Pearsall, the county seat of Frio County, was a poor, sleepy town of 5,600, with one main road surrounded by farmland, an hour southwest of San Antonio and 30 miles north of Cotulla, where Lyndon Johnson once taught at a Mexican American school. The stories Rodriguez described to Congress weren’t so different from the ones LBJ told his friends about discrimination against Hispanics in South Texas. They weren’t so different from the extensive testimony Congress heard in 1965 about voting discrimination toward blacks in the Deep South.

Rodriguez was the local chairman of the La Raza Unida Party (“The United People’s Party”), a Chicano-nationalist third party hatched in a graduate political science seminar in 1967 at St. Mary’s College in San Antonio. It was modeled after black-independent efforts like the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. “Our political lives have been controlled by whites who do not represent our interests and who exploit us not only politically but also economically,” he told the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Judiciary Committee.

Before becoming active in politics, Rodriguez took out a loan with the local bank to make improvements on his farm. After he joined La Raza Unida, the bank called and told him he had 90 days to fund refinancing. He spent two years calling around, but no bank would lend him the money. Rodriguez learned that A. R. Galloway of the Security State Bank had urged other banks not to lend to him. When Rodriguez finally found a local rancher willing to lend him the money, he confronted Galloway at his bank. Galloway tried to persuade the rancher, in front of Rodriguez, not to help Modesto with the loan. He did the same to Rodriguez’s friend Francisco Lopez, who hauled crops to the market in his three trucks. “If you are going to help Chicano political organizations,” Galloway told Lopez, “get Chicano political organizations to finance you.”

When economic intimidation didn’t work, the Anglo power structure, which made up a quarter of Frio County but controlled nearly every influential position, turned to politics. In 1973, Paul Morales, La Raza Unida’s candidate for mayor of Pearsall, narrowly defeated the Anglo candidate Buddy White by 65 votes. After the election, the county judge subpoenaed 200 Chicano voters, but no whites, for alleged election irregularities and threw out 100 votes that were marked with an “X” instead of a signature by illiterate voters. Morales was removed from office and lost his construction business after whites boycotted it. Sixteen Chicano voters, under pressure from the county, pleaded guilty to election-law violations.

The subpoenas had a chilling effect on Chicano political participation. “Now when I try to get people to register to vote, they say ‘Go to hell, Modesto,’” Rodriguez said. “‘We don’t want any part of politics.’” For good measure, the county moved the only polling place from the predominantly Chicano west side of Pearsall back to the heavily Anglo east side. They also annexed surrounding white neighborhoods to dilute Chicano voting strength and shortened the hours of the election so that it would be harder for farmworkers to get to the polls before or after work.