On September 26 of this year, twelve neighborhood organizations will hold a convention sponsored by the San Diego Organizing Project at the Barrio Youth Station, 2175 Newton Avenue in San Diego. For the last few years each of the groups has been involved individually in an activity known as community organizing, performing “actions” — citizen protests, demonstrations, and confrontations with civic officials and landlords — to bring about needed changes in their neighborhoods. At this landmark convention, approximately 800 people will join together for the first time. They will adopt a constitution, elect officers, choose a name for the group, and decide on a platform of issues for the coming year. They will also celebrate the “victories” they have won.

Somewhere at the neighborhood convention a tall, thin man — with blue eyes, a high, suntanned forehead, and a neatly cropped brown beard — will probably be standing in the background, avoiding public attention as if it were a debilitating viral infection. Although he is a Jesuit priest and pastor of Christ the King Church at Thirty-second and Imperial Avenue, the thirty-three-year-old man probably will be dressed like a golfer — in a light-blue polo shirt and tan slacks — save for a weathered pair of sandals he has worn, as a missionary, throughout this country and in Latin America. A majority of the people at the convention will not recognize him on sight, and many of the participants will not know that he originated community organizing in San Diego five years ago. Those acquainted with Father Michael Kennedy, however, say that this lack of recognition doesn't bother him in the least. “Mike is interested in giving others authority,” says Marvin Threatt, who will soon become a deacon at Christ the King. “He doesn’t want the power. And community organizing isn’t another dole-out system for the needy. That just breeds lack of dignity. The point of community organizing is to allow the people to recognize, articulate, and act upon their own needs. What Mike does is empower the people to act for themselves.”

Father Michael Kennedy speaks with a pronounced Spanish accent and flavors his sentences with phrases from both that language and the jargon of the streets — a mixture of the various cultures of the Southeast San Diego community where he has lived, at Christ the King, for the last five years. Developing an ear for his multiple vocabularies is an acquired taste, as is becoming accustomed to the number of frequent distractions and interruptions that — like the linguistic interventions in his speech — fill the hours of his long day.

And one learns soon enough not to take personally his repeated habit of glancing down at an inexpensive wristwatch for the time. Kennedy is a busy man.

His day begins, between four-thirty and five in the morning, with a jog around the community- — the route varies — and with an hour of meditation. It concludes, often late in the evening, with an hour of solitude and more meditation. And the day itself is a routine of almost hourly appointments — church duties, committee meetings, counseling sessions, visits to the neighborhood, hospitals, jail, seminars on healing. At our first meeting, in a small office next to the parish of the church, I asked him about his daily schedule. A series of interruptions had already made it clear that even each hour had its own set of subdivisions. He began to answer — his goal is not to be a workaholic but to be an “integrated” person; he enjoys the beach and time spent with friends — when the telephone rang, the third time in minutes.

The call allowed an opportunity to peruse the office — a compact, cluttered .enclosure with old, comfortable furniture. A place to put your feet up, without hesitation, if you could find a place to put them. The walls were a quiltwork of photographs of family and friends, and of drawings which often had poetry inscribed upon them (one reads: “If you only stay/On the surface/You’ll never know the beauty/ That is within/Not even Bird Rock should fool you/You need to dive/Explore within”). The bookcase contained many theological texts — works by Thomas Merton among the most prominent — but also Carl Rogers and books on holistic healing, death and dying, meditation, and Latin America. “Good, senora," he said, concluding his discussion on the phone about fundraising ideas for community organizing. Then to me: “Where were we?” “Integrated person.”

"You first have to be who you are. Then act on behalf of your values and integration. I think that opening up the dimensions in one's spiritual life also taps into a person’s creative life. What happens in people’s inner worlds needs expression. I get blocked if I don’t create.”

There was a knock at the sliding glass door of the office. A woman entered and said, “Father Mike, I’m going shopping. Since you’ll be here alone until next week, I could get some things for you at the store. I have a check. What would you like? Orange juice? Eggs?”

“Simple foods. You know, some fruits, vegetables.”

Father Michael Kennedy “Orange juice?”

“Sure.”

“Eggs?”

“Si.”

“That it?”

“Oh,” he said, almost as an afterthought, as if the request were tinged with the hint of luxury, “some cayenne, no?” “Okay, cayenne.”

“Perfecto.”

He turned to me as the woman began to leave with her shopping list. “Know cayenne?”

“Yeah.”

Thumbs-up sign with a nodding wink. “Good stuff.”

“Oh, yes. Father Mike?” the woman said, returning through the glass door, “the funeral’s been moved up an hour to eleven, don’t forget the nine o'clock staff meeting. Oh — and call Margie.” "Bueno, senora, gracias.”

Again I asked him about his schedule, if his days were normally this busy. “Usually, yes,” he said. “Except for Fridays — my day off. I go to Rosarito Beach or to the mountains or relax with my friends. The schedule would be a strain otherwise. Not just a strain — but what I do would suffer proportionately without the break. I tend to become very impatient at times. The rest helps me to process the stuff out. That way I can have the strength to empower others.”

