In this class, you will be tasked with doing an Oral History Project. Your assignment will be to transcribe an interview that covers the educational experiences of Mexican Americans in Texas. The ta
Interviewee: Juan Parras
Date: 08/18/09
Interviewer: Natalie Garza
Transcriber: Carol Valdés
NG: This is Natalie Garza. I’m interviewing Juan Parras on August 18th, 2009 at the TEJAS offices on Harrisburg in Houston, Texas. Can you begin by telling me your full name?
JP: Yeah, my full name is Juan Hernandez Parras and I was born in Big Spring, Texas.
NG: When were you born?
JP: A long time ago, 1949.
NG: What’s your birth date?
JP: 12/26, the day after Christmas.
NG: Where did you go to school?
JP: All my elementary years I went to, it was called Bauer, Bauer Elementary. Then, I went Reynolds Middle School in Big Spring, Texas and then my high school years were spent in San Antonio at St. Anthony’s Seminary.
NG: Why did you go to San Antonio for school, for high school?
JP: Well, for, for a number of reasons. I’m the oldest of ten children and we were obviously, very poor. My dad was a World War II veteran, but back then you know, they had a difficult time finding jobs, and so anyway, the church was always giving us some kind of assistance. You know my dad didn’t ask for help, but we would always get, you know clothing donated or food donated because there is so many of us in the family. And then, there was an opportunity when I was going to the ninth grade, okay, and the local priest suggested that, well basically, what he said was that, “You know, you’re a good kid and you’re smart, and we’d like to see you are interested in a priest, a priestly vocation.” So, they gave me the opportunity to go to San Antonio and study on the, at the Saint Anthony’s Seminary and it was paid by the parish. Otherwise, I couldn’t, we couldn’t have afforded it. So, that’s how I ended up in San Antonio.
NG: Did you continue your education after high school?
JP: Yes, I graduated from Saint Anthony’s Seminary in ’68 and then I went to a Saint Mary’s University because that’s where they send you when you go to the seminary and I went to the Saint, Saint Mary’s for a year and then I got out and I went back home and I went to Harvard County Junior College until I got all my, all you can get at junior college, and then I came back to Houston and I went back to the University of Houston and, right now since 1978, all I have is seven hours to go. Never went back.
NG: Well, what did you want to study, or what were you studying?
JP: Well initially, I got in there to study optometry and then as they, I changed two or three majors and anyway, I ended up with 154 hours of college work with seven hours from a degree. So, I, I understand I can get a math degree, or biology degree, or a este, a psychology degree. But, I never took the time to go back.
NG: Why did you stop going?
JP: I stopped going because you know, that was like in the seventies and I was lucky enough to be offered a job to be an international union organizer, and I took the job and as it turns out that job you know was, it’s a well paying job, it’s a good job, and it was paying more, a lot more than college degrees, guys that I went to school with were earning and, so I felt like, well, I would like to have a degree, but you got to consider about, you know maintaining your family and upkeep and all that stuff. My salary was very good compared to all the college grads that I went to school with. So, so, I didn’t see a need at the time and at one time when I was working for the unions, I wanted to go back, pero I started you know, on those seven hours, I started, and I had to drop out because they transfer you to different places. So, as long as I worked for the unions, I didn’t care about going back. I had a good paying salary, a stable job, and I didn’t have the time to finish off what I wanted to finish.
NG: So, you said you worked for an international union. What was, did it have a name?
JP: Yeah, the union is American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. It’s a public employee union. It’s like city workers, county employees, hospital workers, school, HISD, that’s the kind.
NG: And it’s nationwide?
JP: Yeah, it’s, all unions are nationwide, basically, but what they do is, see, locally, they have a local. They call it local, like “Local 716”. That’s with electrical workers and then, the electrical workers in the state, they belong to a state affiliation and then, from the state they belong to a national affiliation. It’s just like a little pyramid. In the organization that I worked with, it has a local here in Houston. It was Local 1550, but see I wasn’t working for the local. I was sort of in a way, jumped all the way to the top to the international union, and the international union pays you to help the locals all over the state, I mean all over the nation. Wherever they have problems they can theoretically, send me and I would be like their [ ].
NG: How, how did you come into that work, you know, it seems like, like you would need a lot of qualifications to be able to help all of these unions?
