Change taking root in the community garden

front-line reporting fom Claire Goodwin-Gittlesohn, newest SWU intern extraordinaire:

The Roots of Change Community Garden is running and growing strong! Each week, community members, students, and members of the Southwest Workers Union have been working diligently, weeding, mulching, planting new black eyed peas and okra, harvesting tomatoes, and battling fire ants and aphids. Last week, we hosted a group of youth from the Boys and Girls Club, and we saw how exciting a little bit of dirt and some seeds could actually get. We taught them how important water was for our food to grow, and hopefully we changed their perspective on soil a little, showing them that it has purposes other than for getting you dirty.

Right now, we are growing organic tomatoes, cucumbers, okra, black-eyed peas, Serrano peppers, New Mexico green chiles, grapes, oregano, mint, bananas, strawberries, raspberries, green beans, and squash. The next few weeks we are hoping to harvest and plant more seeds, if the summer heat will give them the opportunity to grow. We're also building a compost and starting a native plant garden, which the entire community will be able to enjoy in the years to come.

We're always looking for new community members, students, and any other people who would like to help us with in the garden. So come on in and learn how fun gardening can be!

Call Claire at (210) 299-2666 for more info.

Domestic Worker Member, Araceli, in NY Times

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Domestic Workers Organize to End an 'Atmosphere of Violence' on the Job

Conference participants rallied in Manhattan on Saturday for the New York State Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights.

By CARA BUCKLEY and ANNIE CORREAL

Published: June 9, 2008, New York Times

The women’s stories seemed to come from a backward country, or from a shameful time in the United States that many would sooner forget.

Sharing stories from the workplace: Violet Anthony, top, was slammed against a wall and subjected to beatings after she arrived from India; Georgia Danan, middle, was paid just $70 for working a 24-hour shift; and Araceli Herrera, bottom, says employers searched her bags before they would allow her to leave for the day.

The march was part of the first National Domestic Workers Congress.

One woman, too scared to give her name, told of being struck by her employer in Bethesda, Md., as she scrubbed her hands raw polishing the floor. Another woman, Violet Anthony, who is 29 and from Mumbai, said her face became marbled with bruises after her employer in Queens slammed her into a wall and slapped her. Araceli Herrera said some of her employers inspected her bags before she left their homes and refused to drive her to or from the bus stop, a half-hour’s walk away. One employer, she said, fired her after she had a gallbladder operation and needed a month’s rest.

“With each job, I was exploited more. The thing is, the more you suffer, the harder it is to defend yourself,” said Ms. Herrera, 48, who trained to be an optometrist in her native Mexico and now works as a housekeeper in San Antonio. “We come from an atmosphere of violence, of blows, and we think we have to tolerate that.”

All three women were in Manhattan over the weekend for the first National Domestic Workers Congress, four days of workshops, meetings and a rally to demand rights for a work force that organizers describe as splintered, almost invisible, and staggeringly difficult to organize.

“Collective bargaining is not possible,” said Ai-jen Poo, an organizer with Domestic Workers United, an advocacy group for nannies, caregivers for the elderly, and housekeepers in New York. Workers usually achieve rights through strength in numbers, Ms. Poo said, banding together to pressure an individual employer to change. But in the New York City area, she estimated, there are 200,000 domestic workers working for perhaps as many employers.

“The power dynamics are different,” Ms. Poo said. “If you try to negotiate, you’re out.”

The conference drew about 100 women, most of them representatives from domestic workers’ groups in about 10 cities. Nearly all of them were immigrants, from Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, the Philippines and India. They came together to build alliances and hone strategies to demand benefits that many of their employers almost assuredly take for granted: paid vacations and holidays, cost-of-living wage increases, health benefits and advance notice of termination. The workers threw their support behind a proposed New York State Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, which, if passed, would be the first in the nation.

“Right now, it’s like the wild, wild West — anything goes,” Ms. Poo said. “Our point is that there needs to be a basic standard of protections, because the majority fall under employers who abuse, and everyone is vulnerable.”

Ms. Anthony said she was duped into working for next to nothing after responding to an ad in India that promised her $600 a month for baby-sitting in the United States. Instead, she said, her employer took away her passport after she arrived in 2004, paid her $100 a month for her first job, in New Jersey, and later forced her to work without pay from 7 a.m. to midnight at his home in Queens, cleaning, cooking and baby-sitting. The man also threatened to tie her up in the basement, she said. After his wife beat her, she said, she fled to a neighbor’s home. Ms. Anthony later learned of a group for South Asian workers that helped her move on to a better job as a mail clerk at a law firm.

