Social Justice - Ernesto Cortes Jr.

The Education of an Organizer

Cortés's initial ventures in community organizing came when he was a young man in the 1960s. Educated at Texas A&M, he later dropped out of a graduate program in economics at the University of Texas at Austin to help organize Mexican-American workers in Texas, his home state. He earned a reputation as a revolutionary but found that he made little progress when he went up against companies that hired strikebreakers. Then, as Cortés likes to say, he "got serious": "I was sick of losing," he says.

He moved to Chicago, where he studied with Ed Chambers at the Alinsky Institute, which was founded by Saul Alinsky, the legendary radical community organizer who also founded the IAF. For years, Alinsky had agitated for better living conditions for poor people in Chicago, and he had chronicled that work in his best-selling book "Reveille for Radicals" (1946). From people like Alinsky and Chambers (who is now executive director of the IAF), Cortés learned that there are two kinds of power: organized money and organized people. In 1974, Cortés decided that he had learned enough from Chambers to strike out on his own, so he returned to his roots in San Antonio. There, he launched a revolution that changed the city.

The first group that Cortés helped organize, Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), forced the city to make good on a sewer-and-drainage proposal that it had passed 30 years earlier -- but had never implemented in the poor neighborhoods that the proposal was intended to help. As a result, for years, residents of San Antonio's West Side had faced annual floods, which often took lives. In 1974, shortly after winning that battle, COPS pushed the city council to allocate $100 million (money that was supposed to be spent on these neighborhoods in the first place) to improve the infrastructure of San Antonio's poor neighborhoods. The city balked, and COPS came through with a protest reminiscent of Alinsky's old Chicago tactics: Hundreds of COPS leaders lined up in a downtown bank to change hundreds of dollars into pennies -- and then stood in line again to change them back into dollars. Meanwhile, other COPS leaders were in a local department store, trying on clothes and asking to be shown other items, but not buying anything. The demonstration brought much of the downtown area to a halt. Within days, city officials agreed to a meeting -- and eventually, they handed over the money.

These days, COPS and the other 12 IAF groups in Texas rarely need high-profile antics to get public officials to respond. Politicians have seen these groups single-handedly swing elections with their intense "get out the vote" and other voter-education campaigns. What about change through electoral politics? "In this country, we no longer have politics," says Cortés. "There are auctions at which people bid for the office of the presidency. The politics that we talk about is the politics of the Greeks -- the politics of negotiation and deliberation and struggle, in which people engage in confrontation and compromise. My goal is to reclaim that political tradition."

The Organizer as Educator

In the past few decades, the IAF has diverged from the Alinsky model in significant ways. Alinsky was never a conscious mentor or teacher, and the momentum of his movement was always heavily dependent on him -- so dependent, in fact, that many people believed (incorrectly) that the IAF would flounder when he died in 1972. Cortés, however, is an adamant and passionate teacher. "We're much more thoughtful and careful about congregational development and institutional development across the board than IAF was in the past," he says. "We're asking ourselves harder, tougher questions about leadership and mentoring and how to go about achieving that." The other change that the IAF made was to expand on Alinsky's work with organized religion -- making parishes and faith-based organizations the center of the whole program. Cortés says that he's not organizing "communities"; he's organizing "institutions."

"If there's going to be a sense of community, there has to be an institutional base to that, which connects leaders and money and traditions and capacity and expertise," he explains. Cortés's methods of community building have become so successful and so well known that some of the institutions that he has traditionally relied on to help him are now seeking his help. The Catholic Church is one such institution.

Sister Maribeth Larkin's cell-phone rings insistently as she takes her seat. She's the first to arrive for a morning meeting at the headquarters of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Larkin, who wears a short-sleeve navy-blue dress, no makeup, and a plain, gold band on her left hand, leans over to pull the bleating phone from her leather briefcase on the floor. It's Cortés. He's supposed to be at the meeting with Larkin, who is one of the 40 or so Southwestern- region IAF organizers who train community leaders. "Ernie, where are you?" she asks. She smiles indulgently at his response: He's lost, just a few blocks away. "Head west until you hit Mariposa Street," she directs. "Which way is west? It's toward the ocean, Ernie." Then her phone loses the connection. She snaps it shut, annoyed. "Shit!" she mutters. "I hate technology."