0001 Justice at the Gates of the City

CENTER Days
Presenter: Ernesto Cortés, Jr.

“All organizing is disorganizing and reorganizing,” Ernesto Cortés, Jr., said to several hundred ministers filling the Regency Ballroom at the Hyatt Hotel in Long Beach. “The first action is disruption,” for even dysfunctional communities have their own organization, or their own acquiescence to oppression. The only way, Cortés said, to counteract oppression and the unilateral power of organized money and organized power is by community organizing. And this organizing, through face-to-face meetings where relationships are developed and nurtured, is the work of the Industrial Areas Foundations as they seek to help people to reclaim their place and power in the polis of the nation.

Cortés, Southwest Director for the IAF, spoke with the ministers about why it is that he dedicates his life to organizing. It began, he said, in the experiences of his parents' humiliation because of their heritage, and the reactions to his invalid sister. What we would now call discrimination was felt by Cortés and his family as humiliation, a sense of powerlessness in the face of institutions and organizations that created a sense of second-class citizenry in them. His empathy for people with no voice, and who are treated civilly but not decently by the social organizations that should be helping them, comes out in his desire to change institutions. Organizing is about developing institutions and networks of institutions (schools, churches, etc.) that, rather than humiliating adults as many of the social agencies do these days, instead develop the capacity of adults to be full citizens and to challenge the institutions that do not treat them as such.

Cortés said we are living in turbulent times, where organized capital has organized labor on the run. There is not much difference, he said, between the two major political parties. The Republicans court those who earn over $500,000 a year, while the Democrats court those who make between $150,000 and $500,000 a year, and no one is there working with or for those who make under $80,000 a year. Both parties have been involved in shifting the tax burden from those whose income comes from capital to those whose whose income comes from their work. Both parties are disrespectful of working people. Regardless of which political party wins the national elections in the fall, in January 2005 the problems will still be with us: people who do not know what it is that they truly need and how to go about organizing to get it. To understand today's politics, he said, one should study marketing rather than political theory, for it is the marketing of candidates that is all important.

Cortés talked about the need to help families understand what their interests are. Through marketing, the true needs and desires of families are eclipsed, and they need help to understand what it is that is truly important — money and time. With today's 24/7 working world, poor people find they have no time to be with their families, nor to understand how to utilize their birthright of citizenship. What these families need is someone to help them gain “standing” in the community. Standing, in the legal sense, means that you have a claim to be heard, and to be involved in the deliberations and decisions about the process. Today's poor and disenfranchised people do not have standing — they cannot have their voices heard and counted as important in the day-to-day decisions important to their lives, and the organizations that currently exist were designed in such a way as to deny families this standing.

What organizing is about, then, is working face-to-face to develop relationships with people who can help lead the change to enable families to get standing, representation and a voice for those who currently have no voice. The job of community organizing will be to create and reweave the social fabric by creating institutions that teach people about the politics that really matter — township, school district, and municipality — for it is here that decisions are made about the education of our children, whether we have access to health care, and other crucial matters.

Cortés cited the dismantling of the community college system in California. Not only is the price of community college outpricing many people, but the number of slots available is decreasing by the practice of the state universities requiring students to complete their first two years of higher education in the community colleges. The poor for whom there is no other option are being bumped by those who will later attend the University of California's various campuses. As we move into the 21st century, more and more young people will be competing with computers for positions, and the labor market will be divided into those who have the requisite creativity and skills to deal with ambiguity, and the majority who will be competing for low wage service jobs. Any concept of the “Sabbath” is being eroded by the need to work seven days a week to stay afloat.

Cortés said that it is an issue, not of family values, but of the value of families. It is time, he said, to claim the language of family from the right wing. The value of families cannot be talked about until we are also able to talk about moving from that which is familial to tribal to clan and to cities, so that we can realize the connectedness across the barriers that are too often drawn to isolate and disempower people. We need instead to talk about our birthright — the politicalness that is our inheritance. The story of the American political situation is a story of oppression, but it is also a story of a great awakening that includes the struggles of people to gain standing. Because we are ahistorical, and our children do not learn these stories, they forget what it is that they are missing.