The woman who said she was beaten by her employer in Maryland has been living at a shelter. At the conference, she drew small hearts on her name tag, but fearing repercussions from her former employer, asked that her name not be made public. She is 37, a slight woman with small hands and a stud adorning her nose. She is from Kanpur, India, and arrived in Bethesda in December 2007 to work, she said, for a man who worked at the Indian Embassy. Her days started at 6 a.m. and lasted well into the night, and she said she was paid $200 for three months’ work. Exhausted, sickened by the chemical cleaning solutions that seared her lungs and burned her hands, she ran away in April and was placed in a shelter. “At first I had many dreams,” she said. “But I have let go of so many dreams.”

Casa de Maryland, an immigrants’ advocacy group, and its Committee of Women Seeking Justice took on her case and sent her to the conference.

Other women told less harrowing tales that still evinced how little their work was valued, and how little recourse they felt they had. One woman, who wore a yellow T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Tell Dem Slavery’s Done,” said she used to baby-sit full time in New York City for $275 a week, and was pushed to work for less. Georgia Danan, a 76-year-old who works as a caregiver for the elderly, said an agency in California paid her $70 for working a 24-hour shift; she is fighting for several months of back wages. Martha Alvarado, who is 41 and from Peru, said that in her first housekeeping job in the United States, in 1994, she was forced to live in a basement and work six days a week, until 11 p.m. at night.

Ms. Alvarado, like many of the women at the conference, said she considered herself lucky to be there because untold thousands of domestic workers remained exploited and deeply isolated.

“Many women feel they are alone,” she said, “and don’t dare come out in the light and speak.”

"Your Couch Doesn't Watch TV"

At a community forum last night, CPS Energy demonstrated once again that they just don't get it and seem to be even more clueless about who their customers are. Receiving a mayoral mandate to increase energy efficiency, CPS unveiled its bold step: advertising. Its new campaign includes turning off the TV and lights. The company repeatedly emphasized the wastefulness of plasma TV, a item you don't see much or the need to turn down your thermostats, which the majority of houses do not have.

CPS in recent years has invested in energy efficiency in their own buildings and cut electricity use by an impressive 25%, however there is no commitment to truly fund these programs in the community.

Also, we were inundated by talk of the 'wave of the future.' Which in case you were thinking solar power, weatherization or great public transit systems, you are wrong. The wave of the future, which is going to merit massive funding is real-time meters with color changing globes that tell you when you are using too much energy. Yes, CPS customers, into our leaking houses without insulation or proper windows, we will get to enjoy watching a color changing ball that interprets our energy use within the bigger market. In case you have more questions about where your payments are going, CPS will be releasing a video to highlight this new gadget.

By the time CPS and the City finish their numerous, seemingly endless, amount of studies, San Antonio will be once again behind the curve. Instead, we are ready to be on the forefront of developing a green economy, green jobs and a renewable decentralized energy system. Models are out there. We need the City Council to propose real solutions, real policies that will go beyond its term to legislate San Antonio onto the right course.

Austin school cafeteria workers ask district to pay for uniforms

Request comes as Education Austin requests $29.5 million in overall raises and benefits package from district

By Molly Bloom
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, June 16, 2008

Austin school district cafeteria workers must supply their own work clothes: a pair of black pants, a white collared shirt, rubber-soled shoes, and a hairnet. It's not haute couture, but school district bosses say that workers should pay for the clothes and hairnets because they can wear the items on any number of occasions outside of the hot lunch line.

Some food service workers disagree.

Last month, the Austin school board heard a grievance originally filed by six food service workers who say it's unfair that the district requires its 750 cafeteria workers — among the district's lowest-paid employees — to pay for the clothing and mandatory hairnets themselves.

Larry Throm, the district's chief financial officer, said a budget request for uniforms for the food service workers, most of whom work part time, was submitted for consideration for the upcoming school year budget that Superintendent Pat Forgione is expected to present to trustees today.

Although several other local school districts, including Hays and Eanes, provide food service workers with uniforms, Austin food service workers receive higher starting wages, $9.50 compared with $8.25 and $9.24, respectively, and significantly more paid holidays.

