Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS)
Sr. Pearl Ceasar, Lead Organizer
P.O. Box 830355
San Antonio, Texas 78283
(512) 222-2367

There's something unusual about San Antonio: The 10th largest city LOOKS good, and there's a sense of pride that extends beyond the Alamo, the famous Riverwalk and the bustling downtown. It is clean, its houses sport fresh paint, and there's no definable "ghetto."

In a political situation that may be unique in America, every citizen of this large city has a voice ... and knows it. COPS, with a 19-year track record of community organizing behind it, can take a large share of the credit for that.

Things were starting to change in San Antonio during the early 1970s. The small, rich, conservative Anglo minority that had ruled the city for most of the 20th century, setting the public agenda through the "Good Government League," a Chamber of Commerce-like organization, actually preferred to avoid development and growth rather than risk the arrival of jobs, unions and the "difficulties" that an empowered Hispanic minority might cause. But this group was dying out and starting to be challenged for political power by well-to-do developers from outside who saw the city as a market ripe for the plucking.

Into this setting came Ernesto Cortes, a native of San Antonio, who learned community organizing from Saul Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation and founded COPS in 1974. "In the heyday of the civil-rights movement," Cortes has written, "It was not unusual to equate the repressive conditions under which the Mexicanos of South Texas lived to the situation of blacks in the Deep South. Racism and cultural repression reinforced an economic need to maintain a reactionary social and political framework for the state."

San Antonio's ethnic divisions divided the city from northwest to southeast. Above it, the mostly Anglo "North Side" enjoyed the benefits of government and its services. Below it, the so called "West Side," predominantly Hispanic, was like a Latin American barrio. As Henry Cisneros noted in a 1988 article in Commonweal, San Antonio in the late '60s was "so poor that Peace Corps volunteers were trained in its barrios to simulate the conditions they would face in Latin America. Thousands of Hispanics and black families lived in colonias, with common-wall, shotgun houses built around public sanitation facilities with outdoor toilets. The barrios had no sidewalks or paved streets, no drainage system or flood control. Every spring brought flooding; families were driven from their homes; children walked to school through mud sloughs. In the shadow of downtown San Antonio lurked a stateside third-world 'country'."

Incredibly, a quarter of a century has seen this condition reversed, to the benefit of ALL the city's people, and the secret -- the entire secret -- was Alinsky-style community organizing.

By 1977, in a referendum that saw 96 percent of the city's Hispanic voters in favor, the City Council switched from city-at-large election to representation by district, a measure that virtually guaranteed a Hispanic majority. The city elected a liberal woman mayor, then a Hispanic (Cisneros), and the benefits of government, including street paving, water and sewer service and police protection, started flowing to all neighborhoods, not the north alone.

"I can say unequivocally, COPS has fundamentally altered the moral tone and the political and physical face of San Antonio," Cisneros wrote in 1988.

With never a scandal or hint of corruption, COPS became a model organizing affiliate, leading to the development of a dozen other IAF groups in a broad swath of south Texas including the Metro Alliance, an organizing group focusing on the middle-class, Anglo residents of North San Antonio. Its accomplishments are myriad. The group's records indicate that, over its 19 years, COPS has been directly responsible for the expenditure of an incredible $750 million in development money in the city's Hispanic communities.

Here's the difference the money made: There are no more colonias in San Antonio. No neighborhoods with dirt roads, no water, no toilets.

It would take a book (and perhaps one should be written) to outline all of COPS' accomplishments. Just a few of the more recent projects include:

The San Antonio Education Partnership, a joint effort of COPS and Metro Alliance with businesses, communities, school districts and universities to provide college scholarships or jobs to high school graduates with a B average and 95 percent attendance. Since the program started, the dropout rate for seniors at targeted schools has halved, from 18 percent to 9 percent, and the number of students eligible for the partnership increased by more than 40 percent.

A $10 million Housing Trust Fund to finance affordable housing in inner-city neighborhoods.

A get-out-the-vote effort that ensured a $46.5 million bond issue for library improvements and neighborhood literacy centers and a $140 million bond issue for street and drainage improvements.

Effective partnerships with city police that led to neighborhood storefront police stations and foot patrols, effectively mobilizing police resources against crime and drugs.

Because COPS takes seriously Alinsky's "Iron Rule" of leaving decisions and leadership up to the people and not the organizers, it has accomplished much with scant resources. Counting Ceasar as lead organizer for COPS and Metro Alliance, both affiliates together have a staff of only five and a total budget of about $300,000 a year.

Nor does the group intend to rest on its laurels.

"San Antonio looks good on the outside because of COPS' work," Ceasar said. "But we need to get INSIDE the houses and make sure that the kids who live there will be well educated, have good health care, and that the kids will have good job prospects in the future."

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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