Los Angeles – Janet Murguia grew up on bologna and powdered milk, sleeping five to a room in a tiny Kansas City, Kan., home with mismatched furniture and plastic curtains.
Her parents, one a Mexican immigrant and the other the son of one, never managed to advance beyond seventh grade. But they knew the value of education enough to pinch pennies for a set of encyclopedias.
Her church provided a spiritual compass and close-knit community of mostly Mexican immigrants and their children.
Those values honoring education, family and faith, Murguia said, helped lift her out of her barrio and onto a fast track of law school, the Clinton White House and now presidency of one of the nation’s largest Latino advocacy organizations. Three of her six siblings also went to law school; two are serving as federal district judges.
Now, as president and chief executive of the National Council of La Raza, Murguia said she wants to make such dreams accessible to all.
“There’s no question in my mind that the strong values instilled by my parents – faith, family, community, hard work and optimism – are the pillars that allowed us to be successful,” said Murguia, 45. “It’s what inspires me to be at the helm of this organization today: to throw open the doors of the American Dream to everyone, including the Latino community.”
In Los Angeles recently for the council’s annual conference, Murguia shared her life story and vision for the organization, which claims 40,000 members and a network of 300 affiliated community organizations.
Murguia, who was selected as president last year, inherits an organization with a mixed reputation within the diverse Latino community.
Supporters praise its effective advocacy work and access to political and corporate power brokers, while critics regard it as an elitist organization whose “cocktail activism” is disconnected from the masses.
Some Latinos picketed La Raza’s conference last week, protesting the organization’s support of a compromise Senate immigration bill that provides a guest-worker program and path to legalization for some but not all of the nation’s estimated 11.5 million illegal immigrants.
One of the protesters, Nativo Lopez of the Mexican American Political Association, asserted that La Raza’s significant corporate funding had crippled its ability to project a powerful voice on behalf of the poor. The Senate bill, he said, will serve U.S. corporate desires for cheap labor but slam the door to citizenship to millions of Latinos.
“The National Council of La Raza is the premier organization involved in a betrayal of the immigrant community,” Lopez said. “They are a Trojan horse for corporate America in the Latino community.”
Others praised the council for effective lobbying that has helped, among other things, protect bilingual programs, strengthen immigrant rights, and restore federal funding for welfare and educational benefits to the poor.
“They are very much part of the White House, inside-the- Beltway world where you have to make compromises. From the outside, it sometimes looks like they’re selling out,” said Lisa Garcia Bedolla, a University of California at Irvine associate professor of political science and Chicano/Latino studies. “But the expectations for NCLR are too high. I don’t think any single organization can do everything they’re being asked to do.”
Murguia said she was eager to listen to all voices – supporters and critics, Republicans and Democrats, corporate presidents and illegal immigrants.
“I believe in an open-tent approach,” Murguia said. “If we’re going to sit and throw rocks at everyone we don’t agree with, we won’t get anything done.”
Murguia said corporations, foundations and the federal government each contribute roughly one-third of La Raza’s $25 million annual operating budget.
The value of corporate partnerships, she said, was evident at last week’s conference, where La Raza announced a breakthrough agreement on health care. Concerned with rising neural-tube defects among Latino babies, the organization had appealed to corn-flour producers to fortify the product with folic acid to help prevent them.