“Empower?”

"Si. Give them the authority. Let them depend on the Lord and on themselves. They don’t need me. The priests pass through. You leave something. You give something. And go.”

On some occasions, those “others” don’t realize they are being “empowered” at the time. At a recent fundraising meeting, for example, Kennedy and several representatives from neighborhood organizations met with members of the business community to discuss upcoming projects. Late in the meeting a man mentioned casually that part of his work involved writing grant proposals. “They’re tough to do, no?” asked Kennedy.

“Yes they are,” the man replied, “but there’s a knack to doing them.”

“I guess you have to do a lot of them?”

“Yes. They’re a big part of my job. After a while you develop a feel for writing them, though.”

“You know,” said Kennedy, his eyes beginning to widen, “we need a good' grant writer. We’ve been looking a long time for one. What do you think? Would you be interested?”

Twenty-two pairs of eyes watched the man agree to contribute his valuable skill to aid community organizing in San Diego.

“That’s the thing about Mike,” says Jill Watson, a parishioner at Christ the King and a member of F.I.S.T. — “Fight Injustice Starting Today,” one of the twelve neighborhood organizations that will meet on the twenty-sixth of September. “He sees a need and always seems to know who to get to fill it. He’s a realist who can tell the real pits in someone’s life from the imaginary ones. He gets you to do what only you can do — he never does your work for you — and then he quietly backs away. Because of this, you’d never know he had the original idea for community organizing in San Diego. He’s the opposite of a pompous person, and he never gives you the sense that ‘this is my baby.’ ”

Quite the contrary. Kennedy constantly, and rightfully, refers to the important work others are doing. If someone were to ask him at the upcoming convention whose “baby” it really was, he would point to the 800 people from the neighborhoods gathered there. Kennedy often refers as well to the many tasks that remain to be done. He habitually punctuates his discussions of the specific injustices he sees daily with the expression, “Can you imagine?” But inside this exclamation of moral shock is a second kind of question, one that resonates with the positive urgency of a challenge. Are you able to imagine, Kennedy seems to ask continually, ways of improving the situation?

Michael Kennedy was born in San Jose, California, in 1948. He was the second of three children, preceded by an older brother, Tom, and followed by a younger sister, Ann. His father, Eugene, worked as an arbitrator for the National Labor Relations Board in San Francisco, Now retired, Eugene and his wife Ruth live in Rio Del Mar, a few miles south of Santa Cruz, California.

Between the time of his birth and his graduation in 1966 from Bellarmine, a Catholic boys prep school in San Jose, Kennedy watched the Santa Clara valley grow, expand, and change from a quiet agricultural region dotted with cherry, plum, and apricot orchards — with a population of around 40,000 — to a suburban sprawl, with a population more than a million and a half, and finally to what became the “Silicon Valley” — an industrial Eden for the new technology.

While he was a student at Bellarmine (he graduated twelfth in a class of more than 300), Kennedy began a pattern of observation and activity that has been a constant in his life. What he saw during those years of growth and change, he remembers, was not so much what was being built in the area but rather what was being replaced. As land values escalated, the underprivileged were being moved slowly toward the eastern edge of the valley, to make room for the suburban middle-class communities springing up in their place. At the time, Kennedy’s sense of this migration was more an impression than anything else. But it was a lasting one.

He decided to become a Catholic priest in his senior year at Bellarmine. In the fall of 1966, he entered Sacred Heart Novitiate, a Jesuit seminary located in the foothills of Los Gatos, at the western rim of the Santa Clara Valley. Entering a novitiate is the first step toward the priesthood. The first two years are largely a time of retreat and testing to see if the young candidate is capable of a ‘‘life of service.” Kennedy spent these years at Sacred Heart and later in Santa Barbara, where he worked in a hospital. This period saw many changes taking place in the Church, as a result of the historic Vatican II.

The Vatican’s Second Ecumenical Council (1962-1965) placed a new emphasis on this world. According to Penny Lemoux, in her remarkable book Cry of the People (a dog-eared, annotated copy of which Kennedy has read several times), it also established two principles: ‘‘The Church is of and with this world, not composed of some otherworldly body of celestial advocates, and ... it is a community of equals, whether they be laity, priest, or bishop, each with some gift to contribute and responsibility to share.”

“1 entered the novitiate at a real good time,” Kennedy recalls. ‘‘I was introduced first to the old and then the new wave of Catholicism. The move from Los Gatos to Santa Barbara was both geographical and ideological because Vatican II made the Jesuit order more open and more human. At Los Gatos the emphasis was on an individualistic piety — people seek a private union with God. But the next year at Santa Barbara, even the Master of Novices had shifted to a new emphasis away from personal salvation to the question, ‘What does it mean to serve people in this world?’ ”

In 1968 Kennedy took his permanent vows and for the next four years he studied psychology, philosophy, and theology, first at Loyola University in Los Angeles, then at St. Louis University, and finally in San Francisco. In the summer months, priests had the choice of either taking more classes or working with the community. Influenced by what they felt was a new way of thinking in the Jesuit order, Kennedy and Steve Klink, his friend for the last thirteen years, spent their summers with the poor. They worked at Mono House in St. Louis, conducting a tutorial program for black children. They protested the Vietnam war by doing street theater in Chicago and by attending the trial of Daniel Berrigan at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. They also went to Appalachia and ran a camp for the “forgotten” poor children of the area.

