Speakers at the San Antonio-based Mexican American Civil Rights Institute’s 2026 Symposium this weekend urged the audience to raise their voices and speak truth amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The event, held at downtown’s Malú & Carlos Alvarez Theater, convened scholars, organizers, artists and policymakers to discuss the state of civil liberties and the evolving identity of Mexican Americans. The two-day gathering featured speeches on Saturday by Carmen Perez-Jordan and Rochelle Garza, two of the country’s most influential Latina civil rights leaders.
Perez-Jordan, a human rights activist and co-chair of the 2017 Women’s March, opened the day’s programming with an address grounding the audience in a vision of ancestral memory. She argued that civil rights work must start with an understanding of the origins of our communities.
“Memory tells us who we are,” Perez-Jordan said. “Memory reminds us where we come from. … We belong to a people, to a legacy, to a story.”
The activist also challenged narratives that cast Mexican Americans, who represent more than 11% of the total U.S. population, as outsiders.
“Before there was a border, we were here,” Perez-Jordan said. “Before our stories were politicized, criminalized, distorted and erased, we were here.”
Perez-Jordan also spoke about the personal loss that propelled her into activism. She explained that after her sister’s death when she was a teenager, she learned that “silence has consequences.” She urged attendees to stop waiting for permission to lead.
“I believe this nation is still unfinished. I believe democracy is still being written, and I believe every generation has a responsibility to write the meaning of freedom,” she said.
Since the historic 2017 Women’s March, Perez-Jordan has traveled the country asking communities what they would insist upon if the nation’s founding promise were being written today. From those conversations, she said, a common thread emerged.
“Independence is not enough. We need interdependence. We need a country where our freedom is tied to one another’s freedom. … Our humanity is tied to everyone’s humanity,” she said. “Because none of our liberation is separate.”
Perez-Jordan’s remarks were followed by a keynote by Rochelle Garza, the chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and president of the Texas Civil Rights Project. She said that her road to social justice work started at home, with her brother Robbie, who faced discrimination because of his disabilities.
“ I learned sadly, at a very young age, that there are people in positions of power who will look at someone like my brother and decide that it’s just not worth the time to treat them like a person,” she said.
Garza connected that personal history to a broader pattern of exclusion Mexican Americans face.
“Civil rights are not abstract,” Garza said. “They are about whether we, the people, allow those in power to decide who deserves dignity, who has the right to protection under the law, and ultimately, who gets to be treated as fully human.”
From there, Garza delivered a sweeping historical indictment. She traced the history U.S. immigration enforcement from the Mexican Repatriation between 1929 and 1939 to Operation Wetback in 1954 to today’s interior-enforcement machine. She also detailed the modern tools of exclusion, which have grown to accommodate facial recognition technology, license-plate tracking, AI-driven surveillance and collaboration between police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“We should all assume that our daily movements are being watched,” she warned, citing a 2024 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report finding “no existing safeguards” on federal use of facial recognition.
The heart of Garza’s keynote was the political power of truth-telling. In her role on the Civil Rights Commission, Garza has moderated the People’s Hearings on Immigration Enforcement, where communities have created their own public record of racial profiling, ICE violence and disappearances.
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act,” she said. “Every story passed down from generation to generation, every corrido, news article and court case — we have been documenting and speaking truth to power, no matter the consequence.”
Her assessment of the state of Mexican American civil rights added to Perez-Jordan’s judgment that “independence is not enough.” Garza sharpened that idea into a mandate that interdependence requires truth, and truth requires courage.
Together, the two leaders left the audience with the charge that in a moment of national deceit, telling the truth is not only a radical act of resistance, but also our path to liberation.
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