Hear the captivating journey of Ray Valdez as he talks with us about the era of Mexican-American activism and the Chicano Movement. Ray discusses efforts to preserve the LULAC Council 60 Clubhouse in Houston. He explains the challenges and highlights of historic preservation, and celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month with an exhibit at Houston's Heritage Society Museum marking the 60th anniversary of JFK's visit to Houston, a significant moment in Mexican-American history.
For more information, see:
C60, Inc. https://council60clubhouse.com/
The National Trust for Historic Preservation's website on the LULAC Clubhouse https://savingplaces.org/places/lulac
Hear the captivating journey of Ray Valdez as he talks with us about the era of Mexican-American activism and the Chicano Movement. Ray discusses efforts to preserve the LULAC Council 60 Clubhouse in Houston. He explains the challenges and highlights of historic preservation, and celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month with an exhibit at Houston's Heritage Society Museum marking the 60th anniversary of JFK's visit to Houston, a significant moment in Mexican-American history.
For more information, see:
C60, Inc. https://council60clubhouse.com/
The National Trust for Historic Preservation's website on the LULAC Clubhouse https://savingplaces.org/places/lulac
This podcast is not sponsored by. It does not reflect the views of the institutions that employ us. It is solely our thoughts and ideas, based upon our professional training and study of the past. ["the Sound of the.
Speaker 2:Wind"]. Welcome to Talking Texas History, the podcast that explores Texas history before and beyond the Alamo. Not only will we talk Texas history, we'll visit with folks who teach it, write it, support it, and with some who've made it and, of course, all of us who live it and love it. I'm Scott Sowsby and I'm Gene Pruice, and this is Talking Texas History. ["the Sound of the Wind"]. Welcome to another edition of Talking Texas History. I'm Gene Pruice, I'm Scott Sowsby. Today, scott, we're going to talk to an old friend of mine and some about a project that I care a lot about and been working on for a while but he is the best spokesman for this project and that is Mr Ray Valdez of Houston, texas.
Speaker 1:Ray, welcome. I'm glad you're with us today.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you for inviting me on the show, and I'm excited.
Speaker 1:Ray, why don't you start off with the easy thing? Why don't you just tell us about yourself a little bit your background, what you do and how you got involved with Lula?
Speaker 3:OK, well, I was born and raised in Houston and I've lived in almost all the wards here, but as a young man I was involved with some of the Mexican American civil rights things as a high schooler and in my early working career. But over time I stepped away and, of course, life takes over and my wife and I moved to Seattle and stayed there for 17 years. So we came back In 2012,. We moved into the current neighborhood here and I was just kind of taking it easy and walking around our neighborhood. There was this old beat-up house in front of it, this faded sign that says Lula Council 60. And so one day I just decided to venture in and there was just some guy in there and I started talking to him and telling him about the things I'd been involved with and asking a little bit about the club house and what was going on there.
Speaker 3:But it turns out that they were approximately 10 members to this Lula Council Lula Council 60. And at one time it had been at 300 plus members. It was quite a force here in the city of Houston. And so about two weeks later I went back in again and I met the current president of Lula Council 60, who was Al Madlonado and got to talking to him about that and where they were, and I didn't know any of the history at that time and so I offered him. I said I'll buy this place from you for a small amount. Right, it wasn't anything big. I thought it was generous because of the shape the house was in. It was going to take a considerable work to bring it back. So anyway, they're like no, no, we're not interested in selling it.
Speaker 3:So as a result of talking to these gentlemen, I got involved with the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy's visit to Houston at the Rice Hotel. He had come in to do several things in Houston but he had been invited by Lula to the. It was a national governor's ball, so that's what they called. The state directors back then was governors, so they decided to put it on the agenda and they went to the Rice Hotel and they visited with them and it was a fantastic event. I mean, it was a jubilant celebration and of course we all know what happens a day after that. That was November 21, 1963, the next day he and his entourage move on up to Dallas. So in the process of being involved with this 50th anniversary of his visit, I got interested in history and that's how I became engaged with Lula Council 60.
Speaker 1:That's fascinating because Lula's been around a long time and so I mean in that house it's got to have a lot of history. That's a fascinating story.
Speaker 2:You know, one of the things as we've been going along is a lot of people don't know what Lula is. Can you tell us a little bit about how Lula got started, and how it got started in Houston and what it means?
Speaker 3:Well, lula itself, the organization, was formed in 1929 in Corpus Christi. It was several organizations that had come together to put together this union and they struggled with a name and finally settled on Lula, the League of United Latin American Citizens. And they ramped up, slowly starting spreading out from Corpus to other towns, into La De Lo and Corpus Christi and San Antonio, and eventually they came to Houston. They had been trying to get the guys in Houston involved and they finally organized the Lula chapter in 1934. So at that time very much like times now there were a lot of issues in the Hispanic community. Now, when we talk about what Lula is and what it does, we actually have to use the word Latino, because we have so many different cultures that are now residing in Texas that when we talk about issues in education and housing and health care, it's not just basically Mexican-Americans or Mexicans any longer.
Speaker 1:I have a question that popped in my mind a little bit, because we all read about the various stages of Mexican-American activism for their civil rights and things, and there's different generations and the per generation of Mexican-American generation. But you're someone who lived through much of that and it's one of the I think it would be interesting for our listeners to see, because there was a big change between what we like to call the Mexican-American generation to the Chicano movement, and so give us an idea of people like yourselves who are involved in the Chicano movement. What was your mindset? What were you all looking for? What were you modeling things after?
Speaker 3:Well, I was very fortunate because I got to. Well, I was introduced to people like Lionel Castillo, who was at one time the director for the immigration service. He was very much involved in Houston and the Mexican American civil rights movement, and so me and my friends in high school were introduced to him through one of my teachers who I was taking Mexican American history from in high school and he told us about this thing and we formed a group called the Chicano Youth Council because of Dr Cano and Lionel Castillo, and I really didn't know much about current events I was too busy being a kid, but it was compelling information about all of the different things that Mexican American students really had to struggle for, things that you would normally take for granted. You know, things like being equal opportunity to scholarships, being accepted to top tier universities. You know, having access to health care at affordable prices. You know just everything. Just everyday life was impacted by.
Speaker 3:You know, back then our word was discrimination. You know Latinos and Hispanics were being discriminated against. We were being barred from participating in certain things. So you know I don't know where the drive came to want to rectify that, but that's really what was driving us. Me and my friends wanted to change the world, you know, and we were going to do it.
Speaker 3:You know, as Chicanos, we didn't want to be called Mexican Americans or high Hispanics. That's what you know. We called the guys with a suit and tie right with a high Hispanics. And so, you know, and that's what Lulac represented to us at that time, because they, they were, you know, there were attorneys and you know, business owners and judges, and these guys were boardroom negotiators. That's how they attacked problems in our community by going to in the mainstream and working through the system. We, on the other hand, we're a little more, you know, action oriented. You know we wanted to go out into the streets and protest and bring, you know, awareness and attention to the issues that were important to us. So, being in the Chicano movement, it was exciting and accelerating because it was action driven.
Speaker 3:You know you have an issue of things like education, you know, not the smartest boy, you know but, I remember that my, my Mexican American history teacher was having to do all his own research, put together all the core, all the class materials had to.
Speaker 3:You know, I don't know if you remember mini graphs or not, but he got to come in early and minograph all the materials because there was just no source material out there to work with. And so we were upset about that because, as we looked around, it wasn't just Mexican American studies that wasn't being provided the materials that we needed, it was across the board. And this was back in 1969 and 70. And we're like, is this going on in Bel Air? And of course, you know, we had a friend that was in Bel Air and he's, of course not you know got this beautiful new, you know textbook and it covers all these wonderful things, right. So that made us even more upset and we want to go protest. So we had sit-ins and some walkouts and things of that sort and we thought that we were making a difference.
Speaker 1:Sure, that's interesting, you say and it brings up I had this conversation years ago with Wadalupe San Miguel. One time Some of this disconnect and the same things and what you just said does, and you could probably expand it. Wadalupe said you know, lulac, when he was a boy and a teenager, represented just what you said. They were the guys that owned the businesses. They were the guys who joined, you know, tried to join the Chamber of Commerce, and he said they were just trying to fit into the white establishment. I said we young people who are influenced by the NIO and MalDeaf he goes, we weren't. That's not what we wanted. We wanted full equality in society. Do you think that that that was a what was the best way to do this? Why did young people at that time, why did they somewhat rebel against Lulac, if you will, and their ideas?
