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The Mexican American Civil Rights Institute (MACRI) has for five years brought together leaders from across the nation for its annual symposiums.
Past speakers have included journalists, historians, lawmakers, and civil rights leaders.
This year is no different. The 6th MACRI Symposium takes place this weekend at Texas Public Radio’s downtown headquarters.
Sarah Gould, MACRI’s executive director, offered this preview.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
GOULD: Ninety percent of the year, our focus is history, but the symposium is an opportunity for us to talk about current civil rights issues and hear from current thought leaders on civil rights.
So, this year, our focus is going to be on First Amendment rights, voting rights, and the right to be counted. So, I know that's three big things, but these are all pretty essential.
So, we're really excited that this year, for the first time, we're actually going to be moving the symposium to the theater at Texas Public Radio, the Carlos and Malú Alvarez Theater. We've never been in that space before for the symposium. The first couple of years, we were at the Guadalupe Theater here on the West Side, where we're based. Of course, they're closed for renovations. So, then we went to the San Antonio Public Library, which is a beautiful space.
But the cool thing about the theater at Texas Public Radio is that it really is kind of like a town square in a way. TPR has been doing so many events in that space to bring in community voices and share information. It seemed like a great space, just in terms of what TPR is doing with that theater.
But also, I think it's meaningful to us because of the location. Of course, Texas Public Radio it's next to — attached to — the old Alameda Theater, which was the showcase, landmark movie theater for Spanish-language movies in San Antonio, at the heart of what used to be Mexican downtown. And so, it just sort of fits into this history in a really nice way. So, we're excited to be there.
So, we'll have a reception with a welcome with [TPR President and CEO] Ashley Alvarado ... and we also then have our keynote speaker, who is two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Lalo Alcaráz. He's a political cartoonist. He'll be focusing on the First Amendment, free speech, in his keynote address. And then we have a meet and greet, kind of a party, next door at La Zona, right next door to Texas Public Radio. So, we'll have a catered reception. If you register for the event, you are more than welcome to join us. That's Day One.
Day Two is going to be an all-day event, starting with an opening address of the Honorable Robert Santos. He's our most recent Census director, and he'll be talking about the importance of being counted. And so that will be at 10:30 after the 10 a.m. welcome.
Then at 11, we have a fireside chat with Vilma Martinez and Tom Saenz. Vilma Martinez was the first woman to lead the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). She is a native of San Antonio, but by the time she was leading MALDEF, MALDEF had moved from San Antonio to San Francisco.
But it's so fascinating that she ended up in that position, because when she was in high school, growing up in San Antonio, she had a summer job at the law office of Alonso Peralez, who was probably the most important civil rights lawyer from San Antonio in that period of the 1950s. She says that working in that office and seeing him fight for Mexican American rights inspired her to pursue a law career, and she ends up becoming the first woman to lead MALDEF. Now she's lived in California for a long time. Actually, people may remember that just a few years ago, she was U.S. Ambassador to Argentina.
She's semi-retired now, but we're bringing her to San Antonio because this year is the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Voting Rights Act, which she was very much involved in. This is the Voting Rights Act that was an extension or an expansion to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which brought voting protections to African Americans.
There were still some groups that were not included in that and who were having trouble getting equal access to the ballot. So, the 1975 Voting Rights Act expanded the 65 protections to include what the federal government ended up calling “language minority groups.” Now that really means Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, but people who were not getting equal access to the ballot. So, that's a really important act.
She'll be talking about that, and she'll be joined by the current director of MALDEF, Tom Saenz, who's just a brilliant person. I mean, they're both brilliant — they're both brilliant. They'll be in conversation with each other, reflecting on their careers in civil rights law and the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Voting Rights Act. That conversation will be moderated by Celina Moreno, who's a former MALDEF lawyer herself and now the executive director of [Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA)]. So, she's well known here in San Antonio.
Then after that, we're going to break for lunch followed by a fireside chat with none other than María Elena Salinas, a broadcast journalist that I know many San Antonians are familiar with. She's been called “the voice of Hispanic America.” So, she'll be talking about her career in journalism and the importance of getting our stories told, and who tells those stories, and how do we tell those stories?
And then finally, we'll have a closing address from Dr. Elena Rios, who oversees a number of initiatives around Hispanic health and public health. She calls herself a health care futurist, but she's somebody who's really been working at trying to close some of the gaps in medical issues, particularly chronic diseases that face Latinos and unequal access to health care. Particularly, again, for those chronic things that are treatable, but we just need better health care access. So, she'll be talking about that in the future of that.
So, it'll be a great day of really just some amazing thought leaders and hopefully inspire everybody to find out what, what can they do about an issue that matters to them.
MARTINEZ: Those issues are mattering more to people right now in this political climate. We're seeing many civil rights protections appear to erode under this current administration. So, have you maybe seen a spark in interest in the symposium because of the times that we're living in now?
GOULD: Absolutely. And honestly, as we were working on the schedule, it was a little complicated to narrow it down so that this is a manageable event — to narrow down what are we going to focus on because there are so many issues that are really at [the] forefront of conversations right now.
I will just say, our focus is primarily history. So, with this symposium we wanted to touch on things that we could easily say, "if you want to know more about the history of this, we actually already have a conversation, a MACRI talk online that you can look back to learn the history of this as you're hearing about the current status." And then we also recognize that there are a number of other nonprofits that are focusing on some of these issues right now.
So, we couldn't cover everything, but what we will do, if you come either in person or online — it will be live streamed — we’ll make a resource guide available on the website.
So, you can find out more about some of these other things, because we just couldn't cover everything and this one day and a half.
But you're absolutely right. Civil rights is something we all need to be thinking about, not just because we are seeing challenges to civil rights right now, but I think if we're trying to understand the future and where we fit into the future, we need to understand, well, who are we? And what have we overcome to this point? What remains something we need to be willing to take a stand on?
MARTINEZ: Can you tell us a little bit about how these symposiums have evolved over the years, since your first one, which I think might have taken place during the pandemic?
GOULD: Yes, the first two were during the pandemic. So, the first one was 100% virtual. That was when everybody was getting new to Zoom and how to do those things. So, yeah, that first year was entirely virtual.
The second year, we had an in-person reception, but then the actual talks were virtual because the reception, we were able to do it outdoors. This was when we were still being extremely careful. So that was in 2021.
[By] 2022, we finally were in person, and we've been in person since then. But it has grown, because the first year it was half a day, the second year it was a full day, and now, since then, it's been two days.
So, it has grown and now we're doing it both in person and live streaming. One of the kind of unexpected things about the pandemic and this live streaming is that we were able to reach people far beyond our home base of San Antonio. And ever since then, people will email us and say, “Oh, I heard about this. Will you be live streaming it?” So, we know there are people in other parts of the country who want this information. So, we're happy to live stream this symposium. We try to live stream as much as we can. It's not always technically possible, but we recognize that we are everywhere.
The 6th annual MACRI Symposium is this Friday and Saturday at Texas Public Radio’s Malú & Carlos Alvarez Theater at 321 W. Commerce in downtown San Antonio.
Registration information for either in-person or virtual attendance is here.
