--:-- [Theme music plays]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noel King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In 2020, the killing of George Floyd sort of mainstreamed conversations about police reform in the United States. They were happening in homes and friend groups and text chains and churches on TV. But it's worth remembering that these conversations have been happening for a long time. And there's a new podcast from the Vox Media Podcast Network that serves as a reminder. It's called Chicano Squad.
--:-- Noel King: It's a true crime story blended with a bit of forgotten history from the late 70s. A young man dies in police custody. There are protests and demands for racial justice. And the Houston Police Department responds by creating a team of Latino officers to solve homicides in the city's Latino community. They call him the Chicano Squad.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On the show today, we're bringing you the first episode, but if you want to hear the whole thing, you're going to have to subscribe wherever you listen.
--:-- [Music transitions]
--:-- Cristela Alonso: It was a spring afternoon in Houston in 1978. The date was May 7th. It was a Sunday after Cinco de Mayo. Thousands of people gathered at a sprawling green space north of downtown called Moody Park to celebrate the Mexican holiday.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Cristela Alonso is the host of Chicano Squad.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Now as a Tejana, that's a Mexican-American Texan, I can't help but think of my own typical Sundays with my family. Filled with pan dulce and barbacoa runs, so we could celebrate the weekend with the Mexican staples.
--:-- Noel King: In 1978, the neighborhood near Moody Park was largely Latino, mostly of Mexican descent. Still is today, and so Cinco de Mayo was a holiday to celebrate exuberantly.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: I don't consider it a holiday myself, but the U.S. sure seems to think it is. That day, live Tejano bands played, and the park's 35 acres were full of family picnics.
--:-- Noel King: But as festive as the event was, a certain charge, an ominous energy, lurked beneath the surface.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: In 1978, there was another very all-American aspect to the scene in Moody Park. Carlos Calvillo, a local activist, remembers.
--:-- Carlos Calvillo: That particular one was very different because for about a year, the community had been really upset and just angry at the Houston Police Department for what they perceived that had happened to Joe Campos Torres.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Exactly one year earlier, on Cinco de Mayo in 1977, a young Latino veteran named Jose Campos Torres had died while in custody of the Houston Police Department.
--:-- Noel King: And anger over the case had not subsided, only grown. It was a year full of marches, protests outside City Hall, and increasingly heated exchanges between HPD and the community.
--:-- Carlos Calvillo: We were demanding two things, justice for Jose Campos Torres and jail the murdering cops for life. Those were our simple demands.
--:-- Travis Morales: This is Travis Morales. Travis is an activist who grew up in Houston and was at Moody Park that day.
--:-- Travis Morales: Some people told us before Moody Park that if the cops got off, that there was going to be a riot. Quite frankly, I didn't believe it at the time. And the cops did get off.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Just five weeks before that sunny Cinco de Mayo in Moody Park, a decision came down in Jose Campos Torres' case. The cops got a slap on the wrist.
--:-- Noel King: For a community that had been waiting, they felt justice had not been served.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Despite the underlying tension, the park had remained peaceful, jovial, festive throughout the day. That changed at about 7:30 that night.
--:-- Travis Morales: A small fight over a girl broke out between two intoxicated men. Park police officers tried to stop the fight, and suddenly it was like someone had thrown a lit match on gas.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Adrian Garcia was a teenager attending the celebration that day.
--:-- Adrian Garcia: As those officers in the park used force to try and break up the fight, the crowd reacted. That's when the rocks and the bottles started to fly.
--:-- Noel King: Then that's when you got into a true riot mode.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Two reporters from Channel 2, Jack Cato and Phil Archer, were taking pictures of the burning car when they were attacked.
--:-- Jack Cato: Black jackets and shields were handed out and the officers formed a line to move to the scene.
--:-- Phil Archer: These chaotic clips taken by a news crew at ABC 13 on the ground that night in Moody Park sound like they could have been ripped from any of the protests that have erupted across America today.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Some motorists found themselves greeted with drawn pistols.
