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The reasons for this are complicated and intriguing. Richard Shaw, Secretary-Treasurer of the Harris County AFL-CIO, argues that Houston’s April 10 demonstration was smaller than the one in Dallas because the Houston rally was scheduled on a work day whereas the Dallas rally was on a weekend. “We really felt we should have done ours on Sunday,” says Shaw. But the date was coordinated by a coalition of large national pro-immigrant labor unions and non-profit organizations, he says, and April 10 got locked in.

Maria Jimenez, a veteran organizer and special projects coordinator at Houston’s Centro de Recursos para Centroamericanos (Central American Resource Center, or CRECEN), points out that Houston does not have a history of popular mobilization. “Houston . . . for any social movement . . . is not known for large numbers of people coming out for demonstrations. And so, the same thing [applies] in the case of the immigrant rights movement here,” she says.

Deacon Sam Dunning, Director of the Office of Justice and Peace for the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, agrees. “From a cultural perspective, we really don’t have a history of civil rights organizing, even during the ‘60s,” he says. Jimenez, an activist for more than 30 years, indicates that this spring’s mobilizations in Houston, though small by comparison to those in other American cities heavily populated by Latino immigrants, were the largest in Houston’s history.

Spanish-language media, and particularly radio DJs, got tremendous credit this year for publicizing rallies around the country. DJ Rafael Pulido, who goes by the name “El Pistolero” and is something of a shock jock, helped bring out the crowds in Chicago. In Los Angeles, according to Diaz, radio personalities like Eddie “Piolin” Sotelo issued constant calls for people to take to the streets on March 25. In contrast, according to Jimenez, Houston’s Spanish-speaking radio shows refused to get involved in any such activities, in part, according to one organizer, because they feared retaliation from their corporate parents. As a result, there was less hype altogether, and Jimenez and other organizers were forced to buy ads to promote the rallies.

But these explanations alone do not adequately account for why other Southern metro areas like Charlotte and Atlanta - with much smaller Mexican and Central American populations than Houston - were able to generate disproportionately larger demonstrations, or why enormous numbers of people turned out at weekday protests around the country.

It is impossible to point to a single explanation for Houston’s smaller crowds. But Gustavo Cano, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and one of the first American scholars to study this spring’s rallies in a comparative way, says at least four factors were at play.

First, Texas’s status as a right-to-work state means Houston has a long history of conflicts between unionized and non-union workers. Unionizing is more difficult in Houston than in other places, and non-union workers by law enjoy the same benefits as unionized workers. The labor rule also means an employee can be fired for any reason, inspiring even greater fear in those who might want to organize, according to Cano. There were 506,000 union members out of a total 9.5 million employed workers in Texas in 2005, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics - only 5.3 percent, compared to the 12.5 percent nationwide average and 26 percent and 17 percent in states like New York and California.

A second reason for the lack of political momentum among Latino communities in Houston: The Catholic church in Texas is more conservative than in other states, and churches are reluctant to push mobilizations. “They do not spread the word on Sunday mass,” says Cano. In Houston, there seems to be no equivalent figure to Los Angeles’s Cardinal Roger Mahony, who helped the church get behind the city’s enormous March 25 immigration rights protests (though, notably, Mahony played a substantial role in curbing the demand for a general strike by immigrants in Los Angeles on May 1). Even Deacon Dunning agrees. “Broadly speaking, across all confessional lines, the churches . . . are more conservative in Texas than in other parts of the country,” he says.

The general lack of cohesiveness among Houston’s Latinos may also be caused by their dispersal across the metro area. “In Chicago there are very clear spots [of concentration], whereas in Houston they are all over,” Cano says. “If you take a look at Dallas, the south part of Dallas is full of Mexicans and the north part of Dallas is totally clear of Mexicans. That’s segregation.” In closer-knit Mexican communities, “the level of trust, the confianca, is very high,” and there’s generally a feeling that the community can take on big problems, says Cano. Jimenez, of CRECEN, concurs. “People are very spread out - there isn’t as much of a feeling of interconnectedness. People are moving a lot,” she says.

Cano attributes Houston’s dispersed Mexican and Central American population to the way in which the city has grown. “It’s a city without planning,” he says. The lack of zoning laws and sprawling expansion means immigrants have moved all over the city to follow jobs. Shaw, the AFL-CIO secretary and a longtime Houston resident, says day laborers began congregating at various spots around the city in the mid-1980s. Then, as the economies of Mexico and Central America worsened and Houston hit a recession, more immigrants moved into apartments that had been vacated by whites.

Yet another factor in Houston, says Cano, is the lack of community organizations. There are far more community organizations in Los Angeles and Chicago than in Houston, and the groups in other cities engage in political campaigns more often. This is not to say that community organizations in Houston don’t exist. “If you look carefully, there is a whole ecosystem in the desert . . . under the sand,” says Cano. “In Houston, an organization can have a meeting once every two years, they can get together and solve a problem.”

Jimenez has been an immigrant activist in Houston for 35 years, and her group makes up a part of that ecosystem. She has worked closely with a rights group called America Para Todos, but she notes that, of all the major immigrant centers in the country, Houston is the only city without a formal, well funded immigrant coalition. Houston is simply not as well represented in national policy and strategy discussions. “We’re aware of national movements, but I think local movements in Houston reflect local dynamics rather than a national dynamic,” she says.

This article appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!