Lingual Tremors

A Summary of the Zapatista Women's Gathering

A Summary of the Zapatista Women`s Gathering: Comandanta Ramona & the Zapatista Women

From: Erika Del Carmen Fuchs

PLEASE CIRCULATE ** Favor de Circular**

Hopefully you will find the following piece interesting. It is about the recent Zapatista women´s gathering, which was amazing!! Feel free to write back if you have any questions, as some of us headed down to the Gathering and were witness and participants in this amazing space with these compañeras that inspire us and give us so much energy to organize ourselves wherever we are to have a better and more just world!

Espero que se les haga interesante este resumen del reciente encuentro  de mujeres zapatistas con mujeres del mundo. Si tienen preguntas, por favor escriban ya que algunas estuvimos alla para compartir de las energias e inspiraciones de estas compañeras y guerreras tan valiosas y chingonas!!! Las que nos inspiran y animan para seguir adelante organizandonos para el mejor y mas justo mundo que queremos!!

The Gringo is Back

In May of 2005, I briefly mentioned indie director Gregory Berger, of "Gringothon" fame in a longer post on the war in Iraq ('cause aren't we always writing about Iraq?).

Good news!  Berger has a new teaser up on youtube for his film on Bolivia.  It looks GREAT!  Called The Gringomobile Diaries (click to view the video), the humorous proposition is that North Americans have to voluntarily become slaves of the Bolivian people because of the impact of transnational capitalism.  You have to watch the clip to fully appreciate the "Gringo's" attempts to solve the disparities between the Bolivian people and the United States.

On a more serious note, Berger's work is some of the most innovative stuff dealing with the effects of globalism in Latin America.  As I've said many times before, what I believe we need right now are fresh, innovative voices taking on the tought issues.  Berger is definitely one of those voices. 

He has done a series of award-winning documentaries on everything from abortion to cocaine use in Bolivia among miners to gay life in Morelos, Mexico to the water wars.

And his two newer projects, the Gringothon\Gringotón and Gringomobile Diaries are experimental narratives that play with the concepts of what it means to be a global citizen.  As you see in the Gringomobile Diaries, the "Gringo" takes on personal responsibility for U.S. policies that affect other countries.

Berger's work is definitely worth a look.  If you're a teacher, please consider ordering some (or all!) of his work for your media library.  If you're a film-buff, consider hosting a showing of Berger's work, or bug your local theater to do a showing. 

More Reading:

About Berger (filmography appears on the side)

You can view "Gringothon" and "Chew on This" here at Salón Chingón.

Golf Clubs: Not for Leisure Time Anymore

On NPR this morning, Jens Erik Gould reported that the mayor of Caracas, Venezuela is considering using land currently occupied by golf courses/private clubs into housing for the poor.  You can hear the whole story here.  It caught my attention as part of the increasing left-focused governments of Latin America.  It also caught my attention because it was the opposite of the "Golf Wars" in Mexico in the late 1990s when water for public consumption was directed--during a drought--to private golf clubs for watering the lawn.  As Lopez Obrador launched his parallel government in Mexico this weekend, "south of the border," you have to notice the radical shift to the left, and probably for the better.  At least Latin American and South American news is a little more hopeful than here in the U.S...

Reverse Manifest Destiny

(Photo via the 24 Hour Museum)

The Minutemen are back again.  As part of their on-going attempts to secure the U.S.-Mexico Border, they are sending an ultimatum to President Bush:  erect a fence NOW! 

Their philosophy?  Screw Manifest Destiny.  Let's put up a huge barbed wire fence all around the contiguous states of the U.S. to clearly define what's ours!  Clearly defined borders mark who is "out" and who is "in."

Via Yahoo and AP News:

Minuteman border watch leader Chris Simcox has a message for President Bush:  Build new security fencing along the border with Mexico or private citizens will.

Simcox said Wednesday that he's sending an ultimatum to the president, through the media, of course — "You can't get through to the president any other way" — to deploy military reserves and the National Guard to the Arizona border by May 25.

Or, Simcox said, by the Memorial Day weekend Minuteman Civil Defense Corps volunteers and supporters will break ground to start erecting fencing privately.

In a sense, the struggles over Mexican-U.S. immigration is a form of reverse Manifest Destiny.  As our Mexican neighbors try to enter the U.S. to determine their own economic future, they represent a tangible threat for people like the Minutemen.  But the immigrants who enter the United States continue to see promise and potential in the U.S.  They are coming in the pursuit of a dream that will allow them access to material security (whether or not they can actually achieve that is another matter).