--:-- Martinez: Martinez and I had that experience ourselves. Police officer was just run down.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Police right now are calling for an ambulance as this officer lies seriously wounded here in the street.
--:-- Noel King: The death of Jose Campos Torres at the hands of the Houston Police Department would be the spark that set off a powder keg that had been brewing between Houston's Mexican-American community and its police department for a long time.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: It would push the city of Houston to the brink, and it would destroy the last shred of trust the Houston Latino community had in the police department meant to protect them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: From Frequency Machine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Chicano Squad, A piece of history I can almost guarantee you've never heard before.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: I'm Cristela Alonso. I'm a comedian, actress, and activist. And I'm also first-generation Mexican-American born and raised in Texas.
--:-- Noel King: As a Latina, I have broken the glass ceiling and made TV film history twice. History is important to me, especially telling stories about my Latino community. Even stories that are difficult.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: This year, protests led by the Black Lives Matter movement revealed to much of this country something they never knew about, a problem that has existed for decades.
--:-- Noel King: I have to admit, I've seen some people within my own Latino community react as if these protests are not about them, or rather, us.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: So, it's time to go back. Our story begins exactly one year before the Moody Park riot would shake Houston. It was early on the morning of May 8, 1977, when one of J.C. Freeman's pontoon tour boats was navigating through the already steamy, slow-moving water of Houston's Buffalo Bayou.
--:-- J.C. Freeman: Okay, you have to know, Houston's bayous are its lifeline. Between the concrete, the skyscrapers, the medical centers, the shopping malls, the posh neighborhoods, and the barrios, The bios go on for 2,500 miles.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: They weave underneath tangled highway interchanges and sky-tickling overpasses, past skyscrapers, right through the heart of downtown and into Galveston Bay.
--:-- J.C. Freeman: Over the years, many of these waterways had become badly polluted. It wasn't uncommon for Houstonians to dump broken appliances and other garbage into them.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: I'm not kidding. We even heard a story about how they used to hold a race in Buffalo Bayou every year called the Reeking Regatta. How about that for a picture?
--:-- J.C. Freeman: And by the late 70s, parts of them were thick with brown, foul-smelling water.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Plenty of people loved to make fun of the bayous. But for J.C. Freeman, it was all love.
--:-- Dwight Watson: The heron birds and the special seabirds. And you know, porpoise came up to Memorial Park. That's how clean it used to be, and everybody used to go skinny dipping in the bow.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Come on now. J.C. had spent years building up a successful tour boat company that ferried families and students through the peaceful bayou that splices through the heart of Houston.
--:-- J.C. Freeman: But on this particular morning, May 8, 1977, Freeman was about to become a part of history.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Overnight, he kept his boat safe by paying some of the guys who slept on a landing on the bayou to watch over his fleet.
--:-- J.C. Freeman: Two days earlier, when he'd arrived at the landing in the morning, some of the guys told him they heard something suspicious overnight.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: They were crashed out, and they heard something going on on the other side of the bayou, and you could hear the echo underneath the Fannin Street Bridge.
--:-- J.C. Freeman: The men said they'd heard a commotion on the other side of the bayou. And they kind of saw these cops over there take their handcuffs off the guy and threw him in the bio.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The story sounded crazy. Then, on that balmy May morning, he looked up and saw one of his boat operators speeding back towards the landing with a look of panic.
--:-- J.C. Freeman: He had seen a body floating in the water. And he picked me up and we went down there.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The men pulled the body onto the deck of the pontoon boat.
--:-- J.C. Freeman: It was obvious that the man's body had been in the water for a few days. It was disfigured and the body was degrading very quickly.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: J.C. Freeman began trying to figure out who the man was.
--:-- J.C. Freeman: All these years later, his memory is hazy, but he recalls finding dog tags. He called the police to report the body and read the name to the dispatcher, Jose Torres.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: I said, hey, do you have a line on this person? But the dispatcher said next, stopped him in his tracks.
