by Robert Bryce He’s been called one of
the most powerful people in Texas, and has been f�ted as one of the
saviors of American democracy. William Greider, political
writer for Rolling Stone, devoted a chapter in his book Who Will Tell
the People to the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in general, and to
Cort�s in particular. In 1984, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a
“genius” grant, giving him $204,000 to spend however he liked. His intellect
and abilities have been lionized by Mary Beth Rogers, chief of staff to former
governor Ann Richards, who wrote an entire book about him, Cold Anger.
Every organization depends on one or two key people for direction, energy, and
inspiration. For Austin Interfaith, Valley Interfaith in South Texas,
Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio, The
Metropolitan Organization in Houston, the El Paso Interreligious Sponsoring
Committee, Allied Communities of Tarrant in Fort Worth, and several other
groups affiliated with the IAF, that leader is Cort�s.
The San Antonio-born son of a drugstore manager, Cort�s, 52, is the
IAF’s coordinator for the Southwest. An Austin resident for the past 10 years,
he trains and motivates the leaders that keep groups like Austin Interfaith
going.
And yet to meet him is, well, to be somewhat nonplussed. It’s not that Ernesto
Cort�s is disappointing in any way. He is warm, gracious, and engaging.
But he hardly fits the profile of a powerbroker. There are no sharply cut
suits, no neatly coiffed hair. In fact, there’s not much hair at all. Instead,
Cort�s the genius, Cort�s the inspirational powerbroker, stands
about five and a half feet tall, has a potbelly, and wears plain, inexpensive
clothes.
But as soon as he starts talking, you understand why Cort�s comes with
such an impressive r�sum�. He speaks without hesitation and with
a certainty that he is absolutely correct in everything he says.
If Cort�s weren’t an organizer, he could be a motivational speaker.
Team him with Zig Ziglar or one of those other Go Get ‘Em gurus and
Cort�s could make a bundle. Instead, he lives in a modest tract home
north of the airport which he bought with the money he got from the MacArthur
Foundation. A brilliant orator who throws off quotes from the Bible, Lord Acton
– “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” – and Thomas
Jefferson, Cort�s wheedles, prods, questions, and expounds while
wheeling and pacing through the room. He doesn’t ask for attention, he commands
it with an intellect that allows his listeners to make the connections. He’s
like your favorite college professor who always remembers your name and
challenges you to think and work harder.
His rhetorical power stems from his ability to put the Gospels and the rest of
the Bible into current political reality. He makes the commands and stories of
the Bible into a political manifesto that demands action.
At the May 6 meeting of Austin Interfaith, Cort�s told the crowd that
an “effective government requires an engaged citizenry. If we are to be a
pluralistic culture, we have to have serious, deliberate conversations with
each other.” But that isn’t happening in America, he says. People in society
aren’t mixing as much as they used to. The decline in volunteer organizations
is part, he says, of “an unraveling of the social fabric. Democracy requires
intermediary organizations.”
Creating those intermediary organizations has become Cort�s’
life work. He graduated from San Antonio’s Central Catholic High School at the
age of 16 and took just three years to grad-uate from Texas A&M. He did
graduate work in economics at the University of Texas, then in 1971 moved to
Chicago to work with the IAF.
Two years later, Cort�s returned to his hometown of San Antonio to
begin organizing Hispanics on the city’s west side. The group had a quick
victory, convincing the city to spend $46 million on drainage projects. But
when city leaders balked at a COPS plan to spend an additional $100 million on
drainage improvements, parks, libraries and better streets, Cort�s
initiated a peaceful guerilla war. On February 4 and 5, 1975, hundreds of COPS
members invaded two of San Antonio’s most visible businesses: Joske’s
department store and Frost National Bank. At the department store, they tried
on clothes and more clothes, but bought nothing. At the bank, COPS members
changed dollars into pennies, went to the end of the line and had their pennies
turned back into dollars. The resulting snafu sent the city leadership into a
tailspin, and they quickly consented to COPS’ agenda. In all, COPS forced city
leaders to spend about half a billion dollars on infrastructure improvements on
the Westside of San Antonio, an area that had been neglected by city leaders
for decades. The group also played an instrumental role in forcing the city to
move to single-member districts in city council elections.
“COPS brought a lot of pieces of the IAF tradition together,” says
Cort�s, who developed the accountability sessions while working with
COPS. He calls the sessions a “public drama. It’s an effort to try to develop a
sense of significance. It’s a public action to give people the right and the
opportunity to be public personas.”
Cort�s’ success with COPS brought him notoriety. From 1975 to 1985, he
moved four times to create new IAF organizations: to Los Angeles, then to
Houston, then to Mercedes in South Texas, and then, in 1985, to Austin. Looking
back, Cort�s acknowledges that the COPS experience was pivotal. It was
the first congregationally based organization in the IAF, and those
congregations gave COPS the clout that it needed to succeed. No other IAF
organization “had the ability to be that effective,” he said recently. “We had
the numbers and we had the institutional base.”
A Roman Catholic who attends Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in East Austin
whenever he’s in town, Cort�s is an omnivorous, voracious reader.
Cort�s’ home overflows with books. Not surprisingly, his wife, Oralia,
got an advanced degree in library science and recently began working in the
children’s section at the San Antonio Central Library. She also works as a
co-chair of Austin Interfaith. The Texas IAF offices are a warren of
bookshelves, filled with scores of books on Asian history, American history,
politics, philosophy, and a dozen other topics.
Cort�s is also like a political candidate whose campaign never ends. In
the first two weeks of May he was in San Francisco, New Orleans, San Antonio,
Baltimore, Florida, Houston, Mississippi, and Kansas City. When I finally
caught up with him near midnight on July 10, he had been in Chicago, McAllen,
and San Antonio over the previous 14 hours. He left the next morning at 7:40
for Los Angeles. What keeps him going? “I get a lot of energy from what I do. I
like to see people get charged up, turned on.” And the next challenges for the
IAF in Texas are smaller cities like Laredo, Corpus Christi, Lubbock, or
Tyler.
Cort�s calls himself an organizer, but he considers himself first and
foremost a teacher. He also calls himself a mentor and an agitator. He’s been
called an “outside agitator” many times, but his goal is to agitate people on
the inside. He challenges and prods ordinary citizens to fight for themselves.
He doesn’t want to lead, he wants to create leaders to lead others.
So call him an agitator, a malcontent who can’t accept the status quo. His
job, he says, is “getting people to raise questions about what is important to
them, and inspiring in them a capacity to act.” If it takes agitation to get
more people involved in the political process, then America needs more
agitators like Ernesto Cort�s. n
This article appears in July 21 • 1995 and July 21 • 1995 (Cover).