History Is Written by The Winners

And those who can pay for it

 

While I was in Texas, Dan Benitez had hired a consultant firm from New York for a study on the efficiency of sub-recipients. When I came back the crippling negative report, which I had not seen, had been distributed among the City Council. I didn’t know about the other neighborhoods, but I knew very well that the TBA was, during the time I was gone, not a good example of efficiency or great results. When I got back, I had to fire half the staff hired while I was gone to get things back in order. 

Six months later, when I finally saw the report, I called the consultants in New York and asked them to come back at their own expense and rewrite the report including all the substantial accomplishments we had in the six months since my return.  They politely told me to write my own report.

Thinking back, I should have done the same thing I did later with the Lumber Company: hire them to come and amend and update their report, and then send the bill to the Community Development Department to Dan Benitez. But I didn’t think of it then.

HISTORY: Their report is not history. It is a source for history. This book will also be a source for history. In a free country, history has a better chance to include conflicting anecdotes.

 

To Affect History it Helps to Have

the Power of an Advisory Council

 

Power is the name of the game if you want to win. Money and power make this world move. Maybe I should say Power and Wealth, since wealth includes more than just money, but wealth is too broad a term. Other powerful things like love, ambition, and ego are part of the mix. Love is powerful, a big part of what makes the world go around, but in the short run, money and power win. In the long run, maybe love always under your control is a more enduring clout, because money and power can come and go. If you could combine love with money and power, you would have a very powerful mix. Why don’t we have more of it? Sometimes we are greedy people at heart.

Evil and corruption appear everywhere, the eternal battle between good and evil. This includes the day-to-day struggle where money and power often win if good people do nothing. Thus, we must combine money and power with love and justice! Such a compelling combination demands work, but I keep saying if you share power and love, then wealth and justice will follow. Some people believe that love and power don’t go together. Ask Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. It may be wishful thinking, but I also think they are intricately connected. I wonder what my friend Ray would say about this, but I am not sure that Ray is the kind of person who would turn the other cheek. Am I? Unfortunately, probably very seldom. The least we could do is to take better care of each other. Christianity advocates turning the other cheek and loving your neighbor as yourself. It is a unique concept that has pulled together the largest and most fundamental changes in the history of mankind. Thus, there is power in the love of your neighbor. It is a shareable power, although I don’t always do it myself. However, this power of consideration of others is included in the history of our nation and shares the credit for its success, a success we owe to the Constitution and the separation of political power leading to the spectacular results in the last two hundred and a half years.  The people who negate this statement or who claims that this country is not caring enough, do not have the track record to prove that there are better examples of what they criticize. It is true that looking at details, corruption does surfaces everywhere. Even worshippers of Christianity have made mistakes. Corruption involves a constant battle, and before we point fingers at anyone, we must search for and identify the enemies within. Volunteer organizations in this country form a fourth branch to politics, economy and religion. We give more individual aid to other countries than any other country, due mostly to Christianity. Muslims in general don’t do it.

A lesson learned in my time in Beaumont, TX was that it is helpful to have powerful people on your side, especially if you don’t have enough money. Having bankers and attorneys on your team helps a lot if you don’t sell out to them.

It occurred to me to gather an advisory council of our own and to go to the top. I began by asking selected friends and acquaintances for the names of the most powerful people in Pima County, AZ, friends such as Dave Parslow, and the head of Legal Aid, a university professor, and many others. From there, I selected the ten most recommended names. I evaluated them for their integrity, honesty, impeccable reputation, concentrating on the love part of money and power, and eliminated three of them. I personally went to see the remaining seven. I told them what the TBA was trying to accomplish within a defined time frame and all of them agreed to be on the Advisory Council. Once together, we took a tour of the Barrio. They were impressed enough to join the Advisory Council of the TBA. So far, I had not consulted the TBA, so I brought it up to the Board one day when Danny Cross was not present. The Board approved all the individuals on the Advisory Council, despite not knowing any of them.

Without any expenses, I had enlisted a diverse group of highly influential individuals, and the first request I made was for a professional audit. I wanted to know, and wanted them to know, that we were clean. The CPA woman in the group took it upon herself to review the finances of the association and came back with a clean bill of health.

After my return, one of the family members in the Self Help Housing project, kept telling me that he had heard that Ellen had misused some of the funds. I told him I didn’t believe that to be true. He insisted. I did not think it was in her character to do anything like that, but the truth needs to be visible. Now that issue could be laid to rest. Corrigible mistakes, yes, but there had been no hanky-panky with TBA funds. I never told the family member about this review.

With the support from the advisory council there were immediate results. We already had the good will of Bill Ealey, but now thanks to the Advisory Council, we had direct support from the City Manager, a change in direction from the innuendos in the newspaper for a while and solid relationships with the professionals and financial institutions we did business with. Many subtle barriers disappeared, and a protective bubble kept us not in isolation, but in a ‘leave them alone’ type of attitude. Previously, if you were from a barrio, you got less respect than if you were from the foothills. Somehow, where it counted and when you least expected, we were beginning to get a lot of respect.