And, as the pioneers pushed west through previously Native American lands (and Mexican lands...), weren't they doing the same thing? 

So, let's hear it for reverse Manifest Destiny!  The United States set the precedent for M.D., so let's forget about that fence. 

And, seriously, my tax dollars had better not go towards this ridiculous fence!

Social Welfare System/Recycling Clash

(Photo Via Report on Mexico Trip)

One more reason not to love housewives:  when the state of the kitchen (or rather the kitchen garbage) threatens social welfare.  Reuters reports:

When Mexico City housewives began separating kitchen leftovers from non-organic trash to protect the environment, Juan Santos was devastated.

"You used to find roast chickens, raw chicken, sausages, ham, butter, all kinds of fruit," said the crippled 68-year-old garbage-picker, hobbling through putrid hills of trash that fed him for 20 years. "They have ruined us."

Every day on the eastern edge of this city of 18 million, hundreds of poor families rake what they can sell to recyclers from household waste dumped at their feet by a legion of freelance dustmen in battered horse-drawn carts.

With little state welfare anywhere in Latin America, trash collection and garbage dumps are sometimes a form of social safety net for the very poor who seek food and household goods others have thrown away.

An ambitious plan to bring waste management into the 21st century is highlighting the human cost of going green.

Hundreds like Santos lost their lunch after Nezahualcoyotl, a trellis of working-class neighborhoods housing 2 million, began turning its organic waste into compost last year to ease the strain on its overflowing dumps.

Officials say the next step -- replacing ugly landfills with parkland and a conveyor-belt separation plant -- would reduce the amount of trash buried daily by hundreds of tons, but they also acknowledge it will force pickers off the dumps. They hope the separation plant will be built by the end of the year.

This is a really interesting (and devastating) report on the clash between the spread of values like environmentalism (which, if you have had occasion to visit Mexico City, the city could use) and its particularly privileged perspective on a "better world."  Of course, the best of all possible worlds would be one where every person lived above the poverty level.  However, the reality of garbage dumps in Latin America is that they often serve as a tattered social safety net. 

See also:
Hundreds Live off Mexico's Trash

Technorati Tags:  Mexico,Environmentalism, Poverty, Economics, Social Welfare

The New American Capitalism: You Can't BUY Service

(Image from the Cuba Solidarity Project)

Big Brother is watching;  talk about U.S. surveillance of your activities!  Last Saturday, an American Sheraton hotel in Mexico expelled a group of Cuban visitors.  Yahoo news reports:

The U. S. Treasury Department confirmed that the Hotel Maria Isabel Sheraton in Mexico City was told to expel the Cuban delegation in compliance with the U.S. embargo against business with Cuba or Cubans. The meeting was moved to a Mexican-owned hotel Saturday.

"The hotel in Mexico City is a U.S. subsidiary, and therefore prohibited from providing a service to Cuba or Cuban nationals," said Brookly McLaughlin, a spokesman for the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. He was referring to the Helms-Burton law, which tightened U.S. trade sanctions first imposed against Cuba in 1961.

While Bush's answer to all things post 9/11 has been "it's the economy, stupid," suggesting that the U.S. demonstrate its strength through consumerism, the buck (literally!) stops here.  And while Bush invoked China in his most recent 2006 State of the Union address, as one of our newest "competitors," he also reiterated that "Keeping America   competitive begins with keeping our economy growing. "  Take and spend money, the answers to all that ails the United States (and yes, you can do business with China, even though, like Cuba, they are a Communist regime and have regularly flouted human rights), but don't take money from Cubans. 

Read on:

U.S. Department of Treasury "Foreign Assets Control" Page
Acton Institute's "Morality and Cuban Trade"
USDA Trade Regulations with Cuba
Wikipedia overview of the embargo and the more recent Helms-Burton Law
Jimmy Carter's 2002 call to end the embargo
Effects of US Embargo
EU Counters Helms-Burton

Technorati Tags:  Mexico, US/Cuba Relations, Globalism, American Hegemony

Everybody's a Critic!: An Academic Conference First...

Let me record an absolute FIRST in the age old art of reading an academic paper...

Some of the conference was held in an annex building to one of the old, old churches in Mexico  The building itself was a glorious example of early colonial Spanish architecture.  The building was built around a series of courtyards.  Inside, the corridors wove around the courtyards in extensive rectangular paths.  The high ceilings were bubbled, with one tiny cupola leading into the next.  The doors to rooms were a deep, polished wood with etched glass above each door announcing the name of the room.  I offer this setting so that you can better understand what happened next.

In the middle of our panel, as Female Parental Unit, Ph.D. was reading her paper, a sound that can only be described as the wailing of the dead began as a low, soft moan that built up to a hyenaesque chorus of screams, interrupted her reading.  Fellow academics:  she had to STOP reading her paper because it sounded like we were being invaded!  And indeed, it was a parade of the dead, raucously making their way down each corridor of the building in a parade of the dead for Dia de los Muertos.

Here's the group that interrupted our panel:

Mexlogging

Hola de Mexico!

I arrived in Mexico yesterday to a bright, sunny and beautiful day, watching the blooming marigolds blush along the side of the road.  We took the bus from Mexico City to Puebla, one of my all time favorite cities in Mexico.  I am relieved to say that the rampant global capitalism affecting much of Latin America is progressing at, perhaps, a slower pace here.  While the zocalo now features a Burger King & Subway, in addition to the McDonalds that has been here as long as I have been coming to Puebla, the city seems untouched in other ways.  The calle de dulces wears its dia de los muertos window dressings as the sugar skulls dominate the visual landscape.  The town is preparing for dia de los muertos and we have discovered, delightfully, ofrendas all over the town.  This afternoon, we wandered into a high school with a sign saying "Pasale y ver nuestros ofrendas."  The entire first floor of the school was covered with ofrendas made for everyone from Che Guevara to the women who have been killed in Juarez to two teachers from the school to several young women who created an ofrenda of "only Mexican and indigenous items" because they wanted to be true to the tradition they were honoring.  I feel immersed in a very familiar history as I walk around this city.  It seems to weather the change of modernity alongside its ancient history.  And somehow, I have the belief that long after the McDonalds and the Subways and the Burger Kings have fallen the way of Ozymandias, this town will continue to prosper with its own traditions and its own particular way of being.

Till the next cybercafe comes along...   

Border Bash: Self-Mutilation

It's not as if the U.S. has always welcomed outsiders with open arms.  While the U.S. (and Canada and Australia) has a relatively "open" immigration policy compared to countries like Germany, France or Japan, the fantasy of the U.S. is the image of the Statue of Liberty welcoming the poor and huddled masses seeking a better life and the "American Dream."  But, the reality of U.S. immigration has much more to do with when and how we can close borders.  Remember the Chinese Exclusion Act?    The 1922 Cable Act (ah, yes, another example of governmental intervention in the sanctity of marriage.  Marry the wrong guy?  Lose your citizenship!)? The initiation of quotas with the 1924 Immigration Act?  1953's "Operation Wetback"? The 1990 "Immigration Reform Act" sponsored by Jesse Helms' which, in part, forbids those who are positive for HIV from immigrating--or traveling--to the U.S.?

More disturbing, however, is the continual tension within the citizenry of the U.S. to define who and what is "American."  Within cultural discourse, the populous vacillates between comfort with the complexities of a multicultural society and a form of rampant xenophobic racism particular to the United States. 

Most recently, this xenophobia has raised its ugly head along the U.S./Mexico border with the rise of a vigilante "border patrol" called the Minuteman Project.  La frontera has always been an uneasy place to define;  definitions and borders are slippery.  Rather than being solidly defined, la frontera is a boscage of historical and political ambiguity.  The Minuteman Project seeks to rectify historical uncertainty by defending U.S. soil and keeping undocumented workers on "their" side of the border.

The Minuteman Project:

is a grassroots effort to bring Americans to the defense of their homeland, similar to the way the original Minutemen from Massachusetts (and other U. S. colonies) did in the late 1700s.  Like them, we want to bring to this effort only what few personal possessions we can carry...plus our heart, mind and spirit. 

This call for volunteers is not a call to arms, but a call to voices seeking a peaceful and respectable resolve to the chaotic neglect by members of our local, state and federal governments charged with applying U.S. immigration law.

It is a call to peacefully assemble at the Arizona-Mexico border to bring national awareness to the decades-long careless disregard of effective U.S. immigration law enforcement.  It is a reminder to Americans that our nation was founded as a nation governed by the "rule of law", not by the whims of mobs of ILLEGAL aliens who endlessly stream across U.S. borders.

Accordingly, the men and women volunteering for this mission are those who are willing to sacrifice their time, and the comforts of a cozy home, to muster for something much more important than acquiring more "toys" to play with while their nation is devoured and plundered by the menace of tens of millions of invading illegal aliens.

