For several weeks socialist campaigners petitioned in shopping centers, colleges, plant gates and door-to-door in working-class neighborhoods. Ferguson, a sewing machine operator, is running for a Congressional seat in a district covering most of the central areas of the city. Cook, who has been a leader of the resistance by refinery workers locked out for more than four years by Crown Central Petroleum, has campaigned with supporters in rural and working-class suburban areas of Harris, Fort Bend, and Brazoria counties.

Petitioners won support from many workers and farmers in these areas for putting working-class candidates on the ballot, and generated interest in the ideas presented by the communist workers to oppose all the employers' parties--Democrats, Republicans, Reform--and the dog-eat-dog system of exploitation they uphold.

Socialist candidates Ferguson and Cook are running for positions currently held by liberal Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee and conservative Republican House majority whip Thomas DeLay, respectively.

Campaign supporters had a particular opportunity to learn more about the struggles of working people in rural Fort Bend County when Cook received an invitation to speak at a meeting on April 30 of Chicano and Mexican workers who live in three colonias (communities of makeshift dwellings)--Cummings Road, Rio Brazos and Tensley Estates--on the outskirts of Rosenberg, Texas.

The meeting of the Cummings Road Water Supply Corporation, an organization of some 200 community residents who are among the 35 families in the colonias, was chaired by Hortensia Hernández, leader of the five-year-long battle. The workers are fighting to defend themselves from attempts by developers to drive them out of their homes and open the area to highly profitable commercial development. They are now waging a fight for the city government to provide clean water to their homes.

The efforts by community residents to fight for clean water arose as parents were told their children were developing ringworm, lice, elephant skin, and other diseases by bathing with water from contaminated wells in the area.

Hernández introduced the Socialist Workers candidate by noting, "Mr. Cook told me we should have a government of workers and farmers, and I think that's a good idea." At the end of the meeting, half a dozen people signed the petition to put Cook on the ballot. Later, socialist campaigners returned and sold subscriptions to the socialist press to three area residents.

In Houston, socialist workers who petitioned at one shopping center in a largely Spanish-speaking area displayed signs proclaiming: "No to INS Assaults, End the Embargo of Cuba, Defend the Cuban Revolution, U.S. Out of Vieques, Independence for Puerto Rico."

A number of workers voiced interest in these views and campaigners sold several copies of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial. Books by Cuban revolutionary leaders such as Ernesto Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces were prominently displayed.  
 
 
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