REBUILDING CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE INNER CITY

by

Mark R. Warren

Fordham University

? 2001 by Virginia Hodgkinson and Mark E. Warren

One of the critical issues facing governance in the United States is the low level of participation practiced by its citizens and residents. Robert Putnam (2000) has been the most recent analyst to call attention to the declines America has suffered in civic and political participation, of which the decrease in voting is only the most visible sign. In terms of partisan politics and issue advocacy, Americans give more of their money, but less of their time in active participation. Moreover, amongst those who do participate, there remains strong class and sometimes racial bias (Verba, Schlozman and Brady 1995). In general, those living in America's inner city communities suffer from social isolation (Wilson 1987) and remain the most excluded from social and political institutions (Cohen and Dawson 1993). As a result, these communities lack the effective power to gain equal access to America's resources. Low wages, poor schools, degraded environments and inadequate housing plague their neighborhoods.

Facing an unresponsive government, poor communities can turn to civil society as a place to organize for collective needs. We face a critical need to identify effective models for civil society organizing that can foster democratic participation and power. This chapter focuses on the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) network because it is arguably the country's premiere builder of social capital in low income communities of color. It identifies some of the broader lessons that can be learned from the work of the community organizers and leaders in this network who struggle to rebuild civil society in the inner city and create collaborative relationships with actors and institutions in the broader society.

The Texas IAF finds its historic roots in the community organizing done by Saul Alinsky in Chicago's ethnic working class neighborhoods in the 1930s (Horwitt 1989). But Ernesto Cortes began to recast Alinsky's organizing when he launched Communities Organized for Public Service among Hispanic Catholic parishes in San Antonio in the mid-seventies. Since the founding of COPS, Cortes and his staff have built local affiliates across the state of Texas, in the major metropolitan areas of Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, El Paso and Austin, in border regions with Mexico, as well as in newer efforts in medium size cities in East and West Texas. Since the mid-1980s, the IAF network has been active at the state level in Texas too, scoring its first major victory by bringing water and sewer services to the colonias, America's equivalent of shanty-towns along the Mexican border. While COPS built its base entirely among Hispanic, Catholic parishes, the Texas IAF grew into a multiracial and interdenominational network, based as well in African American and Anglo congregations of both Protestants and Catholics. In the nineties, the network began to incorporate growing numbers of schools and other community institutions. Ten thousand IAF supporters attended the Texas IAF network's founding convention in 1990.

Texas IAF organizations cultivate broad and deep participation by the indigenous residents of local communities. IAF organizations do not advocate for the poor; rather, they engage poor, working and middle class Americans in political action to rebuild their own communities. The faith-based initiatives of the IAF are not about the provision of services. Instead, they seek to transform the passive and often isolated and dispirited recipients of public services into active participants in the nation's civic and political life. Empowered in this way, communities can demand improved services and greater resources from public agencies, and work with them to more effectively address their needs.

The IAF's effectiveness rests upon its deep roots in religious communities. Religious communities offer a solid base for organizing because membership in churches and other religious institutions is widespread in America and, compared to any other set of civil society institutions, equally distributed (Verba, Schlozman and Brady 1995). African Americans participate religiously at exceptionally high rates (Harris 1999), with Hispanic participation high as well. While church attendance may be somewhat lower in the inner city, those communities are as well-stocked with religious institutions as any other part of American society (Foley, McCarthy and Chaves 2001). Other studies have shown that churches play a key role in balancing the class and racial bias in civic and political participation through the opportunities they afford individuals to learn civic skills (Verba, Schlozman and Brady 1995). As we will see, the IAF experience highlights the contributions of churches as institutional and moral anchors for community action.

IAF organizations are composed primarily of congregations. But they are political, not religious groups. Congregations must learn how to work together across denominational and racial lines in what the IAF calls their broad-based organizations, a structural feature that may help mitigate against any exclusive tendencies. Moreover, although the IAF's agenda is informed by a moral vision, it is decidedly material, focusing as it does on such issues as affordable housing, job training, school improvement and public safety.

In this chapter, I chart the development of this faith-based model of civil society organizing in the Texas IAF and show the potential of its organizations to undertake multi-level political collaborations. This chapter necessarily contains a condensed account of the network's development and contemporary organizing, which I treat extensively elsewhere (Warren 2001). I conclude the chapter by elaborating the broader lessons of this case for our understanding of rebuilding civil society and revitalizing democratic life in the United States.

COPS: THE ORIGINS OF FAITH-BASED ORGANIZING

Ernesto Cortes, Jr. arrived in his home town of San Antonio in 1973, fresh from his training in Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). His goal was to build an organization to give voice to poor and working Mexican Americans in San Antonio's forgotten west and south sides. Within a few short years he and a group of committed Catholic clergy and lay leaders had built a powerful organization that broke the Anglo elite's monopoly on political power in San Antonio. In the process, Cortes and the IAF came to base their organizing work almost exclusively in religious congregations and to reach deeply into religious networks to build organizations that would last, and that could expand their political capacity over time.

While Mexican Americans made up a majority of San Antonio's nearly one million residents by the early 1970s, they were almost entirely excluded from political representation at city hall. The Good Government League (GGL), a small association of wealthy Anglos from the north side, had dominated city politics since the fifties and normally placed only one hand-picked Hispanic on its council. While concentrating on Anglo development on the north side, the city neglected Hispanic neighborhoods concentrated in the west and south sides of town. Roads there were often unpaved, sidewalks non-existent, schools poor, and floods a common and deadly occurrence. Mexican Americans were concentrated in lower paying, mainly service occupations. The city embodied an old-fashioned colonial atmosphere, as the growing Hispanic community, reaching a majority of the city's population by 1970, remained a 'sleeping giant'.[1]

Cortes, however, thought the sleeping giant might be ready to wake up. Hispanic groups began more active organizing in the sixties, and, by the early seventies, the Good Government League was starting to show some cracks in its monolithic hold over the city. Builders and developers wanted to push the sleepy city government to take aggressive action to support growth. Fed up with the old guard in the League, they backed independent candidates for mayor and city council in the 1973 election. The independent candidate for mayor and several councilors won the election, signifying the possibility of new opportunities for Hispanic empowerment.