“Mike has some of the craziness of a poet,” says Klink. “He’ll go down the street, take a group of neighbors and say, off the cuff, ‘It’s time for a picnic,’ and off they’ll go — just like that. But within this spontaneity., Mike is a very centered man. He trusts his intuitions, and he has a remarkable ability to cut through to the heart of an issue. He can make mistakes, though. He’s no saint. And he isn’t always the best on details. Intuition, yes; details, no.

“Somehow, as part of the project in Appalachia,” Klink continues, “we got a houseboat — a huge, $30,000 thing. We took the kids on a trip down the Kentucky River.’’ At one point, the boat got hung up on some rocks. They had docked it the night before at a river bank. The water had dropped about six feet overnight and the boat was in fairly shallow water. “When I started up the engines, I asked Mike if he saw anything down in the water. ‘Nope,’ he said, ‘nothing there.’ So I gunned the engines and tore the landing lights right off the bottom of the hull.”

Later on the same trip Kennedy gave vent to a feeling he has always fought hard to keep under control. “I became impatient,” he says. “I saw a lot of sad things and felt powerless to do anything about them.” All he had, at that time, were questions. “What are we doing for the lives of these kids?” he asked Klink. “Take penniless children on a $30,000 houseboat and show them what they could have if they really worked? Is this what we show them? That the goal is materialism?”

Between 1972 and 1974, Kennedy taught sociology at Bellarmine, his alma mater. In the summers he continued his alternating pattern of academic study and work in the world. He ran a social work program for 120 children, tutored in Alviso — an extremely depressed community at (and during the winter in) the southern shore of the San Francisco Bay — and spoke out for the cause of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. “Many of the things I was doing at the time were, you know, different,” he says. “But the school had a good principal, and he got behind me — so I could be part of the school and at the same time could take strong stands on the issues of the day.” While he was teaching at Bellarmine, Kennedy also helped establish the first Summer Institute of Community Organizing in Oakland. The program, which stressed a new, self-help approach for solving problems in the community, took its approach from the work done by Saul Alinsky in Chicago and from Alinsky’s belief that “self-respect arises only out of people who play an active role in solving their own crises and who are not helpless, passive, puppetlike recipients of private or public services.” Unlike previous efforts, in Oakland and elsewhere, in the summer institute the people of the community itself were responsible for choosing the issues, devising the strategies, and performing the demonstrations necessary to effect changes. The organizers — four Jesuit priests, two nuns, and three lay persons — functioned as joiners, providing the occasion for the neighborhoods to band together and improve conditions in their areas. Their initial emphases that summer were on safety at dangerous street comers and on rezoning. The program led to the formation of community organizing in Oakland, the first manifestation of this grassroots, autonomous approach to civic issues in California.

In 1974 the Church sent Kennedy to the Dominican Republic to work as a missionary. Occupying the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola in the West Indies, the Dominican Republic — and its neighbor Haiti — says Kennedy, “should be called Fourth World countries.” The average income on the island is less than one hundred dollars per year, and because of extreme malnutrition, the infant mortality rate is very high: ten percent of live births. Early in his stay, Kennedy witnessed the facts that underly these statistics. He saw two four-year-old children near a river. Due to malnutrition, their hair was white, their stomachs were “swollen unbelievably,” and they were trying to drink the dregs from an empty bottle of rum they had found lying in the riverbed. That same day, a priest who had been there for about a year told Kennedy, “It is hopeless here.”

Injustice, neglect, oppression, and want were routine. “I would visit hospitals in the area,” Kennedy remembers, “and 1 would see hundreds of starving children. Their beds would be surrounded by netting, to keep out insects, but kerosene lamps would ignite the netting all the time. Many children would be burned or killed, too weak to move.

“I also saw the unique revelation of Christianity on that island — that in the darkest moment comes the most light. No matter how poor, the first thing the people of the Dominican Republic would do is serve you. The hospitality!” One Sunday, Kennedy and two friends went way up into the hills to visit an old woman who was dying. Her two sons, ages twenty-three and twenty-one, walked back down the hill with them at the end of the day. “They went into a store and bought us a piece of gum,” says Kennedy, “which was like buying us a car! — because that was all the money they had in the world.”

When he returned from the Dominican Republic, after suffering severe illness due to internal parasites, Kennedy studied at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley (where he received a masters degree), worked as a community organizer in the Bay Area, spent six months in a barrio above Mexico City working with the poor, and traveled to Guatemala and other parts of Latin America. In 1977 he was ordained a priest at St. Peter’s and Paul, a small parish church in San Francisco. In the summer of that year, he came to Christ the King Church, at Thirty-second Street and Imperial Avenue, in the area known as Southeast San Diego.

