When Yzaguirre joined NCLR as its National Director in 1974 – six years after its founding as the Southwest Council of La Raza in Phoenix, Arizona – it had just 17 affiliates, 13 employees, virtually no assets, and a budget of less than $500,000. Under his leadership, the organization has significantly expanded its reach and today has a budget of $28 million, a staff of 125, more than $90 million in assets, a broad network of more than 35,000 individuals and groups, and more than 300 affiliates nationwide.
Throughout the latter half of the 1970s, Yzaguirre worked with the Board and staff to review, reorganize, and develop NCLR’s mission, programs, and priorities. Of paramount concern to Yzaguirre was expanding the political power of the Hispanic community. In the mid-1970s, Hispanic groups operated and advocated separately – Mexican Americans for Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans for Puerto Ricans, Cubans for Cubans, and so on. In fact, in its infancy NCLR focused solely on issues concerning Mexican Americans in the Southwest. Yzaguirre argued for a pan-Hispanic vision in which these groups would work together, pooling their power to create the political “critical mass” that could bring about real change. The idea seems obvious today, but in the 1970s it was revolutionary. Yzaguirre contended that NCLR could speak for the entire community only by building relationships with other Latino subgroups, and that effective advocacy required a unified voice for Hispanics. In 1979 the Board of Directors adopted his vision to represent and assist all Hispanics and to offer affiliation to organizations representing all subgroups. His foresight is increased political and economic power on the part of the more than 40 million Hispanics who live in America today and a strong collective voice rising from organizations at the community level.
The inclusion of all Hispanics became an organizational priority and extended to the Board of Directors as well. Since its early years, men and women have shared equal representation on the Board and its members are representative of all geographic regions of the United States and of all Hispanic subgroups. The result is a stronger institution that has a broad perspective on the issues that matter across the economic, political, and social spectrum of the nation.
Also in the late 1970s, the Board and staff of NCLR began to realize that the policy arguments they were making on behalf of the Latino community were weakened by a lack of “hard facts” to support them. Information about Hispanics – especially regarding their socioeconomic status, their views on public policy issues, and the level of services they received from publicly-funded agencies and organizations – was inconsistently collected and rarely reported. Convinced that fact-based policy analyses that present an Hispanic perspective would provide a major boost to NCLR’s advocacy efforts, the organization strengthened its commitment to a public policy agenda by establishing a Policy Analysis Center in 1980. In addition, Yzaguirre believed that NCLR could only consider its national policy goals credible if they were built upon knowledge and experience gained through relationships with community-based organizations, and it could only hope to achieve large-scale changes in the Latino community by influencing policy at the national level. As a result, NCLR worked to build its affiliate network and expand its own field offices in various geographic regions in the U.S. The outcome of this formative decision was the ability to provide a legitimate Hispanic perspective on issues such as education, immigration, housing, health, employment and training, and civil rights enforcement.
The following links provide a summarized chronology of NCLR at crucial stages:
