El Centro de La Raza - History

History

El Centro was founded October 11, 1972 by Americans of Mexican ancestry calling themselves Chicanos, a socio-political term made popular in the 1960s, and other Latinos and people of different ethnic backgrounds. The militants occupied Beacon Hill School in Seattle, which had been closed due to declining student enrollment. The group was inspired, in part, by the 1970 occupation by Native Americans of the decommissioned Fort Lawton in Seattle's Magnolia district, which had resulted in the founding of the Daybreak Star Cultural Center. The initial spark for the occupation was the fact that about seventy Latino students and ten staff of the Chicano: English and Adult Basic Education Program at the Duwamish branch of the incipient South Seattle Community College had found themselves without an educational home.

The occupation also took place in the context of the activist spirit of the time, including opposition to the Vietnam war and growth of the migrant workers union, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW). By the 1960s thousands of Latinos, nearly all of whom were seeking employment, found themselves in the largely Anglo-American metropolis of Seattle, lacking a traditional community center: a barrio, with a Latin American-style plaza. They redressed this lack by renovating the old school with their own hands, having obtained a lease from the city for $1 a year.

The founders of El Centro crossed racial and ethnic boundaries. Founder Roberto Maestas, executive director until 2009, was close to Black activist and community leader Larry Gossett, Asian leader Bob Santos, and Native American urban activist Bernie Whitebear, as well as fishing-rights advocates in the Frank family. Maestas, Gossett, Santos, and Whitebear were called the "Gang of Four" around Seattle as they set about building an unusual ethnic alliance. Thus El Centro de la Raza became very multiethnic from the beginning, interpreting its name as "The Center for the People of All Races" (when poorly translated without context it means "The Center of the Race"). From the early days, people who worked at El Centro engaged in an on-going conversation regarding how to address questions of race and racism in a society that includes a diverse array of peoples.

From the beginning, El Centro de la Raza was a community project that stressed commitment to struggle for Civil Rights for all persons. The people who occupied the building joked that they were simply implementing advice from Washington governor Dan Evans, “advocating use of empty schools for community needs, such as child care”. Leaders of the building takeover quickly won a pledge from Seattle Public Schools superintendent Forbes Bottomly that no effort would be made to evict them by force. The school district even arranged to open a back door for fire safety. The school had a sprinkler system, but its water long had been cut off.

After three months of occupying the building and numerous rallies, petitions and letters, the Seattle City Council agreed to hear their case. At one point, pressing for an audience, supporters of the occupation had laid siege to the City Council’s chambers. The Council finally approved the lease, but mayor Wes Uhlman vetoed the action. Supporters then occupied the mayor's office and were arrested. An accord was finally reached. A five-year lease was signed January 20, 1973 at $1 rent annually.

Many of the occupiers were blue-collar tradespeople who set to work cleaning the building, repairing light fixtures and windows, painting peeling walls. Artists created murals "depicting life on the old family farms as well as the agonies of migrant work. On one wall, a young boy stood beside a burro; on another, an older man lay across the field of a factory farm, nailed to a cross, surrounded by tractors whose grills took the ghastly gray shape of skulls" (Johansen and Maestas, 1983, 128). What had been a vacant, decaying shell was successfully recuperated, and came to be a "home" for some unlikely allies: blue-collar trades people and white-collar intellectuals, Native American, Asian, Latino, Black, and European-American, men and women.

More than 20 years later, Maestas would remark, "I found that the only way to get things done in this city is to do it -- and then work it out… It took five to six years for the building to become up to code. Everything had to be repaired, replaced or installed. With the help, love and dedication of the community, the organization's building was refurbished piece by piece. Money was donated. Grants were awarded. Materials were donated, as well. Laborers volunteered time. Plumbers gave services. Heating and plumbing were installed. The roof was fixed. Vinyl siding was put in place. The classrooms were spruced up.”

By 1982, the main floor of the old building was a beehive of activity. By 1995, all three floors of the building were in use. The organization continued to practice direct action. When the Washington Natural Gas Company cut off El Centro's heat, for example, the teachers and children of the child-development center moved to a place they knew would remain warm: the reception area of the company chief executive officer’s office.

In ensuing years, Latino culture became far more widespread in Seattle. Taco carts, trailers, trucks, and buses became common along Seattle's arterials, even in the traditionally Scandinavian Ballard neighborhood. In the decade ending in 2000, according to the Census Bureau, the Latino population in King County jumped 115 percent, to 95,242. Maestas estimated that this omitted another 10,000 undocumented Latinos, "and that's a conservative figure".