"I could say one word,” says Marvin Threatt, “one word and it would conjure up a stereotyped image in the minds of most San Diegans. Watch. The word is Southeast. What comes to mind when you hear that word? Robbery? Blacks? Mexicans? Stabbings? Poverty? Inner city — the term is synonymous with all that.” But Threatt, a forty-two-year-old black man who has served in the Navy for twenty-two years and who has a degree in hospital administration, argues that the image is unfair. “Southeast is a blanket term for several very different areas,” Threatt continues. “The area has many communities that are quite different from the Twenty-fifth-and-Imperial image the word signifies in the minds of most people. The place isn’t down on its luck all full of bums. It’s looking for change and a chance to improve itself.”

The area is a corridor of about eleven square miles extending from Logan Heights at Interstate 5 to Lemon Grove on the east, and from Highway 94 on the north to National City to the south. The terrain is gently rolling hills and small valleys, sparsely marked by random pepper trees, dry grass, chaparral, and prolific weeds — an abrupt contrast from the flat, concrete metropolis just over the hill to the west. There are other contrasts as well. Southeast has few banks, no movie theaters, no major supermarkets, and no large shopping malls. One can determine easily the economic status of the small businesses in the area by the age of their paint and by the size of the metallic grates and cages that bar their doors and windows at night. There are few places for public recreation, aside from Chicano Park, under the Coronado Bridge at the western edge of the area (which one resident called “a little bit of greenery under those monster pillars”). And most of the schools of the neighborhood — which turn out students with some of the lowest scores for reading and writing in the state — afford only gravel or dirt playing fields for the children.

Imperial Avenue, from Tony’s Liquor Store on Twenty-fifth Street to Christ the King at Thirty-second, is a collection of old storefronts — liquor and drug stores, several former social service agencies, and small markets that paper their windows with the sales of the day. “Folks here always pay the exact amount,” a glassyeyed, ancient black man said as he hunched against the wall of Mullen’s Liquor Store at Thirtieth and Imperial with several other men, all seeking shade from the warm afternoon sun. “When folks are poor, you gotta take it right down to the penny — even for the shit they’re sellin’ us. And a car ain't a car in this part of town,” he said, watching a seemingly endless flow of autos and pedestrians moving slowly up the street. “A car’s just a battery, is all — a chance to grab some ready cash.”

The area came to be called Southeast only about ten years ago. “We were just a residential district over the hill from downtown,” says Margie LaMar, who has lived in the area all her life and who currently resides in a house behind the one in which she was born. “South of Imperial was Logan Heights. We had it better then. Now it isn’t a safe place to walk through. People without jobs loiter. They hold up the walls, brown-bagging bottles and hassling passersby — especially women. A lot of elderly people are afraid to pay their utility bills at the drugstore because of the hassling.”

A number of residents in the area say the changes occurred when the freeways were constructed in the Sixties. Interstates 5 and 15 divided it north/south, and Highway 94 cut east/west. When I-15 was built, says LaMar, businesses began to fold in the community. “A five-and-ten on Imperial closed; so did Dobler Brothers and a theater showing Mexican movies, and the Bank of America moved.” When Highway 94 was completed about twelve years ago, "it knocked down a lot of houses. Now we’re isolated, surrounded by freeways. Whoever designed them must have been cracked in the head.” Whether the design was unintended, “cracked,” or conscious (“racist gerrymandering,” one resident said), its effect was to shrink the communities — and skew its demographic statistics severely.

Southeast has approximately 120,000 residents. According to the now outdated population statistics for the 1975 Special Census, almost one-half of the adults in the area were unemployed, and more than half of the youth under the age of twenty-five were jobless'. The median income for an average family of 2.8 persons was $5060, or $2000 below the national poverty level. And the overall crime rate was (and is) the highest in San Diego, with many of the assaults and robberies classified as “survival crimes.” In one three-block alley, for example, fifty-three major crimes were reported in an eight-month period of 1978. In the words of a brochure, prepared by the San Diego Organizing Project, “Southeast San Diego is a paradox. It is a ghetto in an otherwise beautiful city. It is a blight on what the chamber of commerce likes to call America’s Finest City.’ ”

When I came here in the summer of 1977,” says Father Kennedy, “one of the first things I did was go jogging in the neighborhood. People said I was crazy. They said it was dangerous to go out there. But this is my neighborhood, too. ‘I live here,’ I told them.” And thus in the early hours of the morning he would leave his small room in the rectory next to the church and would jog down the unswept streets, littered by weeks of accumulated debris and scarred with unfilled potholes. A route on Imperial Avenue usually meant dodging broken glass on the sidewalk as well as avoiding the airless pockets of odors — alcohol, urine, vomit — that left pungent traces of the previous night’s activity. A route down one of the adjoining streets, however, revealed many different locales, combinations of renovated dwellings — well kept, usually surrounded by a four-foot-high cyclone fence, and guarded by large dogs — and other homes in varying stages of determination, dusty brown shacks and aged wood-frame houses. He would also pass weed-filled vacant lots, unpaved alleys, and abandoned homes, which were boarded up but ineffective in keeping out the intruders of the night.