District officials say that purchasing workers' clothes and shoes would require corresponding cuts in other areas of the food service department's budget. It would cost $27,000 a year to give each worker two 50-cent hairnets a week.

Still, Aracely Reyes, a 40-year-old mother of six who makes $10.15 an hour as a part-time worker in the Kealing Middle School cafeteria, said it's not fair that she has to spend about $200 a year on work supplies.

"They don't pay us anything extra" to purchase them, Reyes said.

The workers' request for uniforms comes as Education Austin, a labor group with 4,000 members including food service workers, asks trustees for an 11 percent raise for all employees over two years, an increase in the district's minimum wage from $9.50 to $13 over two years and a district contribution to health insurance costs for employees' families, among other items.

The total price tag for Education Austin's request would be about $29.5 million.

After a series of meetings with the cafeteria workers last month, trustees declined to act immediately on the grievance.

Trustees have scheduled a fifth grievance hearing about the uniform request for September and have asked district administrators to "explore the development of comprehensive food service work standards in collaboration with the Southwest Workers' Union," which represents about 200 district employees, most of them food service workers.

An attorney for the school district said that if administrators supplied cafeteria workers with the requested equipment, they might have to provide mandatory supplies and uniforms for bus drivers, custodians, maintenance workers and other employees. Currently, the district supplies uniforms only to district police officers.

Giving uniforms to all 2,455 custodians, food service workers, and transportation and maintenance workers would cost more than $715,000, officials said. To supply all food service workers with ten $15 shirts, ten $18 pairs of pants and two 50-cent hairnets a week would cost about $274,500 for the 36-week school year, officials said.

The food service workers calculate their needs more modestly. They say each worker needs five $7 shirts, five $16 pants, a $70 pair of shoes, and $15 for hairnets each year — a total cost of about $150,000.

Under state law, food service workers must wear hair restraints and clean outer clothing, but the Austin school district goes beyond that. It requires food service workers, most of whom work less than 40 hours a week, to wear white collared shirts and black pants so that other employees can identify them, said district food service director Chris Carrillo. Workers are required to wear rubber-soled shoes such as sneakers for safety reasons, Carrillo said.

All of the items — white shirts, black pants and sneakers — can be worn outside of work, Carrillo said. The district has food service workers buy their own hairnets so they can select a model that suits their hair color and head size, Carrillo said.

"They're more of a personal hygiene item," Carrillo said.

mbloom@statesman.com; 445-3620

Source: Southwest Workers' Union; Austin school district

Domestic Workers Unite

Domestic Workers Unite
by Lizzy Ratner, The Nation


Georgia Danan was both laughing and crying. It was Friday, June 6, and she was sitting in a Barnard College classroom, telling the tale of how she came to be a 76-year-old Filipina domestic worker fighting to win $22,000 in back wages from a recalcitrant employer. Speaking in hurried, distraught sentences, she unfurled the story of how she immigrated to Los Angeles in 2005, sought a job as a domestic worker through the Mt. Sinai Home Care agency, and then, like so many before her, found herself being both poorly treated--she said she was regularly yelled at and accused of stealing--and cheated out of a minimum wage. For one fifteen-day period, she said, the agency didn't pay her at all.

"I am old. If I get sick, if I have no money, what will happen to me for my medicine and doctors?" said Danan, a former third-grade schoolteacher, as she wiped two streaks of tears from beneath her bifocals. "So I am appealing for the sake of all caregivers that are exploited like me. I am appealing that we should have justice!"

And then she chuckled.

This gesture of defiance in the midst of despair, of humor amid horror, was the dominant if unofficial theme of the first National Domestic Workers Congress, which took place June 5-8. For four days, some one hundred nannies, housekeepers and caregivers came together in New York City--one of the most important domestic-work capitals--to share their stories and to strategize solutions with regard to their collective mistreatment. Many of these women (and they were almost all women) had traveled long distances to be there: from Miami, Denver and as far as San Francisco. And many, like Danan, had undertaken personal journeys that stretched back even farther: to India, Mexico and the Caribbean.

These treks had been followed by excruciating tours of misery in the homes of wealthy, and occasionally violent, employers. Several women had actually been hit or otherwise assaulted in the line of duty. By the time they reached New York, they were determined to make themselves heard.

"For too long we women have been silenced," said Joycelyn Gill-Campbell, a Barbados-born nanny-turned-organizer for Domestic Workers United, one of the leading New York-based domestic rights groups, during a speech to her sister congressgoers. "But today we are in the forefront, we are moving forward... We are going to build an enormous movement!"

