El Centro de la Raza in Seattle, Washington, United States, is an educational, cultural, and social service agency, centered in the Latino/Chicano community and headquartered in the former Beacon Hill Elementary School on Seattle's Beacon Hill. It was founded in 1972 and celebrated its 35th anniversary in 2007. El Centro de la Raza continues to serve clients in Seattle, King County and beyond. It is considered a significant part of civil rights history in the Pacific Northwest.
Their website points out that they are "probably the only organization in the world to hold the Nicaraguan '10th Anniversary Medal of the Sandinista Revolution' (1989), and the 'Thousand Points of Light' award (1991) from the Bush administration." El Centro founder Roberto Maestas (July 9, 1938 - September 22, 2010) was the 2004 "Seafair king", the first Latino ever to receive this civic honor. On April 25, 2011, the Seattle City Council voted unanimously to rename the segment of South Lander Street between 16th Avenue South and 17th Avenue South (immediately south of El Centro) as South Roberto Maestas Festival Street.
Video El Centro de la Raza
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 building was built in 1904. 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 ongoing 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".
In 2007, El Centro celebrated its 35th anniversary with a gathering of nearly 1,000 people at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle.
El Centro de la Raza's mission has evolved over the years to include a commitment to serve and empower all whom we reach to learn from people seeking basic social change. El Centro de la Raza believes that the provision of a wide range of survival services alone is only a temporary relief for deep societal wounds; it does not address the roots of poverty, discrimination, alienation and despair. The organization seeks long-term solutions to problems that provoke racism, poverty, and war.
During the early 1980s, when the Reagan Administration was supporting the Nicaraguan "Contras," El Centro played a major role in convincing the Seattle City Council to adopt Managua as a sister city, an extraordinary achievement considering opposition by local media and a White House occupied by Ronald Reagan. El Centro's bond with Nicaragua was forged before the Sandinistas took power in 1979. The same fall that the Beacon Hill School was occupied, a devastating earthquake leveled much of Managua. El Centro coordinated relief efforts in the Seattle area. Over the years, dozens of writers, poets, and musical troupes exchanged visits as part of the Managua-Seattle Sister City Association.
El Centro strongly supported the renaming of King County, Washington (which includes Seattle) for Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1986, the King County Council voted, by a narrow majority, to rename King County for Dr. King. Originally, the name "King County" was adopted in the nineteenth century after the 13th vice president of the United States, William Rufus DeVane King, who (ironically) had been a slaveholder.
The vote stirred some controversy, but because the county retained its crown-shaped symbol, many residents remained unaware of the decision. Many (to be fair) also didn't know why the county had been named "King" to begin with. In 2000, petitions were delivered to the Metropolitan King County Council urging its members to add Dr. King's profile to the county's logo--on stationery and the shoulder patches of law-enforcement officers, for example.
Affordable Housing at El Centro de la Raza
El Centro de la Raza built moderately-priced apartments south of its main building - 110 units, home by 2016 to about 350 people, a direct response to a housing crisis that was becoming worse by the day.
A few miles to the west, during the summer of 2016, an ordinary single-family house with a blue tarp covering holes in its roof, mold-infested walls, crumbling floors, and a driveway pounded to rubble (leading to a sign on the door saying the house was so dangerous that a legal waiver was required to enter was put up for sale. Within days, ending July 6, the Seattle Times described 41 bidders who offered escalating amounts, up to $427,000, more than twice the asking price. This house was demolished and a new one, also of average size, was built on the same lot and sold for $1.2 million. In Seattle, as a whole, housing prices rose 53 per cent by 2016, in five years. In 2016, the average sales price of a home in King County was $516,000. About 700 people attended an initial briefing for apartments at Plaza Roberto Maestas in February, 2016. While much of new apartment construction in Seattle offers studios and one-bedroom units to single people or couples without children, El Centro's project emphasizes families. On the first day alone they had nearly 700 applications for their 112 units.
"So many of our people are being pushed out into the county because rents are more affordable there so this is a wonderful opportunity with this project," El Centro de la Raza Executive Director Estela Ortega said. "A lot of the units that were developed in the city were studio and one bedroom apartments, and they were not family units" (Rozier, 2016). Ortega said that when the application were sought for the apartments demand was overwhelming. "We had anywhere between 900 and1000 people who were in the hallway waiting for a chance to turn their applications in," Ortega said (Rozier, 2016).
The apartments are designed for families making 30-60 per cent of the average median annual income in Seattle, or $24,000 to $49,000. The apartments have been built within easy access to El Centro de Raza and its 44 social-service programs, and across a street from a major light rail station, allowing access to much of the metropolitan area to people without automobiles. It also is designed with a 12,900 square-foot gathering space as well as shops.
REFERENCE
Rozier, Alex. "Seattle Affordable Housing Project Focuses on Families." KING TV news Seattle. March 30, 2016. http://www.king5.com/news/local/seattle/new-affordable-housing-project-focused-on-families/109926001
Maps El Centro de la Raza
Notes
External links
- official site
- Oral history interview with Roberto Maestas, 2005.Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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