September 1997

On Thursday, September 11, Christian right-wing groups pressured the San Antonio, Texas City Council to eliminate all City of San Antonio arts funding to the Esperanza Center.

The Esperanza Center (also known as the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center) was scheduled to received over $76,000. The Esperanza has been known in the city as a leader in combining cultural arts programming with a broad range of social justice advocacy including racial and gender equality, peace in Mexico and Central America, Lesbian and Gay rights, and issues pertaining to youth, and low-income communities. The center serves as a meeting place, network and fiscal umbrella for many organizations. One of the Esperanza's umbrella organizations is the San Antonio Lesbian and Gay Media Project, the producer of Out at the Movies, an annual festival of lesbian and gay films.

The Christian Pro-Life Foundation, an anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy center" whose director and supporters regularly picket women's clinics, began the campaign to defund the Esperanza Center by distributing flyers characterizing the Esperanza as a Lesbian and Gay organization that was using tax dollars to target youth and produce a Lesbian and Gay film festival. The San Antonio Lesbian and Gay Media Project was scheduled to receive over $7,000 from the city for the 1998 film festival.

The Christian Pro-Life Foundation with Bexar County Christian Coalition, San Antonio Right To Life and the Association of Spirit-Filled Pastors organized a massive phone call campaign to city council members through fundamentalist churches, conservative talk radio and political networks. The issue was never raised in the mainstream media.

Without any public discussion by the City Council, The Esperanza Center -- and all the groups for whom the center acted as fiscal sponsor including the San Antonio Lesbian and Gay Media Project -- was defunded when the Council adopted the city budget. The Council reduced the allocations of all city funded arts organizations by 15%. The Esperanza Center was the only organization whose entire funding was eliminated.

The right-wing groups also targeted the Alamo City Men's Chorale, a city funded Gay men's chorus. It's funding, however, was cut by the across-the-board 15%. The chorale was spared total elimination, according to one councilman, because "everyone knows they're Gay, but it's not brought up. Those boys just stand up there and sing. The Esperanza promotes a way of life."

While denying the Council's decision was an anti-Gay move, Mayor Howard Peak told the New York Times, "They [the Esperanza Center] seem to go way beyond what people want their money spent on. That group flaunts what it does -- it is an in-your-face organization. They are doing this to themselves." Mayor Peak has used the chorus's funding as evidence that the Esperanza decision was not driven by homophobia.

During a raucous 3-hour public hearing before the budget vote, speakers spoke passionately about the value of arts in the community, freedom of expression and the connections between oppression by race, class, gender and sexuality. Anti-Esperanza speakers decried the "homosexual agenda" and the "filth" being promoted by the festival and being paid for "with our money."

Anti-Gay speakers projected the festival schedule on video screens in the council chamber. Photographs of smiling lesbian couples and portraits of gay men including one bare-chested Latino were called "abnormal" and "disturbing." The schedule's descriptions of two films -- Latin Boys Go To Hell by New York filmmaker Ela Troyano and A Queer Story by Hong Kong director Shu Kei -- were read aloud as evidence of the festival's depravity. One city council member described the festival schedule as "borderline pornography."

No council member would speak publicly about the phone campaign. Since the vote on September 11, no council member has publicly explained or discussed the decision to defund the Esperanza Center. Before the public hearing, Councilman Robert Marbut, leading the fight against all funding for the arts told the New York Times, "I don't have a problem if they promote that. But that doesn't mean taxpayers have to pay for it."


BACKGROUND

The Esperanza's city arts funding has been the target of previous attacks. In 1994, conservative Gay men complained to the City government, objecting to the Center's politics and community organizing efforts. They claimed the Esperanza was not an arts organization, but a political group using public money to promote multiculturalism.

The same Gay men escalated their attacks the next year by demanding the complete defunding of the Esperanza for promoting pornography. Cited were an exhibited sculpture by a local Latina Lesbian artist, Ana Fernandez and the 1993 film festival screening of Nitrate Kisses by Lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer.

Throughout Esperanza's ten year history, Esperanza has worked to bring diverse communities together who are working for social and economic change through our cultural arts programming, PazARTE. And because we have been successful, we are feared. The result is the defunding of public arts monies which for the last seven years helped stabilize our arts programming, kept our doors open, paid our artists and staff, improved and developed working relationships with groups and individuals not necessarily committed to similar goals, and have strengthened our voice.

Esperanza's voice is the voice of mujeres, of Latinas/os, African-Americans, Native and Asian people. Esperanza's image is of gente pobre, immigrants and refugees, of the working class and the unemployed, of the sick and hungry, of dykes and heteros, of the old and the young. Esperanza's message is that of truth to the struggles of oppressed communities struggling to survive.

And this message is loud, strong, passionate and honest. This message takes form through performances of Latina immigrant women with AIDS who are ashamed of their disease, afraid of being deported and being left alone to die in their home country which is less sympathetic with PWAs. This voice comes through visual images of high school youth hiding from police, risking their lives to spray paint an image of their anger at the power structure and society in general which despises youth. This concept of diverse communities coming together is reflected when straight Chicano men, having experienced first hand, homophobic rhetoric espoused by their own friends and allies, initiate a meeting with the Mayor of San Antonio to challenge the defunding of Esperanza, a recognized latina, queer led, cultural arts/social justice organization.

Esperanza is about bringing communities together to create a consciousness that begins with the understanding of economic exploitation of oppressed groups and the intersection of race, class, and gender. With this understanding, groups allied with Esperanza create an agenda that is inclusive of each others issues. Esperanza has survived and evolved because its leadership and its vision is inclusive, dynamic, new, and unique. The Esperanza works to help individuals and community-based organizations become empowered so that they can control decisions that affect their day-to-day lives in a way that respects differences and honors shared goals for a just society.

The struggle around funding of the arts in San Antonio is a reflection of a national trend to rescind, to destablize, to victimize and ultimately to destroy institutions, policies, and individuals who have helped to challenge oppressive structures. It is the Cultural War which Pat Buchanan referred to in his 1992 presidential bid. It is a war which pits poor people, people of color, women, queers, welfare mothers, immigrants and all the disenfranchised in this country against transnational corporations, media monopolies, and conservative right wing reactionary forces. The defunding of Esperanza on September 11, 1998 was the culmination of years of deliberate attempts by conservative voices to destabilize one of San Antonio's few progressive voices.