Spanish speaking peoples in Utah, oral histories: book 13, numbers 135 through 146

Page 92

The following is an interview with Mr. Duvan Lujan, conducted by Greg Coronado, at Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 5, 1973. DL: So you'll find that along these lines many programs started, like housing, when you realize that too many cities had public housing, there were determined to help the poor, they had 4 or 5 people hired there to maintain the house, maintain the property and so forth, and then they would charge a very low income ..• like in the gardens in California, Los Angeles, different housing areas, but as the · cities began to realize that these were expensive measures on their part, politically they got out from under it, and gave it to the non-profit organizatio.ns, and some non-profit organizations all of the suddent become very, very non-profit but only on paper, they forseen it 25 years ago, that from now they would have something for nothing, and of course here is another time that they would manage to use the term "poor" or the "aid of the poor" when in fact they have little or no use for the poor, except to say that I am going to get something out of it as a group or as an organization in a few years from now, and this has been the basis of your so called "non-profit housing set ups" and ... which I have been very much against, and we could have gone into it in Albuquerque, but we got out of it fortunatelly, and again the image is to use the poor, anyone that wants to look into this housing area, those things if it wasn't for the government paying the rent, it wouldn't be helping the poor, instead of saying ..• well the cities s~ould