Neighborhood watch: a Texas twosome takes on polluters, and wins - Profile/People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources

Sierra, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Marilyn Berlin Snell

Sylvia Herrera was seven years old when her teacher taped her mouth shut. It was her first week of school at Govalle Elementary in East Austin, Texas. She was being punished for speaking Spanish. More than four decades later, the memory still stings. But today, with a master's degree in social work and a doctorate in health education from the University of Texas, Herrera's voice is familiar and frequently heard in Austin's environmental politics.

Her friend Susana Almanza can match Herrera's stories of early life in their Austin neighborhood. In a family of ten children, Almanza became the translator at age five because she had picked up English best. Whether to the grocery store with her mother or to the ballot box with her father--day laborer who believed so strongly in voting that he was willing to pay Texas's poll tax--the young Almanza was brought along. Sometimes, she says, she didn't translate what people said to her parents.

"Following my dad around, I learned about racism at a very early age--how you were treated if you were poor or spoke only Spanish," says Almanza, 52. "My life experience mentored me in speaking out against injustice." With thick black hair she pulls back: with combs, Almanza speaks English with a Tex-Mex blend of southern drawl and a more-southern-still Spanish accent. A single mother of four and grandmother of two, Almanza's open face and laid-back

We are sitting in a tiny house on Garden Street that Almanza and Herrera, 50, bought with part of a $130,000 "Leadership for a Changing World" Ford Foundation award they won last year. The house serves as the office for PODER, which the women cofounded in 1991. Poder means "power" or "empowerment" in Spanish, but it's also an acronym for People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources. The group helped boot polluting industries from East Austin and then changed the zoning laws that herded polluters there in the first place.

In the office a photo of the two women protesting at a massive fuel-storage facility in East Austin hangs on the wall. (There's also a bumper sticker that reads: "They aren't hot flashes. They are power surges.") Another photo shows a young woman marching in the street, fist raised. "That's me at a protest in Waco, way back," says Almanza, who adds that she was a member of the Brown Berets, a Chicano iteration of the Black Panthers, in the 1970s. When asked how she has managed lifelong activism without burning out, she laughs and answers quickly--without really answering. "People think I seem calm," she says, "hut they don't want to read what's in the bubble over nay head!"

Herrera nods then glances upward, as though reading unspoken words above both of them. Her beaded blue earrings, shaped like corncobs, stand out against her jet-black hair. "Thank God our parents taught us about respect," says the single mother of two. "We realize that not everybody has laced the adversity we have. Sometimes it's hard, but we've got to be willing to educate, not alienate--provide information about Austin's zoning laws, for instance, in a way people can hear."

The topic of zoning is full of unintelligible shorthand; it's about endless meetings under fluorescent lights, and bureaucratic niggling. It seems boring, I admit to Almanza and Herrera. "It seems boring," they politely reply. Then they pull out their large City of Austin map.

It's late April and the weather outside has turned humid and warm. The wrought-iron screen door, which Herrera's father designed and welded (along with the bars on the windows), lets in a slight breeze. Garden Street is typical of East Austin, with its small homes and well-tended lawns, kids whizzing around on bicycles or playing in the yard, and live oaks and pecans offering a verdant canopy of shade. What stands out, however, is the chain-link fence with a KEEP OUT sign, smokestacks, and latticework of imposing metal towers and high-voltage power lines at the end of the block. Surrounded by single-family homes and a school, the four-unit Holly Power Plant looms above the trees.

After we unroll and tack down the map with coffee mugs, Almanza looks up. "First, we made it color-coded. Then we got really mad."

Most of Austin's neighborhoods and the area around its famous public swimming hole, Barton Springs, are a relaxing blue (for parks and other city property) and yellow (for single-family homes). But East Austin looks bruised, with blocks of purple and red--for industrial and commercial--crowded within its boundaries at three times tire rate for the rest of the city. Many single-family homes were built on East Austin land zoned as industrial, so the property has less value and is difficult to insure; it also means that on this property a resident can and often does run an auto-body repair and paint shop, or other toxic business, out of his home.

"We're about to make history," says Almanza. "It took two years and a lot of arguing, but the East Austin Neighborhood Plan is going to down-zone over 600 parcels, mostly single-family residences, from industrial to residential, and to restrict any more industrial from coming here.