JP: Well, that’s, that’s, another interesting question because what happened is that when I was going to college, I used to work for the welfare department, Harris County Social Services. That’s what it was called. Now, with the only Latino and the majority of the workers were female. So, two things, you know, that I saw then is that social work is, in the seventies, was mostly women, and so, anyway, I got this job because they needed somebody that was bilingual. So, I got the job working for the Harris County Social Services and in working there we encountered a lot of employee issues. You know, as far as salaries, as far as benefits, as far as working conditions, and then, me personally, being the only Latino with the Harris County Social Services, I had to interview all of the Latinos that came in there and said, “We don’t know how to speak English.” So, my caseload, on a number of days, was three or four times bigger than the average person, and think of it this way, mira, you have thirty employees and you have two hundred people that come in for welfare assistance, and out of those two hundred people that come, if, if fifty say they don’t speak English, I have fifty and the other twenty-nine individuals only have a hundred and fifty to look at, right? So, I was overwhelmed and overworked, and pero that was one issue. That was just because you know, I was Latino, and I had to do that. But in addition to that, the other problems that we had at the welfare department was that, if you had let’s say, three hundred people come in on a, every day, three hundred people, at five o’ clock, if you still had like thirty more people that needed to be interviewed, at five o’ clock the applicant doesn’t know it, but at five o’clock we can do the interviews or we really can’t give them any help because we need to verify where they live and, generally they’re in apartment units and you can’t call the landlord at five and say, “Hey, I want to verify you know Jose and see if he lives here.” Uh, if you needed to pay a utility bill, you couldn’t call the light company and say, “I understand the lights are off on this family unit. Can, can we, how much is it going to take to turn it back on?” because they didn’t work after five. So, any person that we interviewed after five, they, they thought that they were going to get help. But, then we couldn’t help them, and they would get belligerent with us. Some of them would tell us, “You know I’ve been here all day long and you’re not going to help me and I’m this, need this and that.” So, because of those issues, and they always talked about them. The employees always talked about them, but they never did anything about it and, finally, you know, just naturally, because nobody trained me, but just naturally I said, “Well, we got to get together. We’ve got to, at least, tell management what’s going on,” because what used to happen was at five o’ clock the management, you know, the people in charge of us, they would tell us, “Well, I’m going to go home, but you guys stay, and work overtime and we’ll see you tomorrow.” So, we didn’t even have supervision after five because they would always go home and, of course, the custodians and other people would lock up the doors, and we were left with that situation, okay. We couldn’t help people and they thought that they were going to get help and they were belligerent because we didn’t help them. So anyway, in the short story, I organized the employees. We started having like meetings among ourselves, and, and we started discussing problems that we have and, finally we all had a meeting and we told management we think you ought to change all of these things and initially, they didn’t want to change anything because they said this is the way we’ve been operating forever, and it’s been good, and we’re not going to change it. So, anyway, instead we continued to at least file grievances, you know, not really grievances, pero oral grievances and they started to at least, listen to us, and they basically found out who the instigator was or who they thought was the trouble maker. So, over a period of four years, I ended up getting terminated three times. But, every time I got terminated I was lucky because somebody at the county commissioner’s courts, they would go to the department and say, “Well, why do you want to fire this individual, because you know, he’s doing good work and this, and that.” I found out este in the end que, the county commissioners, they knew they had problem with the Harris County Social Service, with the leadership there, but they couldn’t fire them, or they didn’t have any ammunition to fire them. So, we were now becoming their tool to get rid of the supervision there. They were saying, “Well, we have too many employee complaints, they have issues, and you’re not dealing with them” so, eventually, they got rid of the leadership at the Harris County Social Services, but I also ended up getting fired, with conditions though. They made them, uh, they forced them to pay me until I found another job and they made them recommend me to, for employment wherever I went, and I ended up working for Kathy Whitmire then, the mayor of the City of Houston. So anyway, based on that activity, then I went to work for Kathy Whitmire with the Housing Development Corporation is the CDC, Community Development Corporation, and they were having también employee problems, and I didn’t know we had a union see, but anyway they were having employee problems and we started addressing those, we started organizing, and, and it’s during that time that a union employee actually came up to me and said, “Hey, look we’ve heard a lot about, you do naturally what we pay people to do. Are you interested in working for us?” and I said, “You mean I’m going to get paid for doing that?’’ This is fun. And so, they said, “Yeah.” So, they hired me in 1976, and I worked for them for fifteen years just helping people out.
NG: What made you, what do you think makes you want to do that naturally, wanting to organize people naturally?
JP: Well, I think, over the years there’s been several things este, my parents were very helpful with our community. I mean, they didn’t go out and volunteer, but again look, being the oldest of ten and we, I remember still living close to the railroad tracks and back then they had a lot of, what do they call those hitch hikers on trains, uh…
NG: Hobos?
