FAMILY, CHURCH

Family, church and neighborhood
Latinos of faith exercising collective power to improve daily life
by Timothy Matovina
Spanish-Language Version Here.

Deacon Carlos Valdéz was angry. Gang member intimidation of seventh and eighth graders on the school playground of his parish, Ascension Catholic Church on the north side of Minneapolis, was so intense that the school principal had begun to patrol the schoolyard with a baseball bat. Frustrated by the lack of police response to the principal’s pleas for help, in 1996 Valdéz enlisted the support of the Joint Ministry Project (JMP), a local faith-based community organization that addresses urban issues. Armed with JMP training in community organizing and public action, Valdéz and other parish leaders joined with JMP to gather 600 people and demand that the police chief and mayor increase patrols to deter gang recruitment. While at first city officials refused to negotiate, the media coverage that local organizers fostered soon shamed them into action. The following week "Safe Teams" comprised of civilians and police patrolled the schoolyard and adjacent neighborhood every afternoon. Gang members fled. Elated at their success, Valdéz and his fellow parishioners concluded that these events represented far more than just winning back their schoolyard. More importantly, they had learned that they could exercise collective power for the good of their community. As Deacon Valdéz summed up his own transformation after the victory, "I feel alive, and I’m being called by God to organize in my community, the Latino community."

Subsequently Valdéz played a leading role in founding Sagrado Corazón parish; hundreds of Latino Catholics from this congregation have received leadership training in faith-based community organizing. Along with numerous other small victories stemming from this organizing effort, Latino leaders have created a Mercado Central business cooperative, raised $3 million for the cooperative’s 40 small businesses, and compelled the Immigration and Naturalization Service to process immigrant applications in a more timely and humane manner (Valdez’ story is chronicled in the 1999 annual report of Interfaith Funders, Jericho, N.Y.).

‘The important thing is to relate the stations to what is happening in the community.’

Perhaps the most overlooked dimension of the Latino public presence in the U.S. is their ritual and devotional traditions, faith expressions that often spill out into streets and plazas of U.S. cities and towns. While such public ritual has been a long-standing tradition at San Antonio’s San Fernando Cathedral, the oldest cathedral sanctuary in the country (and a member of COPS), similar faith traditions are increasingly evident in the streets of U.S. towns and cities. Like European Catholic immigrants from previous generations, more recent arrivals from Latin America and the Caribbean bring treasured expressions of faith with them, such as the Puerto Rican devotion to their patron San Juan, the Cuban veneration of their patroness Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre (Our Lady of Charity), Guatemalan faith in El Cristo Negro de Esquipulas (the Black Christ), and El Salvadoran dedication to Oscar Romero, the slain archbishop of San Salvador who is popularly acclaimed as a martyr and saint. In New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and other locales with significant Latino populations across the nation, Latinos celebrate their feasts and religious traditions with processions through city streets, outdoor Masses and prayer services, televised worship, and other public manifestations of devotion that alter the sacred landscape of numerous U.S. communities. One of the most widespread traditions among all Latino groups is the extensive devotion to the crucified Jesus and his suffering mother on Good Friday. As at San Fernando, in many Hispanic parishes this devotion encompasses a public reenactment of Jesus’ trial, way of the cross, and crucifixion or some other procession through the streets. Parishes like St. Bridget’s on Manhattan’s lower east side, St. Stephen’s in South Bend, Ind., St. Anthony’s in Milwaukee, St. Clement’s in Santa Monica, Calif., and eight Catholic congregations along 18th Street in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood are just a few of the many predominantly Latino parishes that annually observe this public ritual tradition.

