THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW ERNESTO CORTES JR.
Rocawich, Linda
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Ernesto Cortes Jr. 'Spark, challenge, agitate.' BY LINDA ROCAWICH Ernesto Cortes Jr. has been called a lot of things: angry, brilliant, dangerous, energetic, possessed,...
...Cortes: Yes...
...Q: We've been talking a lot about statewide issues...
...How do you keep that up over twenty, thirty years, that level of commitment...
...We're not sure yet how to structure it most effectively, but it would be to expand health services available to poor people...
...Later trained at Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation, Cortes is one of the group's chief organizers...
...Economics, political theory, the social sciences...
...Because all of a sudden they weren't making any profits...
...There's no one way to do this business...
...For me organizing is teaching, and the organizations are mini-universities...
...Q: So, is it fair, or is it not...
...So as long as there is an opportunity to try to teach different people, new people, new insights and new dimensions of this process, then it stays real interesting...
...In Los Angeles, when we began in 1976, we held more than a thousand house meetings...
...So they move in and they have no water and no sewer services...
...The first step is a sponsoring committee, which is essentially a group of people who are willing to raise the money for a two-year budget to begin the organizing effort...
...Yeah," he said, "I took my family to Italy for three weeks...
...The organizer has to be thinking about all this—how do you develop the organization...
...None of that, okay...
...After doing enough of these individual meetings in a particular area, you can pull people together...
...And also some middle-income professional types...
...So another thing we don't do is file lawsuits...
...Also ready at hand are biographies of Mary Tudor and Charles II, treatises on Judaism, a history of Greece...
...They operate either with outhouses at the worst or sometimes with septic tanks...
...Was that a good bill...
...the work is all being done by lawyers...
...The board began to get a sense of the importance of this...
...Never do for people what they can do for themselves...
...It's not a giveaway program...
...There's no role for them...
...They'd tell them, hey, eventually there's gonna be water here...
...Q: What are the most important things you're working on right now...
...In El Paso...
...Cortes: Yes, and the corporate community across the state is for an income tax...
...Does this person have the curiosity and the passion...
...Cortes: I'm glad you asked that because a lot of people have the mistaken impression that our organizations are predominantly Mexican-American...
...If it is, is that just a pragmatic result of local conditions or is it a basic philosophy of organizing...
...The organizer's organizer," he is often called, as well...
...It's ironic, because the Texas Association of Taxpayers was formed to fight the income tax, and now it's one of the biggest proponents...
...I mean, there are hundreds of people involved in the leadership, who are volunteers who don't get paid...
...And also two godchildren...
...Some of our leaders would notice these little girls coming to school smelling really bad...
...I don't mean this in a harsh way, I don't mean it in a mean way...
...Q: Give me a concept of size...
...You want to tap their energy, tap their vision, tap their imagination and their curiosity...
...Is that the idea...
...Q: I've heard people say at one time or another over the years that one characteristic of the Interfaith organizations is they don't work in coalitions with other community groups...
...But mainly it's been church people who make up the sponsoring committees...
...Over at the Frost National Bank, they lined up to change dollars into nickels and nickels into pennies and then back into dollars...
...That evening, there was another award to accept, The Texas Observer's annual Social Justice Award...
...Probably the reason you hear that is we don't join these huge, big coalitions...
...Less than twenty years ago, none of them existed...
...they only have the powers that the state of Texas gives them...
...Cortes: Exactly...
...That took effect in 1985...
...The accountability forum works well...
...And where there was a water-supply company, people were paying outrageously high prices for water on a monthly basis just to get by...
...for them it's an opportunity to get out of some very congested and debilitating public housing or whatever...
...My impression from everything I've heard is you work long and hard...
...When it rains heavily and there's flooding, there's no drainage...
...Remember that we think our primary task is developing leadership, not just resolving some problem, not just doing good...
...So part of what the organizer is doing is looking for talent...
...Q: Is it enforced...
...Sometimes you get some union leaders too, and others who have a long-term vision and a commitment to the common good, maybe a few professional people who have some resources they're willing to put in...
...Governor vetoes the damn thing...
...You had a fair number of developers who were relatively unscrupulous...
...Tell me about indigent health care...
...Q: These would have how many people at them...
...And there are stories...
