Couple Show Devotion--to Rights Group

In the heated, often polarized world of ethnic politics, Gil and Susie Flores stand out as low-key, conciliatory and quietly determined advocates of civil rights.

Third-generation Americans who choose to live in a densely populated, low-income neighborhood of immigrants, they have more than 40 years of community activism between them, many of those years spent volunteering for the League of United Latin American Citizens.

LULAC, the nation’s oldest and largest grass-roots Latino civil rights organization, is an advocacy group formed in 1929 by a coalition of Latino groups in Corpus Christi, Texas. The group’s projects brought the two divorced parents together nine years ago, and fittingly, they were wed between workshops at the LULAC national convention in Anaheim last month.

“LULAC is like my extended family, so it made sense to get married when everyone was already in town,” Susie Flores explained.

A few days later, Gil Flores was sworn in as LULAC’s new state director, and Susie Flores took charge of the organization’s Orange County district.

Instead of a honeymoon, the new couple spent most of the last few weeks putting together an ambitious agenda for LULAC, a once-prominent national organization that lost much of its clout and membership in California over the last two decades.

Sincere, passionate and refreshingly optimistic, they hope to expand LULAC’s membership in California and regain the respect of state and national legislators. “I’m going to make sure that we have positive movement,” Gil Flores, 54, said. He listed affirmative action, immigrant benefits and bilingual education as three key areas for activism.

“I don’t want the Latino community to become a separate class or to become disenfranchised,” he said. “We have a lot of energy that can be used for the common good, and we’re here to stay.”

It’s a challenging task: Even as the state’s Latino population grew, LULAC membership steadily declined from a peak of several thousand in the late 1970s to about 1,200 today.

And LULAC, which was once at the forefront of movements for equal rights in education, housing and employment, has been only a minor player in recent years on issues ranging from affirmative action to government benefits to immigrants.

“There are still a lot of people who don’t know what LULAC is,” Gil Flores conceded. It all comes down to a lack of leadership, he said, and he plans to change that.

“The Latino community has been the whipping boy for five years,” he said. “Either that makes you madder and you take action, or you don’t confront it and hope it goes away. Well, denial doesn’t work, so we’ve got to take action.”

Larry Luera, LULAC state director from 1980 to 1982, said a new generation of Latino politicians--including California Assembly Speaker Cruz Bustamante (D-Fresno) and U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove)--have created a more favorable climate for up-and-coming Latino leaders such as Susie and Gil Flores.

“We can only be successful if people [in Sacramento and Washington] are paying attention to us, and we’re starting to get that now,” Luera said. “It seems like the tide is turning, and in Gil, we have a real strong leader who can take advantage of it.”

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Born in Texas, Gil Flores is a Vietnam veteran and a senior engineer with Boeing. He recently completed a master’s program in nonprofit leadership at Chapman University, and he has already made his mark at California LULAC, designing its Internet home page (www.californialulac.org). He also is rehabbing a small office for LULAC’s state headquarters, close to the small two-bedroom apartment in downtown Santa Ana he shares with his wife and a teenage son from a prior marriage.

He has scheduled a “leadership retreat” for October, when the state organization will adopt a vision and action plan. With his wife, he’s also planning summits on youth education, women’s issues and the elderly for early 1998, and will co-sponsor a voter registration workshop in Santa Ana in mid-September.

“The basic thing I try to fight for is justice,” he said.

Susie Flores, 41, a county health department administrator who also serves on the board of the Girl Scout Council of Orange County and the Soroptimists, a professional women’s group, said her passions are women’s issues and youth involvement--in part because her own early adulthood was limited by expectations that a young Latina should be a mother and homemaker.

Married at 19 and soon afterward a mother of three, she put off higher education for 10 years before finally studying at Cypress College, funded in part with a LULAC scholarship.

“I might not have a lot of degrees, but I have a lot of lifetime experience,” she said. “I think that gives me credibility with young people. I want to let them know they don’t have to get married at a young age, but if that’s what they want to do, I want to help them be successful at it.”

During her year at the helm of LULAC in Orange County, she said, she plans to hold workshops on parenting and education. And she will continue to co-sponsor an annual all-day workshop for young Latinas, called Adelante Mujer. .

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Both Gil and Susie Flores emphasized the importance of starting LULAC councils on college campuses and involving more young Latinos in the organization, which has been criticized by some youths as irrelevant or out-of-date.

“We need to keep bringing the young blood in,” said Susie Flores, whose district secretary is a 17-year-old high school senior.

LULAC became a force for change and inclusion through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Gil and Susie Flores hope that that can happen again.

“Society has changed. The ‘60s are behind us,” Gil Flores said. “It’s possible that the problems are becoming too big for the old way of thinking. They’re overwhelming. But we can deal with them.”