“After a while,” Kennedy says, “people got used to seeing me jog down the streets. And I got to know them. I began to learn of injustices and was really struck by the sad stories, like elderly people getting robbed daily, like landlords who wouldn’t fix apartments, like food in grocery stores that was inferior, overpriced, and that often had bugs in it. And like people afraid to walk the streets. Can you imagine? So a group here at Christ the King decided to do something about it.”

That group was a small number of parishioners at the church who attended a seminar Kennedy taught, in 1977, on “liberation theology.” This movement in the Catholic Church, first developed in Latin America after the Second World War, does not begin with the established standards of the Church but rather with the condition of the people in the world. “In the old way,” Kennedy says, “you had a theologian writing in a nice room with three meals a day. Now you start where the people are — whether it is the Dominican Republic or Southeast or Hawaii, the issue is the same — and you ask, ‘What does their condition mean in the light of faith?’ ”

In the theology of liberation, according to Gustavo Gutierrez, a theologian from Colombia, the Church “becomes an institution for social criticism. ” In this view, it should be a critic of whatever political system in which it finds itself. What separates this movement from others, Gutierrez says, is that the church does not lead the struggle. “It is done by the people themselves, through their own institutions in their villages and slums.”

As he was teaching the class on the theology of liberation, Kennedy went to different leaders in the community and asked them what they thought of the idea of community organizing. At first it wasn’t easy. Marvin Threatt, who attended the class, recalls the day when Kennedy met with several black leaders from the neighborhood who were opposed to organizing (at the time, Threatt says, he wasn’t all that keen on the idea either). They felt it was merely another bleeding-heart, white cause eager to “do something for these poor folk.” They had seen enough of that over the years and were fed up with white angels soaring down to Southeast to save the place, apparently from itself.

“The meeting was real messy,” Threatt remembers. “For over an hour Mike sat on the hot seat. He took questions and a ton of resentment. They called him names and accused him of being a pseudo-liberal. But Mike just sat there and took it all. He explained that the purpose of organizing was that the community itself does it and that the leaders emerge from within the group. Then he said, ‘I know it can work here.’ And you know? I was impressed by his sincerity. He had taken fire from this group for over an hour — and he hung in there anyway. He convinced me. At that point I knew he was for real.”

After he made the first few contacts, residents in the area began to invite Kennedy to talk with them. In 1978 a “sponsoring committee” was formed; by May of that year, the self-supporting committee had raised more than $32,000, including a $15,000 grant from San Diego Bishop Leo Maher. In December, led by veteran organizer Father Jerry Helfrich, one neighborhood achieved a small victory when their efforts resulted in the city’s street maintenance division repairing a huge pothole in an alley. At the beginning of 1979 there were four neighborhood groups. Their actions had resulted in potholes repaired in Logan Heights, trees trimmed in Valencia Heights, and the resumption of street sweeping in the area. On January 31, 1979, many of the members of these groups joined together when a tragedy struck the community.

For five years, from 1974 to 1979, Jose Serrano had phoned the City of San Diego frequently, asking for repairs to an open storm drain near his home at 3250 Island Avenue. For unexplained reasons, there was an open, seventy-foot gap in the drain. In the winter, the four-foot-diameter drainpipe, near Thirty-third and Market, would clog with debris, flooding Serrano's back yard. His oldest son Raol and a daughter also made many calls, as did several neighbors, and the reply was always that there were more important priorities on the city’s agenda of repairs. “You would call them,” says Raol Serrano, “and they would have no time for you. There was always something doing somewhere else. This area has always been last on their list.”

On January 31 the fifty-six-year-old Serrano and his then fifteen-year-old son Jose Jesus took a long pole and attempted to clear the muck that had plugged the drain and that had backed up the muddy rain water seventy-five feet to the rear door of his house. As he stood on the treacherous bank at the mouth of the storm drain, Serrano slipped and was sucked into the pipe. His son looked on, helpless.

Serrano’s body was found in a drainage channel about a mile away on February 22. His son George identified the body. Serrano’s wife Consuela, who had been recovering from a gallbladder operation, learned of the tragedy four days after it happened. Father Kennedy, a friend of the family, urged her not to view her husband’s remains. But Consuela insisted, so she, her son Raol, and Kennedy went to the city morgue. Both men still tried to talk her out of going. When they arrived, there were several delays. Finally, Consuela went in, blessed the body, and left. “It helped her,” Kennedy says. “We were all wrong to tell her not to do it. She was getting over a serious operation and we thought it would be too much for her. But she really had to see him and say good-bye in her own way. She is a strong, courageous woman.”

Residents of the community had joined together long before the body was discovered. Calling themselves the Neighborhood Self-Help Action Group, seventy-five people, along with Kennedy and three other local priests, met on February 13 in the back yard of the Serrano home, at the site of the fatal accident. Two weeks had passed with no results gained through the bureaucracies of the city. Thus, in the presence of the media, Kennedy declared that “there have been enough city council meetings. The priority of people’s lives is not being considered enough.”