Along with commentary on the ethno-religious origins and significance of Good Friday and other public rituals, media coverage often focuses on messages of political protest against injustice and violence that these rituals embody. Chicago Tribune reports of the Good Friday Way of the Cross in the Pilsen neighborhood, for example, have made links between the suffering of Jesus and the suffering of contemporary Latino communities (see, e.g., 3/26/91, 4/14/95). In fact, as Tribune reporters have noted, it was the suffering of the community that led Mexican Catholics and parish priests in Pilsen to initiate this annual public ritual. On Christmas eve in 1976, 10 children and two mothers died in a fire that swept through an apartment building two blocks from St. Vitus parish. Because they did not understand Spanish, Chicago firefighters who responded to this emergency were unaware that these victims were trapped inside the burning building. In a public meeting following this tragedy, parishioners from St. Vitus and other Pilsen parishes argued that these deaths resulted from a lack of Spanish-speaking firefighters, as well as absentee landlords, overcrowded housing, and city neglect of public services. The following Good Friday they began their annual Way of the Cross as an expression of faith intended to draw the community together in a collective act of solidarity, remember their lost loved ones, and connect their deaths and the plight of the Pilsen neighborhood with the unjust crucifixion of Jesus. Subsequently the annual procession links the Stations of the Cross (the events that comprise Jesus’ painful walk on the road to Calvary) with "community problems such as housing, crowded schools, immigration and gang violence." In the words of Father James Colleran, pastor of St. Vitus the year of the first Pilsen Way of the Cross, "the important thing is to relate the stations to what is happening in the community" (Chicago Tribune 3/26/91).

Another significant but frequently overlooked element of the story is the practitioners’ notion that their rituals embody a religious experience that transcends time and space. Anthropologist KarenMary Davalos’ outstanding study of Pilsen’s Way of the Cross encompassed numerous conversations with leaders in the Good Friday ritual like Patricia, who summed up the intersection of yesterday and today: "Christ suffered way back 2,000 years ago, but he’s still suffering now. His people are suffering. We’re lamenting and wailing. And also we are a joyful people at the same time. ... So this is not a story, this is not a fairy tale. It happened, and it’s happening now."

In a society that focuses more and more on individual spiritual quests and frequently neglects the human need for collective ritual, Latino traditions and congregations offer a significant model of one way the church can fulfill its public role and provide a religious experience that transcends cultural and denominational boundaries. – T.M.

Changed face for civic landscapes

The Latino Catholics of Minneapolis are part of the long-standing and growing Latino Catholic presence in the U.S. With the addition of newcomers from such diverse locales as Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Argentina, along with ongoing Mexican immigration, to the ranks of an established Hispanic population comprised primarily of Mexican-descent Catholics, Hispanics are the largest group of U.S. Catholics as well as the largest group of recent Catholic arrivals; they will comprise the majority of U.S. Catholics during the first decades of the new century. This demographic shift, which is also affecting other religious denominations, has changed the face of numerous Catholic parishes and U.S. Catholicism generally and, as the efforts of Deacon Valdéz and his collaborators illustrate, the civic landscape of cities and towns across the nation.

Participation in faith-based community organizations like JMP is the most consistent and extensive form of Latino Catholic political activism. Sociologist Richard Wood contends that faith-based community organizations, that is, organizations whose membership is comprised primarily of local congregations, "arguably represent the most widespread movement for social justice in America." Wood’s recent study (with Mark Warren), Faith-Based Community Organizing: The State of the Art (Interfaith Funders, 2001), reveals that there are 133 such organizations in the U.S. with an office and at least one full-time staff person. Collectively, these organizations link 3,500 congregations plus 500 other institutions such as public schools and labor union locals; congregations engaged in faith-based community organizations encompass between 1.5 and 2.5 million members and are in nearly all major urban areas and many secondary cities across the nation. Latinos comprise a majority in about 21 percent of the aforementioned 3,500 congregations. This figure represents a level of Latino involvement that nearly doubles their population ratio, currently about 12.6 percent of the national total. In cities and regions with large Latino populations like Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago, San Antonio, El Paso, and the Rio Grande Valley, Latino participation and leadership is even more conspicuous. For example, in Texas half of the member congregations in faith-based community organizations are Hispanic Catholic parishes. Not surprisingly, the five states with the largest number of faith-based community organizations are California, Texas, Illinois, New York, and Florida, the five states with the heaviest concentration of Hispanic population.