...It requires the colonias residents themselves to pay for the sewers...
...Q: Because of the Texas recession...
...No realm of knowledge too obscure, or too obvious, to go unexamined...
...It passed the House...
...There's nothing for them to do...
...These sponsoring committees primarily, in the beginning, are church leaders...
...We'd bring our people to the Capitol to get state representatives to commit themselves...
...And we have organizing efforts in Dallas and in Beaumont/Port Arthur...
...In San Antonio, I did a thousand individual meetings, one-on-one meetings, with a thousand persons in the community...
...I like to teach...
...But the problem with that is he can only do it with allocated dollars, he can't raise taxes...
...But then the state went into a very serious downturn, and we had a hard time keeping the financial commitment alive...
...Q: You mean they have to keep providing services even when they're out of funds...
...Outside the city limits of any city in Texas, in unincorporated areas, the counties are responsible but they have no ordinance-making power...
...Cortes: There are two full-time organizers and a secretary...
...Q: What turned those people around...
...Cortes: It's a recognition that it's not the way to develop the organization, particularly in its early stages...
...Is this person a potential leader...
...Cortes: It was a very important day...
...We want to be sure that whomever we work with is somebody we can work with, someone we can trust, someone who will be accountable in some kind of way to us...
...Now, COPS and the other Interfaith organizations have been famous over the years for their confrontational meetings with local officials, city council people and so on, holding their feet to the fire...
...But there was still a lot of work to do...
...There are people who would say, "Let the court do it—appoint a special master...
...The Progressive and The New Republic, The New Yorker and Tikkun...
...I haven't seen Linda Rocawich is the managing editor of The Progressive...
...I hear it all the time...
...I guess the best indicator, or one of the best, of success is that the Department of Human Services has a half-billion-dollar deficit, because people are using these programs...
...In the Valley, it's probably more like four out of five, at a minimum three out of five...
...Austin writer Kaye Northcott has described what happened next: "Cortes took aim at the establishment that supported the mayor...
...has been called a lot of things: angry, brilliant, dangerous, energetic, possessed, unrelenting...
...This other thing is possible...
...We're trying to teach people politics...
...We got the Water Development Board to come down to the Valley and tour the colonias, walk in the sludge, walk in the mud...
...He likes to stay in the background, but was thrust into the limelight a few years ago after receiving a grant from the MacArthur Foundation...
...We're selective about whom we work with...
...So to that extent, the generalization is not fair...
...Cortes: Oh, I'm sure from their perspective it's fair...
...Cortes: I think so...
...At first the mayor refused to deal with COPS...
...By and large, they kept that commitment...
...Cortes: I think it's had some effect in the Rio Grande Valley...
...Cortes: For Fort Worth to happen, somebody would have to talk to us about—advocate—putting an organization together...
...Some would have a lot more...
...Cortes had no idea the MacArthur Foundation even knew he existed...
...Cortes: It took effect last year...
...And sometimes that means we don't get into coalitions...
...We are finding more people troubled by the quality of life and the lack of vision of people in the political establishment...
...And once you have a broad enough sponsoring committee, one that's representative of the community, then it hires an organizer...
...Cortes: When somebody is willing to deal with you, for you to be confrontational, you're just being a bully...
...Counties here are creatures of the state...
...You're also thinking about the people who are involved...
...you call a house meeting...
...Cortes: Yes, because people have a legal right to them now...
...Cortes moved on after a couple of years...
...He was the first organizer for COPS—Communities Organized for Public Service—a San Antonio civic group founded in 1973 and considered one of the nation's most successful...
...Q: That's a corporate lobby...
...We don't need to do the kind of confrontations we used to...
...Then you can say afterward: Well, now that you've got this done, what about this...
...Because people get tired...
...Those were to get public officials to deal with us...
...In Texas now we have ten, and I'm working with some sponsoring committees in Arizona—the beginnings of new organizations—in Phoenix and Tucson...
...Q: So that's starting to get put in place now...
...The one that's most important...
...We'd have these sessions with legislators, gather thirty or forty people around him...
...Cortes: It's really Exxon...
...Cortes: We worked very hard to pass a bill back in 1985...
...Books are everywhere...
...Q: Tell me how one of these organizations starts up...
...So that's what we do...
