ACTIVIST GROWS FRUSTRATED IN HER BATTLE FOR HISPANIC RIGHTS

When a young goatherd was fatally shot by Marines on a drug patrol
along the Texas border in 1997, Maria Jimenez led a group of townsfolk
to Washington, D.C., to plead with an office full of generals for a
change in U.S. policy.

Last week, when an immigrant woman in an East End barrio was forced to
return to Mexico for dialysis treatments, Jimenez jumped into that
fight, too, challenging the Harris County Hospital District.

In 1996, she addressed thousands of Hispanics who marched to the White
House, and last summer she spoke to a handful of angry Houstonians
protesting the police shooting of Pedro Oregon Navarro. Her
behind-the-scenes work helped win the release from Texas' death row of
a Mexican national she believed to be innocent, and the mayor has
appointed her to a committee looking at ways to make the 2000 Census
more fair to minorities.

But Jimenez, an activist voice in causes large and small since she won
a state debating championship for Milby High School 30 years ago, is
beginning to sound weary of the fight.

"We may have won some battles, but we lost the war," she lamented
recently in El Paso at a meeting of the Immigration Law Enforcement
Monitoring Project.

She noted that while U.S. troops no longer conduct armed drug patrols
on the border, they still work closely with law enforcement, a
combination that worries human rights advocates. Jimenez pointed to
ever-tightening immigration policies and fretted about the Immigration
and Naturalization Service and U.S. Border Patrol becoming some of the
nation's best-funded agencies.

Fellow activists, while quick to encourage their battle-hardened
colleague, say they understand her frustration.

"The war ain't over yet. We're entrenched and we're here to stay,"
said Lupe Castillo, a border coalition member from Arizona, where an
immigrant was recently shot crossing the border by an elderly property
owner. "But Maria is right, the policies are harsher and
super-unfriendly now."

Johnny Mata of the League of United Latin American Citizens said
Jimenez has made life better for Hispanic immigrants in Houston, and
he appreciates what she gave up to do so.

"I admire the sacrifices she's made," he said. "She's a very sharp
lady and could probably have been a department head making a lot more
money than she does."

If Jimenez, 48, sounds tired, consider this: After spending the
Christmas holidays with family in Monterrey, Mexico, she traveled to
Orlando, Fla., to discuss organizing a nationwide coalition for
low-income families. At month's end, she was in El Paso to help
organize strategy for the U.S.-Mexican border group. Right now, she is
in Denver for a meeting of the National Network for Immigrant and
Refugee Rights board. Next, she flies to Mexico City to meet with
government authorities as well as laborers and community workers.

After all her travels, through successes and setbacks, she always
returns to her home in one of Houston's oldest barrios.

Since 1987, Jimenez has been the local director of the American
Friends Service Committee, a Quaker-based human rights organization.
She works out of rented office space in a wood-frame house at 6926
Navigation, in the same East End industrial neighborhood where her
father opened a machine shop 40 years ago.

Born in Castanos, in Mexico's Coahuila state, Jimenez legally
immigrated here in 1957 at age 7 with her parents. Her father, Raul
Jimenez, was a skilled machinist who had helped organize unions with
the steel plants in his native country.

Her mother's father, who helped unionize teachers, now has an
elementary school named after him in Monclavo, Mexico.

"In dinner conversation from a very young age, I was aware of
inequities, class differences and poverty," Maria Jimenez said.

The oldest of five children, Jimenez has two sisters and two brothers.
The first four went to college, including a sister who is a physician
in El Paso, while the youngest brother has taken over their father's
machine shop, which has expanded to a warehouse a block from the
Houston Ship Channel.

Jimenez attended Franklin Elementary, Edison Middle School and Milby
High. While a champion debater at Milby, she recalls losing one match
because the judge said he didn't like her accent. She still smarts
from never having been offered a scholarship.

Also at Milby, Jimenez was a classmate of Mario Gallegos, now a state
senator from Houston. She remembers the brouhaha Gallegos caused among
Anglo students when he ran for senior class president and even made a
runoff at the then-predominantly Anglo school.

Jimenez went on to the University of Houston, where she earned a
political science degree. Allied with the Mexican-American Youth
Organization, she excelled in political activity. In 1971, she became
the first Hispanic and the first woman elected student body president
at UH.