--:-- J.C. Freeman: And they said, yeah, he's in police custody right now. I said, no, he's not. He's down here on the bio.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Something had obviously happened between the time Jose had been in police custody and the time his body was fished from the water.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Jose Campos Torres's family had started to get nervous.
--:-- Janie Torres: I know it was Cinco de Mayo. He was out that day, went to a neighborhood cantina a couple of blocks away from the house.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Now, everyone knew that Jose Campos Torres liked to visit the neighborhood bars, the cantinas.
--:-- Janie Torres: He was especially fond of one in the heart of Houston's East End neighborhood called Club 21, where he often fought with the bartender and anyone else who wanted to argue.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: But everyone also knew that no matter what, he always showed up to work.
--:-- Janie Torres: At the time, he lived with his grandmother. The day after Cinco de Mayo, she grew worried when she realized he hadn't come home.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And even more worried when she heard from a co-worker that Jose hadn't been at work.
--:-- Janie Torres: As word got out that he was missing, Jose's family gathered at his grandmother's house, a few blocks from Club 21.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: So my aunts and my dad and everybody was looking for him, calling around, trying to find out where he could be at or who was he last with.
--:-- Janie Torres: The Torres family was well-known in the Houston vecindario, the neighborhood they called home.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Okay, a quick sidebar here. In the series, you might hear some people use the word barrios.
--:-- Janie Torres: For me, barrios has a negative connotation, similar to the word ghetto. So I prefer to call them simply vecindarios.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: In the Torres home, there were three boys and three girls.
--:-- Janie Torres: Jose was the oldest. All the kids were born and raised in Houston.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: There were also aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and babies.
--:-- Janie Torres: The Torres family was large.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: For a kid like Janie, waiting for news about her favorite brother was agonizing.
--:-- Janie Torres: We knew that he wasn't in hospital. We knew that he wasn't in jail.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: One day passed, and then when Friday passed, Friday payday didn't show up.
--:-- Janie Torres: Jose missing payday was a big deal.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Jose's mother grew quiet.
--:-- Janie Torres: Now as a mother myself, I kind of see that my mom was more quiet.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: I saw her more, of course, down, you know, and things like that.
--:-- Janie Torres: That's probably, you know, a mother's instinct, you know, feeling when your child's no longer with you.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: You know, she just had no confirmation yet.
--:-- Janie Torres: But it's like every mother knows their kid.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Torres's sister hugged me and was crying, saying nobody has told Jose's story the way that you told him.
--:-- Janie Torres: She says he's either a superhero or he's a villain.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: But you made him real.
--:-- Dwight Watson: That's Dwight Watson, an associate professor of history at Texas State University in San Marcos.
--:-- Dwight Watson: Dwight researched the Houston Police Department, including the Jose Campos Torres case, for his book called Race and the Houston Police Department.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: A change did come. And he's gone through every moment of the night Jose Campos Torres went missing.
--:-- Dwight Watson: As we've mentioned, Jose was a veteran.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And as Dwight told us, Jose had returned from the Army with more than just a rucksack.
--:-- Dwight Watson: He was part of an elite mountain unit, according to the record.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The end of Vietnam War brought on veterans.
--:-- Dwight Watson: It brought on people who were damaged by the war.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: One person was like that was Jose Campos Torres.
--:-- Dwight Watson: Jose came home with a serious drinking problem.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: He became a professional drinker, and he drank from sunup to sundown.
--:-- Dwight Watson: When he was sober, Jose was serious and disciplined, a man with plans.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: But he had been struggling for eight months, unable to find a job in Solid Footing back home in Houston.
--:-- Dwight Watson: Finally, in April of 1977, things began to look up.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Jose got a job making $2.75 an hour as a glass contractor.
--:-- Dwight Watson: It was a relief, and the jingle in his pocket wasn't bad either.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And on Cinco de Mayo, Jose took some of that jingle out to celebrate, like so many others in Houston.
