Leo R. Chavez
speaker
1,192 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 20 Dec
Leo R. Chavez’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.
Appearances
Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure.
Sure.
I mean, you gave a pretty good background there, but I could add a few things and you could ask me some more questions.
I was born in New Mexico, which previously was part of Mexico and before that part of New Spain.
I'm 13th generation New Mexican, and my family came in the early 1600s.
And so when I hear a lot of this rhetoric about
you know, Latinos should go home.
Well, I kind of asked, well, where did you come from?
Because we were here a lot longer than most of the people who were talking.
And, you know, even the president is the son of an immigrant.
So a lot of the rhetoric sort of falls...
on deaf ears when it comes to people I know in the Southwest who've been here for generations and generations.
So I was fortunate to be born in a place like New Mexico, absolutely beautiful state, long history, great people.
And then my family moved to California when I was really young.
It was an interesting time in the 50s.
I'm an old guy, so in the 50s, we forget what the demographics were like in the Southwest and California.
Foreign-born Latinos were relatively a small proportion of the California population, and
Latinos who were citizens, who were born here, and whose parents or grandparents came in the 1910s, 1920s, were much more common in the 50s.
And so the great migration into California and Southwest really began in the 60s and 70s, and you start seeing the demographic shift to where about 44% of the Latino population in California is now foreign-born, or Mexican-born.
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