Dr. Tatcho Mindiola, now head of the school's Mexican-American Studies
Department, recalled recruiting Jimenez during formation of La Raza
Unida, the Hispanic political party that targeted Texas Democrats.

Mindiola, who was chairman of Harris County's La Raza Unida in the
1970s, encouraged Jimenez to run for state legislator against
then-incumbent Ben Reyes. That set up the county's first Hispanic-only
legislative general-election contest.

"She's always been a leader, and her ideals have not changed. She has
always been dedicated to the dispossessed," Mindiola said. "She's
admirable for her style and grace. She does what she does, not for
recognition but because she sincerely believes."

The race with Reyes was a nasty political battle. Being 24 years old,
inexperienced in running a campaign and battling an incumbent, Jimenez
was pushed hard on her socialist and communist leanings.

She got 19 percent of the vote.

"She disappeared for a while," Mindiola said. "She felt that she could
not overcome that reputation and image of being left of center."

Jimenez surfaced in Mexico. She married a government rural development
worker and held a variety of jobs. She wandered from field to field,
lecturing farm workers on everything from history to health and
safety. Then she taught English at a private high school in Mazatlan.

In Merida, Yucatan, she volunteered as a union organizer. A strike at
a steel plant was crushed by government riot police, and Jimenez had
to hide.

After 11 years in Mexico, with her job lost and her marriage split,
Jimenez returned to Houston in 1985 with her 7-year-old twins. Born in
Yucatan while Jimenez worked organizing campesinos in rural
development projects for the national agricultural bank of Mexico, the
twins' names reflect their mother's youthful ideologies.

Her son, Carlos, is named after Karl Marx, and her daughter, Stalina,
for the Russian revolutionary.

Stalina Villarreal, who now attends Washington University in St.
Louis, said the name has raised some eyebrows.

"I like the fact that my parents had their own ideas and were
independent thinkers," she said. "It has caused me some debates, but I
like that, too."

Jimenez's ties to Mexico remain as strong as her passion for the
underprivileged. She has testified before congressional committees in
both countries and served as an official monitor in Mexican
presidential elections.

Last year, she became one of the first in the United States to receive
the dual nationality offered by Mexico.

"We have social and economic rights, but not voting rights in Mexico,"
she explained. "We can own property or have certain jobs. We are
becoming part of two nations and two peoples who can subsist in either
society."

Not surprisingly, she is active in the fight to allow Mexicans living
in the United States to still vote in Mexican elections.

Unlike many of the crusades Maria Jimenez has adopted over the years,
the shooting death of Esequiel Hernandez Jr. put her directly inside
the halls of power.

Hernandez, 18, was tending his family's goats when he fired his
.22-caliber rifle in the direction of three camouflaged Marines on a
border drug patrol. Whether he knew the soldiers were there is
unclear, but one of them fired back, killing the young man who had
dreamed of being a park ranger or game warden.

Within a week of the May 20, 1997, shooting, Jimenez was in the small
border town of Redford. She attended a town hall meeting of shocked
family and neighbors.

"It was terribly hard for them," she recalled. "The grandfather, the
mother, the sister were all there. All I could tell them was, `Let the
pain you have be turned into a light for other people and democracy.'
"

Two months later, she and the others were sitting in the Pentagon,
surrounded by generals.

"But it was the townspeople who were the ones addressing them,"
Jimenez said, deflecting attention from herself. "We just helped them
go and set up meetings with the drug czar (Barry McCaffrey) and (INS
commissioner) Doris Meissner. But it was the village who raised the
child, and the village who lost the child."

Last week, the Pentagon acknowledged that it has all but ended the use
of ground troops along the U.S.-Mexico border. New Pentagon rules
require special permission directly from the secretary of defense or
his deputy before armed anti-drug efforts can be initiated there.

Despite the victory, Jimenez remains concerned about the military's
other anti-narcotics duties along the border. In conjunction with
federal law-enforcement authorities, troops are involved in civil
engineering projects, air reconnaissance and intelligence analysis.

Those are the types of policies that had Jimenez uncharacteristically
down when addressing last month's border coalition meeting in El Paso.

The discouragement may be temporary. For when the conversation turns
to her plans for the year 2000, Jimenez begins talking
enthusiastically about another grand march on Washington. She said she
hopes the October 2000 event will rival the 1996 march, which drew
perhaps 100,000 people and which she also helped organize.

"We're expecting even more to come," she said. "This time around we
won't be fighting the disbelief that it will happen."