Remarks to the Delegates to the Mexican-American Conference, El Paso, Texas.

Mr. President and Mrs. Diaz Ordaz, Mr. Foreign Minister and Mrs. Carrillo Flores, Governor Connally, distinguished Members of the Senate and the House, distinguished delegate to the United Nations, Dr. Garcia:

I am here on a mission that fills me with a great deal of pride and with deep satisfaction.

The Chamizal is now Mexican territory. The United States of America and the United States of Mexico have solved a political problem of more than 100 years' standing.

So the fiesta that you are enjoying serves a dual purpose:

--first, to celebrate the Chamizal, and

--second, to concentrate our attention on the achievement, and the concerns, of America's Mexican-American people.

This is the first time, to my knowledge, that the Federal Government of the United States has sent five of its top Cabinet officers across the land in search for new ways to fulfill the fundamental hopes of Spanish speaking Americans--hopes and yearnings that they have for good education for their children, good jobs for their workers, good wages, good health, and good housing.

This is not much to ask, but we have a long way to go in order to get it. This is home country for me, as you know. When I talk with you about the problems and the potentials of the Mexican-American, I am talking about people that I have known all of my life and people that I care about deeply. These people are proud people. They are strong people. They are people who are older in history than the United States of America itself.

What a change there has been in your lives--in all our lives--since I was a poor schoolteacher in a Mexican-American school at Cotulla, Texas, 40 years ago. Most people in Texas--Mexican-American included-then lived on the farm and made their living in the fields.

Few Mexican-Americans had moved into better jobs, where they could offer their families a few of the comforts of life.

There has been a good deal of upward movement during these 40 years. It is encouraging, but it is not enough.

Tens of thousands of Spanish-speaking Americans entered professional and technical occupations during this period.

They became managers, executives, and proprietors.

They worked as key employees in some of the great new industries of the Southwest.

But for too many years your Government paid too little heed to both the status and the hopes of the Mexican-American community.

For too many years Americans who were poor remained invisible.

But in the 1960's, we decided that an era of neglect must come to an end.

And with the help of a great Congress, we wrote into law more measures to train, to educate, to heal, and to house more Americans than had ever been written in all of our history before.

We were abused, and we were criticized, and we were condemned, but we wrote into law two landmark civil rights acts to guarantee that no American would be deprived of opportunity by the prejudice of other Americans.

We did all of this amidst a sea of controversy. That was to be expected. So far as I can determine, no President has ever done anything that is very worthwhile without controversy.

And I would much rather be controversial than complacent--or just critical. You will be hearing more about that in the days to come.

The effort and the controversy, I think, have been worth it. For the first time, we had the tools to work with each minority in a way that met its particular needs--that provided help, without regimentation or conformity.

For the Spanish-speaking citizen, there was a "New Focus on Opportunity."

He gained a powerful voice in the highest councils of government, the voice of a distinguished public servant who sits with the Cabinet committee and gives the Mexican-American community of our Nation able leadership--Vicente T. Ximenes.

I am very pleased to observe, from the Baltimore Sun front page this morning, that the distinguished Dr. Hector Garcia, the first Mexican-American to ever sit as a delegate to the United Nations, sat in the United Nations yesterday and made a speech in Spanish to that great body.

Yes, we have found programs that answered their special needs in language, education, and economic development.

And those programs respected the rich and unique cultural traditions.

In the last 4 years, your Government has trained tens of thousands of Mexican-Americans in the Rio Grande Valley and throughout the Southwest, for useful and rewarding jobs.

And we have reached down into the smallest town and the largest city to do this.

And just as fundamental as jobs is education.

In 4 years we have passed 36 landmark education bills. We have tripled the money invested in these programs from $4 billion to more than $12 billion in education in this country in the last 3 years. We are doing three times as much today as we were doing 3 years ago.

These are not just statistics. They represent children that are being prepared to take part in America's prosperity and in America's future.

Let me tell you the story this afternoon of a young Mexican-American named Frank (Pancho) Mansera who came to visit me the other day in the White House.

Pancho got off to a rough start in life. He was sickly. His parents were poor. When he came into the Head Start program, he could hardly talk or walk, even though he was 5 years old.

But after medical treatment and the stimulus of people who cared about his education, Pancho moved ahead like the wind. He became cheerful. He was active, alert, healthier. He wanted to learn. He was a bright child. He just needed a chance. Head Start and the Government of the United States--through the Congress of the United States--gave him that start. And they are going to give other children that. We will be voting to give hundreds of thousands of other children that when we pass the poverty program--I hope in the next few days.

There are more than 2 million Pancho Manseras who have gotten a new educational head start already. There are millions more who need to.

And if I have my way, they will return to this country much more than they have received.

We are moving forward to set up additional community health centers for needy families.

In 41 different sections in our country now we have neighborhood health centers that we didn't have just a few months ago. But we need more than 41.

We are ready to launch other neighborhood health centers for San Luis, Colorado, and Taos County, New Mexico. It could help more than 7,000 Spanish-speaking citizens in a remote area that has only two doctors and has limited health facilities.

So we are moving forward. Nobody knows better than you how far we have to go.

Nobody can know, who has not experienced it, what it is like to be turned away at a personnel office because you have a strange accent. Nobody knows from the outside what it is like to have your children stumbling over words in a schoolbook, because a teacher hasn't taken the extra time to help them learn. Nobody can know, but those who have lived it, how a man wonders whether he will ever break free of the old cycle of just following the crops, and give his son a better chance.

A lesser people might have despaired. A lesser people might have given up a long time ago. But your people didn't give up. They believed. They believed that they were full-fledged citizens of the greatest nation on earth, even if others didn't always treat them as such.

It is a long way from the Cotulla schoolhouse to where I live now, but we have made progress and we are going to make more.

Today their time has come. And with the help of their Government--but far more importantly, by their own hard work and with high good humor--they are entering into their rightful heritage as Americans. They are contributing to their country's welfare here, and to their country's security abroad.

I can tell you that nothing I have seen since those days long ago when I left that classroom has given me greater happiness.

I hope that in my time of leadership that I have helped to make some of it happen. I know that in the time that remains, I am going to do all that one man can do to make the promise of these years multiply among the Mexican-American people. And you can be certain of that.

In the last 12 months, of the 129 nations in the world, the President of the United States has conferred with more than 80 of the heads of state. That is a record since the founding of this Government.

And there is another record--in all of those more than 80 meetings, none has been as pleasant, or as successful, or as fruitful as the one just concluded with the distinguished leader of Mexico.

And I want all of you to know his beautiful, gracious, enlightened wife, Mrs. Diaz Ordaz, the First Lady of Mexico. And Mrs. Johnson.

The Senate had to adjourn today because we had the Majority Leader and most of the distinguished gentlemen on the plane-Senators coming down here with us. I would like to ask the Members of the Senate and the Members of the Congress, including all of our own delegation--Members of the House and Senator Yarborough--to please stand and take a hand.

I want to ask our distinguished Governor to please stand and take a hand--Governor Connally.

Now ladies and gentlemen, I want to present to you the great leader of a great people, a statesman, a man who understands the needs of not only his own people but the people of the world, a man who is providing international leadership--not only in this hemisphere, but throughout the world--because today in Afghanistan and Iran, in India and Pakistan, they are receiving the blessings of the laboratories that produced the Mexican wheat under the leadership of the great nation that the President represents-the nation of Mexico. In the years to come, you will find--not only in this hemisphere, but throughout other lands-the mark of leadership of the Mexican people. And no one will be more responsible for that, no one will contribute more than His Excellency, the able, the cordial, the friendly good neighbor, Diaz Ordaz.