“The anger of the people was spontaneous,” Kennedy recalls. “Everyone knew about the Serranos’ many phone calls to the city for years.” The group elected Elliot Osborne, a local pastor, to lead them. They established two specific goals: close the seventy feet of open storm drain and erect a fence on the site so children playing in the area would not have access to it.

They also planned strategies for implementing these goals — direct confrontations with civic officials, one of which took place two days later.

Councilman Leon Williams held an open house at his district office at Forty-seventh Street and Imperial Avenue on February 15. City Manager Ray Blair was invited. Sixty members of the neighborhood group arrived, unannounced — though they had invited the media. They demanded that the drain be repaired within a set period of time. The group was reminded that the city council had passed a resolution on Tuesday, the day of the gathering at the Serrano home, to erect a fence around the site. To this reminder, an angry George Serrano stood on a chair and shouted, “Then somebody will still have to climb over the fence to unplug the pipe!” The goal was closing the drain, and the crowd, pressed together in the small office room and maddened by another bureaucratic placebo, became irate. “What was planned as a simple question-and-answer session became very emotional,” says Kennedy, “because Blair seemed to lack compassion for what had just happened. The people weren’t talking about stats and figures. They were talking about human life. He was dealing with a lot of people who just had a senseless thing happen to them.”

On February 21 Blair set a date of June 1 for completion of repairs on the drainpipe (earlier estimates had been late August). And on Monday, March 19, Kennedy led the groundbreaking ceremonies at the site, saying, “As we begin this project today, it is a sign of hope, a sign that people working together can get something done.” Looking back on the event. Kennedy said recently, “It is so sad that there had to be a situation like that to get the changes made. But if organizing had not been around, I don’t think the drain would have been fixed at all.”

A question raised by many Southeast residents is, Why is it always here? “Where else?” asks Alice Smith, a slender black woman with deep brown eyes who has lived in Southeast since 1937. “Where else can you get away with putting a freeway through a neighborhood? They’ve been putting them through here for years. But when it comes to something positive, like putting the Navy Hospital here in Helix Heights, then it’s something else again. Racism was behind that. A lot of people here feel that way. This has always been the case with anything that would benefit this community.”

An attendant question is this: Why are the neighborhood actions, and the tactics of direct confrontation they employ, necessary? “Most people in community organizing don’t want to be known as radicals or riot-starters.” says Margie LaMar. “Those aren’t our aims at all. We just want to be effective, which usually means having to shout.” As did Father Ned Brockhaus, in August, 1980, when he publicly declared war on the absentee landlord of an abandoned apartment house across from his parish at Our Lady of the Angels Church (weeks later, the building was torn down). As did one hundred members of PAWS (People Against Weeds Southeast), when they showed up at a city council meeting in 19.79. They wore firemen’s hats and, instead of placards, carried four-foot-long dry weeds. Angered by a weed-filled vacant lot that had caught fire and threatened several homes in the neighborhood, their protest led to one of the toughest municipal weed-abatement ordinances in the state.

At a fairly recent action, seventy members of Our Lady of Angels Neighborhood Coalition confronted Councilman Leon Williams with the need to put a stoplight at the busy intersection of Twenty-fourth and Market streets, in the Sherman district of Southeast. As part of the action — all of which was mild in comparison to declarations of war, “weed parades,” or the fury over the Serrano fatality — two elderly women and a young boy were asked to cross the busy street. As they walked south, down Twenty-fourth to Market, a group of about twenty children followed them to the edge of the curb only to be told by a television reporter not to interfere. “You kids stay back,” he said. “Don’t get in the way. We’re doing a story here” (he would have had a real story if all twenty tried to cross the street — as they have to do after school every day).

The action, spoken in English and then translated into Spanish since the coalition was a mixture of races, concluded with a stalemate. Councilman Williams promised to give the matter more consideration after the effectiveness of a new light going in two blocks away was tested to see if it could alleviate the problem. A vote was taken among the coalition, and a majority approved Williams’s proposal. “We are not here to fight against government,” said Linda Navarro, president of the coalition, “but to join hands with it.” Some people in government, however, see it differently. Although the stated aim of community organizing is the issue, not the person, and although the person confronted in an action is always invited to attend the celebrations that follow a “victory,” at times the tactic results in personal vindictiveness and, in the words of a onetime target who asked not to be identified, in “bureaucrat-roasting.” “The means used,” the man said, “are often very naive and politically unsophisticated. They seem to expect everything to happen all at once. And they’re often more interested than anything else in victimizing public officials in front of the media. Many of their approaches are unreasonable.”

Often the motivation behind any specific action — and an underlying cause of the clashes between the people and civic officials — is the speed with which things are accomplished in Southeast, in particular the speed with which Councilman Leon Williams proceeds. In spite of having been the target of actions by the neighborhoods, Williams claims he favors community organizing. ‘‘It is tremendously valuable,” he says. “The area is the weakest part of the city because citizens have not been organized to express their concerns. For the whole time I’ve been a member of the city council I’ve been trying to do the same thing.”

