Vilma Socorro Martínez

Vilma Socorro Martínez (born October 17, 1943) is an American lawyer, civil rights activist and diplomat who formerly served as the U.S. Ambassador to Argentina from 2009 to 2013 under President Barack Obama.

Vilma Socorro Martínez in 2012

Quotes

Speaking in Congress (1975)

In Voices of Multicultural America: Notable Speeches Delivered by African, Asian, Hispanic and Native Americans, 1790-1995 (1995) edited by Deborah Gillan Straub

• In 1970, of 15,650 major elected and appointed positions at all levels of government, federal, state, and local, only 310, or 1.98 percent were held by Mexican Americans. This result is no mere coincidence. It is the result of manifold discriminatory practices which have the design and effect of excluding Mexican Americans from participation in their own government and maintaining the status quo.

• The pattern of abuses in Uvalde County is strikingly reminiscent of the Deep South of the early 1960s. The Civil Rights Commission's study documents that duly registered Chicano voters are not being placed on the voting lists; that election judges are selectively and deliberately invalidating ballots cast by minority voters; that election judges are refusing to aid minority voters who are illiterate in English; that the tax assessor-collector of Uvalde County, who is responsible for registering voters, refuses to name members of minority groups as deputy registrars; that the Uvalde County tax assessor repeatedly runs out of registration application cards when minority voter applicants ask for them; that the Uvalde County tax assessor-collector refuses to register voter applicants based on the technicality that the application was filed on a printed card bearing a previous year's date. Other abuses were uncovered by the study of the Civil Rights Commission in Uvalde County, and elsewhere in Texas: Widespread gerrymandering with the purpose of diluting minority voting strength; systematic drawing of at-large electoral districts with this same purpose and design; maintenance of polling places exclusively in areas inaccessible to minority voters; excessive firing fees to run for political office

• In Texas, as many of you know, children were required to be educated in either the white or the colored school. Officials in Texas, and I have in mind Pecos County and Nueces County, which have large percentages of Mexican American people, could not decide whether Mexican Americans were white or colored, so we got no schools. In most other schools, as in Uvalde, we were in fact put into a third category of school, called the Mexican school.

• In order to prevail in Texas, we have to argue what is now known as the northern de jure segregation cases. We culled through the school board minutes going back to 1919. We traced the development of their school construction policies, their school assignment policies. We noticed that even toys were provided on the basis of race; twice the amount was spent for children in the Anglo schools as for children in the Mexican school, even though there were double the number of children in the Mexican schools as in the Anglo schools.

• This list of voting abuses shows the persistence, determination, and the resources of local officials bent on making it as difficult as possible, and in some cases actually impossible, for minorities to exercise their right to an effective vote.

Speech (1990)

In Voices of Multicultural America: Notable Speeches Delivered by African, Asian, Hispanic and Native Americans, 1790-1995 (1995) edited by Deborah Gillan Straub

• I am concerned that some members of the university community do not share the belief that failure to make the university more culturally diverse not only represents a loss to the institution but indeed threatens its very existence as a major world university. Many such people hold that standards of excellence can be maintained while being insulated from the society which nurtures it. For many of them the very use of the term "affirmative action" tempts them into a logical fallacy: that where the recruitment method includes an element of affirmative action, anyone recruited in this manner is necessarily less qualified or able to secure the university's excellence.

• What does it take to build a great university? One must start from the premise that a great university is much more than a campus which provides a home to a group of professional schools. The courses which it chooses to offer, the people it chooses to employ and to teach, and the questions it chooses for research ultimately derive not exclusively from discussions in faculty meetings, but from society: society's demands, its questions, its dreams. The university is both the creation of and the intellectual force for the society in which it lives. A university flourishes as it examines and teaches the intellectual questions arising from the society of that time and place.

• The university of the twenty-first century would be irrelevant if it did not take account of the most striking changes in our world: rapid communications, enormous increases in lit-eracy, and, most importantly, greater mixing of cultures in all aspects of our lives.

• We do not fulfill our role as a university when we, effectively, abdicate our charge to foster and maintain diversity in the university environment.

• It means requiring all students to study the history, culture, and contributions of these people whom we call "minorities."

• if the goal of this great university is excellence, and it is and should be, the attainment of that excellence requires diversity as a fundamental element. Anything less is mere pretension.