I don’t want to mislead the reader. In retrospective, although there were bumps of support and respect following achievements, the more success we had, the more resentment and subtle opposition we encountered at a surprisingly very high level, from politicians and from the media.

I reached out to the Advisory Council several times with very good results, but contrary to my own best advice, their support was not a source of power that I was willing to share. A big mistake on my part because, when toward the end when things were going downhill, their help could have made a difference, but I didn’t want to have anyone else on board. Had others on our good side had access to the advisory council, perhaps they could have kept the fight going a bit longer. 

As it was, the son of a well-known store owner, whom I’ll call William, the same one who brought the newspaper reporter to the board meeting under the pretense of “news” that I was going to be fired, managed to contact some of the advisors to turn them against me. He failed. He also contacted the doctor who gave us the loan for the tractor to try and scare him with legalities and have us lose the tractor. He failed. Later, he contacted a foundation in California that was contemplating giving us a guaranteed loan to restore half a block of an adobe dilapidated project with the rehab crew. He badmouthed the project to them and poisoned the well. Here he succeeded and they withdrew their offer. We tried our best at pulling in our direction, but even in our group, there were people with selfish and sometimes evil intentions trying to pull in their own direction. Now I wondered if Williams was working on his own or if he was a plant.

I should add here that the TBA did get a very good attorney to represent us in contracts and some other issues, Art Chapa. He served us well as a transitional person to the Advisory Council. He may have done much more than I was ever aware of. Very often the success of the TBA was independent of my knowledge, as were the many sacrifices and triumphs by others.

Sharing power is not a blank check, it can get complicated. Some people do not deserve power. Perhaps that’s conceited on my part, but who is to judge. Consider the case of Danny Cross, or worse, Mr. and  Mrs. Williams. They wanted power without sharing it. Maybe they were better people than I, but the way I saw it, they used their power to contain and withhold, not to enhance. Power can be misused and if I am tempted to do so myself, so can others. Why should I share it? Why should anyone share power with those trying to harm us? There is a difference.

What I mistakenly saw was that William, who at first was very helpful to the effort, began to change when money appeared. CDBG funds were for low and moderate income, which was the reason he didn’t qualify, but he claimed to have Indian blood and having married a black lady, he had a minority spouse, so he thought they were entitled to government money by playing the minority card, thus, in their perspective, entitled to power as well. When his claim failed, compared to the need of others, he set out to destroy what we and others were doing. Is it envy and greed? Was it a hidden agenda? Or did they perhaps have a valid point that I failed to see, or they failed to explain? I think it was the hidden agenda.

In another case of wrong kind of power, my friend Ray who doesn’t care what your background is, got into an altercation with a black professor at the University of Arizona whose personality rubbed him the wrong way, as happens. When the highly educated professor said that his race was entitled to affirmative action and other perks due to a history of slavery, and that he wanted Black Power to be acknowledged, implying something was due to him, personally, including restitution, Ray blew up.

“Really?” exploded Ray in a fashion I had seldom seen him express. Ray never agreed with me about sharing power. He only went as far as articulating “not to abuse power.”

“I’ll bet you a years’ salary that you have no slavery in your personal history, and if so, then I’ll bet three year’s salary that, knowing you, if you did, it was your family who captured other and sold them as slaves to the English, or was it to the Portuguese?” he fired at the professor. That conversation did not end happily. Neither of them wanted to share any power with the other. I try to avoid that kind of confrontation with diplomacy, not him. The classical pyramid of power is a visual that makes it difficult to understand and accept the sharing part. Whites are constantly accused of not sharing power with browns or yellows, and there is some truth in that. There is always opposition in life, even within the same group. It is a fact of life and it goes both ways. Yet, not sharing does not necessarily mean exclusion, as there are legal and ethical ways of gaining power despite the opposition of others. We were becoming living proof of that in the Barrio.

The experience of power from the advisory board to assist an association enhanced my understanding of the importance of getting mentors for children from disadvantaged homes and environments. As a result, I agreed with Ray when he told me that he made an exception to sharing power, “Mentorship is education, the true meaning of sharing power and books are like good mentors.” I made a mental note to tell Grijalva about mentoring as part of education, but unfortunately never did. “Also parents should read to their children no matter what ethnic background they come from.” Amen.

I then told Ray of one of my experiences.

“For one of my psychology classes, while at the university, I did a questionnaire survey on students’ study habits, and found some very surprising correlations. None of them followed up scientifically, but pertinent here. Among many questions, I asked students if their parents read to them as children, where, and how often. In unrelated chronology, I asked them where they studied most often, and about their Grade Point Average. Over one hundred responses, half had one of their parents read to them. Their answers showed that their favorite place to study, kitchen table, bedroom, sofa, etc., was the place where they were read to as children. And with two exceptions, the upper half in GPA scores was made of those whose parents read to them when children, the lower half did not have parents who read to them.” This is a very powerful support for family involvement. Just as my selection of Advisory Council members was done not with equality but with equity, so must be the sharing of power.

One problem with the word ‘equity’. I share a thought of when victory leads to defeat:

“…until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits …” Alexander Tyler

Victory of handouts = defeat of democracy.