Future generations will inherit a tangle of rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures with no common bond to hold them together, and a certain guarantee of the death of this nation as a harmonious "melting pot."

 

The result:  political, economic and social mayhem.

Historians will write about how a lax America let its unique and coveted form of government and society sink into a quagmire of mutual acrimony among the various sub-nations that will comprise the new self-destructing America.

For me, the Minuteman Project is less about the *glorious* history of the United States celebrated in the early independence of the colonies and more about the miscarriage of history.   The Borderlands/La Frontera is a place of many identities.  Writing about the U.S.-Mexican war of 1846, Gloria Anzaldua reminds us:

The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it.  Con el destierro y el exilio fuimos desunados, destroncados, destripados--we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history.  Many, under the threat of Anglo terrorism, abandoned homes and ranches and went to Mexico.  (30)

Let's talk about the arbitrary nature of borders:  it's one thing to call the Pacific or the Atlantic a border.  It's another thing to call Texas, I mean Mexico, oops, Texas again... part of the United States.  Border logic:  the biggest guns mean the biggest borders.

The Minuteman Project feeds into some of the oldest xenophobism in the United States.  The historical definitions of la frontera, however, are less complex than the current realities.  Yes, historically, a great part of the Southwest actually belonged to Mexico.  Yes, many of the former occupants of that land were forced across a new border into a diminished Mexico.  The complexity, however, is that the "border" was never effectively or efficiently enforced.  Instead, a new world--what Anzaldua calls "the borderlands" emerged, a mezcla of white, Mexican, Native American and other identities crossing back and forth across the "border" between Mexico and the United States.  The border is an imaginative construct.  We need a border only to define national unity. 

The border, however, isn't really a border at all.  It's more like an elastic band that stretches and retracts based on economic need.   To suggest that the undocumented folks crossing the border are coming to the United States with some malicious intent is to misread the current function of the U.S. economy.  Most of the people are crossing the "border" to gain access to a better socio-economic life.  They come for jobs.  And many people in the United States give them jobs.  They aren't undocumented slackers.  They're undocumented workers fulfilling a substantial economic need.  Undocumented workers are the ugly stepchildren of the U.S. economy.  The Minutemen are protecting the U.S. from itself.

There's no easy remedy for this--and no excuse for the Minutemen to take issues into their own hands.  But to suggest that securing our borders is the answer to the many problems that plague the U.S. is to make a fatuous argument targeting the least among us. 

This posting is PBU14 in conjunction with the Progressive Blogger Union. 

Further Reading:

• Anzaldua, Gloria.  Borderlands/La Frontera:  The New Mestiza.  2nd Ed.  San Francisco:  Aunt Lute Books, 1999. 
• A nice history of Vigilantes in the U.S. by Dr. Tom O'Connor at North Carolina Wesleyan College. 
• Time.com's Special Report on "The New Frontier"
• "React or Regulate?"  A commentary on U.S./Mexican Immigration history from the Harvard Political Review
• Bloggers Beware:  Are bloggers the next category to be added to the U.S. Immigration "Watch" list?
• PBS' Interaction Border Timeline **Only through 2000
• "The Value of Undocumented Workers" prepared by the Pew Hispanic Center
• Common Dream's "Bush Plan's 3 Flaws"
• AP Newswire (from Yahoo):  "US to Tighten Border Controls by 2008"
• History of the HIV/AIDS Immigration Ban from Aids.org
• Undocumented Workers at Wal-Mart

Teoti-Wal-Mart OR Why NAFTA SUCKS!

Two apologies as I get started here:

1.  I'm new to the blogging bandwagon, so I'm still catching up on the hipster topics of the day, week, month, year.  I'm behind.  I'll catch up.  Many thanks to Librarian on Progressive Blogger Union for the reference for this post.

2.  As the semester has begun, I'm woefully behind on any kind of relevant reading.  I'm in the headline scanning only stage of the term--looking for crises on NPR, The Guardian and the Nation.