...We worked real closely with the Equity Center—that's a coalition of property-poor school districts which were plaintiffs' interveners in the lawsuit—to adopt a framework they thought they could live with...
...So you take a district at that level—say, Richardson or Piano [well-todo Dallas suburbs], which have maybe $400,000 worth of property per child...
...So the point of the bill was that the state makes up the difference...
...So it's yes and no...
...Cortes: Well, we work in coalition with a number of groups...
...New books, old books...
...Cortes: Well...
...They would lure people into areas—particularly such areas as El Paso, where you had a housing crisis, no affordable housing for poor people...
...How many members depends on what level...
...We particularly don't do that in the beginning...
...People are endlessly fascinated by its so-called genius grants...
...Hard, hard negotiating...
...Q: But there's a bigger distance to cross with, say, the lieutenant governor than with a city council member or state representative...
...Or both...
...A native of San Antonio, Cortes, now in his mid-forties, has been agitating Texas since the mid-1960s, when he worked for the United Farm Workers, then engaged in a strike broken by the Texas Rangers at the behest of Governor John Connally...
...So I would say the tactic works, with modifications...
...If they are going to get buried in some coalition effort, then it doesn't teach them any sense of recognition of their own power...
...We have also been working with Senator Lloyd Bentsen's office, trying to develop a multicounty health district in the Valley...
...And people then begin to see their role, see how important they can be...
...the admiring ones not always by his friends...
...COPS now has numerous offspring, and he heads up the Interfaith Network, an alliance of such groups in Texas...
...It will cost a lot of money...
...What they're going to do is find the leaders who will come together and build the organization...
...It's hard to organize and raise money at the same time, so you have to have money for the organizers to do the work...
...Alinsky used to say, "When you people do the right thing, you do it for the wrong reason...
...Probably in four years I'll be in New Mexico...
...So this bill stopped that...
...Q: And now they know they have to...
...Later she changed her mind, and I'm inclined to agree...
...Not totally stop it, but at least the most egregious aspects...
...I asked if he had done anything he wouldn't have been able to do without the more than $200,000 from the foundation...
...My point is that the courtroom freezes the action for people...
...We had a lot of help, bipartisan support...
...Q: You've probably heard people say this, though...
...The derogatory adjectives are not always spoken by his enemies...
...Q: I've seen photographs of people keeping their water in the front yard in drums used to ship chemicals to the maquiladoras, the manufacturing plants along the border...
...And magazines, a whole room full of magazines...
...Third World development...
...Phoenix, Tucson...
...And there is an ideological question here...
...We're trying to teach people how to become involved, to be participatory...
...Cortes: It was not the best bill, but it was a good bill, we thought...
...Cortes: You have to understand, first, that in Texas there are no county governments worth talking about...
...So people who make those accusations or complaints are only thinking about their particular issue...
...Sales taxes are no longer deductible from Federal taxes...
...And we helped pass the Texas Water Plan, major legislation, with the understanding that both Hobby and White would appoint people to the Water Development Board who would be sensitive to this issue, who would be willing to work with us on this issue...
...it passed the Senate...
...In El Paso, people had no water...
...So that is one thing the bill did...
...Cortes: Well, we believe in the iron rule...
...There is no county home rule...
...You can begin to talk about a particular issue that people are concerned about...
...Is this person just ambitious to be on the city council...
...It virtually assured a college education for my kids, if they want it," he said...
...And now we're back to square one...
...That's true along the border and with COPS in San Antonio...
...Valley Interfaith has the largest staff, three full-time organizers, but there are easily a thousand leaders involved in some sort of way, giving from five to ten hours a week of their time...
...This is not widely known outside of Texas...
...COPS not only got its meeting with the mayor, it extracted a $10,000 loan from the president of the bank...
...When we first worked on school finance, one of the lobbyists described us as "the circle-and-conquer group...
...Q: Let's turn to some particular issues...
...The importance of an action is to put yourself in a position where you can sit down and really do some hard negotiating...
...They tried on dresses and furs, experimented at the makeup counter, tested the beds in the furniture department...
...Or is this person just going to be concerned about this one local issue and that's the end of it...
...Is this person going to mature, to develop...
...It's real important to enable, to empower, to inspire, to challenge people to begin to take responsibility for their lives...
...The question is how do we take the leaders of these organizations and challenge their vision on such issues...
