Editor's note: This is the third installment of a four-part follow-up to Michael Ackley's April 13 column on government-sponsored volunteerism. Read Part 1, "The streets of Laredo." Read Part 2, "The president, by George."
It was 1967 in Laredo, Texas, and the VISTA volunteers had been told they could not register voters because they might sign up more from one party than another.
Our patient supervisor had been frustrated at every turn by the bureaucrats in Austin as he strove to have his troops accomplish something, and he had had enough.
I don't recall whether he said "to hell with Austin" or something stronger, but that was the sentiment. He rallied us with the declaration: "We are going to register voters."
And so the 22 VISTA volunteers gathered one morning in the town square, which was the terminus of most streets in Laredo's simple grid. We paired up and walked every street, up one side from the square clear out to the edge of town, then down the other and back to the square. Some took north-south streets; others went east and west.
We knocked on the door of every home. My wife and I recited in our textbook Spanish: "Estamos registrando la gente de este barrio para votar. Este año no cuesta nada, porque no hay poll tax. Donde nacio?" ("We are registering the people of this neighborhood to vote. This year there is no poll tax. Where were you born?")
If the nativity question was answered, "En los Estados Unidos," we could assume citizenship and press ahead. We also inserted, "Habla usted ingles?" because it was much easier for us gringos to do business in English. If the answer was negative, we soldiered on in Spanish. I could tell many anecdotes about the registration effort, but in the interest of space will share but one:
In a tiny house we met an older man and wife who, like most of the citizens we encountered were overjoyed to learn the poll tax was gone. But most poignant was the husband's statement, "Somos votos." "We are voters."
With this declaration he pointed to the wall over a worn couch. There, tacked to the bare wall, inside a wooden frame, were two, 50-cent poll tax receipts from 1956 – the year he and his wife had scraped together an extra dollar to participate in the civic life of their nation. To this day, I tear up recalling it.
In all, that year's VISTA effort registered 3,500 voters. But, coming as we did from a culture in which voting was the norm, my wife and I didn't see it as a monumental accomplishment. Discouraged, in the summer we resigned from VISTA – to get on with professional life and to start a family – thinking we had done little.
We were wrong. Several years later we met another alumnus of the Laredo VISTA project, who had arrived there after we left. Those 3,500 new votes, he said, tipped the balance of power in the city. Did the people throw out the rascals? No, they re-elected them, but to win votes, the incumbents had to promise to serve all of the city. Out on the dirt byways occupied by Laredo's poor, this did not mean welfare programs; these proud people didn't want welfare. It meant the delivery of services these taxpayers deserved: Streets were graded, streetlights and fire hydrants were installed, the ditches that served as storm sewers were cleared of weeds.
Still more years later, I encountered the book "The Border," which had a chapter on every border town from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Naturally, I turned immediately to the chapter on Laredo. There I found a picture of our next-door neighbor's son-in-law, Jose Valdez. We knew him as "Loco" Valdez, a fiery, quixotic crusader for the city's underprivileged.
His picture was in the book because he was Laredo's mayor.
Tomorrow: What it all means
Read Part 1, "The streets of Laredo."
Read Part 2, "The president, by George."