights organization called the American GI Forum, which Dr. Garcia had founded earlier that year. Within two months, with the assistance ofthen Sen. Lydon B. Johnson, Pvt. Longoria was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

The episode only reinforced Dr. Garcia's resolve to protest discriminatory treatment against Mexican American veterans who were being denied the health and educational benifits for which they qualified under the GI Bill. If the country's minority citizens were to be held accountable for doing their share in defending America in wartime, he reasoned, then America must do its utmost in granting minorities the full and equal protection of the laws.

Many Hispanic leaders today routinely discount the significance of U.S. citizenship in their search for the expanded political constituencies provided by immigration.  But Dr. Garcia never wavered from his commitment to making Mexican Americans an integral part of the American nation. Like those individuals who founded the League of United Latin American Citizens in 1929, and who underscored patriotism and the learning of English, he wanted his people tobe part of a whole.

As the nation becomes more and more fragmented along thnic and racial lines, it will have to make a choice. It can honor the ethnocentric militants or it can honor a nation-builder committed to equality, such as Dr. Garcia.

I cast my vote for Dr. Garcia. In having lost an individual who so deeply believed in the promise, and promises, of America, the nation as a whole may have lsot more than the minority citizens to which Dr. Garcia so nobly dedicated his life.