So rather than convincing people of the need for organizing, Cortés said that instead we should begin the hard work of building a constituency. Organizing is nothing more than a fancy word for building relationships of a public nature, going outside of our comfort zones, and crossing boundaries of class, race, ethnicity, gender — connecting in real relational ways with those who are different than we are.

Yet part of the reason we shy away from the work is that we have an uncomfortable relationship with power. By imagining and only thinking of power as unilateral power — the ability to make others do things — we do not claim the other types of power — power with others. The theologian Karl Rahner said that power is from creation and from God, and that power can be either good or bad — it is how we use it that is crucial, not the mere existence of power. Power and love have to be combined, as love without power leads to sentimentality, and power with love leads to justice. When we talk about power, we are talking about people having the capacity to exercise their own agency.

Power over, though, requires either the consent or the acquiescence of the people to others having that power. Organizing is about helping people understand this, and finding ways to reawaken their actual needs, rather than just succumb to what it is that they are told they need, or should need. We should not be as concerned about the use of power and authority, but rather with the way that consent to power is obtained. Are people truly given the tools and information to develop the capacity to make distinctions so that they can make real judgments? This is not currently being done, and so organizing is a form of mini-university where people are taught these important skills of how to be effective actors.

Doing this work is important, for we have a responsibility to the disinherited. Within the covenant tradition of the Hebrew Bible, it means that people are (and should be) obligated to one another. The “other's” material needs are my spiritual needs, and to the extent that we deal with other people's needs for dignity, self-respect, feeding and clothing, we are then dealing with our own spiritual needs. The way in which we encounter God, said Cortés, is through the other, and this is shaped in relationship between and among us. The self that is “us” is created through dialog and interaction, not through any independence.

IAF organizes through one-on-one relational meetings where people learn the story and history of the other, what they fear, what they long for, and what is necessary to protect and sustain the other person so that human flourishing can occur. To begin, one develops these relationships with leaders who can help develop and deliver the promise to others. By beginning these relationships, the work can later be shared so that each is learning and teaching, rather than the work being done only by those who “know better.” A team of those with vision and who are willing to work for that vision must be created. These face-to-face meetings are places where people can make common cause as they help each other understand the interests that are most central to their lives. This sort of organizing is agitation—stirring up the pot and the curiosity and understanding of what possibilities can be constructed. The “iron rule,” though, is never do for anyone what he or she can do for themselves. It is the obligation to develop institutions that teach people how to do for themselves, and that provide hope. Cortés said that this form of organization is the only antidote to the Grand Inquisitor style of unilateral power that rules the world, and it is the embodiment of hope.

Ernesto Cortés, Jr., is the Southwest Regional Director for Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). He has dedicated his life to public service and the common good by working to make the government more responsive to the poor and politically disenfranchised. IAF, founded in Chicago by Saul Alinsky in the 1940s, is one of the leading faith-based community organizing agencies. Its Southwest Region includes over 23 community-based organizations, from New Orleans to Des Moines to Los Angeles. In 1974, Mr. Cortés founded the IAF affiliate Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio. This church-based grassroots organization gained national recognition for transforming fragmented, low-income neighborhoods into organized and politically savvy group capable of taking on the city's power structure. As neighborhoods became organized, junkyards were removed, drainage systems installed and traffic signals erected. Increasingly aware of their own power, residents began to reach out across neighborhood boundaries to develop a master plan for public service equity. Mr. Cortés is a recipient of many awards, including the MacArthur Foundation's prestigious “genius” grant for his life-long work in community organizing.

Reported for the web by Lisa Presley; edited by Jone Johnson Lewis; first photo by Nancy Pierce, others by Bill Lewis

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