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9 The Power to ProtectWhatWeValue In the barrios that provide so much of the support for the Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the emphasis on organizing among community members has a long history. While unloading freight at the rail yard, over a beer at the pool hall, picking endless rows of cotton, while hanging clothes out to dry, people touted the benefits of mutual support. “I still remember it so clearly,” Texas community activist Viviana Cavada recalled from her childhood: hearing the adults saying, “We need to get health going, to take care of these people from the moment they are born to the day that they die. And have a mutualista club where they can even have the burial.” She adds for emphasis, “People didn’t even have any place to be buried in or any money even to bury them.” Or as a leader of Sociedad Mutualista Ignacio Allende in San Antonio noted back in the 1920s, “For that reason the sociedades mutualistas say ‘One for all and all for one.’ The avaricious, to the contrary, say, ‘All for us and the people can drown.’”1 As with IAF groups such as Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) and OneLA, most of the mutualista activists came from the working class. Not unusual was the El Paso officer of Sociedad Mutualista “La Constructora” who lived in the wagon yard where he worked.2 The leaders of mutualista groups in 1920s San Antonio included a teamster (Sociedad Mutualista Mexicana), a shoemaker (Sociedad Mutualista “Amigos del Pueblo”), a blacksmith (“Union Católica Mutualista”), and a printing press operator (Sociedad Mutualista Miguel Hidalgo). Then there was the case of Guadalupe M. Báez, a cowboy in the stockyards and a longtime president of Sociedad de La Unión. This cowboy headed the largest, most prominent mutualista organization in the city that itself served as the unofficial capital of US Mexicans at the time. A prominent speaker for “La Unión” by 1890, President Báez was exhorting his members to foster “a culture of good harmony ” as late as the 1930s.3 A smaller but significant percentage of the leaders held minor municipal jobs. For instance, a clerk at the El Paso courthouse, Pedro Calendaria, served as secretary and president of Sociedad Mutualista “La Fraternal Number 30” in 1913 and two years later was elected president of the El Paso chapter of the mighty Alianza Hispano Americana (AHA). Calendaria was 119 The Power to Protect What We Value “a faithful servant of the community,” another community leader recalled years later. And just as the Southwest IAF includes more than a few professionals among its members, so did the mutualista associations. Typically neighborhood professionals or owners of barrio businesses, they had a stake in the local community even as the mutualista network and attendant press coverage provided them with customers or clients and publicity. For example, the founding director of a school in Laredo, Simón Domínguez, belonged to some ten organizations and served as president of Sociedad Mutualista Hijos de Juárez in 1907.4 A few mutualista associations were founded by professionals, and not surprisingly these groups had a larger percentage of leaders from that class. The most notable case was the AHA, but even in the AHA many of the officers were laborers. Thus, while the top officers of the Alianza chapter in El Paso in 1913 were a physician and a civil engineer, the very next year one of the officers was a laundry worker.5 Like the Southwest IAF meetings, those of the mutualistas typically were conducted by the largely working-class officers in a professional manner, complete with parliamentary procedure.6 Most of the mutual aid groups that survived longer than a year or two also kept careful records, a practice that was reinforced by state insurance regulations instituted by the 1920s. At any rate, members were keenly aware that solvency was essential to the survival of the insurance benefits that they cherished and that they supported with their dues. People active in mutualista operations strove to protect what they valued . Regarding mutual benefit societies in general, historian David Beito has noted that “Unlike private companies, they drew on extensive reserves of membership solidarity. It might be one thing to bilk a commercial insurance company with a phony claim, but the mutual benefit nature of fraternal coverage, not to mention the fact that it was fairly easy for lodge members to check up on each other...

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