Why a long-overdue recognition of Latino voter advocate Willie Velasquez matters

Velasquez is best known as the founder and longtime CEO of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP), the first national Latino-focused voter mobilization organization. 

By Charles Kamasaki and Viviana López Green, Racial Equity Initiative, UnidosUS  

Recently, the esteemed American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest “learned societies” in the U.S. with deep roots in the nation’s founding, recognized William C. “Willie” Velasquez in its first class of Legacy Honorees. According to the Academy: 

The Legacy Recognition Program recognizes individuals who were not members of the Academy and whose accomplishments were overlooked or undervalued due to their race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.  

Velasquez’s “classmates” include luminaries such as legendary civil rights lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, pioneering Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and groundbreaking environmentalist author Rachel Carson. 

Willie Velasquez is best known as the founder and longtime CEO of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP) in 1974. It was the first — and for many years the most important — national Latino-focused voter mobilization organization. Velasquez and the organization he led had enormous impact: within a decade of the organization’s founding, the number of Mexican Americans registered to vote increased by 50%. Together with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and others, SVREP led litigation challenging exclusionary voting systems in some 85 jurisdictions in Texas from the mid-1970s to 1980s, winning in virtually every case. From 1974 to 1987, the number of Hispanic elected officials grew from 1,566 to 3,038, an increase of over 80%. 

Beyond his undoubted numerical impact in expanding the Latino electorate in Texas and throughout the Southwest, Velasquez’s legacy is far larger. He coined the iconic phrase “Su voto es su voz” (Your vote is your voice), still widely used by Latino advocates today. He pioneered culturally competent canvassing techniques that are almost universally used by voter registration and mobilization organizations.  

Velasquez collaborated with other organizations, including MALDEF, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and many others. SVREP itself was a spinoff of the National Council of La Raza, now UnidosUS. Alongside NCLR, he catalyzed and supported the development of other organizations, such as the U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute, and partnered with the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) to create “boot camps” for aspiring Latino political candidates in both parties, versions of which still continue today. 

In recognition of his achievements, Velasquez was among the first Hispanics to be awarded a Fellowship from Harvard’s Institute of and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton. He died of cancer at the age of 44. 

Why this matters 

When Willie Velasquez, the son of a union butcher in San Antonio, left graduate school at St. Mary’s University to organize with Cesar Chavez’ United Farmworkers of America in 1967, or when he founded SVREP in 1974, the world was starkly different from the one Latinos experience today. Schools in Texas and throughout the Southwest were still heavily segregated, with local governments resisting federal desegregation orders following the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The original Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not cover Latinos or most of the Southwest; it wasn’t until the Act’s extension a decade later that coverage was extended to Hispanics and language minorities.  

Even among “racial or ethnic minorities,” Mexican Americans and other Latinos were at best second-class citizens. The U.S. Census had yet to even recognize “Hispanics,” as a distinct category until 1980, meaning that Latinos were largely invisible in most government reports and data sets. This was reflected in foundation funding, where less than one percent of foundation dollars were allocated to Latino-led or Hispanic-focused organizations.  

The Democratic Party in Texas and the South was dominated by conservatives, many of whom supported the segregationist and former Alabama Governor George Wallace in the 1968 presidential election. Although most Mexican Americans were Democrats, inspired by the candidacy of John F. Kennedy, most Republicans had little interest in removing barriers to voting that excluded Hispanics. 

Within the Latino community, attention was focused on young militant movements such as the Brown Berets, the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) and the Puerto Rican-focused Young Lords in the Northeast. Meanwhile, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta’s United Farmworkers of America (UFW) captured what little public attention was paid to Latinos. As one of MAYO’s original founders and a former UFW organizer, Velasquez was unique in his ability to bridge his youthful militancy phase to founding and operating SVREP, a mainstream group, effectively connecting two divergent strands of the Latino civil rights movement. 

Unsurprisingly, Velasquez, along with NCLR and SVREP, was targeted by the Nixon White House in the late 1960s and early 1970s; which delayed the IRS approval of the group’s nonprofit tax status for years. At the other end of the political spectrum, some mainstream Latino elected officials were wary of efforts to expand the Hispanic electorate — after all they’d been elected by their existing voters — and resisted Velasquez’ efforts to empower new voters who could threaten their positions. That Willie Velasquez achieved so much despite fewer legal protections at his disposal, far less philanthropic support or public recognition than his counterparts in other communities, while facing both indifference and hostility from partisan political actors and navigating substantial infighting with his own community, is a testament to his skills, diplomacy and tenacity. One can only imagine what more he might’ve done had he not died so young. 

A long overdue recognition of an American hero 

Through its recognition of Willie Velasquez, the Academy has taken an important step in addressing the legacy of racism that has affected nearly all American institutions. When Velasquez met his untimely death in 1988, his Washington Post obituary was bundled with five others who died that week. His New York Times obituary was fewer than 200 words, buried on page 26 in the D section.  

Research by UnidosUS and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education conducted in 2023 revealed that, unfortunately, very little has changed: of several dozen “Latino firsts” identified by history scholars as deserving of recognition, only Cesar Chavez and Justice Sonia Sotomayor are mentioned in the most widely used high school history textbooks. 

Just like President Clinton’s posthumous recognition of him in 1995, the Academy’s announcement is an important milestone. Recognition of this American hero, a pioneer in empowering the nation’s largest ethnic minority, is a profoundly powerful act in addressing the Academy’s historic exclusion of people of color, particularly Latinos. It reminds all Americans that people of every racial and ethnic group have made important contributions to this democracy. 

(Special thanks to UnidosUS alum and Academy Member Cecilia Muñoz for nominating Willie Velasquez for this recognition.) 

Photo credit: Southwest Voter Registration Education Project