The time is certainly ripe for a movement of domestic workers. In the annals of contemporary American labor injustices, the ills suffered by domestic workers remain among the most stark and stomach-churning.

Barred from even the minimum protections of basic labor laws like the National Labor Relations Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act, domestic workers float in a kind of legal zero-gravity zone where they have no right to organize and no guarantees of paid sick days, paid vacation days, severance pay or advance notice of termination. Some forms of domestic work are also excluded from portions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (a fact that helps explain the wide pendulum-swing of wages that domestic workers earn, from as little as 50 cents an hour to, say, $10). As a result, all too many women who make their living in other people's homes--cleaning their dishes, raising their kids and otherwise making their lives possible--find themselves enduring everything from humiliation to exploitation to worse.

"The lady said, 'Scrub it, scrub it, scrub it!'" recalled Araceli Herrera, a 58-year-old housekeeper in San Antonio, replaying a former employer's obsessive insistence that she clean, clean, clean even though Herrera was suffering from agonizingly painful gallstones. Later, when she tried to return to work after a monthlong recovery from gallbladder surgery, she found that the employer had hired somebody else.

Not that this was the first time she had been ill treated by an employer. An immigrant from Mexico City who arrived in the United States at the age of 40 after a harrowing weeklong trek across the border and through the desert, Herrera has experienced a post-immigration life that reads like a latter-day Steinbeck novel, from the forced separation from her then-16-year-old son--a memory that still makes her cry--to the story of her first employer, who paid her $45 a week, made her sleep on the kitchen floor, let her rest only a few hours a night and then fired her when a hip injury prevented her even from walking. Even some of her kindlier employers have often shown an all-too-callous thoughtlessness, taking vacations at whim while refusing to let her spend Christmas with her ailing mother--now deceased--in Mexico.

"They never think we are humans," Herrera said, her genial voice turning suddenly raw. "I am a lady. I am a woman. I have dreams. I want to do something. No, they never [think] that. They maybe think we are machines."

To many of the women at the congress, stories like these, enraging as they are, are hardly new. As Gill-Campbell observed, they've been playing out their brutal plots since the beginning of time--or at least since the earliest days of this country. "The roots really date back from the days of slavery," she said, tracing the evolution of modern-day domestic work from the forced household labor performed by women slaves, to the free but rarely voluntary housework performed by post-abolition-era African-American domestics, to her own degrading treatment in the house of her first employer.

"To see the way I was treated in that first job, having to wear a white uniform from head to toe and white shoes," said Gill-Campbell, describing a scene in which, while dressed in this full servant regalia, she was forced to push her employer's dog in a stroller.

Moreover, such scenes of humiliation just seem to be proliferating. The Census Bureau estimates that there are currently 1.5 million domestic workers toiling and struggling in the United States, and domestic-work advocates say that, anecdotally, this number is rising, spiking upward with the tide of increasingly wealthy Americans who feel that time, work or money makes them no longer capable of cleaning their own toilets.

"The documentation has shown that as wealth inequality grows, so does the domestic industry," said Ai-Jen Poo, 34, a tall, preternaturally calm organizer who also works for Domestic Workers United.

In an effort to begin reversing this trend--or, at the very least, the exploitation that so often accompanies it--domestic workers and the groups that represent them have been forced to conjure up canny and sometimes unexpected solutions, like, working with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice to educate and organize sympathetic employers. At the same time, the New York groups have been waging a fierce campaign for a bill of rights, which, if passed by the New York State Legislature, would finally extend basic labor rights to the state's roughly 200,000 domestic workers.

This campaign was in full swing on the third morning of the conference, when the women of the National Domestic Workers Congress gathered in front of City Hall in Lower Manhattan with banners, a sound system, and yellow T-shirts embossed with the words, "Rights, Respect, Recognition for Domestic Workers." In reality, this rally probably would not serve as the grand, suasive push that would tip certain legislators in their favor (despite the bill's uncontroversial, and incontrovertible, merits). And, it was excruciatingly hot. But none of this seemed to take any air out of the women's lungs.

"We are the strength of this city, whether they know it, yes or no," shouted Deloris Wright, a veteran nanny with a graceful Jamaican lilt, who served as master of ceremonies for the English-speaking part of the rally. "We are a powerful group of people!"