Four major organizing networks

Most of the 133 organizations are associated with one of four major organizing networks. The most famous of these is the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), which Saul Alinsky founded in 1940. Like the IAF, the Gamaliel Foundation is also based in Chicago, while the Pacific Institute for Community Organization (PICO) has its headquarters in Oakland and the Direct Action Research and Training Center (DART) is in Miami. The four networks contract with local organizations to provide professional organizers and leadership training. The Gamaliel Foundation, for example, supplied the organizer and training for Deacon Valdéz and others in Minneapolis. Although the local organizations remain autonomous, at times they work with other organizations on state and regional issues. Professional organizers often forge these collaborative links through their respective organizational networks. Latinos account for 16.3 percent of the professional organizers employed through the four networks and 21 percent of the board members in faith-based community organizations. Moreover, various Latinos are key leaders within the four organizational networks, such as Mary Gonzáles in the Gamaliel Foundation, Ernesto Cortés Jr. in the IAF and Denise Collazo and José Carrasco in PICO.

Religious leaders like the U.S. Catholic bishops have offered strong support for faith-based community organizations. In November 1969 Catholic bishops launched the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD, formerly the Campaign for Human Development) to address "the problems of poverty, racism and minority tensions" made painfully evident through the Civil Rights Movement and the rage and despair of poor urban Black Americans. In founding the CCHD, the bishops articulated two explicit goals: educating Catholics and other interested persons about contemporary social ills to promote "a greater spirit of solidarity," and funding support for "organized groups of white and minority poor to develop economic strength and political power." The latter goal has led CCHD to consistently support faith-based community organizations. Warren and Wood’s study showed that the CCHD provides more funding for faith-based community organizations than all other religious givers combined; CCHD support totals nearly one-fifth of all income for faith-based community organizations nationwide.

Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS)

The most renowned faith-based community organization that is overwhelmingly Latino is the Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio. IAF organizer Ernie Cortés worked with lay leaders and priests like Edmundo Rodríguez, Albert Benavides, Charles Herzig, Patricio Flores, Hector Rodríguez, Bill Davis, and David García in the 1974 effort to found COPS among six Mexican Catholic parishes on San Antonio’s west side. By the first organizational meeting that summer COPS had expanded to 27 churches, each of which agreed to provide leaders and annual dues to support the organization. Parish delegates at the inaugural meeting decided that the organization would initially focus on a single goal: improving the horrendous storm drainage on the west side. For decades the frequent flooding in west-side neighborhoods had caused school closings, accidents, stalled cars, damaged homes, potholes, impassable roads, bridge collapses, a dearth of business establishments, even deaths. Amazingly, when COPS leaders researched past efforts to address flood problems they discovered that many drainage projects had actually been authorized in bond issues passed as far back as 1945. Outraged, they sought meetings with the city public works director and the city manager, but with no satisfactory results. Then, after a period of heavy flooding, COPS members filled city hall during a council meeting and related their horror stories of flooding catastrophes, as well as their findings on the city’s failure to fulfill authorized drainage projects. Mayor Charles Becker, stunned by the crowd and the overwhelming evidence presented, ordered the city manager to devise a drainage project implementation plan. In November 1974, COPS took the lead in passing a $46.8 million bond issue for 15 west-side drainage projects.

This initial major victory was only the beginning of COPS’ long series of successful efforts at development and revitalization in neighborhoods on San Antonio’s west and subsequently east and south sides. COPS has achieved more than $1 billion in infrastructure improvements for these primarily low-income and working-class neighborhoods. These improvements include new streets, sidewalks, libraries, parks, streetlights, clinics, affordable housing and drainage systems, as well as significant advances in educational reform, job training, economic development, living wages, voter registration and active citizenship campaigns, after-school enrichment classes, college scholarships and adult literacy. The organization’s Project QUEST (Quality Employment through Skills Training) won the 1995 Innovation in American Government Award from Harvard University and the Ford Foundation. More importantly, COPS has transformed its members and the wider civil society of San Antonio. In the words of former San Antonio mayor and HUD secretary Henry Cisneros, "COPS has fundamentally altered the moral tone and the political and physical face of San Antonio. It has also confirmed ... that one way to overcome poverty is to empower the poor to participate more fully in decisions that affect their lives." Grassroots COPS leaders agree, like parishioners from Our Lady of the Angels who attested on the occasion of COPS’ 25th anniversary that "many positive changes have come about in our community [because of COPS], but the most positive change has been in the attitude of our people. Twenty-five years ago, we couldn’t imagine that a city council member would attend our meetings, now we know that with the power of educated, organized people, anything is possible."

