Cold Anger: A Story of Faith and Power Politics

4. You Feel Like Your Work Is a Ministry

4 You Feel Like Your Work Is a Ministry San Antonio, 1986 I drive for almost an hour through the suburbs and shopping centers in the rolling hills of northwest San Antonio before I find Mary and Jesse Moreno's home near the University of Texas Medical School. Jesse has worked for almost four years to remodel the white brick and frame house with bright blue shutters that sits on two acres in the tree-filled neighborhood. The house is spacious and comfortable for Mary and Jesse and their four children who range in age from 6 to 11. Wide windows bring in the pastoral scenes from the backyard where the children's pony grazes peacefully. While the kids watch Saturday morning cartoons in the den, Mary heats coffee in her microwave and we sit at a huge pine table in the dining room, where books and newspapers are stacked alongside children's art, school papers, and comfortable family clutter. The washing machine is humming in another room, and we hear Jesse hammering away, making repairs on the carport he recently added. Mary is telling me about her children with an enthusiasm that makes her seem younger than her 38 years. Her jet-black hair is cut stylishly short and she wears a diamond drop around her neck. Mary Moreno has the confidence and grace of a seasoned politician, which is how her friends regarded her when she 34 / You Feel Like Your Work Is a Ministry became an officer in the Metropolitan Congregational Alliance .1 Trained by Ernesto Cortes and the Industrial Areas Foundation, Mary Moreno joined hundreds of new people moving into urban politics, disregarding the cynicism of media handlers and packaged candidates, and deciding to bring their own values to hardball political decision-making. "My parents were victims," Mary tells me in her staccato voice only slightly tinged with a Spanish accent.2 "We children were aware of the social injustices. We were migrant workers so we saw it all over. I remember the cotton pickings and everything. We went mostly to the Rio Grande Valley. We went to California and Michigan. But we always tried to get back so we kids could go to school. Sometimes we would have to stay until the crops were in and then we had to start school late. But we couldn't come home without any money. My mother had two years of school. My father had none." Mary Moreno reminisces about the times in elementary school when there was neither food nor money in her house and she ate chewing gum for lunch, hoping the sugar would quell her stomach rumbles. She talks about the sweet sadness she saw in her father as he came home in despair with whiskey on his breath after being turned down for day labor, all day, every day for weeks. She talks about her older brothers and sisters dropping out ofschool to help support the family, and of her own determination to make something of herself, to finish high school, maybe even to go on to college after raising her own family. "With all of this, two things stayed with me," she says. "One was the voting. Everyone was poor, but we were the poorest of the poor. One time my father came home, and he was very happy because he was able to get a dollar because a dollar was a lot of money. The way he got that dollar was that some patr6n gave it to him for his vote. I didn't know about things like that at the time. I was only a little girl and we werejust glad he could buy bread or flour or something. But it stayed with me. You know, who pays you for a vote? Every time there was an election , it was tamales and beer. Votes for the Mexicans. It always bothered me. I didn't know e~actly why." The other thing that stayed with Mary was her father's death. You Feel Like Your Work Is a Ministry / 35 "I had to fight the city and county, and I realized that things are not done because of right or wrong," she says. "It made me wake up." In 1971, when she was 23 years old, Mary Moreno was a patients' representative at the Robert B. Green Hospital-San Antonio's charity facility. Her job included everything from helping police...