With that disclaimer, here we go:  NAFTA SUCKS.  There's a Wal-Mart/Sprawl-Mart in Teotihuacan. Are you kidding me?  ARE YOU KIDDING ME?  Well, of course not.  Teotihuacan, in addition to being a commercial site for pre-Aztec Mexico and one of the largest urban centers in the world at the time, is also a sacred space.  Much of what remains at Teotihuacan are the spectacular Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon, sites of worship, sacrifice, and sacred celebration in the ancient city.  In our ever-expanding neo-conservative, creepily and narrowly defined theologically illiterate but "Christian-centric" (by which I mean the practice of Christianity at its extremes, not the tradition of Christianity as social justice...),   and capitalistic  colonialism--of course Wal-Mart went after an ancient, sacred space.  We're talking about the company that bans books and won't fill prescriptions for the morning-after pill for women. So, they are suddenly going to respect ancient cultural and religious spaces in another country?  Oh, yeah, the company that has obliterated the much celebrated American "countryside" as we know it with their ridiculous sprawl--that's right:  respecting sacred spaces is high on their list of concerns.  Oklahoma's "Oh What a Beautiful Morning," anyone? 

The 21st Century lyrics for "Oh What a Beautiful Morning":  How about, let me navigate my car past what used to be really nice cornfields and instead stop at newly constructed intersections and annoyingly long red lights every 10 feet so that "progress" can be represented by quickie-service (in other contexts, we do dismiss quickies, folks--get your hamburger faster than your orgasm? ), ticky-tacky plastictechture, monoculture of exported US globalization:  a McD's, Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut, and Star Buck's on every corner?  It gets boring.

So, back to NAFTA.  In 1993, just months after NAFTA was signed, I visited Mexico.  That's no big deal--I visit Mexico all the time and have since I was a kid.  On this trip, however, I was off the regular path of Mexico City, Cuernavaca and Puebla.  I was hanging out in Tepotzlan (of the "Golf War" fame where developers wanted to put a golf course with luxury homes in the El Tepozteco National Park.  The particular point of controversy was the excessive use of water the course would have consumed.  More here on the Golf Wars--an increasing global battle of luxury versus survival.  Ask yourself:  what is the price of water?).  While I was in the town, I wanted to check out their widely celebrated market.  Less than a few months after NAFTA, traditional handcrafts had been replaced with plastic garbage you would get in the dime-machines (well, dollar-machines now) in the local supermarket.  To be fair, I haven't been back to Tepotzlan in almost 10 years, so perhaps it's survived the post-NAFTA plastic invasion and what I saw was an aberration.

However, I have seen--as an outsider--the way the U.S. has changed Mexico.  The constant blurring of the border between "American" and "Mexican" as Mexican culture takes on more and more American companies.  When was the last time a Mexican company--due to the vast benefits of NAFTA--threatened to close out local businesses in your community (presuming you're in the U.S....)?

Some of my earliest memories are walking down the Avenue of the Dead in Teotihuacan.  My early teenage years can be charted in the almost yearly pictures of me standing on top of the Pyramid of the Sun in increasing inches as I grew from summer to summer.   It saddens me that now, from the top of that magnificent structure, the reward for struggling up those immense steps is a view of Wal-Mart.

But, this isn't just rash sentimentalism--what can Wal-Mart do for the community?  Of course we can go to their corporate home page and read about their remarkable philanthropy.  But...  But.  It's not as if transnational capitalism is a new thing;  it's not as if Wal-Mart--a WALL of marts (you know other countries have Wailing Walls and Great Walls.  We have Wal-Mart...)--is the only corporate transgressor;  it's just some days the remarkable hubris of American capitalism is just so bald. 

Of course, I suppose cultural desecration is what the U.S. does best.  I mean, it's not like we're not doing it at home, either folks (well, okay, a loud and proud NYC shout out to Queens which just sent Wal-Mart packing.  Yay!). 

At the site of the former World Trade Center people were hocking sun glasses, tsatske, and the ever ebullient "I'm a Real Patriot" American flag... days after the towers went down.  Hey!  Hey!  How about a Mickey D's concession in the White House?  The Library of Congress?  The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (come on--Arlington is FAR and you have WALK and you get HOT and THIRSTY...).  And, since it's been a few years since I've done the D.C. tourist circuit, maybe there is a McDonald's kiosk in the National Cathedral.   

Rant.  Almost.  Over.  But.  By the way:  Are you a woman?  I have to say this:  if you're a woman, Wal-Mart hates you.  Stop giving them your money.  Just, everyone, stop giving them your money.

More Reading:

John Ross' Teoti-Wal-Mart in this month's Progressive
An Overview of the Teoti Wal-Mart Situation from Common Dreams
Francisco Toledo (see John Ross' article for the connection here.  I particularly like "Eyes and Tails," "The Wanderer," and "La Vani Dosa" (which reminds me of Cortazar's "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris").

Technorati Tags:  NAFTA, Walmart, Teotihuacan