Puerto Rican statehood backers poised to take over oldest Latino civil rights group
The board of the League of United Latin American Citizens ensured Puerto Ricans could determine the new leadership by refusing to replace in-person voting with electronic voting.
2022-07-28 20:18:06 - VI News Staff
Puerto Ricans have the numbers to seize control of a 93-year-old civil rights group founded by Mexican Americans in Texas, but the organization could end up in a messy legal fight over it.
The League of Latin American Citizens, established in Corpus Christi in 1929, is holding its annual conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, this week, the group's first in-person gathering and elections since 2019 because of Covid.
In advance of the conference, the number of councils in Puerto Rico— what the group calls its chapters — has exploded from 54 last year to at least 343, according to LULAC. That outnumbers the councils in Texas, which has been home to most of the group's presidents elected over the years, though LULAC said it has had a similar number of councils in Puerto Rico in the 1990s.
Dallas attorney Domingo García, who is Mexican American, could very well be defeated by his challenger, Juan Carlos Lizardi, a New York resident born in Puerto Rico and son of longtime board member and Puerto Rico statehood activist Elsie Valdes.
That's in large part because members must be at the conference in Puerto Rico to vote, which many mainland members, who tend to be older, have opted against in the midst of inflation.
David Contreras, a Houston LULAC 688 member and a group historian, said creating “paper councils” has been done in the organization for years. The paper councils are made up of people who pay the membership fee but have not been active in LULAC before signing up but can vote.
“We saw it to some extent at the Texas convention, on a smaller scale … So, they’ll bring in people to the convention to vote, people who are or have not been active in LULAC,” he said.
There have been attempts to change that, as well as the requirement for voters to attend the conference, but so far those efforts have failed.
“One of the major issues, which is voting,” Contreras said, “is coming back to bite us in the butt.”
While the prospects of a LULAC president of Puerto Rican descent is exciting to some members, the fast increase in councils has raised alarm bells and could once again throw the group's elections into dispute.
Years of disagreement in Puerto Rico over the island’s status has led many mainland Latino groups to stay relatively neutral and limit their positions to support for residents of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, to decide its future. Political divisions are carved on the island largely by where support lies on Puerto Rico's status, becoming a state, keeping the status quo or being an independent nation.