A Chicano activist and founder of Tiempo newspaper, Ernesto Fraga worked tirelessly to advocate for the interests of Hispanic communities in Waco and Austin. Fraga’s family had a long history in Waco: his grandparents, like so many others, had moved there in 1910 fleeing the Mexican Revolution, joining a growing Hispanic community in Waco. Fraga made it his life’s mission to protect this community by fighting discrimination, advocating for their representation in politics and media, and celebrating their rich heritage.
Born in 1950 in Chicago, Fraga spent the early years of his life moving all over the country because his stepfather was in the Army. He moved to Waco when he was twelve years old, where his extended family still lived, and grew up on Spring St just north of the Brazos. Many of his family members, along with others in the Waco Hispanic community, worked in the cotton fields. In school, Fraga encountered racism and sometimes got into fights; from a young age he refused to let racism go unchallenged. At age seventeen he left home due to familial strife and moved in with two roommates, one of whom was Manuel Sustaita, a Vietnam veteran and activist in Waco, and at this point his political involvement began. That same year, he helped create a junior chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Texas-born civil rights organization, bringing together around eighty high school and McLennan Community College students in Waco. Within a year, he moved up the ranks to be elected as a state director. He then helped to organize a chapter of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) in Waco, a group originally founded in San Antonio based on more aggressive political demonstrations, including protests and school walkouts. MAYO in turn coordinated the Alliance of Mexican American Organizations in Waco, a coalition of churches, businesses, and clubs that advocated for equitable hiring practices. All of this took place before Fraga graduated from high school in 1968.
In 1970 Fraga moved to Austin to work for the Office of Economic Opportunity, a War on Poverty initiative, and he quickly became involved in the Austin Chicano Movement. He helped found a chapter of the Brown Berets in Austin, a paramilitary organization that pushed for civil rights for Hispanic communities and a major player in the nation-wide Chicano Movement. The Brown Berets participated in strikes, protested police brutality, and advocated for housing, education, and immigration reforms. While in Austin, Fraga also worked with the Echo newspaper and some other barrio newspapers, introducing him to the ability of media to empower a community. He believed that the mainstream press both in Waco and Austin did not represent the issues and concerns of Hispanic residents, making barrio newspapers crucial tools for informing and organizing Hispanic communities. Fraga moved back to Waco in 1974 after being fired by the city of Austin for his involvement in protesting a city official. He organized another chapter of the Brown Berets in Waco but moved back to Austin in 1977 to continue his activism.
Two of the most famous incidents the Brown Berets organized in East Austin took place at this time. The first was a confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan in 1977. The KKK claimed they were going to patrol the border in South Texas to intimidate illegal immigrants. After the Brown Berets announced their intent to confront the KKK at a press conference and organized caravans to travel to South Texas, a KKK leader called off the patrol to avoid the encounter. Fraga recalled this success with pride. The second was a protest in 1978 against the annual Aqua Fest, a boat racing contest that took place in a Hispanic neighborhood. The residents of this neighborhood had repeatedly petitioned to have the contest moved to another location, to no avail. The races caused noise, traffic, and significant pollution, as viewers left their trash in the neighborhood and parked on lawns, devaluing the properties in the area. The peaceful protest turned violent when police began to roughly handle and then beat protesters. Ernesto Fraga was one of the nineteen protesters arrested, although all of the charges against them were dropped when the court found that they had been within their rights to protest. Fraga’s activism in Austin was varied, but it forever shaped his political consciousness.
Fraga’s most well-known work in Waco began with the founding of the Tiempo newspaper in 1982. He believed it was important to have a media outlet that represented Latino concerns. Tiempo was distributed free of charge; Fraga and his wife Linda made their living from ads placed in the newspaper. Tiempo covered all kinds of topics, both political and personal, and it was bilingual. Articles about immigration issues could be found next to announcements of community socials. Fraga continued his political activism, organizing marches and protests, especially against immigration-related policies which he and others felt were degrading to Latinos. The day after one such march in July 2018, Fraga suffered a heart attack which forced the closing of Tiempo. Another newspaper has not yet stepped into the same role, leaving a “void” in the Waco Hispanic community. He inspired not only Latinos, but other minority groups to organize and fight discrimination. Fraga never remained silent on an issue that impacted Latino communities, but raised awareness and advocated for change.
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]]>Manuel "Manny" Sustaita was a Vietnam veteran, civil activist, and the founder of Waco Citizens for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Though an insurance salesman by trade, he spent most of his life advocating for veterans and their families, Hispanic communities, and other underserved groups in Waco.
Sustaita was born in 1944 in Waco. As a boy he sold newspapers, shined shoes, and did other odd jobs to help support his family. In his free time, he played sports with the Waco Boy’s Club and especially enjoyed playing basketball. Though his parents did not speak English, they required their children to learn it, resulting in Sustaita and his siblings speaking what he called “neighborhood Spanish,” a mix of Spanish and English. Sustaita struggled with academics, and he dropped out of high school when he was fifteen.
