After building a big civil-rights network, a longtime activist retires from his job
The young Latino activist was aghast as he watched leaders of the National Council of La Raza argue loudly with
each other on a convention podium in Austin, Tex. It was clear that the fledgling organization would soon need a new chief to pull it together. The activist looked at the contentious scene on stage, turned to a friend who had also made the trip to Austin, and said, “Man, I feel sorry for the poor SOB who gets that job.”
Thirty years later, that young activist -- and “poor SOB” -- retired as the organization’s president.
Last month, Raul H. Yzaguirre sat at his desk at National Council of La Raza for the last time. He leaves the organization much richer and less internally riven than he had found it. Now the largest organization that advocates for the civil rights of Hispanics in the United States, National Council of La Raza has grown from a tiny collection of small activist groups into a well-established operation with 160 employees and an annual budget of $34-million. In addition to advocacy work, the organization provides an array of services to Hispanics, such as housing aid and Head Start programs. Those who have followed Mr. Yzaguirre’s career say he built the organization by including all types of people in it.
“He was successful at coalescing regional and ethnic interests throughout the nation,” says Roger Cázares, a former National Council of La Raza board member and the recently retired president of the MAAC Project, a San Diego charity that serves Latinos. “The policy issues and advocacy that National Council of La Raza addresses affect all regions and groups. This couldn’t have happened if we were fragmented. I credit Raul for having the insight to bring us all together.”
Refusing to Dictate Policy
While other observers say that Mr. Yzaguirre’s success at wooing corporate donors has helped the group attain its stature, he emphasizes its grass-roots strength.
“What’s been unique is how we derive our power,” says Mr. Yzaguirre, who is 65. “We decided we would be an umbrella for community-based organizations, but that we wouldn’t dictate to them.” Instead, Mr. Yzaguirre and his staff have provided advocacy for the 310 community organizations that National Council of La Raza counts as members and the five million people they represent -- and indirectly for the 43 million Hispanics in the United States.
When Mr. Yzaguirre leaves the organization, Latinos will lose a strong voice on Capitol Hill, say some of Mr. Yzaguirre’s protégés and other Hispanic leaders.
“Raul has been as influential an advocate before Congress for working families and children as anyone,” says Rep. Xavier Becerra, Democrat of California. “He’s been able to develop a rapport and a trust -- even with people on the other side of issues -- that has allowed him to successfully fight for Hispanics and the working poor.”
Mr. Yzaguirre has advocated the protection of rights for migrant workers and other immigrants, increased federal financing for programs that educate poor children, and expanded federal income-tax breaks for low-income workers and immigrants following passage of the 1996 welfare-overhaul law, which pushed many immigrants off of welfare rolls.
Under Mr. Yzaguirre’s direction, National Council of La Raza and others also successfully worked several years to encourage the federal government to restore $20-billion in welfare benefits to immigrants who legally reside in the United States -- money that was eliminated in the 1996 law.
Mr. Becerra and others also credit Mr. Yzaguirre with being a driving force behind the creation of an executive commission on Hispanic education in 1990, extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1992, and the formation of the North American Development Bank which, as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement, is designed to help poor towns along the Mexico-Texas border start businesses.
Last month he received one of the highest accolades in the nonprofit world. He received the John W. Gardner Award for Public Service from Independent Sector, a Washington coalition of grant makers and nonprofit organizations.
Running Away From Home
Although Mr. Yzaguirre has become a well-known figure in Washington since taking over the reins at National Council of La Raza in 1974, he grew up in more-humble circumstances.
A native of San Juan, Tex., a small town near Brownsville, on the Mexico-Texas border, Mr. Yzaguirre was raised among families of migrant workers. His mother and father, who ran an icehouse and raised cattle, were the children of Mexican immigrants.
At age 13, he ran away from home and joined the crew of a fishing boat in Corpus Christi, Tex. From a fellow worker, he learned about a doctor, Hector Garcia, who was working to improve the lives and prospects of Hispanics. “The more I heard about the work he was doing, such as taking on some big issues -- discrimination, segregation, voting rights -- the more excited I became,” Mr. Yzaguirre says.