Speaker 3:Well, I have friends now that one of the guys and I don't know if you'll recognize the name was Johnny Mata. Johnny Mata was working for a social service organization in Magnolia neighborhood of Houston and he tried to recruit me and some of my friends for Lulac. And our reaction to that is you guys are a bunch of old conservative guys dressing up, going out there and basically we were like you guys are kind of booty lickers, we don't want to be a part of that and so I didn't disrespect them. I just didn't want to be part of this suit and tie kind of thing. I like being with people basically my age that had the same views that I did and I just didn't feel that I fit into that organization.
Speaker 3:I think the other people they were members of my Chicano Youth Council, which was basically a group of high schoolers from Bel Air and Mildey and Austin High School. I think we have one guy from Davis, a couple from South Houston. We all were like-minded and we liked the association. Talking to the guys from Mayo, for example, we learned a lot from these guys. I mean they were a little more radical than we were, but it was eye-opening and exciting.
Speaker 2:Let me show something with you here real quick. Oh no, here we go, this is 1971, and there is a young, ray Valdez.
Speaker 3:What a handsome man, my goodness I have to tell our listeners now.
Speaker 1:They have to get this picture in their mind of what Jean just showed us, as they can't do it of a young Ray Valdez. He looks just like a 60s radical folks. He's got a T-shirt on long hair. Take a picture of it. That's what he looks like.
Speaker 3:But there's the Mexican American Education Council. There is where we formed and that's where we did a lot of work from. They had an old Mimograph machine where we could go in and make up flyers and letters and we used that as a base of operation. What we did is we wanted to have a youth conference and we invited youth from the local colleges and high schools. We had representatives come and we held it at the University of Houston. So we had representatives from Cesar Chavez, this group, come and we invited, like Ramsey Mouñiz and all these people to come. We had all these different seminars and it was really fantastic because there was a lot going on across the country. We felt like we were part of this wave and making a difference and hopefully making some changes along the way. But it was also the Vietnam War was raging at this time as well.
Speaker 1:Tell us a little more about the clubhouse. How about the little more of the history, the total history of the clubhouse, of course?
Speaker 3:They were meeting downtown, I think, at one of the courthouses and they were using one of the conference rooms, but the membership, like I said, was very large at that time. They were going to be over 300 members and they needed a space, a larger space. The current president at that time was Felix the Heddinger and he owned all these restaurants in Houston. Felix was the name of the restaurants and they were very popular and he made a lot of money and he was right in the Montrose. The Montrose is right off West Timer and Montrose Boulevard and that's where his restaurant was. They started meeting there for a while using the back room of his restaurant, but a house became available in the neighborhood right off of Bagby Street close to West Timer. Felix provided I think it was somewhere in the vicinity of $55,000 to $6,000 to help buy this clubhouse. And then they went to the bank and seven of the Lulac members signed on a note for the remainder, which is cheap I think it was $10,000, $11,000 for this house that became their headquarters. They purchased it in 1954, opened the doors in 1955.
Speaker 3:I like the joke that in the process of converting this from a residential building to a Lulac clubhouse that they must have picked up every lost pallet in Houston, because when you pull all the stuff off the walls it's just a mess back there.
Speaker 3:They moved in, they used it, they were meeting actively up until 2013 in this clubhouse, but it had fallen into disrepair and it was Lulac politics. There's always something going on either at the local, state or national level, but this one happened locally where there was some discord because the Lulac president at the time had started moving some money into a campaign to assist someone to get elected nationally, siphoned money out of the clubhouse fund. They weren't doing the needed repairs. They had a special fund but the money, like I said, got siphoned off. But then, on top of that, the leadership decided that they could do better than the seven guys that were trustees. They called themselves trustees, but they were the actual owners. They had signed off on a note and they held the property for the benefit of Lulac Council 60 and they served as the trustees for it. So Lulac Council 60 would go out and have these fundraisers raise money go into the special fund. They were in charge of making sure that the bills got paid and that the maintenance got done.
Speaker 2:How did you get interested in preserving the clubhouse?