‘No permanent enemies and no permanent allies’

Beyond San Antonio, COPS set the tone for the establishment of other faith-based, multi-issue community organizations by transforming Saul Alinsky’s model for organizing religious congregations. Under the innovative guidance of Ernie Cortés and COPS clerical and lay leaders, the organization adapted Alinsky’s highly confrontational style of organizing to the cultural and religious sensibilities of Hispanic Catholics on San Antonio’s west side. To be sure, COPS was necessarily confrontational, particularly in its early years, as an entrenched political and business establishment sought first to thwart and then to limit the organization’s influence. But over time COPS leaders also worked collaboratively with elected officials and business executives, living out the dictum, common in faith-based organizing, to have "no permanent enemies and no permanent allies" but instead remain focused on the issue at hand. COPS also transcended the initial issue of drainage improvements to focus on a wider agenda, and ultimately on the primary agenda of creating a power organization that could address any number of issues and concerns that might arise. Moreover, like most faith-based organizing efforts, COPS’ effectiveness and longevity are further enhanced by having an ongoing contractual relationship with one of the networks for leadership training and the services of professional organizers.

Scholars, reporters, and other observers often overlook yet another of the key innovations that Cortés and COPS leaders introduced into Alinsky-style organizing: the importance of integrating politics and faith. As sociologist Mark R. Warren, author of Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy (Princeton, 2001), has observed, "while Alinsky took a rather utilitarian view of churches as repositories of money and people to be mobilized, the modern IAF developed a close collaboration with people of faith, fusing religious traditions and power politics into a theology of organizing." For example, the figure of Moses, whom faith-based organizers often deem "the first organizer," is regularly engaged as a model for the vision, courage, relationship-building and public action of organizational leaders. Similar parallels are drawn with Jesus, Paul and other significant biblical figures. Moreover, unlike efforts that IAF organizers initiated during the Alinsky era, the primary leaders in COPS are not activists committed to the cause, nor even clergy with social reform sympathies, but parishioners who perceive their activism as an extension of their commitment to family, church and neighborhood. All but one of COPS’ seven presidents has been an Hispanic woman, most of them middle-aged mothers with strong familial and parish ties. COPS leader Inez Ramírez summarizes the sentiments of many organizational members in Mary Rogers’ Cold Anger: A Story of Faith and Power Politics (U. of North Texas Press, 1990): "This is not merely politics we are engaged in, but correcting injustice, which is God’s work and the mission of the church. There is more to our spirituality than just going to Mass on Sundays. Our spirituality embodies a deep concern for the physical well-being of every individual."

So strong is COPS’ interest in vital congregations that the organization has even taken on the role of parish development, a process that encompasses identifying and training new leaders, collective learning based on Scripture and church teachings, building congregational unity around common goals and needs, expanding church outreach and ministries, and even the enhancement of stewardship and church finances. Leaders at Sacred Heart parish reported during COPS’ 25th anniversary that "parish development has been key in our growth and success as a COPS parish." With Catholic parishes closing in the core of many U.S. cities, IAF organizer Sister Mary Beth Larkin offered perhaps the most blunt praise for the role of COPS in congregational life: "Not one parish on the west side of San Antonio died after COPS started."

COPS has provided an organizing model that numerous other community organizations have emulated. IAF organizers in Texas, many of whom initially served an apprenticeship with COPS, helped establish organizations in locales like Houston, El Paso, the Rio Grande Valley, West Texas, Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, the Gulf Coast region around Beaumont and Port Arthur, Fort Bend County south of Houston and the Eagle Pass—Del Rio border region. At COPS’ 10th anniversary assembly in 1983, Ernie Cortés announced the formation of the Texas IAF Network, which he then served as director. That same year this statewide network of local community organizations won its first major victory on the issue of school finance equalization and reform. Subsequently the network lobbied successfully to gain critical funding for indigent health care and infrastructure improvements in the colonias, poor, unincorporated communities along the Texas-Mexico border which were completely bereft of potable water, sewage systems and other basic amenities before the Texas IAF Network. The Network’s Alliance Schools educational initiative, an effort to build strong schools in low-income neighborhoods through the mutual collaboration of parents, teachers, administrators and community leaders has received national acclaim from school reformers. In 1999, organization leaders pronounced COPS’ 25th anniversary assembly as an occasion to celebrate "25 Years of Organizing in the Southwest." Representatives from IAF-affiliated organizations across the Southwest had delegates present; these organizations now include groups from various locales in California, New Mexico and Arizona. Cortés, who is now based in Los Angeles, heads this new effort to link IAF-affiliated organizations on a regional basis.