--:-- Dwight Watson: Jose's favorite place to blow off steam was Club 21.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: It was a bar on the bottom of a two-story white brick building on Canal Street, a hole-in-the-wall kind of place where the beer was cheap.
--:-- Dwight Watson: He and the bar owner had a contentious relationship.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And on that night, he and the bartender got into a fight.
--:-- Dwight Watson: It was a hell of a fight because they called the police.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The bartender had had enough of Jose, who was at the end of a 12-hour drinking bender.
--:-- Dwight Watson: He had asked him to leave, but Jose refused.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: So the bartender called HPD.
--:-- Dwight Watson: And the police knew Jose, they said, that they had had a run-in with him before.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Jose's previous drunken fights had landed him in handcuffs and behind bars in the Harris County Jail a time or two before.
--:-- Dwight Watson: So when the policeman showed up to pull him out of the bar, he didn't go quietly.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: He was beyond belligerent.
--:-- Dwight Watson: He was screaming and cussing, and there was a lot of cussing back and forth.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: at him by on part of the officers.
--:-- Dwight Watson: Jose yelled at the officers, calling them pigs.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The officers decided, as one of them would later tell a source, to teach Torres a lesson.
--:-- Dwight Watson: They took Jose to a quiet spot they called The Hole.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: There were a few places like it around town, secluded spots where uniformed officers might park their cars, crank up the A.C. and catch a snooze on a hot summer day.
--:-- Dwight Watson: But this particular spot they headed for that night was a parking lot in the shadows of downtown buildings along Buffalo Bayou, far from Jose's East End home in Club 21.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: So they got out, beat the hell out of him.
--:-- Dwight Watson: Okay, trigger warning. I have to let you know this next part, it's emotional.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Maybe it's because we're still hearing stories like this today.
--:-- Dwight Watson: But it's important to tell.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: So this is what happened.
--:-- Dwight Watson: They beat Jose with their batons and their bare hands.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Once they finished, they loaded him, bruised and broken, back into the squad car and drove him to the jail.
--:-- Dwight Watson: But when he arrived at the jail looking like he did, The admitting officer wouldn't take him.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Houston had had a series of events where prisoners in the jail had either died or been seriously hurt.
--:-- Dwight Watson: And so the jail would no longer take a prisoner that had visible scars or marks or looked like he was in need of medical attention.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: So they had already kind of beat the hell out of Torres and the jailer said, no, we're not going to take him.
--:-- Dwight Watson: The officers were told to take him instead to a hospital, but they didn't.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: So they decide, during the drive, that they're not going to do that.
--:-- Dwight Watson: The officers headed back to the hole.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: They even called buddies to come.
--:-- Dwight Watson: They get on the radio and say, meet us at the spot.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: They got somebody who needs to teach a lesson.
--:-- Dwight Watson: And so with batons and flashlights, and they basically beat the hell out of Torres.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: One of the officers walked Jose Campos Torres to the edge of the lot, where... depending on who you believe.
--:-- Dwight Watson: He was either pushed, fell, or jumped 20 feet down into the dark, polluted water of Buffalo Bayou.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: His handcuffs were off at that time.
--:-- Dwight Watson: But he's already still drunk.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And sometime between the buff whooping and letting him go, Torres drowned.
--:-- Dwight Watson: Hosed died in the murky water of Buffalo Bayou.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Houston would never be the same.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: More after the break.
--:-- [Music transitions]
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know?
--:-- Cristela Alonso: That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Didn't know that.
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--:-- Cristela Alonso: I've never met an AI agent.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Support for this show comes from Macy's. Layering is an art form.
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--:-- Cristela Alonso: So find the perfect look for you with the help of Macy's Fall Fashion Guide, your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: From leather to denim to cozy knits, find everything you need to piece together your new fall look.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Explore the Macy's Fall Guide for yourself and shop in-store or online at Macy's.com.