Speaker 3:My wife, the judge again, she loves old houses and she saw this thing and I said this old house would be better suited to be torn down and become a McDonald's or a water burger. And she says no, we need to preserve this thing. There's history there that needs to preserve. And then she reminded me that as a Chicano, I was obligated to do something. So this is how I got interested in doing the research and really working with you, because, I mean, you helped point me a lot in the direction that I needed to go to get an idea of how important the Lula Council 60 history was and how beneficial having their own club house was to their efforts.
Speaker 2:So tell us how far the preservation efforts have progressed and what steps have you taken so far?
Speaker 3:Well, it was quite the shock to all of us, the newbies, because as soon as I got in, I started bringing in more members to take our membership to where we had more hands on deck to be able to do some of this work we had decided they had been talking about. You know. They shuttered it in 2013 because they deemed that it was too dangerous to held meetings in that house, so they had wanted to convert it into, you know, upgraded, make it look more like one of the condominium buildings that was there in the neighborhood. That was one of the ideas. The other idea was to take the clubhouse and have it relocated and put it down at Sam Houston Park, which is downtown in Houston, right across from the Houston Public Library. It's operated, managed, through the Houston Heritage Society, but we got really fortunate and we were introduced to this young lady named Sayla Casper, who was with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She had been looking for a property to rehabilitate or to restore that's what they were doing at the National Trust and she was leading the charge on the Latino side and she had been looking for some properties in Texas. She approached Laredo, so the Laredo is Lula Council 12 and they're older than Council 60, and they also own their own building. But they weren't interested. So she came to us next and of course we were in the process and we wanted to do something and through our association with the National Trust for Historic Preservation we were able to set up a nonprofit A little bit before they came over. We set up the nonprofit, but we were able to convince the last surviving owner of the clubhouse, mr Ernest Aguilla, to transfer the title, put the deed into the nonprofit C60 Inc, which the C stands for obviously Council, and 60 is Council 60. So Councils at C60 Inc.
Speaker 3:We thought we were being clever. So now we have the ownership of it and then comes the shock you own this property and you owe all these back taxes because they had been broke for so long they had been putting off paying their property taxes and so as soon as we took ownership of the house, we're hit with a lawsuit you owe all this money. Come up with the money or we're taking the house. That was the shock. We started getting busy. We knew we needed to raise money and literally almost everyone that we saw we asked for money. Whether it was a dollar or a million dollars, we would take what we could get. But first we had to structurally fix ownership of the clubhouse. We make sure the title was registered and that everybody knew C60 was now the current owner and that we were assuming all the obligations, all of this junk that goes into being the new owner.
Speaker 3:And then we dealt with the taxes, a little at a time. We could raise some here. We paid off like two years of taxes through donations, and then there's all these other years that started coming in. So one lawsuit got settled and we got hit with another one for another set of years. And so it was just. It was like living through a nightmare. But you know we got there eventually. You know we raised the money to own it.
Speaker 3:But through the National Trust we were able to to add a level of sophistication. So I mean we had to go to the city to get a historic landmark designation. So that helped in terms of now they won't tear the house down because it's in bad shape, that the house is protected. And then we went to the to the county Harris County and asked for a property tax exemption. We were turned down the first time but we went back a couple of years back, or late or a couple of years later and applied again, and this time we were able to convince them that we were yes, you know, we were a bona fide nonprofit and this property belong to us and that we were out there doing exactly what our 501 C three designation said, that we were doing charitable work in the community in the area of education and social service. And so we made our case and got property tax exact. It was right at that time when we applied for some monies from the Houston endowment. Then Houston endowment funded us 100 that.
Speaker 3:Well, let me roll it back. National Trust applied for emergency stabilization money under because of her hurricane Harvey. So we got $140,000, did emergency stabilization work. We're able to go to the Houston endowment, get another $100,000 from them to do additional repairs. You know the house was kind of leaning a little bit, not as much as the leaning the leaning tower piece of the house. It was headed that way and so we got it all straightened up, fixed up the roof, the foundation. The house was in great shape but the chimney was still kind of pulling away from the building and you know there were still a lot of things that need to be done.
Speaker 3:But because of having gotten up the exemption from the county and the designation from the city, getting the local grant from the Houston endowment changed the whole, the whole plan.