The faith-based perspective: construct a just and more vigorous democracy

Significantly, faith-based community organizations like those affiliated with the Southwest IAF provide an alternative model for people of faith to engage in politics. As sociologist Warren has noted, the IAF and similar networks attempt to build local power organizations from the ground up, enabling working-class and other congregational members to participate more actively and effectively in our democratic society. Unlike most food banks, clothing drives, rental assistance programs and other "charitable" social service efforts, faith-based community organizations do not focus on temporary assistance but on constructing a more just and vigorous democracy. Unlike the Christian Coalition and any number of groups who in large part attempt to lobby policy decisions at the national level, faith-based community organizations focus on building mediating institutions that provide the "missing middle" in American politics. Rather than propose a fixed moral agenda that they promote in public policy debates, faith-based community organizations are efforts to build institutions that primarily address the need of reestablishing a more participatory democracy.

Not surprisingly, community organizers like Ernie Cortés frequently bemoan the widespread (and often unconscious) presupposition that voting is the sole means for ordinary U.S. citizens to participate in our democracy. While not diminishing the importance of voting, they stress that "what you do after the election" most clearly reveals how active you are as a citizen. Building strong community organizations is their way of enabling congregations and their members to engage meaningfully in public discourse and decision-making processes that affect their lives. This organizing model presumes people from diverse backgrounds and religious traditions engender values and perspectives that can enliven and enrich this public discourse and the decisions that flow from it. In other words, faith-based community organizing offers an inherent critique of a political culture with limited alternatives and thus represents a vital contribution to the revitalization of American democracy.

Challenges and obstacles

While accentuating the promise for rejuvenating democracy that faith-based community organizations offer, Mark R. Warren and others have noted several challenges and obstacles that still lie ahead for community organizations like those in the IAF network. One of these challenges is the difficult transition from organizations focused explicitly on local needs and concerns to regional and even national coalitions that are a force for a wider political transformation. This challenge and its potential for effecting policy decisions and social change will make the recent emergence of the Southwest IAF, as well as other statewide and regional organizing efforts like the PICO California Project, even more fascinating to observe over the coming months and years. Additionally, while organizations like COPS and the wider Texas IAF network have been highly successful at attracting member congregations among Catholic, historically African-American, and mainline Protestant churches, they have few Jewish, Islamic, or other non-Christian congregations and a similar dearth of evangelical or Pentecostal churches. In Texas IAF-affiliated organizations, for example, the lack of Anglo-American Southern Baptist congregations – the predominant denomination throughout the northern half of the state – poses a significant challenge for these organizations to achieve their objective of building within their ranks as broad a base of support as possible. Among Latinos, who abandon Catholicism for evangelical and Pentecostal congregations at an annual rate of some 60,000, these churches’ lack of participation in community organizations drastically curtails the possibility that their Latino members will engage in organizing activities. The recent establishment of Christians Supporting Community Organizing (CSCO) in Boulder, Colo., is an attempt to address this concern; CSCO’s initial project is to link evangelical and Pentecostal congregations to faith-based community organizations in Philadelphia, Boston, Rochester, Chicago and Spokane. The success of this effort is another emerging story in the ongoing development of faith-based community organizing among Latinos and other groups in the U.S. l

Timothy Matovina is associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., where he specializes in theology and culture and U.S. Hispanic/Latino theology. This piece is a condensed version of a longer article that appeared as a chapter in the book Can Charitable Choice Work? Covering Religion’s Impact on Urban Affairs and Social Services published in 2001 by the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. The entire book is permanently archived on the Center’s web site <www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl>. Readers who would like a free copy of the paperbound version can obtain one on a first-come-first-served basis by contacting the Center at <csrpl@trincoll.edu>.