Guest Column
Where's 2006 version of a great champion for Mexican Americans?
- Where's 2006 version of a great
champion for Mexican Americans?
By Carlos Guerra
San Antonio Express-News
July 26, 2006
Amazingly, it was a decade ago that Austin American-Statesman editorial page editor Arnold García called me at home and said: "Dr. Hector just died."
We both held Dr. Hector Pérez García in high esteem, so there was no need for
an explanation.
"I met Dr. Hector in 1968 and it was like meeting a movie star, only with substance," Arnold recalled.
I met him at an earlier age, in Robstown, when my father took me in his arms to meet the man he called a hero.
For many, Dr. Hector was a Corpus Christi physician who treated thousands who hadn't the money to pay him, and frequently reached into his pocket for the money for their prescriptions. When I last interviewed him, he was in his 80s and driving a 13-year-old car. His shirt cuffs were worn through, but he had the smile of a man contented. Rightly so.
He was aged, but he was erect, upright and fussy. He knew that it was his red American GI Forum cap — the one that he never took off — that made him special, and that his short-tempered pushiness had won tens of thousands of Mexican Americans — millions, perhaps — the just rewards of their abilities and hard work, or, at the very least, the benefits of their citizenship.
Born in 1914 into a family of seven children in Llera, Mexico, Dr. Hector's family fled to the Rio Grande Valley a few steps ahead of the Mexican Revolution. In Texas, Hector excelled in public schools and went on to distinguish himself at the University of Texas School of Medicine at Galveston, volunteering for U.S. Army upon his graduation.
He was admitted into the officer corps, but wasn't commissioned an Army physician for two years because, as he told me later, "they kept thinking that I had gone to a Mexican medical school." But his combat officer service wasn't wasted either. Dr.
Hector earned a bronze star and six commendations for valor.
After the war, he settled in Corpus Christi but he wasn't content with being only a healer. Numerous complaints of Mexican American veterans shortchanged of their GI Bill of Rights benefits led him to call a meeting at Lamar Junior High, and there was formed the American GI Forum, which grew into a national organization, a major civil rights group and Dr. Hector was its chief, a title he held until his death.
Dr. Hector is best known, perhaps, for championing the case of Felix Longoria, a Three Rivers veteran whose family was refused the local funeral home's chapel for a service before he was buried in the town's segregated cemetery.
That the family of a man killed in combat would be denied such basic dignity stirred national scorn and, in the end, Longoria was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with military honors.
But for all of Dr. Hector's battlefield victories, the war remains for others to win.
"Dr. Hector and people like him opened a lot of doors for Chicanos," Arnold García said Tuesday, "yet people who benefited from the back-breaking effort it took to do that won't even make an effort at repaying the favor by making a difference.
"Where is the 2006 version of Dr. Hector? Where is the leader who fights and charms and cajoles change out of state legislatures and a U.S. Congress that are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to Hispanic issues?"
He is right, of course. And too many of us are unworthy.
__________________________________ - To contact Carlos Guerra, e-mail cguerra@express-news.net
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