--:-- [Music transitions]
--:-- Cristela Alonso: In the days after José Campos Torres was beaten by Houston police officers and left to drown in the Bayou, no one who was there that night said a word.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The police department's code of silence had descended over the entire incident.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: It's an unspoken understanding that when shit hits the fan, Police protect each other.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: After Jose's body was discovered two days later, police crawled the banks of the Bayou, ostensibly searching for evidence.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The situation was clearly suspicious.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Jose had last been in police custody, and now his mangled body was floating in Buffalo Bayou.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: But none of that came out, at least initially.
--:-- Travis Morales: I remember seeing this tiny little article.
--:-- Travis Morales: Again, that's community activist Travis Morales.
--:-- Travis Morales: Maybe a two-inch article about an unidentified body of a Latino man had been found in Buffalo Bayou.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: An unidentified Latino man.
--:-- Travis Morales: Despite these suspicious circumstances, a homicide detective concluded that it appeared there was no foul play involved, and the body was left unidentified.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Now I'm sure this is not going to come as a surprise to a lot of people, especially Latinos.
--:-- Travis Morales: But long before the death of Jose Campos Torres, it wasn't uncommon for the Latino community to have contentious encounters with HPD.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Even as a child, Janie Torres recognized that the Latino neighborhoods were not always served and protected by the cops.
--:-- Janie Torres: We always knew somebody getting beat up by the police.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: You know, we saw it as life.
--:-- Travis Morales: Not realizing until way later, you know, that it was wrong.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: We always heard of so-and-so's brother got beat up real bad.
--:-- Travis Morales: And so, yeah, it was scary.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Houston police were known for their excessive use of force, but especially in neighborhoods of color.
--:-- Travis Morales: Growing up in our household, we didn't see cops as being our heroes or anything.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: You know, we actually feared them.
--:-- Travis Morales: You know, to be honest, we feared them.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: In the 60s and 70s HPD was known as just look they were known as murdering brutalizing thugs
--:-- Travis Morales: I mean black people Latino people did not want to get stopped when they were driving
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Travis grew up in Houston and was a self-proclaimed nerd who always had a slide rule in his pocket.
--:-- Travis Morales: At age 17, he enrolled at Rice University in Houston and started school in the fall of 1969.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: I mean, I was stopped and harassed.
--:-- Travis Morales: I mean, for instance, there's an incorporated city called Bel Air within Houston.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: It's over on the west side.
--:-- Travis Morales: I would not, as a teenager, I would not drive through Bel Air because the police had such a horrible reputation of stopping people and planning drugs and brutalizing them.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: People would be scared to death.
--:-- Travis Morales: I myself have to tell you, I'm a Texan, and I know exactly the kind of discrimination and fear that we're talking about right now.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: I've lived it.
--:-- Travis Morales: But I think in order to understand why José Torres was discovered floating in Buffalo Bayou, we need to go back in time and get into a little bit of Houston's history.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Houston is as old as the state of Texas itself.
--:-- Travis Morales: In 1836, when Texas won its independence from Mexico, the Allen brothers paid $1.41 an acre for nearly 7,000 acres of land along Buffalo Bayou.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: There were about 12 people living in Houston at the time, but it turned out to be a pretty good investment because in 1901, oil was discovered nearby.
--:-- Travis Morales: That's right, black gold.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And that put Houston in a pretty sweet position as the center of oil development.
--:-- Travis Morales: As gusher after gusher flowed and wells went up everywhere, oil workers, both black and white, bled it to the city to take advantage of the jobs.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: For decades, Houston was a biracial city, home to black and white citizens.
--:-- Travis Morales: Then, in 1942, with World War II raging and absorbing thousands of workers into its war industry, farm labor ran short.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: So the U.S. instituted the Bracero Program.
--:-- Travis Morales: Bracero means laborer in Spanish.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: It permitted Mexicans to enter the country and work as laborers on farms.
--:-- Travis Morales: It's often overlooked that many Mexicans came to the U.S. to help during World War II.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: In return, they were offered decent wages and living conditions.