Sustaita joined the National Guard at age sixteen, partially because of a desire to travel, and partially because of his love for movies like To Hell and Back and The D.I. Popular in the fifties and sixties, these movies depicted life in the military in a thrilling and heroic light, and Sustaita was moved by the example of the heroes in these films. For someone under the age of eighteen to join the military at that time, they had to have written parental consent. His father could not write, so Sustaita forged his signature. In 1963, Sustaita enlisted in the Marines. After training in San Diego, he went to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and then to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. After this first deployment, he served in Costa Rica and the Mediterranean before volunteering to join reconnaissance in Okinawa. With reconnaissance, he toured in the Philippines, Thailand, and finally went to Vietnam in 1965. Sustaita’s battalion operated out of an American air force base in Da Nang. Their primary objective was to scout for the division, and they chiefly had contact with Viet Cong guerilla units. Sustaita did one tour of duty in Vietnam before returning to the United States and serving at Camp Pendleton in California. He finally left the Marines in 1966.
When he returned to Waco, Sustaita became a life insurance salesman, drawing on his sales experience from his childhood jobs and love for interacting with people. After working for MetLife Insurance for a while, he started his own insurance company, called Multi Services Associates. He married Patricia Rivera Sustaita, and they had two daughters before getting divorced in 1981.
Sustaita made a name for himself in Waco as a civil activist. He was a founding member of the Cen-Tex Mexican American Chamber of Commerce, and he later served as its president. He served on the board of the Waco Boys’ Club and was involved with the Red Cross, but perhaps his most memorable contribution to the Waco community was his work on the Waco Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Sustaita was deeply moved the first time he visited the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. Knowing that there were many people in Waco who had lost brothers and sons in Vietnam, as well as a significant number of other veterans, he resolved to build a memorial for the people of Waco. He, along with the Waco Citizens for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial, began the planning process in 1987, but due to a series of delays, the memorial was not dedicated until 2004.
After a lifetime spent serving his country and community, Manuel Sustaita died peacefully on May 20, 2020. He left behind a legacy of activism, having worked tirelessly to aid veterans, the Hispanic community, and all who needed help in the Waco area.
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]]>Dubbed the “Athens of Texas” by many who praised the veritable wealth of knowledge found within the city, Waco boasted a host of educational institutions and news sources which promoted the distribution of information. First established in 1865, just a few years after Waco incorporated, the Waco Examiner was one of the city’s first newspapers. John Wesley Downs published the first issue of the Waco Examiner in 1865. As editor in chief, Downs employed Henry Payne as his assistant editor and J. M. Conrad to run the paper’s mechanical department. Conrad printed the semiweekly, four-page paper using a Franklin common press, a handpress which used a large wooden screw to create an impression upon paper. As the reputation of the Waco Examiner grew, Downs expanded the paper’s services. In 1868, Payne and Conrad sold their interests to Downs. Shortly thereafter, Downs began to offer a weekly publication in addition to the semiweekly subscription. By November of 1873, the popularity of the Waco Examiner had reached unseen heights. Downs quickly altered the structure of subscriptions once again, eliminating the semiweekly issue and instituting a new daily paper.
As more Wacoans subscribed to the Daily Examiner, Downs’s profits also increased. In 1873, citizens could purchase a yearly subscription to the daily paper for $8, or receive the weekly issue for $2.50 per year. By the late 1880s, the daily subscription cost $10, while the price of the weekly issue had dropped to $1.50. Downs continued to develop the business and began to offer customers the option to purchase the paper for one, three, four, and six months at a time, in addition to the yearly subscriptions.
The Examiner papers were associated with the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, an organization which worked to advance agricultural and political causes on behalf of farmers throughout America. In 1873, the Weekly Examiner was made the official mouthpiece of the Patrons of Husbandry in Texas. When the paper reached a circulation of thirteen thousand, Downs changed the name to the Daily Examiner and Patron. Downs’s support of the Grange led him to purchase the Waco Telephone, another paper which served as a mouthpiece for the Texas Grange, and to incorporate it into the Daily Examiner. The paper became known for a short time as the Waco Daily Examiner and Telephone. Downs continued to support the granger movement until it adopted the greenback policy, an attempt to return to currency not backed by gold, around 1878. On May 18, 1875, the Examiner office burned down, completely destroying Downs’s printing equipment. The paper remained out of print for two months while Downs recovered from the losses. Although the paper appeared once again in July, Downs sold it just a few years later in 1882 to Captain John E. Elgin. In September of 1884, the firm of Bartow, Cravens, and Leachman purchased the paper from Elgin. The new firm focused more broadly upon local, regional, state, national, and international news rather than the interests of the Grange. On November 24, 1887, the paper changed firms again. The Examiner Publishing Company, directed by Frank P. Cravens, continued to run the paper until it ceased publication in 1888. By the late 1880s, the Waco Examiner claimed to have the largest circulation record of any paper in Texas. In a town where life increasingly depended upon agriculture, the paper sought to protect the interests of farmers while fostering discussion and sharing information.
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