But critics of Williams, some of whom are community leaders reluctant to be identified because they work with him, argue that his methods are too slow, that he has “kowtowed too long in government,” that he is “afraid to rattle the council,” or that he “does not represent the Spanishspeaking community.” “Visibly it appears he’s been bought off,” one said, “but then he’ll do something remarkable and really surprise you.” Reverend Bill Johnson, president of Southeast Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and a moderate critic of Williams, says, “The issue is rapidity versus his methodological approach. Leon Williams is the black leader — bar none — who has made the most significant contributions to our community. But some of us don’t want to wait for things to get done. He gets us there, but sometimes not as quickly as we’d like. Therefore it’s necessary for activities like community organizing to speed up the process.”

“All the little victories,” says Margie LaMar, “like street sweeping and weed control, may not seem like much in themselves, but a lot of people in Southeast have gone through so many years of frustration because nobody listened. These little victories do add up — the convention in September will be a great step forward — and community organizing will be even more effective in the future. It will have to be. There’s so much more that needs to be done.”

Let’s go for a walk,” Kennedy said one day as tractors outside the parish at Christ the King cut away at the eastern rim of the church grounds, fulfilling a project planned years ago to widen Imperial Avenue and, for unexplained reasons, to move the railroad tracks that border the grounds two feet closer to the church. The noise had made conversation difficult, especially the unmistakable sound — a fibrous snap — of three pepper tree trunks being severed by the blade of a tractor.

Moving the tracks those two mysterious feet closer to the church meant cutting away at the paved surface behind it until access to a small parking lot in the rear became nonexistent. It also left an eleven-foot drop, unprotected, from the remaining asphalt to the ground below — a dangerous incline that prevented the sixty or so children at the church’s summer tutorial program from playing near the excavation.

“This looks almost consciously planned,” I commented as we stared at the remains of what once was the back yard of the church. “Why would someone want to move railroad tracks two feet closer to an existing structure when there’s a huge, empty field on the other side of them?”

‘‘Supposedly it’s been in the works for quite a while,” Kennedy replied. “Things like this happen all the time here. The emphasis is wrong. We’re having to pay $2000 to have underground wiring put in. Of all the things we need, we don’t need that.

‘‘Or that,” he said, pointing to the other side of the railroad tracks, where mounds of garbage were stacked high in an otherwise vacant lot. “For almost a year the people in this area tried to get the landlord, who lived in Hawaii, to clean it up. It’s not just an eyesore, it’s also a breeding ground for large rats. People across the way find them in their homes all the time.

“This is not one of our victories,” he continued, indicating the piles of trash. “The slumlord who owned the property was cited four times to have it cleaned up. But he was off in Hawaii getting a suntan under the palm trees. Never did anything about it. Then he sold it to someone else. Now the whole process has to start all over again.”

We began walking down Imperial Avenue, from the top of a brown, grassy mesa that looks east, across the Thirty-third Street intersection, past the Chollas Creek Flood Channel, to the neighborhood known as Shelltown on the next mesa. It was late afternoon as we headed down the hill. The shadow of Christ the King Church began to spread slowly east across the little valley below.

“People that don’t live here call it a ghetto,” Kennedy said as we passed under an archaic railroad trestle made of oil-soaked wooden beams. “I don't like that word, though. This is a depressed area — one that wants to grow and change. People don’t realize the amount of pride there is in this community. When you sec that there are real people here, you see it much differently.”

At the base of the hill, which was a dusty road because tractors had dug up the concrete to widen it, we stopped at the intersection of Thirty-third Street and Imperial Avenue. “See those stoplights?” he asked. Up to that point, I had not. Took them for granted. “One of the first actions of community organizing was here. The intersection had nothing before — not even a stop sign. There were many accidents and two people were killed. So the neighborhood got together and did an action at the department of transportation, which was responsible for the lights. They met with the head of the department twice and he agreed to put in the lights the second time they met. To most people they are just stoplights. To the people of this area, they are a victory."

We turned north, past Lew’s Market — where seven or eight men were passing the afternoon with tastes from a pint of Ten High — and up Thirty-third. Along the way we passed a group of thirteen young Hispanic men, ranging in age from fourteen to seventeen. They were dressed in khaki pants, Hushpuppy shoes, and clean white T-shirts worn outside their pants. Three had shaved their heads. Father Kennedy waved hello to them. A few waved back, covertly. Shortly thereafter, the group broke up. “The home boys — people call them gangs, but they really are the people of the barrio. Everyone is down on them. There are good reasons to be, but we’re all part of the problem. They live in poverty, without a decent education or jobs. When you have people pushed down, not able to see above their heads, then that’s where they’ll throw their anger — to equals.

“Many people in the area have begun working with them. Father Ned [Brockhaus] and others have formed Sherman Unidos. And the mural painted on the wall at Twentieth and K — did you see it? Isn’t it good? — is a very positive sign. This work is what a lot of other neighborhoods are starting to do. It means that they don’t have to be locked into a stereotype and a self-fulfilling prophecy of destroying each other.”

