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Social Forces 81.1 (2002) 368-370



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Book Review

Dry Bones Rattling:
Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy


Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy. By Mark R. Warren. Princeton University Press, 2001. 307 pp. Cloth, $52.50; paper, $17.95.

For those who lament the decline of the democratic public sphere, Dry Bones Rattling, Mark Warren's generous portrait of grassroots political organizations in Texas, is good news. The topic cases are descendents of Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the storied neighborhood improvement movement that was born in Chicago's poor white ethnic communities in the 1930s and became a benchmark in the history of American social activism. The spirit and organizational means of IAF were brought to Texas through Ernesto Cortes, a community organizer who saw both political marginality and political potential in San Antonio's majority Hispanic population. Years of work, and innovation on IAF organizing principles, bore much fruit: a billion dollars worth of service and infrastructural improvements to low-income San Antonio neighborhoods; diffusion of the movement to several other cities and the creation of a regional network; perhaps most significantly, a [End Page 368] novel model of citizen mobilization that uses religious commitment to build politically effective cross-racial and cross-class coalitions.

Warren's story begins in 1974, when Cortes founded Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in keeping with IAF tenets of building on existing institutions and volunteer talent in nonpartisan ways. But Cortes employed religious faith and religious organizations more extensively than Alinsky ever had, relying on San Antonio's Hispanic Catholic parishes to supply both the moral rationale for political mobilization and the organizational infrastructure required to get bodies to rallies and ballot boxes. Warren, who describes his book as political ethnography, tracked the emergence of COPS and its two-decade development into Southwest IAF, a regional network of community-based organizations with considerable political clout. The research is solid. Warren conducted some 150 interviews and was a participant observer at many COPS/IAF events.

There are several remarkable features of the organizations Warren studied. First, they are designed to resist the drift to oligarchy. Explicit rules prohibit the concerns from endorsing particular political candidates or administering the programs for which they advocate, and there is an active commitment to maintaining the autonomy of local organizations within extra-local coalitions. Second, unlike the many leftward causes in which hierarchy is a bad word, these organizations actively recruit, train, and celebrate leadership, reaping the benefits of vertical administrative arrangements. Warren notes how laywomen are an especially vital pool for leadership recruitment in the Southwest IAF. Third, the causes are thoroughly infused by religion. Hispanic Catholic and Black Protestant faith traditions, in particular, provide COPS and its peer organizations with broad moral frameworks within which activists can make social issues compelling to potential constituents, with practical resources and social networks useful for mobilization, and with a cultural glue that enables believers to sense commonality with other groups despite differences of race, class, and locality.

The news may be too good. This reviewer found himself wondering where the contrarians were. Religious movements are invariably conflictual ones: between the upstart innovators and the more orthodox old hands, and among the leadership, where unity is usually hard won. Such troubles multiply when movements bridge theological, racial, and class divides. Warren addresses several such conflicts in his story, but he consistently accentuates the things this movement has, in his estimation, done right. It also is clear what kind of activism Warren does not like. He offers Southwest IAF as a model of good citizen activism, but he disparages the Christian Right, with its emphasis on national leadership over local empowerment and on sexual/moral issues over economic ones. This is the work of advocacy as well as scholarship.

But whatever we call it, Dry Bones Rattling stands as an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about the future of American civil society. All the big issues are here: how to build organizations that are both thoroughly democratic and politically powerful; how...

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