Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Why I Love this Guy

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Here’s a photo of my friend Javier Diaz.

Javier Diaz is 78 years young. On Saturdays, he’ll drop by the office and ask ‘what’s up Senator? What are we going to do this week?”

Every day Javier wakes up wanting to make El Paso a better place.

Javier grew up in Chihuahuita, in the heart of Southside, the son of Mexican immigrants from Aguascalientes.  As he explains it, he learned how to run real fast ‘getting away from la migra.” Like most in the Southside, Javier went to Aoy and Bowie. Today, he is ‘el mas orgulloso’ of the Bowie Bears and goes to all the alumni dances and events.

At age 18, he joined the United States Marines and went to Korea in 1950. Within weeks, he was in one of the fiercest battles in US military history at the Chosin Reservoir, where 65,000 Chinese attacked US Marines and Army troops. By age 22, he was back in El Paso, a war veteran, where he enrolled at UTEP. Within a few short weeks, a UTEP provost told him, ‘you need to leave this school, college is not really for you.’

Back then, El Paso was different. In 1946, Bowie High had no band uniforms. So the seniors went to Juárez and asked President Avila Camacho to give them some. He took the band uniforms off his military band and that’s how Bowie got uniforms.

When UTEP declined to take him, Javier’s friend Tiny Barcena told him about East Texas State University. Javier was real fast in track thanks to la migra, so when he went to Commerce, Texas where he was offered a track scholarship. Going on a road trip through East Texas to get to college in 1953 was not so easy for a young Chicano he said. Many of the restaurants had signs back then that said ‘no blacks, no Mexicans, no dogs.’ The best way to get to collge was to hitch-hike," he said.

Javier graduated from East Texas and went on to teach for 45 years in the El Paso Independent School District, first at Hart then at Crockett. To this day, he is known everywhere as Mr. Diaz. Over the years, he has helped thousands of students go to college, find scholarships, get help when they had ‘problemas’.

Javier has always believed in government’s role to do good. “That’s where education comes from—and education is the most important thing’, he says.

In my race, he walked precincts, and put up signs until two o’clock in the morning. On Election Day, November 6, 2006 at the age of 77, Javier stood with me at busy intersections waving at cars, asking people to go vote. Later that night, we had a beer and he was ready to go some more!

He’s done it for dozens of candidates, many of whom are in office today.

But what makes him Javier is attitude. After the war, a Holocaust survivor said ‘they can torture you, deny you food, take away all your clothes, but the one thing they can’t take away is your attitude.”

That’s Javier. Every day it’s—“Senator what are we gonna do today?”  That’s why I love this guy.