--:-- Travis Morales: A new wave, thousands of Mexican workers, poured into the U.S.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: At almost the same time, a new landmark 1965 immigration law lifted previous quotas.
--:-- Travis Morales: Quotas that severely limited immigration to the U.S. by anyone who wasn't Northern European and white.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Oh, look at that.
--:-- Travis Morales: White people had it easier back then.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And with the door now opened, the demographics of Houston began to shift dramatically.
--:-- Travis Morales: It was, however, still against the law to be an undocumented immigrant in the U.S., even if it was legal to hire one.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: With so much uncertainty over their legal status, many Latinos in Houston feared the Houston Police Department, which had been founded in 1841, back when Houston was still a one-horse, one-steamboat kind of town.
--:-- Travis Morales: Again, Travis Morales.
--:-- Travis Morales: You know, Lead Belly wrote this song back in the 30s about, you know, if you ever go to Houston, you better not gamble, you better not fight, because it had a reputation of brutalizing police.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The folk song, recorded in 1934, was when the blues musician Huddy Ledbetter, who went by Ledbelly, picked up while serving a murder sentence in the Imperial State Prison Farm in Sugarland, outside of Houston.
--:-- Travis Morales: In it, he sings about the horrifying conditions inside the lockup.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And as Travis Morales said, it also references the reputation of Houston's police force.
--:-- Travis Morales: A force that was overwhelmingly white.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: In 1950, when there were around 500 officers in HPD, the department admitted its first Mexican-American into the academy.
--:-- Travis Morales: Eight years later, there were still only 15 Latino officers in HPD's ranks.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Meanwhile, by 1960, Latinos made up 6% of the county's 1 million residents, and the Latino population doubled in the 1970s.
--:-- Travis Morales: The distance between HPD and the growing population of Latinos in Houston was only stretching further apart with every year, and the department would prove they were ineffective, or unwilling, to bridge the gap.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: We wanted an equal seat at the table, but for Latinos, that was complicated because, and get this, it's a wild fact when you think about it.
--:-- Travis Morales: The government didn't consider us our own group.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Yeah, until 1970, we were always just lumped in with white.
--:-- Travis Morales: But the census was about to change that.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And I know the census can be seen as nerdy and wonky, but I like nerdy and wonky, and also it's very important.
--:-- Travis Morales: I myself worked with organizations in both English and Spanish on the 2020 census to make sure people were counted.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And in 1970, for the first time, the U.S. Census Bureau asked participants if their origin or descent was Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, other Spanish, or none of these.
--:-- Travis Morales: And that, quite literally, put us on the U.S. map.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Suddenly, Mexican Americans, who had almost no political representation, had strength in these numbers.
--:-- Travis Morales: And with these numbers, they started to unite and push for equality.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC as it's known, registered citizens to vote while the American GI Forum represented the rights of Hispanic veterans.
--:-- Travis Morales: A political party called La Raza Unida was also formed and ran Hispanic candidates for city council, county, and state office seats.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The Brown Berets marched and rallied for civil rights of all Latinos.
--:-- Travis Morales: Together, these groups combined under the umbrella of the Chicano movement.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: It's a social movement.
--:-- Travis Morales: It's an awakening.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And it's not a bad word, it's a good word.
--:-- Luis Cano: That's Luis Cano.
--:-- Luis Cano: He taught sociology at the University of Houston and is someone who has not only studied the movement, but was part of it.
--:-- Luis Cano: It embodied a philosophy and an attitude of Mexican Americans becoming aware of our history, our heritage, and the racism that was buffeting us and had buffeted us and had denied us opportunities.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And the Chicano movement was a spirit of protest that enabled Mexican Americans spiritually to fight back against that injustice.
--:-- Travis Morales: This groundswell of young Latino people bucking against the racism that was so institutionalized in Houston began to gain increasing traction.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The Houston Police Department was an obvious target.