...The grant money is primarily to make it possible to buy down the cost of interest...
...The idea is to pick something that you need, that you can get hold of, that will give the people a picture of what they can do...
...We're building an organization, so we have to think about these questions...
...Q: Turning to something more personal, you've stayed active and involved for a long time now...
...Q: Primarily in Mexican-American communities...
...So you get into these house meetings, and you're always looking for people whom you can spark, whom you can challenge, whom you can agitate...
...You can't do it yourself...
...Cortes: That's true...
...In the Valley, there were these cooperative water-supply companies, and there was water, at least, in a lot of the colonias, though not every one...
...Q: You mean there's a self-protective reason not to join...
...Valley Interfaith began organizing on this issue back in the early 1980s and got Mark White, when he was governor, to make some small grants to particular colonias...
...Q: Somebody in Texas—Lieutenant Governor Hobby, I believe—shocked everybody a few months ago by calling for an income tax...
...One thing it does is try to prevent "dumping...
...So you make a determination or recommendation...
...Really, we're just stretching out the long-term payments on these sewer projects to make them more affordable...
...The counties are not real happy about this bill because they have to pass model rules and they have to start taking some responsibility for the colonias...
...And we thought we had a bill that, over five years, would work...
...But since 1982, there has been a real push on issues such as public-school finance, water and sewers for the poor border communities, health care for the uninsured, job training, fair taxes, our toxic nightmare, other issues that cut across a region and the state...
...It guaranteed school districts an equal tax yield for equal effort, up to the ninety-fifth percentile of wealth...
...One of the reasons I'm in Arizona now is because it's new turf, there are new people, there's a new dimension, I get my head into a new situation...
...Now, there's nothing wrong with a septic tank, except that, when you get to certain densities, to certain levels, they will flow and you will begin to have seepage...
...These folks are very poor...
...Q: So you pick something that's doable, and people can have a success...
...But I have seen his office...
...So a county cannot, as a matter of course, control development...
...Q: Is it possible yet to tell whether there has been an effect on the infant-mortality rate...
...Virtually every corporate leader I know of is for an income tax...
...So they move to these areas...
...Cortes: I would agree that all politics are local...
...Do you think that's a fair generalization...
...Like all things, you have to constantly maintain some vigilance, or go back and redo it...
...Cortes: Not necessarily the most important, because some of the most important ones are the hardest ones to do something about...
...We think too many things are having to be solved in the courthouse in the United States...
...There are some grants to get hookups to the actual homes, but the colonias residents have to pay for these projects...
...And then you take a poor district in the Valley which has, say, $20,000 of wealth per child...
...In the beginning, you're thinking: How do I build the organization...
...And, frankly, a lot of people see that we've got numbers and we've got a constituency, and they will try to use that...
...A lot of money...
...temporarily, the bill provided for a half-cent increase in the sales tax to pay for it...
...The county could not tell that developer, well, now, wait a minute, where is the water, where are the sewers, where are the roads...
...That's all part of what you're doing as an organizer...
...One of the things I've always liked about the Industrial Areas Foundation approach is it allows you to do things differently...
...Q: Let's move on to the water situation in the colonias...
...And they'd keep water, as you said, in these drums...
...Private hospitals used to dump poor patients, take care of them just long enough to stabilize them and then move them over to a public hospital, because they didn't have any insurance...
...But the purpose is to get people to know each other, to get people to form relationships, to talk, and finally to get the committee to take some action and do some kind of research...
...Your role as an organizer is to teach people how to organize...
...But you know the Industrial Areas Foundation has been around for fifty years...
...Cortes: In Texas, yes...
...Let's work on this issue rather than that, on the basis of: Is this going to help build the organization or not...
...his home—"a jumble of books," she says—or his car—"a library on wheels...
...You're trying to teach them...
...How many people are fairly active in COPS as members, and how many paid staff...
...And then they tell you what it is...
...They call you on the phone and tell you you're the recipient of the grant," he says...
...Lawyers want to go into court and be heroes...
...And finally, in this last session, 1989, we worked very, very hard and passed a bill providing $100 million worth of sewer and water services to the colonias...
...Ernesto Cortes Jr.: Right now, the most important agenda is to expand the network of organizations, IAF organizations...
