A model for Texas?

Read this piece, and every time it says "LA" mentally insert "Texas". Granted, the labor laws aren't nearly as conducive to this sort of organizing, but I believe there is much to be learned from what Contreras accomplished.

The Man Who Changed L.A.

When Miguel Contreras became leader of the Los Angeles labor movement back in 1996, he inherited a set of time-honored axioms about life and politics under the Southern California sun.

The first was that nobody actually worked in campaigns -- walking precincts, making phone calls. The state and the city were too big for anyone to mount a significant field operation. Campaigns consisted of fundraising and advertising: money in, message out, no activists need apply. The second was that it would take years, perhaps decades, for the wave of Latino immigrants sweeping the state to have an impact on its politics. Republican governor Pete Wilson's Proposition 187 two years earlier, which denied public services to undocumented immigrants, may have riled the Latino community, but the payback, if any, would be a long time coming. And the third
was that the labor movement, in Los Angeles as everywhere else, was shuffling off to Jurassic Park -- a dinosaur incapable of saving itself, much less affecting its environment.

None of this came as news to Miguel, but it somehow never occurred to him that these were realities set in stone. The son of immigrant farmworkers, he had gone to work at 17 for Cesar Chavez's union, where he learned that every so often improbable social transformations were all in a day's, or a decade's, work. Miguel had a decade -- not even, just nine years -- to transform Los Angeles when he died last Friday, at age 52, of a sudden heart attack. The smog and the traffic remain unchanged, but politically the place is unrecognizable.