The crowd cheered, unleashing one of those wild roars usually reserved for large sporting events. The rally was just beginning. Perhaps some of those sleeping Albany legislators would hear them after all.

He said what? Mayor calls for going green

Yes ladies and gentleman, Mayor Hardberger said green collar jobs five times yesterday at the unveiling of his new "Mission Verde" sustainability plan for San Antonio. If city leaders walk the talk, the plan will convene taskforces to address the huge challenges facing San Antonio in the areas of energy efficiency and transportation.

Calling San Antonio a "low rate, high waste" energy economy, a report prepared by consultant CNT called on the City and CPS to prioritize energy efficiency. $10,000 per home could be saved a year in energy costs, according to the report.

While Councilwoman Diane Cibrian touted all the big businesses itching to cash in on the City's new interest in solar, including The Rim luxury shopping complex in her district, SWU continues to call on City Leaders to prioritize the homes of low-income families. We have to harness the opportunities of the green energy boom to lift working families out of poverty.

Among the suggestions the Mayor promised to champion were many initiatives SWU has long been fighting for, including:

- Rerouting of toxic train tracks
- A light rail
- Green collar job retraining and curriculum development
- The development of renewable energy sources including solar and wind
- Retrofitting programs for homes
- Efficiency programs for schools and government buildings
- Mandatory green building codes

Solar arrays on the Convention Center and San Antonio Airport were recommended, along with advanced metering, car sharing, and, importantly, the involvement of community organizations in the development of the sustainability programs.

Aurora Geis, CPS Board Chair, had some stern words for Council, who recently denied CPS the full 5% rate increase they wanted. While committing to fully fund CPS's newly doubled efficiency goals, she alluded that other green programs might get axed, and, cryptically, said CPS would need to move in the next 120 days on some critical "capital imporvement projects" (a.k.a. we want those nukes and we want them now).

Too bad the Mayor saved the most important and ambitious of his projects for his last year in office, after voting to invest billions into nuclear reactors as Boardmember of CPS. Time to get crackin 'berger.

Read about it in the SA Current and SA Express-News.

Victory! City to DOUBLE green energy efforts

CPS, city plan ways to save on energy use

By Anton Caputo, Express-News

CPS Energy announced Wednesday that it was nearly doubling its conservation goals over the next 12 years, a move that will be accompanied by significantly more stringent building codes to promote energy efficiency around San Antonio, Mayor Phil Hardberger said.

Utility officials made the announcement at CPS Energy's Summit on Energy Efficiency. The new goal of saving 771 megawatts by 2020 would offset nearly as much power production through efficiency programs as the utility's new $1 billion coal plant will produce.

It doesn't change the utility's plans to pursue two new nuclear reactors at the South Texas Project in Bay City, but could postpone the need for new power plants after that, CPS Energy Deputy General Manager Steve Bartley said.

“These are very aggressive goals in our opinion, but we believe they are achievable,” Bartley said. “We're talking about a fundamental transformation on how CPS Energy does business.”

The summit brought experts from all over the country to discuss the challenge of meeting the nation's booming energy demand at a time when conventional power sources are becoming more scarce and expensive and the threat of global warming is making people rethink the wisdom of depending on fossil fuels.

Hardberger applauded Wednesday's announcement by the city-owned utility and promised that a citywide sustainability plan unveiled at a City Council meeting next Wednesday would help drive the conservation goals.

“Clearly, building code improvements are going to be a major component,” he said. “We must act now. We don't have a choice. ... Energy efficiency is a necessity, not a luxury. That's the direction we have to go.”

Details of the new efficiency plan haven't been ironed out and will have to wait on a consultant's report that should be complete in three or four months.

Bartley said the efficiency program would cost about $800 million, but that the utility would have to pay only a fraction of that cost because much would be spread throughout the development community by more stringent building codes.

“But it'll give them something,” he said. “They'll be able to market energy efficiency.”

The utility already offers free programmable thermostats through its Peak Saver program. These allow customers to set heating and cooling units to automatically adjust during the day. It also allows the utility to remotely cycle a home's air conditioner on and off during times of peak demand.

CPS will launch another conservation program early next year when it begins rolling out “smart meters” to commercial customers, said Bruce Evans, director of customer solutions and delivery.

These will allow customers to see if they're using electricity when it's most expensive.

“You may decide not to run your dishwasher at those times when it's most costly,” Evans said. “You may decide you would rather wait to pay 8 cents a kilowatt hour rather than 35 cents.”

