POVERTY BEHIND THE CACTUS CURTAIN
Rogers, John
Poverty Behind the Cactus Curtain Federal aid for the underprivileged. Months after the first war on poverty funds had been authorized by Congress, the San Antonio city administration had done...
...Governor John Connally received national attention last spring when he vetoed a war on poverty project...
...Governor Connally's home town of Floresville, where he still has his ranch and business headquarters thirty-five miles south of San Antonio, has no poverty program yet...
...Governor Connally, too, owes his election to a first term in 1962, by a margin of 25,000 votes, to South Texas and its power system...
...The people who have to stay in Floresville, and many of them are Mexican-Americans, are not so fortunate...
...All we can do in Congress is pave the streets...
...During the summer the Texas AFL-CIO accused Connally of delaying decisions on other proposals for summer projects, thus killing them by pocket-veto...
...PASO is struggling now to get back to its feet...
...Simply stated, President Johnson's programs are doomed—as far as South Texas and the Mexican-Americans are concerned—because the political bosses, the economic chieftains, and the wealthy and middle-class Anglos oppose efforts that might reduce the poverty of Mexican-Americans...
...The Catholic church stepped into this gap and sponsored its own Youth Corps for 1,000 high school youngsters...
...Ironically, it was a fledgling Mexican-American political organization, the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations (PASO), which had an opportunity to defeat Connally in 1962...
...This border city finally received approval for a community action planning grant of less than $60,-000...
...Before the Democratic primary, PASO chose to endorse Daniel instead of Yarborough, apparently out of political expediency...
...The power structure had made no attempt to get war on poverty projects...
...He asked for a Federal civil rights investigation, but nothing happened...
...As backward as San Antonio is in combating poverty, it is far ahead of other areas of South Texas...
...So did Governor George Wallace of Alabama...
...The average income of the 17,000 persons in Starr county—one of the twenty poorest counties in the country —is $700 a year less than the average income in the state of Mississippi, and from $1,000 to $1,500 below the per capita income of the people of any state in the Appalachia region...
...All of these avenues to the Great Society are now closed to them...
...Father Virgil Eli-zondo, the town's Catholic priest, complained that a group he headed had several times applied for community action projects and a Neighborhood Youth Corps without success...
...fellow Congressmen from the region speak and vote in the House for the power system that runs South Texas...
...In rural areas of South Texas the picture is even drearier...
...it simply said "No...
...Head Start and Neighborhood Youth Corps programs actually were proposed and approved by the Federal government before the city's poverty agency was functioning...
...The role of PASO shrunk in the last statewide contest within the Democratic Party as Connally votes inundated repeat-opponent Don Yarborough...
...Even more than the theoretically-available projects, these forgotten people need a massive, Federally financed and operated program aimed at South Texas...
...It refused a Neighborhood Youth Corps project because, according to school board President George Guthrie, a contractor, "The $1.25-an-hour wage [to be paid corpsmen] would wreck the city's economic structure...
...no one comes to see how they are faring...
...Laredo has a per capita income of only $937...
...In Mathis, not far from Robstown, a political coup last spring changed the city's government with the election of a progressive Anglo newcomer and two Mexican-Americans to the city council...
...The local veto is only one obstacle which the citizens concerned with poverty in South Texas have to clear...
...Most important, the other newspapers in the area are an integral part of the power structure...
...This should include projects to end illiteracy, provide housing, hospitals, and clinics, job training, and, above all, jobs that will pay Mexican-Americans a decent living wage...
...The man who could do more than any other to help them escape from poverty and despair—fellow Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson, who said "I'll do anything for the Mexicans"—has yet to commit himself on specific programs in their behalf...
...Senate came from South Texas...
...He was then running against a field that included the incumbent governor, Price Daniel...
...At the time the bill to aid the economy and the people of the blighted areas of Appalachia was being debated in the House, Representative Henry B. Gonzalez, who has been fighting the power structure in his area since he was elected to the San Antonio city council twelve years ago, called for massive aid for South Texas similar to the Appalachia program...
...Connally's veto was slapped on a $381,000 Neighborhood Youth Corps project proposed by the Texas Farmers Union...
...A few of the politico-economic bosses of South Texas—such as George Parr, who after numerous scrapes with the Internal Revenue Service and other Federal agencies, remains the "Duke of Duval County"—have achieved some national notoriety...
...This veto undoubtedly discouraged other possible sponsors that could expect to be looked upon with disfavor by the governor...
...The students would be getting more than their parents...
...Grants were repeatedly denied because the committee excluded poor people—who make up more than half of the population...
...Its effectiveness has been limited...
...Some of those who have moved, like Connally, come home occasionally to check on their cattle and crops...
