Alonso S. Perales

Perales fought discrimination in print as hard as in meetings. His two-volume En Defensa de Mi Raza, published in 1936 and 1937, gathered his essays, letters and speeches with other writers' essays on discrimination in Texas, and Are We Good Neighbors? followed in 1948. From 1945 to 1959 he wrote the column Arquitecto de Nuestro Destino for La Prensa, and from 1951 to 1960 he wrote for the Catholic paper La Voz. He died in San Antonio on May 9, 1960, was first buried in San Fernando Cemetery No. 2, then reburied in Alice on October 15, 1960.

What the plaque says

Alonso S. Perales Alonso Perales, born on Oct. 17, 1898 in Alice, was orphaned at a young age, losing his father, Nicolas Perales, at age six and his mother, Susana Sandoval, at age twelve. Perales graduated from Alice High School and attended Draughon's Practical Business College. During World War I, his stenography skills earned a job as a U.S. Army field clerk. Perales moved to Washington, D.C. and worked for the U.S. Department of Commerce. He received a B.A. from George Washington University and a law degree in 1926. His skills as a bilingual lawyer led to a job with the U.S. Department of State, where he served on 13 diplomatic missions to Mexico, the West Indies and Central and South America. Perales was an attorney on General Pershing's staff for the Tacna-Arica Commission in 1925-26, and a legal advisor to the electoral mission in Nicaragua in 1928, 1930 and 1932. On June 29, 1927, Perales issued a press release publicizing his new law offices in McAllen and Rio Grande City, as well as "preliminary steps for the formation…of a strong entity of American citizens of Mexican origin whose exclusive objective would be to sincerely work for pro intellectual, economic, social and political improvement." On Aug. 14, 1927 at a civil rights conference in Harlingen, Perales, J. T. Canales and Luz Saenz, members of the League of Latin American Citizens, supported a resolution to unify all Mexican-American organizations. That action led to the founding of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) on February 17, 1929. Perales was a prominent civil rights leader through LULAC and through hundreds of essays, speeches, and newspaper articles and three books. He died in San Antonio on May 9, 1960 and was buried in Collins Cemetery, next to his mother. In 1977, San Antonio's Edgewood ISD dedicated Alonso S. Perales Elementary School. (2013)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Duval County Courthouse — 12 mi
  A red-brick Classical Revival courthouse of 1916 in San Diego, the seat of a county governed for decades by the Parr family machine.
• King Ranch Visitor Center — 19 mi
  The bus-tour gate to a working ranch of about 825,000 acres, founded on Santa Gertrudis Creek in 1853 and worked from the start by the Kineños, families from Cruillas in Tamaulipas.
• Lipantitlán State Historic Site — 20 mi
  Five undeveloped acres on the Nueces named for the Lipan Apaches who camped here, where Mexico built an earth-and-rail fort that Texans took early in the Revolution.
• Lake Corpus Christi State Park — 24 mi
  A lake park in the South Texas brush country above Mathis, on a reservoir of the Nueces, with a Civilian Conservation Corps refectory and more than 200 bird species.

More markers nearby

• Archelaus Bynum Dodson — steps away
• Los Preseños — 1.4 mi
• Jim Wells County Courthouse — 1.5 mi
• Alice — 1.6 mi