Vicky Castro,
former member of Los Angeles Board of Education at
Southwest Voter Registration Project Conference, 6/1996
"Q
ue viva la raza, que viva la raza (long live our race)! I'm here to welcome all the new
voters of 18 years old that we're registering now in our schools. Welcome, you're going to
make a difference for Los Angeles, for San Antonio, for New York, and I thank
Southwest for taking that challenge. And to the Mechistas (MEChA students) across this
nation, you're going to make that difference for us, too. But when we register one more
million voters I will not be the only Latina on the Board of Education of Los Angeles.
And let me tell you here, no one will dismantle bilingual education in the United States of
America. No one will deny an education to any child, especially Latino children. As you
know, in Los Angeles we make up 70% of this school district. Of 600,000 -- 400,000 are
Latinos, and our parents are not heard and they're going to be heard because in Los
Angeles, San Antonio and Texas we have just classified 53,000 new citizens in one year
that are going to be felt in November!" (3)
Ruben Zacarias,
former superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School
District at Southwest Voter Registration Project Conference, 6/1997
"We have 27 centers now throughout LAUSD. Every one of them has trained people,
clerks to take the fingerprints. Each one has the camera, that special camera. We have the
application forms. And I'll tell you what we've done with I.N.S. Now we're even doing
the testing that usually people had to go to INS to take, and pretty soon, hopefully, we'll
do the final interviews in our schools. Incidentally, I started this very quietly because
there are those that if they knew that we were creating a whole new cadre of brand new
citizens it would have tremendous political impact. We will change the political
panorama not only of L.A., but L.A. County and the State. And we do that we've changed
the panorama of the nation. I'm proud to stand here and tell you that in those close to
three years we have processed a little over 78,000 brand new citizens. That is the largest
citizenship program in the entire nation." (4)
Did our government know about this and if they did, was anything done? The
answer is YES, they did and NO, they didn’t do anything about it. Why? The
following excerpt from former Chicago prosecutor David P. Schippers book,
“Sellout” explains it well. As you read, remember the dates and information
shown above.
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