Feliz #HispanicHeritageMonth: raceAhead
If you're planning to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month this year, it's worth taking a moment to meet the man who made it happen.
Hispanic Heritage Month, the more generous evolution of the original Hispanic Heritage Week, was born of legislation sponsored by Rep. Edward R. Roybal (D-Los Angeles) and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968. (It was expanded to a full 30 days by President Ronald Reagan in 1988.)
It begins every year on September 15 to acknowledge five Latin American countries that declared their independence in 1821: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
At the time Hispanic Heritage Week was born, Roybal was just six years into what would be 30 years of exemplary work representing his district in the U.S. Congress. But he walked into the House with real bona fides: He’d started out as director of health education for the Los Angeles County Tuberculosis and Health Association.
And, in 1949, after a failed first attempt, he became the first Latino elected to the Los Angeles City Council.
He filled a seat which represented District 9—for those who know the area, it included Boyle Heights, Bunker Hill, Civic Center, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, and the Central Avenue corridor. For those who don’t, the population was then 45% White, 34% Latinx, 15% African American, and 6% “other,” a bewildering designation which, I guess, includes the people living in Chinatown and Little Tokyo.
But Roybal seemed to know who everybody was.
Roybal had become the “recognized leader of East Side minority groups,” and was “often the spokesman for minority groups,” the Los Angeles Times noted in 1955 and 1956, respectively. Evidently, he knew a little something about helping people with very different life experiences to find common ground: He held on to his seat until he went to Congress in 1962.
In Congress, he earned a powerful spot on the Appropriations Committee, co-founded the House Select Committee on Aging, and established the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. There, he cared about and influenced issues related to the health and citizenship wellness for people well beyond his district, advocating for a wide variety of programs designed to help ignored, vulnerable, and immigrant populations find their full expression in life. In addition to inclusive education and health programs, was ahead of the curve on aging, mental health, and fought for the first federal funding for Alzheimer’s disease research
I would certainly watch a biopic of this extraordinary man who very few people seem to know; evidently, the Roybal family can trace their roots in New Mexico back some eight generations to before the Spanish settlement of Santa Fe. That’s a long time to watch America… evolve.
Thinking about Roybal makes it even harder to mark the start of Hispanic Heritage Month this year, at a time when so few elected officials seem to be able to accelerate an American evolution in a way that shares, rather than stockpiles, power.
And when so many of the asylum seekers currently sitting in cages or in desperate trouble at the U.S. border are descended from the people who won their independence nearly 200 years ago.
So maybe now, in the age of hate speech and family separation, we might consider spending the next 30 days sitting in the ugly awkward that this commemorative month is sure to reveal: The growing gulf between individual achievement and systemic failure.
Here’s just one example: While we remember the long history of Hispanic and Latinx service members, it’s also worth remembering that the government is cruelly deporting them as veterans on the other.
Si la meta de una institución es la inclusión verdadera, no es solo adoptar un hashtag, o servir enchiladas, o tocar música ambientada a la temática de “La Bamba.” ¿Que acciones va a tomar la tuya?
Feliz #HispanicHeritageMonth.