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The largest benefactor of Hispanic advocacy groups, the Ford Foundation seems determined to divide Americans along racial and ethnic lines.

In 1968, the Ford Foundation established two Hispanic advocacy groups: the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and the Southwest Council of La Raza (later renamed the National Council of La Raza, or NCLR). Both were "creatures" of the Ford Foundation, say Linda Chavez and Jorge Amselle of the Center for Equal Opportunity. To this day both MALDEF and NCLR remain "dependent on annual grants from New York City and unrepresentative of Hispanic Americans."

Writing in a recent issue of Foundation Watch, a publication of the Capital Research Center, Chavez and Amselle argue that these two organizations "have played an enormous role in shaping public policy toward Hispanics, on everything from immigration to education to voting laws. In 1975," they observe, "MALDEF was instrumental in amending the 1965 Voting Rights Act to force jurisdictions with significant numbers of voters identified as Hispanic to receive voting materials in Spanish." MALDEF also "pushed through bilingual education programs and requirements across the country." On a grassroots level, however, Hispanic Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to bilingual ballots and education.

"Despite their ability to stage media events," say Chavez and Amselle, "MALDEF, NCLR, and other Hispanic advocacy organizations funded by the Ford Foundation are not directly accountable to the community whose interests they purport to represent. The Hispanic community does not elect the members, officers, or boards of these organizations, most of which pursue their objectives with little public scrutiny. Because they are not membership organizations dependent on individual contributions from the community at large, few Mexican Americans can name these groups. Their leaders are unknown despite their influence on public policy affecting Hispanics."

Hispanic advocacy groups like MALDEF and NCLR simply do not represent the average Hispanic American. "The Hispanic community does not control the funding of these groups and, most important, it has virtually no say in the agenda they choose to promote," say Chavez and Amselle. "The Ford Foundation and other grantmakers have freed these organizations from the need to be accountable to the communities they are supposed to represent. And they have created a cadre of ethnic power brokers, instead of identifying legitimate representatives from the Hispanic community."

Linda Chavez and Jorge Amselle charge that the objective of these advocacy groups is to transform Hispanics into "wards of government permanently entitled to public benefits because of their ethnicity. Most Hispanics, like other groups before them, would choose to become part of the mainstream. Instead, these groups speak of 'empowering' Hispanics by defining them as members of a protected class." According to Chavez and Amselle, "Only the lobbyists and activists who broker the policies of the welfare state benefit from such strategies."