JP: Yeah, hobos, that’s when they called them hobos. And they would get off in Big Spring, Texas and we were real close to the tracks, like I said, about a block away. So, we had a lot of hobos that would come and ask for food and coffee and donations and what not. I always remember my dad, you know, he didn’t care who they were, “Hey, you know, make them a taquito, or give them whatever you have” and we were ten, we barely had stuff to eat, but, but he was always kind enough to feed them because he said, you know, “If ever something happens like that to us, I wish somebody would help you all. So, anyway, I think that was like an imprint there. I became like socially conscious of how bad their situation was, and then how my dad and mom were kind enough to, even give them, though they didn’t have enough for us también to, at least, share what they have. And then the other part was I had a scoutmaster, and he’s still alive, se llama Bird Andrews. I got to know him because he would go to church every day. Every day he went to church, but he got us into the Boy Scouts. And when we got into the Boy Scouts, and I was about ten or eleven, one thing that I learned from him too was that he was very, very helpful and very generous. Again, you know, to be in the Boy Scouts you have to pay to go to summer camp, you have to pay for your uniforms, and all this stuff. And again, we couldn’t do it, but he offered to pay for the family, you know, “If you want your son to be a scout, don’t worry about it, you know, I’ll pay the expenses.” One thing that I learned about him that I think sort of lead me into environmental work, which is what I do right now, is that I remember going camping and this old bus, we call este, what’s that little mouse, Gonzales, Speedy Gonzales right, that’s what we called our bus, Speedy Gonzales, but we used to go camping because this bus was real slow, an old bus, but we used to go camping and one thing that, that I learned right away and we all used to get mad, initially, but if we went to a state park, or even a national park, we would camp out like two or three days, and before we left, when we were getting ready to go home, he would line us up in a single file, you know, he said, “Spread your arms and everybody just line up” and he would make us walk all the way through our camping area and beyond the camping area and clean up everything. He says, “If it doesn’t belong in the dirt, pick it up” and initially, we think, well, what doesn’t belong in the dirt because you’re not used to it, right? Pero what he meant like, like if you saw a can you know, that doesn’t belong in the dirt. If you saw paper that doesn’t, if you saw cigarette butts, that doesn’t belong there. So, he made us clean up, and as a young kid, we would say, “Yeah, but, you know, this was filthy when we got here and now you’re making us clean up” but, he said, “Well, you enjoyed it and if we clean it up, others can enjoy it” and that’s how I, I think I got into the environmental movement.
NG: You mentioned a couple of times that you started your union work in the seventies, why do you think, do you think that was a different time that, what made it different that you would start at that time?
JP: Well…
NG: Like if you started at a different time, do you think it would have been a different experience?
JP: With union organizing, uh, the experience changes with the loss of the nation, you know as far as labor unions are concerned. But back then they had public employees, let me tell you a little history. In our fifty states there is still eleven or thirteen states, I’m not sure if it’s gone down to eleven, but back when I was working there were thirteen states, okay, they have what they call “Right to Work Laws,” and Right to Work Laws means that an employer can terminate you at will. Now, the other states have contracts, or they negotiate contracts so, at least, you, you’re protected from it when you’re outside of this thirteen states if you work for anybody in that state, at least you have some kind of security because before you get terminated they have to you know, let you know that you’re not doing the job right, you have a right to grieve, you have a, you know if you get suspended you have a right to grieve that. But, right now in thirteen states we still have laws that say it’s a right to work state, and Texas is a right to work state. And, basically again if you’re a public employee, a politician runs for office, you know, like, any of our politicians right now, our city councilmen right now is James Rodriguez, when he takes office he can let all of his staff go and bring in new staff because you know, it’s a right to work state. So, anyway, one of the differences back then was that we’re still in a right to work state. So, it’s very hard to negotiate because when you have a right to work state, the city doesn’t have to negotiate with the union. Now, it has changed then, since then, but if you call right now, the City of Houston actually has a contract with public employees where they come together and they negotiate wages, working conditions, and benefits, but it’s really, it’s kind of like laissez-faire contract because it’s really a memorandum of agreement, where they agree to, to settle down their issues. It’s really not a contract. So that has changed and now, under the Obama Administration okay, well, I’ll tell you another thing. When you organize a union, you have to an election, that’s by the Fair Labor Standards Act and if the majority of employees decide they want a union, then you get a union. But now under the Obama Administration, and this is long time overdue, you don’t have to necessarily have an election to decide whether you’re going to have a union. All it should be is that the unions, I mean, the employees, basically said, “We want a union to negotiate on behalf of us and we think we have enough people that are interested in it. So, let’s start talking about forming a union.” Because the other way, what happens is that the employer will, they’ll start intimidating people that are talking about a union, and the easiest way to do it is if you’re interested in becoming a union member and they find out that you’re the leader, just like when I was in the early seventies, you know you’re on your way out. They’re going to fire you, or they’ll come in there and they’ll tell you, “Hey, look if you start a union, we are not going to accept the union. We’re just going to move our business somewhere else.” So, so things are changing now, but back then and, and still, it’s still hard in a lot of states to organize because management or the company always uses the other debate against unions. “Why do you want to pay the unions thirty dollars a month when you can just come and talk to me about your problems, you know and talk about pay raises,” but it doesn’t work like that, you know, because a company is not going to negotiate individual pay raises with an individual, or vacation pay, or sick time. So, you actually need a union, but that’s another way to intimidate folks from joining the unions.
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