Not long after that, young Raul said goodbye to the fishing boat, returned to home and school, and joined Hector Garcia’s group -- the American GI Forum -- in 1954. While he was in school, he spent weekends and holidays working with the group and getting an education in political organizing in the scrub-desert towns of south Texas.
Despite being considered a radical group by some government officials -- “This was the McCarthy era,” he says -- the American GI Forum concentrated on working within the political system, offering scholarships to promising Latino students and, in 1954, sponsoring the first case tried by Hispanics before the Supreme Court of the United States -- Hernandez v. Texas, which ended a longstanding practice in Texas of excluding Hispanics from juries.
Mr. Yzaguirre formed the American GI Forum Juniors, an auxiliary to the group.
“We came up with the idea that the Forum should become a family organization, like the American Legion,” says Mr. Yzaguirre. “We wanted to recruit another generation of people, so organizing became a top priority. We wanted youths to have both a social club and an organization that encouraged them to develop some civil-rights consciousness.”
The organization started petition drives urging local governments to start preschool programs for Latinos that were the equal of those for whites. And at a Texas high school, Mr. Yzaguirre was arguing with a principal and his school board about how winners of school popularity contests, such as Homecoming Queen, were chosen. Routinely, the selection process favored whites, even in majority-Hispanic schools.
He would rather have battled for preschool classes or an end to the practice of segregating students by language, he says. “But I learned from that episode that you go where people are. You might try to organize around lofty ideals, but people want their potholes fixed,” he says.
Working in Government
The American GI Forum Juniors continued to grow, reaching its membership apex in the late 1960s, but Mr. Yzaguirre wasn’t there to see it.
After graduating high school, he joined the Air Force in 1959, serving as a laboratory worker at a base outside Washington, D.C.
Upon his discharge in 1963, Mr. Yzaguirre attended George Washington University with the help of federal scholarship money for veterans and became a program analyst at the federal Office of Economic Opportunity in 1966. Shortly before graduating from college, he started the National Organization for Mexican American Services, a group that fizzled because it couldn’t raise enough money.
At the time, small Latino groups were scattered around the country and a dozen or so activists kept moving from organization to organization as one folded and another formed, Mr. Yzaguirre recalls. “Same people, different titles,” he says.
Mr. Yzaguirre became a consultant to one of the groups, Southwest Council of La Raza, after he left his federal job in 1969, offering the organization advice on garnering federal dollars, setting up an accounting system, and training board members. In 1972, the Southwest Council of La Raza, previously a California-to-Texas organization, became a nationwide group. It moved its headquarters from Phoenix to Washington.
“There was a recognition that to make a difference, the group had to be in Washington, where the action is,” says Mr. Yzaguirre.
But he was moving in the opposite direction. He returned to San Juan, where he hoped to do some organizing work before running for local office. He worked part-time there for the Center for Community Change, an antipoverty group in Washington that helps advocacy groups nationwide.
Then came the National Council of La Raza conference in 1974. Two months later, he was asked to take over the group. “I turned them down,” Mr. Yzaguirre recalls. “But three friends on their board encouraged me to take it.”
Seeking Money
Mr. Yzaguirre inherited a group with big ambitions, but no programs, little organization, and less money.
“I had to get resources, which meant tapping the federal government,” he says. He was able to get money through federal antipoverty programs and from the Department of Labor, and then Mr. Yzaguirre and his staff of four drew up a comprehensive plan for the organization.
Within six years, the organization’s staff grew to 160, affiliates signed on at a rapid pace, and National Council of La Raza was holding an annual conference.
Then, with the election of Ronald Reagan as president, the bottom fell out.
“The government just wiped us out,” Mr. Yzaguirre says. Millions of dollars in federal contracts for job training, research, and for increasing staff at affiliate offices were eliminated as part of Mr. Reagan’s sweeping domestic budget cuts. By 1982, the organization’s personnel list had dwindled to 16 people. Mr. Yzaguirre was forced to take out a second mortgage on his Maryland home to meet payroll costs.
Diverse Pool of Donors
The collapse taught Mr. Yzaguirre and the organization several valuable lessons, he says: Don’t rely too much on government grants and contracts, grow slowly, and beware of taking ambitious contracts to provide services too quickly. To make up for the money losses, the group began treating its annual conference more like a fund-raising event than merely a social gathering, and decided to focus more on advocacy efforts and to be very careful as it started new programs to provide services.
