Thirteen years ago, inveterate activists Pam and Ricardo Martinez wedged time between their day jobs and volunteer work organizing a grassroots group of Latino parents that eventually prospered into Padres Unidos, a dynamic coalition that became a full-time vocation.
Together, this amalgam of parents helped to defeat an English-only ballot measure, rallied support for a tobacco tax that finances health care and instituted bilingual education and other opportunities for Spanish- speaking Denver Public Schools students.
Now their work has drawn the attention of the Ford Foundation, which singled out the Martinezes for one of 17 Leadership for a Changing World grants of $100,000 over two years. They’ll also receive $15,000 “to explore new learning opportunities” for their work, according to the foundation’s website.
The foundation cited their success in advocating for the Latinos who make up 57 percent of the 73,000 students in Denver Public Schools.
Pam and Ricardo Martinez are lifelong activists. Ricardo Martinez is the son of Mexican farm workers who weeded and harvested commercial crops in California.
At age 14, Martinez and his family joined others organizing a union to improve working conditions and joined Cesar Chavez and his fledgling United Farm Workers Union.
Martinez met his future wife at a picket line. Pam Cole, who attended her first civil-rights demonstration at age 13, was a San Francisco State University student active in Chicano and women’s causes. Like Martinez, she believed firmly in grassroots activism.
Beating the odds
“By staying together and organizing, people can make progress and change conditions against enormous odds,” Pam Martinez said.
The Martinezes exude the self-possessed earnestness of seasoned activists. Both have dark, graying hair worn in ponytails. Their faces are careworn and resolute.
They’ve been lauded by peers and civil-rights advocates but not by change-resistant administrators and politicians.
In its early years, Padres Unidos routinely found itself at odds with the DPS administration. Former DPS superintendent Irv Moskowitz opposed Padres Unidos’ proposal for a bilingual-education plan. He wrote to the group’s benefactors advising them to cut the group’s funding, accusing Padres Unidos of “disruptive behavior and unwillingness to sit at the table.”
DPS spokesman Mark Stevens said the district now has an “excellent” relationship with Padres Unidos.
In 2001, DPS officials objected when Padres Unidos members, dissatisfied with the Cole Middle School principal, bypassed the formal collaborative decisionmaking committees to successfully lobby for the candidate they preferred.
The Martinezes adopted the cause of instituting change in public schools when they moved from California to Houston in 1978. While scouting apartments, they noticed a lot of school-age Latino children milling aimlessly during classroom hours.
They learned that Texas law allowed public schools to deny enrollment to the children of undocumented workers. The couple helped engineer more than 600 families into the Coalition of Undocumented Students’ Rights and filed a lawsuit.
The U.S. Supreme Court declared the Texas law unconstitutional in 1982.
“You need your legal team, but you also need your community to pack courtrooms and hand out fliers,” Pam Martinez said.
University of Denver economics professor Rob Prince, who nominated the couple for the Ford Foundation grant, said their knack for organizing communities is inseparable from their political victories.
“These two work well with people within the social movements, and within more established circumstances, and that’s really hard to do,” Prince said.
Prince praised Padres Unidos’ underdog campaign in 2004 against California multimillionaire Ron Unz’s “English for the Children” ballot measure. Padres Unidos rallied a door-to-door offensive that shocked its heavily funded, politically brawny adversaries.
The defeat solidly established Padres Unidos as a muscular force for change, though insiders chalked it up as only one in a chain of victories. The first goes back to a group of Valverde Elementary School parents’ frustration in 1991 with their principal’s custom of disciplining Spanish-speaking students by making them sit on the cafeteria floor at lunchtime.
With Martinezes’ help
With help from the Martinezes, the parents won media attention and community support. They forced the principal out and got the controversial punishment abolished.
At a celebratory potluck, parents congratulated one another, Pam Martinez said.
“And then one of the dads, Gilbert Gutierrez, stood up and said, ‘We cannot end this here,”‘ she said.
He went on to suggest the name Padres Unidos, which means United Parents.
Over the next decade, Padres Unidos successfully sued DPS for failing to adequately educate Spanish-speaking children. The group drove support to fund and build the school district’s dual-language Acadama Ana Maria Sandoval, the first of its kind in the U.S.
In 2004, a Padres Unidos coalition helped pass a Colorado tobacco tax providing $175 million in public health care that included care for undocumented residents. Padres Unidos created a youth auxiliary, Jovenes Unidos, to increase educational standards and opportunities for Latino students aspiring to college.
“As the doors of education open up, jobs open up and equal access opens up,” Pam Martinez said. “It’s not happening on its own. That’s why I think this work is really important.”
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
