Cold Anger: A Story of Faith and Power Politics

3. We Need Power to Protect What We Value

3 We Need Power to Protect What We Value Austin, 1988 Charles "Lefty" Morris and I spot Ernie Cortes walking ahead of us into the Texas French Bread Bakery and Deli. We are going to meet him for a late lunch. Morris is a successful attorney and former president of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association who has recently grown disenchanted with the gritty little skirmishes of political combat and has been seeking ideas about how to change the structure of the war itself. He had heard about Cortes and wanted to know more about him. Cortes has just come from a doctor's appointment, where he was warned one more time to shed a few pounds. Only about 5 feet 7 inches tall, Cortes' genetic tendency to be overweight worries his wife Oralia, but his obvious comfort with his teddybear body belies worry and lends a surprisingly sensual air to him. It is hard not to be drawn to his dark eyes, which compete with a bushy, graying mustache to dominate his face. Physically, he is almost oblivious of himself. His attire is conservative, but he is as mindful of his clothes as a 3-year-old. During the day, his shirttail might work its way out of his trousers, his tie might be witness to his meals, or the unnoticed string of a price tag might dangle from his sleeve. No matter-to him or to anyone else. Cortes clearly does not dress to be the center of attention. In fact, throughout his career, he has tried to deflect the 24 I We Need Power to Protect What We Value spotlight from himself to the people who hold his organizations together. With each of his successes, however, that has been harder to do. We order salads and sandwiches, none of us yielding to the whiffs that fill the air of fresh-baked sugar-and-cinnamon concoctions . And we talk. With Cortes, talk is always more compelling than sugar. His conversation is colorful and gossipy, yet informed and infused with ideas. In an hour, his topics can cover the decline of the American manufacturing system, the Liberation Theology, Thomas Jefferson, Paul's letters to the Corinthians, the clumsy infidelities of a well-known public official , and a confession that he once shaved his trademark mustache because his daughter, then 7 years old, would not kiss him until he did. But today, the talk is about his church-based organizing in politics. "The work we do is about power and about building power and teaching people how to organize around their own interests , how to be effective," Cortes tells Morris. The "we" Cortes describes is the Industrial Areas Foundation network of church-based organizations that represent at least 400,000 people in Texas. Nationally, they are linked with similar organizations in New York, California, Maryland, New Jersey , and other states, and they reach more than a million people through their affiliations. Cortes serves as the peripatetic manager of the Texas network, as well as its lead fundraiser. He is also one of the five members of the governing cabinet of the IAF, which has developed both the philosophy and organizing techniques underlying Cortes' successes. Successes that mean changes in the lives of ordinary men and women, not necessarily fame or fortune for Cortes. Although I had known Cortes when I lived in San Antonio in the 1960s, I had only a vague notion that he was behind some of the public school reform efforts in Texas in 1984 and that he played a role in the dramatic political and social transformation that San Antonio had been experiencing since the mid-1970s. Now something new was happening in Texas politics to cause thousands of church people-ministers, priests, nuns, and laypeople -to flood the public arena, operating with the same Bible in hand but with an entirely different social agenda from the religious fundamentalists who were thundering into Amer- We Need Power to Protect What We Value / 25 ican politics from the right. Something out-of-the-ordinary was happening when 10,000 Texas church members rallied on the State Capitol steps to demand more state money for poor schools in places like Mercedes, Edgewood, and Socorro-and to pledge themselves to work for the taxes to raise it. Or, when Houston church leaders brought petitions bearing 30,000 signatures to the state Public Utility Commission to stop a local...