The election in which Anita N. Martinez prevailed was supposed to be a tight race.
When Anita Martinez filed to run for Dallas City Council on March 1, 1969, she faced an uphill battle. The first-time candidate was the wife of the El Fenix restaurant owner, had served on the metropolitan board of the YWCA, participated in community improvement programs, and was active in the Jesuit Parents Group.
“I was a neophyte where politics were concerned,” Martinez told The Dallas Morning News in a 1972 interview. “I applied home management skills to the political work.”
But her lack of experience didn’t prove much of an issue during her campaign. While many pundits thought the race would be decided in a runoff, Martinez won 52 percent of votes in her district. She beat out Mrs. Shirley Baccus, director of the Dallas Homeowners League, and Frank Hernandez, a lawyer and active member in the Hispanic community — and officially became Dallas’ first Hispanic council member.
Community first
After the election, Martinez, a native of Dallas’ Little Mexico, devoted much of her political work to representing the interests of her community. When a roofing supply company in West Dallas failed to comply with state air pollution regulations, Martinez repeatedly raised the issue at council meetings until it was remedied.
Martinez received numerous recognition awards for her work, including a service award from Zonta International, a nonprofit focused on women’s empowerment. President Richard Nixon also appointed her to the Board of Directors of the National Center for Voluntary Action. She spearheaded youth leadership programs, called for the formation of a police unit to handle domestic violence cases, and was a vocal supporter of a training center for potential city employees from underrepresented communities.
“If Mexican Americans had a Head Start-type training program 25 years ago, we wouldn’t have the problems we have now," Martinez said in a 1971 interview with The News.
Policing problems
Many of those problems stemmed from the deteriorating state of relations between law enforcement and the city’s Mexican American community. On Feb. 15, 1971, two Dallas County sheriff’s deputies and an Ellis County officer were taken captive and killed along the banks of the Trinity River in West Dallas, where the majority of the population was Mexican American. In response, Dallas County Deputy Tom Barker said, "the whole damned neighborhood” knew the captured deputies were going to be executed.
Councilwoman Martinez called a news conference to denounce Barker’s remarks and said he indicted “an entire community for the actions of a few.”
Four days after the slayings, Thomas and Bertha Rodriguez, a Mexican American couple living in East Dallas, were shot and seriously injured when two deputies burst into their home looking for the suspected killers. The incident quickly became a flash point for the Mexican American community.
At the request of Martinez, Dallas Police Chief Frank Dyson met with 150 Hispanic residents to address policing issues in West Dallas. Following up on the meeting, Dyson told The News the department was “considering the addition of Spanish language courses for police assigned to West Dallas" and finding ways to engage with community leaders.
West Dallas proud
When her final term concluded, Martinez reportedly entertained a state legislative run. She ultimately decided against it.
Martinez helped open a community clinic and founded the Anita N. Martinez Ballet Folklorico group, a dance company dedicated to overcoming “the low self-esteem" she said she noticed in Hispanic youth. The move was a natural extension of her own mantra to embrace her heritage and community.
″Be proud of the heritage and be proud of making the neighborhoods worthy of pride and admiration," she said to a crowd at the Elmer Scott Housing Project in 1970. “It means the future of our entire city, which cannot exist without West Dallas.”
Read more about Dallas’ rich Hispanic history by becoming a Plus member at archives.dallasnews.com.
