The Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control

3. The Emergence of RUP's Machine Politics (1971-1972)

3 The Emergence of RUP's Machine Politics (1971-1972) After a year of RUP's struggling to consolidate its community control of CristaI's city council and school board and make major policy changes and implement various programs, Ciudadanos Unidos (CU) was evolving into a full-fledged political machine. Jose Angel Gutierrez understood and applied Saul Alinsky's dictum that "the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the poor and oppressed is organization:' In doing so, he organized CU into a powerful family of communitybased organizations that became the vanguard of the peaceful revolution and of RUP in the area. CU now was the most powerful organization in and around Zavala County. By late 1971 CU, with its big base of constituents and its ability to deliver the Mexicano vote, was evolving into a partisan political machine rather than a community organization . And at the top was Gutierrez, who functioned increasingly as CU's political boss. For the next four years Boss Gutierrez and the invincible CU controlled and directed local election after local election. Political Machines: Instruments of Control Machine politics began in the United States in the mid-1850s with the arrival of various ethnic groups in the growing urban areas of the na86 Copyrighted Material The Emergence of RUP's Machine Politics 87 tion. Many arrived in cities that were cauldrons of extreme poverty and alienation. Scholar Eugene Lewis writes about the horrid conditions that fostered the emergence of political machines. Nineteenth century America was a horror for many of urban citizens. Slums in the large cities were worse than they are today. There was incredible overcrowding and disease; crime and poverty characterized every urban center. Starvation was frighteningly common. Millions ... arrived in America poor, hungry, diseased, and completely unable to cope with life in the New World.... Social disintegration and alienation from public institutions were real problems for urban dwellers-both old and new.! The strength of the political machine lay in the low-income ethnic communities adjacent to the commercial and industrial heart of the city. Political machines also emerged as a result of the social disintegration and alienation created by the horrors of the cities-immense poverty , overcrowding, epidemic disease, and crime. The machine was a reaction to the federal, state, and local governments' inability or lack of desire to rectify the many social and economic problems that immigrants faced.2 City machines are hierarchical private organizations grounded in political party organizations that rule cities by controlling nominations to council and executive offices, including that of mayor. They offer city council members benefits and special privileges in return for unified action. Bryan T. Downes describes a political machine as a "hierarchical party organization within the context of mass suffrage." Political scientists Harlan Hahn and Charles Levine define and differentiate between the two interrelated terms machine politics and political machine. Accordingly, to engage in machine politics is to manipulate certain incentives to partisan political participation: favoritism based on political criteria in personnel decisions, contracting, and administration of the laws. They define a political machine as an organization that practices machine politics-that attracts and directs its members primarily by means of incentives.3 Mexicanos in Texas were not unfamiliar with machine politics. Historian Rodolfo Acuna describes the pervasiveness of gringo-controlled political machines: In South Texas, machine politics also became popular after the Civil War. It handed out patronage-for example, city jobs, contracts, franchises, and public utilities, and, for the poor Mexicanos, it meant a primitive form of welfare. The machine won elections by turning out the vote. In the border towns, the Copyrighted Material 88 Part Two. The Politics of Community Control machine controlled the custom houses. The indiscriminate use of the Texas Rangers bolstered the machine's political hegemony.' Political machines held sway in most cities in south Texas, including Brownsville, Laredo, San Antonio, and El Paso. Brownsville's, led first by boss Stephen Powers and then by his replacement, Jim Wells, was the most powerful. These machines were products of "controlled franchise :' wherein Mexicanos voted according to the dictates of the local patron, or boss. Because these political machines delivered sizable blocs of votes in state and national elections, the Anglo patrones (among them Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson in this century) acquired influence far beyond that of backwater county politicians.5 All these machines depended on inducements that were specific as well as material: A specific...