...But while the city's strategy was to delay and "review" various poverty proposals, the San Antonio primary school district's response was blunt...
...To make matters worse, three of the area's daily newspapers are owned by the Hoiles Freedom Newspapers chain, which in the past has advocated abandoning public education as well as other "socialistic" institutions...
...Representative Gonzalez told an audience in San Antonio, "My hands are tied...
...As if the Mexican-American of South Texas does not have enough troubles with the political bosses, an antagonistic or indifferent press, and the built-in handicaps of being brown, speaking a foreign language, and being extremely poor, in the few cases when he does seek help through Federal programs he must run still another gauntlet—the veto power of the various levels of Texas government...
...The one million Mexican-Americans in South Texas need a political voice if they are to benefit from the Federal programs which should be available to the many who need them, but which are ambushed somewhere on the long road between the county courthouse or city hall and Washington...
...Since then, the city administration has been extremely successful in blocking additional proposed projects...
...Months after the first war on poverty funds had been authorized by Congress, the San Antonio city administration had done nothing to avail itself of the money...
...The city, fearing these would-be poverty fighters might one day become a political organization, was forced to set up its own poverty agency and absorb the young activists by naming them to its many-membered board of directors...
...the new town council already has submitted several proposals...
...all-out liberal Don Yarborough (no relation to the Senator) ; and several other candidates...
...He politicked as part of the system not only for himself, but also for Lyndon Johnson, whose eighty-seven-vote margin in his first successful bid for the U.S...
...Included in his worldly wealth are 20,000 acres of South Texas...
...Starr county, on the Mexican border, has a per capita income of $534—and no poverty program other than a Neighborhood Youth Corps sponsored by the schools...
...Laredo had stalled for months before coming up with an action committee formula that was acceptable to the Federal administrators...
...With his charges supported by a number of affidavits from Crystal City residents, Pena said the Mexican-American leadership there had been jailed, and beaten and harassed in other ways, by the sheriff and other Anglos...
...But surprisingly, orator Yarborough ran second to Connally in the primary and faced him in the runoff...
...The town's power structure, not to be thwarted by an election, has organized a tax payment boycott so that the insurgents will have no money on which to run the city government...
...The governor's veto is even more potent— or at least it was until last fall when Congress took some of the sting out of it by including a provision allowing the director of the OEO to override governors' vetoes...
...PASO endorsed Yarborough then, but the change seems to have confused many Mexican-Americans...
...Its proposals repeatedly have been rejected by the county "poverty coordinator" as unworkable, although they were copied from programs already in existence in other communities...
...One recent PASO tactic has been to criticize community power structures for not participating in Federal poverty and educational programs...
...But most of the local bosses operate their small and effective political machines behind what the Mexican-American political leader Albert Pena calls the "Cactus Curtain," which hides from national attention what goes on from San Antonio south to the Rio Grande...
...the local people have to drive down them...
...The poor here are getting poorer, and those who have done well move to San Antonio," the priest said...
...In Robstown, an agricultural community near the Gulf Coast—described by one resident as relatively liberal "because who can be conservative in a place like this...
...So far, the town has not even received initial funding...
...In his veto message, Connally charged that the Farmers Union was "quasi-political" and that only two of the school districts that would have been involved, through use of their school grounds, actually wanted the program...
...Besides his accusations of terror tactics, Pena complained of a news blackout regarding such incidents...
...None is particularly sympathetic to the cause of the poor Mexican-American...
...Recently the city was ordered by Washington to reorganize the poverty agency's board to include more poor people...
...John Connally grew up and prospered under the power system...
...PASO sprang from the Viva Kennedy Clubs, organized in 1960 in Texas by Albert Pena, which Robert Kennedy has credited with carrying Texas for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket by a thin plurality of 46,000 votes...
...Pena recently charged that "a reign of terror" had descended upon the Mexican-Americans of Crystal City, which two and one-half years ago was shaken by the election of an all-Mexican-American city council...
...community leaders organized to seek war on poverty projects...
...Even San Antonio, the largest and most prosperous (if you can call it that) city in South Texas, has a lower per capita income than the poorest of the Appalachian states...
...It would have provided summer employment for high school students from thirty-three school districts in eight counties of South Texas...
...One problem is that "mass communications" in South Texas are spread thin...
...However, Gonzales, who represents only one of the counties of South Texas, stood alone...
...It moved into the poverty program only after several young union members and settlement house workers threatened to organize their own independent community action program, without any local sanction, and apply for Federal funds...
...Laredo, on the Rio Grande, is eighty per cent Mexican-American and the poorest city in the nation, without exception...
Vol. 30 • March 1966 • No. 3