CPS had planned to roll out the program to commercial and residential customers over the next five years. But the timeline may be extended because the utility was counting on a 5 percent rate increase, which the City Council cut to 3.5 percent last month, Evans said.

The utility also announced it was creating a new senior-level position to take charge of its sustainable energy initiatives and that it would step up its use of renewable sources of power like wind and solar.

The utility's current renewable power goal is 15 percent of peak demand by 2020. That is being increased to 20 percent, or about 1,200 megawatts.

Even without the increase, CPS is tops in the nation for wind power among municipal-owned utilities.

It's a green accolade that utility Chairwoman Aurora Geis made sure to highlight, particularly with nearby Austin usually garnering attention for being an environmentally conscience city.

“That is twice the wind capacity of our neighbor to the north, and I'll leave it at that,” she said.

Staff Writers Vicki Vaughan and David Hendricks contributed to this report.

Change coming slowly in Hondo

By Zeke MacCormack, Express-News

HONDO — A new era begins here Monday when Hispanics gain control of a city council long dominated by Anglos, a minority in this community of 9,000 people.

Despite pledges of cooperation, distrust has already emerged since the May 10 election when Virginia Gonzalez, Lucio Torrez and Chavel Lopez solidly beat council incumbents.

The incoming council members campaigned on a platform promising “real change.” Lopez is a community activist who has long accused city leaders of ignoring the needs of working class residents of the Medina County seat.

The three wanted to be sworn in May 19, but instead watched the outgoing council take actions with which they disagree.

Most upsetting to them was a special meeting May 21 in which the council added a year to City Manager Robert Herrera's contract, extending it through 2012 and sweetening its severance pay provisions.

Mayor Jim Danner acknowledged the action was taken in anticipation of a new council majority, saying, “A couple of council members were concerned (the newcomers) might go after Mr. Herrera.”

Lopez, the outspoken leader of The Hondo Empowerment Committee, said of the contract changes, “I don't think it's a show of good faith.”

He noted that the city charter adopted by voters last year requires a three-fourths majority of the five council members to fire a city manager. It also lengthened city council terms to three years from two.

Ambiguous charter phrasing on when new council members take office has caused some of the discontent leading up to Monday's swearing-in ceremony.

It says, “Each newly elected person to the City Council shall be inducted into office at the first regular City Council meeting following the official canvassing of the election.”

A handout the city gave candidates stated the canvassing and oaths of office would occur at the May 19 regular council meeting. But city officials told the winners on election night that the handout was wrong — they wouldn't be seated until Monday,based on the city attorney's interpretation that the canvassing and oaths aren't done at the same meeting.

The May 19 meeting was canceled due to a lack of a quorum, leading to a special meeting May 21 to canvass votes.

“Its obvious to everybody that I talk to,” Torrez said. “They say, ‘These guys pulled a fast one on you.'”

Danner called the charter “a little confusing” but said there was no conspiracy to delay convening the new council.

Two members of the panel that drafted the charter disagreed on what the intent was. Jim Tomey, committee vice-chair, said its aim was to seat new members in June. But Bob Heyen, a former councilman on the panel, said oaths should have been taken May 19, had the meeting occurred.

Gonzalez said the old council's last-minute changes to Herrera's contract showed that “there's going to be friction.”

“I'm totally open to working with anyone, but we haven't been given a chance yet,” she said.

The incoming council members campaigned for more open government, improved services, expansion of local educational opportunities and boosting the local pay scale.

Despite running on a slate and being Lopez's brother in law, Torrez said he'll be independent.

“I think the way I think,” he said. “I don't follow anybody.”

Their victories have supporters like Armando Gonzalez hoping for smoother streets and better water pressure.

“All I want is for the Spanish community to be treated equally,” said Gonzalez, 65, who is not related to Virginia Gonzalez. “Before now ... white people controlled the city council. We don't want (council members) to fight. We want the city to be fair to both sides.”

Lopez led a protest last fall in which he accused city leaders of “environmental racism” over pollution from downtown grain silos and overflowing sewer lines.

Councilman J. Gruber said he's looking forward to working with the new members. “I think he'll realize we're not racists,” he said of Lopez.

Herrera said, “I don't have any preconceived opinion that they're coming in with a negative agenda. I believe they want to improve the quality of life and employment conditions.”

He expects Lopez's view of the city to change, adding, “He's part of the establishment now.”