Speaker 3:Because all of a sudden, you know, we were actually playing in the historical restoration of the city but people started noticing the work that we were doing and a lot of people started talking about it and as a result, you know, we have, we have gone and got a half million dollar grant from the Houston endowment to be able to improve not just the organization C 60, which is supporting it and we were able to get a congressional earmark they're called the Community Program funding or Community Fund programs and our Council woman or Congresswoman, sylvia Garcia, was able to get as the $750,000 grant.
Speaker 3:But there's a lot of strings that come to come, you know, with that particular grant and we're still kind of working our way through it. But that will allow us to work on the interior of the house. We've stabilized the exterior. Now we need to go in there and bring it up to the standard. So we're dealing with a couple of things. One is we want to do a national register application, but we also need to follow all the city of Houston and the state building codes Right. So we're, we're, we're looking at how do we do this rehabilitation, stay true to the historic nature of the property and, you know, be able to comply with all these regulations, to be able to open the door, because we got to get an occupancy permit to be able to do any kind of work out of it.
Speaker 2:And you also got help from the Historical Commission right.
Speaker 3:Right. So the Texas Historical Commission on these federal grants, if they're over a certain dollar amount, I think it's like $490,000. If you're over that, you're over in the $500,000 grant. You have to have an environmental review on the property.
Speaker 1:Well, it sounds like you're doing a great job on that, so what would you say? Right? How far on? How many more years is there to do this?
Speaker 3:Okay. So I think that you know we're thinking, you know, in three years we can be completely done with this rehabilitation project.
Speaker 1:That's pretty great, any of our listeners out there. You got a lot of money. Contact Ray, give him some. If you got any leftover, you can contribute to the gene and Scott drinking and partying fund. But as we reach the end, of course says was tradition holds. We always ask our guests as the last question and give them a chance To spread knowledge, give us a philosophy, whatever it is. So, ray Valdez, what do you know?
Speaker 3:I know that that nothing good ever happens without hard work and commitment. If you want to change something and I learned that you can't change the entire world you have to pick your fights, you have to pick your issues, but staying the course, being committed it's important, and having good friends to support you along the way makes a world of difference. That's what I know.
Speaker 1:And that's a good philosophy.
Speaker 2:That's really good.
Speaker 1:And this Ray, it's been great to have you on. Listen if you want. You know it's not a rant, gene says a rant, but I think these issues are important. I mean, we're going to have to. Some Texans are going to have to get in their mind. Latinos are now plurality in this state, that's. You know, they are the people they're. More than anything else, their history is vital to understanding Texas history. So we need to embrace that history and not just say, hey, this is a, this is this part sitting over here. It has to become central and we've been the entire narrative and people like you are helping us get there, and maybe one day it will become more mainstream. So thanks for coming on.
Speaker 3:I agree with you. I think that you know that we're better together, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Ray, tell us real quick about what you've got planned, with the Heritage Society coming up to celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month.
Speaker 3:Well in the process of doing our work with the clubhouse. One of the people the president of the board at the Heritage Society is a Manette Bozel, and she was also the local board member for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and so she was a big supporter of our project from the beginning. She agreed to partner with us, and when I say us, I'm talking about the clubhouse, c60 Inc. Lulac Council 60. And we also picked up the Houston Public Library along the way to do a an exhibition for Hispanic Heritage Month. So we are commemorating the visit of John F Kennedy to Houston to visit with the Lulac governors at the Rise Hotel.
Speaker 3:This is the 60th anniversary of that event and so we have a curated exhibit that's happening at the Heritage Society Museum and so this event will run all the way into January, into starting on September 15 and running into January 15. And it'll be open to the public. We were happening and an opening reception for the event on September 15. And from there on we're hoping to have a whole bunch. We're going to reach out to organizations across the city inviting them to bring their groups to visit this exhibit to learn about this important piece of Mexican American history and civil rights. Part of the civil rights movement.
Speaker 1:Remember October 5th through 7th, the on the coming academic adeptures. We've got an ETHM meeting going on again, but thank you for coming. This has been informative, fantastic. These are. Y'all make our programs for people like y'all. Come on, we just sit here and just bask in what everything y'all do. So thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, ray, it was very good, thank you, thank you.