National Council of La Raza also focused on winning attention from corporations, in part by creating a corporate board of advisers that at one point included Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is now Secretary of Defense.
Today, nearly 40 percent of the organization’s budget comes from donations made by 100 companies, including Bank of America, CitiBank, Pepsico, and State Farm.
Another 40 percent comes from foundation grants, with the remaining 20 percent from dues, fees for services, donations from individuals, and return on investments. Because of a lack of wealth among Hispanics, getting the support of businesses and foundations is doubly important, Mr. Yzaguirre says.
“We haven’t done all that well with individual donations,” he says. “The median net asset of the Hispanic family is $0.”
National Council of La Raza’s courting of corporate donors has been a source of controversy for some activists, who wonder whether business money may cause advocacy groups to moderate their voices. But those who work with Mr. Yzaguirre say he is adamant about not providing protective cover for corporations who might seek it.
“He has been willing to say ‘no’ to corporations that have tried to buy the organization’s silence,” says Cecilia Muñoz, vice president for research, advocacy, and legislation at National Council of La Raza.
Mr. Yzaguirre says he has never allowed donors to determine where the organization comes down on issues. That policy extends to the federal government, which maintains some contracts with National Council of La Raza -- but reduced them after Mr. Yzaguirre criticized Mr. Bush pubicly.
“We feel that between $3-million and $4-million has been cut because of a speech I gave two years about President Bush and the promises he has broken to Hispanic-Americans,” says Mr. Yzaguirre. “Those kinds of things don’t affect what I have to say. No one is going to muscle us.”
The White House wouldn’t comment, nor would the Department of Health and Human Services, one of the agencies that cut the grants. But the other federal agency that made reductions, the Department of Labor, said the organization was not denied money for political reasons. It was one of several groups that lost out when the agency ended a job-training program, a spokesman said.
Achieving Steady Growth
Since 1986, the National Council of La Raza has grown by about 15 percent each year, even during the recent economic downturn. The organization has reaped as much good will as cash, observers say, because of Mr. Yzaguirre’s emphasis on creating leaders.
Several former staff members, including Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, in Los Angeles, have gone on to lead other Hispanic groups, while others have been given a chance to become top managers at National Council of La Raza.
Not long after she first started working for the group, Ms. Muñoz says, the National Council of La Raza was asked by the U.S. Senate to testify on what would become an immigration-overhaul bill. Mr. Yzaguirre couldn’t make it, so he asked Ms. Muñoz to speak in his stead. “I went to him, scared to death, and he told me, ‘Just rise to the occasion,’” Ms. Muñoz remembers. “I had just started there and to have that vote of confidence from him had a huge effect on me. It also made me aware that the organization was larger than any one person and I had to play my part to make it successful.”
Mr. Yzaguirre is also credited by leaders of other organizations with giving them advice and support. Karen Narasaki, president of the National Asian Pacific Legal Consortium, an advocacy group in Washington, says Mr. Yzaguirre went out of his way to help her organization after she joined it in 1994.
“Raul and his staff reached out to me. They said they remembered what it was like to be the new minority community on the block,” says Ms. Narasaki, who adds that Mr. Yzaguirre offered advice on how best to build her group and how to increase its influence.
For the past year, Mr. Yzaguirre has provided a more personal kind of guidance. He has been grooming his successor, Janet Murguia, formerly National Council of La Raza’s executive director.
Ms. Murguia was previously the executive vice chancellor for university relations at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, and a former Congressional liaison for President Bill Clinton.
Though he will be stepping down from the top job at La Raza, Mr. Yzaguirre still plans to work to expand opportunities for Hispanics. He is helping to form a handful of programs and centers on community development, leadership, and public policy at three universities in the Southwest, including Arizona State University, in Tempe.
Hispanics have made great strides in the past 30 years, he says, but much is left to be done.
“It bothers me that a third-generation Latino does worse than a recent immigrant in school,” he says. “A lack of resources is part of it, but so is a lack of preschool accessibility and lowered teacher expectations. We’re making changes, but they’re glacial.”