--:-- Travis Morales: Following a string of short-lived and sometimes controversial police chiefs, in 1976, the torch was passed to BG Pappy Bond.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Portly and well-liked, Chief Bond was tasked with improving HPD's image with the community, raising morale, and cleaning up a department that was rapidly losing control over a growing city.
--:-- Travis Morales: Over his tenure, his weight would fluctuate with his moods.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: In the end, he was obese and pretty depressed.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Pappy was presiding over the department on the night Jose Campos Torres was murdered.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: On the banks of the Bayou that day in May 1977, J.C. Freeman waited with the body of Jose Campos Torres for the police to arrive.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The dispatcher had told him that Jose was in their custody, but someone had obviously missed a beat in that story.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: When the officers arrived, they seemed nervous.
--:-- Travis Morales: Word had already started to spread up the chain that the body might belong to a man who had been arrested several nights earlier.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And that meant someone would have to answer some questions.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: You know that's right.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The officers placed a call into Police Chief Pappy Bond to let him know.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Pappy hit the ceiling.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: He had been tasked with turning the department's image around.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: This was the kind of thing that would do exactly the opposite.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: He needed this incident to be kept quiet.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: But that wasn't going to happen.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: There, on the evening news, was J.C. Freeman, telling Houston viewers about how the man he'd pulled out of the bayou had been listed in police custody.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: A pair of firefighters paid Freeman's boat operation a visit.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Pappy Bond was pissed, they told him.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The police are going to kill you, man.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: They don't like you.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And then I started carrying my .45 Colt commander to protect myself.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Get out of town for a while, they advised J.C. Freeman.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And he listened.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: He pulled two of his boats out of the water and left one down there, reducing his business to its bare bones.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And then he left the city.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: While Freeman was in hiding, Dolores Perez, Jose's aunt, saw on the news that a body had been found in Buffalo Bayou and called the morgue.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: She and her husband then went to the morgue to try to identify their missing nephew.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Officials kept the pereces from seeing the decomposed body, so they described the clothes that José wore the day he disappeared, army fatigue in boots, a white t-shirt, and a belt buckle featuring an Apache Indian.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Though the Apache belt buckle was in the morgue, officials could not confirm to the pereces that the body was José's until the next day, when he was positively identified using his fingerprints.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Dolores and her husband now had the unimaginable task of breaking the news to Jose's parents.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The Torres family, including young Janie, were all at a movie theater watching Jaws.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: As a lurking shark stalked its victims on screen, Janie's aunt and uncle opened the theater door, flooding it with light.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: They quickly found Janie's father, and the whole family followed them out to the parking lot.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: My dad was talking to my uncle.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: My uncle was talking to him.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: All of a sudden, I just saw my dad just yell out and turned around and just grabbed my mom and just grabbed my mom.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Mama, they found our boy.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Mama, somebody killed our boy.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Janie's older sister was pacing around the parking lot.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Her younger sister was grabbing for her mother.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Janie just clutched her shirt, shaking.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: All I could do was just see my mom just hurt.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: She had no way of carrying her weight anymore.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And my dad just was trying to hold her up.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: I was like, oh, man.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: It's a horrible feeling.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Janie's mother collapsed against the side of the car.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: That day was Mother's Day.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: We were at the theater celebrating Mother's Day.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: When we found out what they did to my brother.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: The family decided on a closed casket funeral due to the state of Jose's body.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Still the signs of abuse had already been well documented and the questions were swirling.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: As the Torres family grieved the story of Jose death spread
--:-- Cristela Alonso: A fire was lit.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: People were angry, including a small but headstrong and powerful community organizer named Mamie Garcia.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: They called him a wedback.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: He was not a wedback.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: He was a veteran.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: A veteran.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Excuse me.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: You're bringing me memories that I still have feelings.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Mamie was an organizer for LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And for Mamie Garcia, like for so many, Jose Campos Torres' death was the last straw.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Her organization's attorney, Alice Barrera, helped her turn her anger into something that would create change.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: Before you open your mouth, you have to have the data.
--:-- Cristela Alonso: And we put all the data together, the happenings, what was