...If I were teaching the same thing over and over again to the same people, I think I probably would have had a hard time sustaining myself...
...On shelves, on the floor, piled precariously on his desk...
...Confrontation was the style...
...Q: Some good may come of that, too, in terms of a commitment to help yourself...
...Sometimes you'll see kids walking to school in sludge...
...One was the Tax Reform Act...
...Cortes: Yes, more or less...
...One study says two out of every five kids born in Texas are born into homes with practically no access to health care...
...Cortes taught the people how to make themselves heard...
...Does that work with state officials as well...
...can you describe the situation...
...So we got Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby to come to a convention of Valley Interfaith, and he made a commitment for $100 million of state assistance for water and sewer services...
...They would come out and subdivide the land and build people homes on land contracts, which meant the homeowners basically paid rent until the last payment, so they had no equity...
...Cortes: Sure...
...The more important beneficiaries of the windfall would be his children, he went on to explain...
...We're into the third special session of the legislature to deal with it, and Governor Bill Clements has vetoed the latest effort...
...But there's no role for our folks in the court...
...It cannot—or could not—in reviewing a plat or issuing a building permit, tell the developer he must provide water or sewer services if he creates a subdivision...
...The people who have to get the recognition for your work are your own leaders, the ones you're working with...
...When the poor district taxes a penny, they have to yield from that penny what the Richardson district, or the Piano district, yields at a penny...
...Her initial reaction was: Nobody buys that many books...
...That has changed, and most observers credit COPS...
...Then you get people involved in a discussion...
...However, the efforts in Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, Phoenix are very interracial—blacks, Hispanic-Americans, poor whites...
...Cortes: Eight, ten, twelve...
...Or Colorado...
...You don't do it for its own sake...
...The staffs job is to recruit new leaders, constantly to bring new people in, so there's always a mix of experienced and new leadership, so the organization stays fresh, stays on the cutting edge, doesn't get lulled into security or into complacency...
...And you're also trying to see if you can get them to see beyond themselves and their situations...
...The city was half Mexican-American but the power was all in the hands of the white business establishment...
...They'd smell bad because they'd bathe in these chemical drums...
...Politics means negotiating and being reciprocal and thinking about the other person...
...Sophisticated organizers know that they are never going to be the builders...
...Burnout is a common problem with grass-roots activists...
...Q: So the idea is to come to some consensus, to pick an issue...
...No sewage and no water...
...Q: Yes...
...After a while you begin to draw a map, a mental map, of that particular community: Who are the leaders, what are their concerns...
...Five hundred folks wearing COPS buttons advanced on the Joske's department store next door to the Alamo...
...Cortes: Two things...
...We discussed the art of community organizing in this bib-liomanic den early on Saturday morning, the fifth of May...
...When you're trying to develop an organization, that's not the way you do it...
...But Hobby has been to our accountability sessions, and so has Mark White, Ann Richards, all those people...
...And the way you do the organizing, the first step is real simple...
...I mean in a way that they begin to see that they have to be co-responsible for what goes on with them...
...It is, in fact, a very conservative bill...
...But we didn't feel that was going very well...
...Cortes: It varies...
...The second thing it did was inaugurate an experimental perinatal program and expanded health services for children and pregnant women...
...Q: Do these organizations still, as COPS did in the beginning, spend most of their energies on local issues...
...Northcott reports that when she asked what he was going to do with the money, he said, "Buy books...
...Q: That should stick in their minds...
...So after a lot of these individual meetings, you begin to hold small group meetings...
...From an organizer's perspective, a negotiated political solution teaches more effectively...
...With a name to make it sound like "just us folks...
...But how do you decide to go and organize, say, Fort Worth...
...So you have these drainage pits in the Valley where there's just nothing but raw sewage...
...In the Valley virtually no one has health insurance...
...And then they began to notice that they were paying franchise taxes and other fees regardless of whether they were making any profits, and the idea of a corporate-profits tax—an income tax—began to look very attractive to them...
...Q: The state is under orders from the Texas Supreme Court to equalize the finances of the public schools...
...All the time...
...Because they are born poor...
...You might get into a fantastic issue that will take ten years to resolve, and you may solve the problem eventually by going to court or all kinds of other ways, but you won't have an organization in the end...
Vol. 54 • September 1991 • No. 9