At first, Cortes followed Alinsky's methods and attempted to recruit to his effort a variety of neighborhood social organizations, including churches, PTAs and social clubs. Catholic parishes, however, soon emerged as the bedrock of COPS, while the other institutions proved too unstable or unsuited for the ensuing political conflict. The Catholic Church hierarchy provided both funds and encouragement of pastoral support for COPS. As COPS became established, the largest part of its budget came from dues paid by member parishes, the funding principle followed by all IAF affiliates. Meanwhile, San Antonio's Archbishop Furey publicly endorsed the COPS effort and gave his blessing to priests who became active in the organization. Auxiliary Bishop Patricio Flores, who became the first Mexican American bishop in the United States, served on the sponsoring committee for the effort.

Support by the Archdiocese of San Antonio for COPS represented the culmination of several trends both in the larger Catholic Church and in the diocese of San Antonio. From above, Vatican II heralded a greater openness in the church, encouraged lay participation, and pushed the church to a greater concern for social justice and the plight of the poor. From below, Hispanic priests and seminarians had begun to organize themselves in the 1960s, forming a group called PADRES.[2] Supported by Bishops Flores and Furey, young Hispanic priests like David Garcia and Albert Benavides, took up posts on the west side and became important leaders of COPS. They joined the Jesuit priest Edmundo Rodriguez, the pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on the near west side, who was Cortes' first ally when he arrived back in San Antonio.

Tapping the funds, legitimacy and institutional leaders from the Catholic Church conformed to traditional Alinsky methods. But in organizing COPS, Cortes began to make a profound innovation. He went beyond the priests and the usually male presidents of parish councils and began to reach more deeply into the networks of lay leaders that spread out from the church. Parishes on the south and west sides served as the center for a variety of social activities.[3] Cortes met with over one thousand residents active in some way in the community. He started with priests, got the names of potential supporters from them and moved through the community. He recruited leaders, now mostly women, from the ranks of parish councils, fund-raising committees, and church-goers who were active in PTAs and social clubs. Many were members of the Guadalupanas, a Catholic association of Hispanic women. Andres Sarabia, the first COPS president, and its last male president, was head of his parish council at Holy Family. Beatrice Gallego, the second COPS president, was a PTA leader and active in the Council of Catholic Women in St. James parish. These new COPS leaders were not individual activists committed to the cause. Instead, they were people connected to institutions and networks who cared primarily about their families and community, and the religion that bound them together.

According to Cortes, 'we tried to bust the stereotypesYto see leaders not necessarily as someone who could speak or persuade a crowd. We wanted to see leaders as people who have networks, relationships with other people'. These leaders were often women, and many of them were excited about the opportunities the new organization offered. According to Cortes, 'many of the women leaders were real power-houses in their private families. They had a lot to say about who does what. But that's not enough. The public side of them didn't get developed because they are invisible outside of the home. They may have gravitated to leadership in our organization because of the need to develop this aspect of their personality. We offered them the opportunity'.[4]

Once Ernesto Cortes found someone whom he thought had potential to be a COPS leader, he could be dogged in pursuit. The organizer Cortes first met Beatrice Cortez at a parents meeting about the closing of a neighborhood school.[5] Mrs. Cortez was an office worker at the time, married to an electrician, and active in her church, St. Patrick's. She became angry when she heard that the San Antonio Independent School District planned to close her children's elementary school, as well as two others in the community. The school department planned to take the money saved by the school closing to help fund a new administration building. With seventy other parents, Mrs. Cortez attended a meeting to discuss the matter. Inexperienced in politics, and fearful of speaking out, Mrs. Cortez tried to avoid the organizer Cortes at the parents meeting. 'There was a man, Ernie -- sitting next to me at the meeting. He encouraged me to push for us to take some action. So I was asked to speak with school officials. But I was afraid because I had never spoken in public before. Ernie met me outside the meeting and pinned me down to agree to speak.' The parents were not able to stop the school closing. But they did stop the construction of the new administration building and got the school department to use the money saved to improve education. Some of the savings were used to reduce class sizes in other neighborhood schools. And Mrs. Cortez was hooked. 'I told Ernie to teach me everything. I stopped being a victim. Now you know what's going on because you're making it happen.'

COPS mobilized its strong church base to challenge the power monopoly of the Anglo elite. In these early battles for recognition, COPS acquired a reputation for pursuing militant and confrontational tactics. COPS engaged in large-scale protests at city council meetings over flooding and drainage issues. And it organized disruptive actions at local symbols of economic power, like Joske's Department Store and the Frost National Bank. Drawing upon the legitimacy of the bishop's blessing and the authority of supportive priests, COPS leaders mobilized their social networks to these actions. Because COPS leaders were embedded in social relationships, they could consistently provide large turn-outs of hundreds of supporters to these actions, something never accomplished before in San Antonio. The deep roots of COPS provided the power to back up the organization's demand for its $100 million counter-budget for services and infrastructural improvements to the neglected west and south sides of San Antonio. The counter-budget represented an unprecedented demand from a community long excluded from access to power. San Antonio's public officials and business leaders were not accustomed to such an active and aggressive posture by the Hispanic community. But the militant tactics proved successful, and COPS began to win important victories.