Chavez, Linda (1947-)

Linda Chavez is a former Reagan administration official and former president of the U.S. English organization. She is a nationally syndicated columnist, talk radio show host, and television commentator. Chavez is a controversial figure in the U.S. Hispanic community for her conservative views on immigration, affirmative action, and bilingual education.

Chavez was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on June 17, 1947, to an Irish-English-American mother and a Spanish American father. When she was 9 years old, her family moved to Denver, Colorado. She attended Catholic school there during her primary years and, later, the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1970. She later enrolled in the University of California-Los Angeles English and Irish Literature PhD program. While at UCLA, Chavez was asked to teach a Chicano literature course. Reluctant to add Chicano works to the course syllabus, Chavez was frequently harassed, along with her family, by her students and other militant campus Chícanos. She left the program in 1972 and relocated to Washington, D.C.

In Washington, Chavez began working for the Democratic National Committee, later assisted Congressman Don Edwards on civil rights issues, and in 1974 became a lobbyist for the National Education Association (NEA). Refusing to be pigeonholed as a lobbyist for Latino interests, however, Chavez left NEA for the more conservative American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in 1975. She served as the organization's assistant director of legislation for 2 years, then director of research and editor of its quarterly, American Educator. Over the next 6 years, she would pen numerous articles espousing traditional values in American schools and what she saw as the negative impact of quotas and bilingual education. Conservatives in Washington took notice of her political stance. She was invited to become a consultant to the Reagan administration in 1981 while still serving at AFT.

In 1983, President Reagan appointed Chavez to become the first female staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Her controversial tenure at that agency was marked by her advocating the reversal of traditional civil rights measures, including racial hiring quotas, and her views of the negative effects of affirmative action. In 1985, she was appointed director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, making her the highest-ranking woman in the Reagan White House team. She became a full-fledged Republican later that year. Embarking on a political career of her own, Chavez left the Reagan administration in 1986 to campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland on a conservative Republican platform. However, she was criticized for changing her party affiliation, her recent Maryland residency, and what some called mudslinging tactics against her opponent, Democrat Barbara Mikulski. Chavez lost the race.

Chavez left politics in 1987 to become president of U.S. English, the controversial nonprofit organization created by Senator S. I. Hayakawa to lobby for making English the official language of the country. She resigned in 1988, however, following the disclosure of an anti-Hispanic and anti-Catholic memo written by one of the organization's founders, John Tanton. After leaving U.S. English, Chavez became the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. In the early 1990s, she became director of the institute's Center for the New American Community, which studies the impact of multiculturalism on U.S culture.

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