We came to a small house, a weathered, wood-frame structure in poor condition. Four young children, speaking Spanish rapidly, rushed up to Kennedy and embraced him around the knees. Three others, after checking out the cause of the commotion, waved excitedly from an open window. “I just want to talk to their mother,” Kennedy said. “It’ll be just a minute.”

We entered the five-room house and sat in a darkened living room. It was furnished sparsely with a table and three makeshift chairs. The plywood floor was bare, save for small islands of filmy yellow linoleum that had managed to escape the wear of years. To our left was a room with eight bunk beds, handmade of various woods, piled four high on two of the walls. To our right, behind the living room, a child was crying in the kitchen.

The woman, who met us cordially, was pregnant. She was feverishly pale, almost the color of an egg shell, and was barely able to move. In Spanish she explained to Kennedy that she was muy enferma, very ill with a high fever that had lingered on for days. Kennedy asked her if she had gone to see a doctor. Yes, she replied, to a nearby clinic, but they wanted to charge her thirty dollars just for a consultation — a sum she didn’t have, so she left without being treated.

That was several days ago, she said. She was afraid to go back because she couldn’t afford it. Her husband had been out of work for the last three months and they had no money. She said she would only be charged five dollars in Tijuana, but was too ill to make the trip. Kennedy explained that the fee must have been a mistake, that the clinic charged on a graduated scale based on income. He promised to look into the matter and urged her to go back to the clinic, since it was obvious her condition was getting worse. (A check with the clinic revealed, in the words of a spokesman, that there was a “lack of communication” between the woman and the doctor. When she returned the next day, the woman was charged a much smaller fee.)

We continued our walk, escorted to the end of the block by six of the woman’s ten children. We passed a vacant lot, with dry weeds almost four feet high (“Another Hawaii slumlord,” said Kennedy), and then headed west. Almost spontaneously, he stopped before a two-story duplex at the end of the street. “Let’s go in here,” he said. “A beautiful family lives here.” The address was 3250 Island Avenue.

A silver-haired, sturdy woman with dark eyes and classic features met us at the door. She was in her late fifties and she was dressed in black. She embraced Kennedy as if they had not seen each other in years. Then he introduced her. “This is Consuela Serrano.”

When he told her we were just walking around the neighborhood and could stay only a few minutes, Mrs. Serrano wouldn't hear of it. She said it was the dinner hour, and the next thing we knew we were promptly seated at a long table in the kitchen with six other members of the family, one of whom was her son Raol. After the meal — abundant helpings of chicken, tortillas, com, rice, and beans — Raol Serrano reflected on the past and the present. He pointed to a twenty-foot-high mound of earth at the edge of their back yard, where the open storm drain used to be. “When they fixed the drain,” he said, “it was level. Then they came in four months ago and put in huge mounds of dirt [as part of an industrial project]. When the rains come, mud will start sliding down on us. There is nothing to stop it. The building permit is wrong. If the drain breaks again, the house is in trouble. We have called the contractor but nobody has responded.” “It’s like nothing has changed after all that has happened,” exclaimed Kennedy after we had said good-bye to the Serranos. “Can you imagine?”

As we were walking back down Thirty-third we met a black man, about thirty-five years old, sweeping the leaves from two pepper trees into a pile in his gutter. The early evening was still warm and he was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt. We said hello.

After he acknowledged the greeting, he said, “I'm new here. Name’s Walter. Been here only a week. But ain’t nobody sweeping the streets! That’s a service everybody’s got. Ain’t it?”

‘‘For a long time, no,” Kennedy replied. "But the community got together and ...”

"Well, ain’t nobody come by this week. Listen, I could bitch about something like this all day long. Wouldn’t do no good. One person can’t do nothing about something like this. Hey! I pay for a clean neighborhood. I should have one!” Kennedy introduced himself and said a few words about community organizing. He spoke of projects accomplished and projects left to do.

"I’m not a Catholic,” said Walter. "No matter. You live here, don’t you?” “Well sure. And 1 want a clean and safe neighborhood. C’mere. I’ll show you what I mean.”

We walked to the end of his property. Next to it was an alley that headed up toward the mesa to the west.

“See that? There’s three things at least wrong with that alley. It’s got a tree blocking it [several large, broken branches from a willow tree blocked all access through the alley], it ain’t paved, and it’s very narrow. Now just what happens if there’s a fire up on that hill? Huh? Just how is an engine going to get through this alley to stop the fire? Alleys get paved in other parts of San Diego. How come not here? How come this part of town lacks the things everywhere else takes for granted? People own stores here and live in other parts of the city. At night, they take our money home with them — and get their own alleys paved!”

Father Kennedy spoke with Walter for a while, discussing community organizing and encouraging him to come to the next neighborhood meeting, which Walter agreed to do. After we said good-bye to Walter, on our way back to the church, Kennedy asked, "What was his name again? Walter? Good. Did you see his pride? See what I mean? It’s a myth about this area that it has no pride in itself. Walter? Good. I hope he comes to the meetings. He’s not afraid to speak out at all. Might make a good leader. Your real leaders are people who would never choose to do it themselves. The community needs him.”