actions – somebody else's paradise

american appalling

tonight down in LA natascha and friends are launching their calender that leashes out to the ads by American Apparel, the LA clothing company that prides itself to be sweat-shop-free. a blurb from the project:

“Horizontally Conceptualized Marketing. American Appalling is an art project and parodic critique of American Apparel, a clothing store geared at a young, hip, and politically conscious audience. While the ‘sweat-shop-free’ aspect promises an economically guilt-free shopping pleasure, the campaign style does not fall short of sexism and gendered racism. Over the course of several months, we shot 12 different models, celebrating all which we do not see in commercial photography: the awkward, the exaggerated, the queer.”

for more on the project: nataschaunkart.com/americanappaling

oaxaca

it’s getting too much and i’m getting too cold and i feel like escaping this place, when i run into a demo that saves the day. around the Common, in peak hour traffic: a not so large group of people is effectively blocking the traffic. two giant puppets – a skeleton bride and groom. these are people who responded to the international day of action called for by the EZLN, in solidarity with the people of Oaxaca.

i’m surprised at how long it takes before police comes. they finally come with a brigade on motorbikes, and try to herd the crowd as if they were the sheppards. the body of the crowd makes sure it doesn’t work. then an officer comes up with another strategy.

standing with his arms crossed next to his parked motorcycle in the middle of the street, in front of the crowd, he speaks once the crowd is close enough to hear:

“Listen. You know that this march is totally illegal. You have no permit to be here. But then of course, you are anarchists and anarchists are all about ignoring laws. But i’ll make you a deal. You can go on with the march, but on one lane, so that the cars can pass. And we’ll drive next to you, for your safety.”

the guy is definately enjoying it – his savoir-faire of recognizing the “anarchists” in front of him and knowing what they are all about. feeling he is the master of the negotiation. as his confidence grows he ventures into a joke:

“Let’s do it like this: you just follow me, I’ll be your leader.” big grin on his face.

the crowd kind of says that it needs a moment to decide (“Ah yes,” the officer replies, “You need to do collective decision-making now.” god, somebody went to the “how to deal with anarchists” training and needs to show it…). but that doesn’t really happen because basically the crowd kind of ignores him without really making a point of refusing his deal. soon after that it becomes a bit of a cat and mouse game with the police, the body of the crowd all of a sudden makes a short-cut through the Common, the police speed up on their motorbikes around the Common. i’ve almost been an hour with these people (and the sympathetic french indymedia woman) when i’m starting to feel really cold, albeit revitalized. okay, i realize, in other circumstances i would not have considered this a particularly uplifting or effective action, but immersed in academic conference/Marriot/shopping mall/the academic elitism of the place, definately changes one’s perspective. i also found out that there was a big rally organized by Hotel Workers Rising in the city today. returning to the Marriott in higher spirits.

for a report on the action see
http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/190138/

march for peace and unity

marÃa, veronica and i arrive at the Watsonville plaza just in time to hear the song of this year’s march played on the harp and the blessing by Lutheran priests. the churches should be here, he said, this is where our struggle is. jesus of nazareth is with us at this march, she declares. in 1994 the Brown Berets marched for the first time through all the neighborhoods of watsonville, to insist that the violence must stop, that the community must empower itself. this is how they started a work that still continues; they stand, in their brown uniforms, in silence and dignity.

los alteres. pictures of those who died, flowers and objects, the Virgen of Guadalupe. marÃa had noticed it: in the spanish text people were invited to bring objects for the altars, in the english translation the altars were not mentioned.

the White Hawk group which i had seen before at a march against violence in santa cruz. they are the head of the march, dancing the whole way through. stopping at some places, to perform rituals with incense. our intuition about these places turns out to be true: killings happened here.

names of peoples, their ages. placards at the front of the march, which we help carrying for a while. i ask the guy next to me, eventhough i see that he is not wearing the uniform, whether he is part of the Brown Berets. i don’t go to the meetings and stuff, he responds, but this is part of my heritage. this is my community, this is where i come from.

there are not so many people. if one would start counting the people affected by violence in this community, it doesn’t make sense. yet the march is powerful, in the way it stands for commitment and remembering.

see more reports and pictures on indymedia

protest migra raids

a bus adventure to get to Watsonville. the autumn sun beats down on the watsonville plaza, where a bunch of people stand to demand justice for migrants. not very many, perhaps 150 or 200. as we walk towards the crowd, we talk about friends in santa cruz who didn’t see the sense in coming out here. what difference is it going to make? there will probably only be white and documented activists. but no, white people are rather absent (and frankly that doesn’t come as a surprise…). and yes, probably most or all people are documented here, which seems a logical division of labour, as long as these public meetings are not safe for undocumented people, in an economy of solidarity, no?

one moment i’m a bit taken aback by the situation. it’s almost the first public protest (there was a more spontaneous immediate one, in santa cruz, but they say that the group of protesters there was “really small”) after the raids and deportations, and there’s a nasty promise of more raids, yet so little people came out today. there’s no way you can stop it. but if everybody thinks like that, and clearly many many people do, it’s no wonder that the networks of collective action are so fragile. but slowly i get into the atmosphere of the gathering: there’s a sense of community and empowerment which is heart-warming. the shift in emotions is accompanied by one in moving bodies: moving away from the side-walk, where most protesters are standing with banners and slogans directed towards the street (how strange this sensation, cars as the main public of your protest), to the grass in the middle of the plaza. we sit down in a circle, and people talk.

the creation of a migra watch (already prepared by the Brown Berets), the mira migra, seeking to strenghten community connections and enable a fast-travelling alert system when the migra comes back to town. an agricultural laborer talks about working conditions. the head of a local school talks about the children whose parents been taken away, the children who’ve been taken out of school because of fear, and how the school now declares la migra unwelcome on their territory (oh, imagine all kinds of institutions doing that, declaring la migra unwelcome and organizing to keep them out…) fear is tangible and when one of the organizers asks if someone who was close to people who got deported wants to say something, there first is silence. then a woman steps up and talks about the children she works with, telling in fact the story of how she came to america, more than 14 years ago, and found herself working in the fields, not knowing english, and slowly slowly got herself into classes and trainings and now works in a kindergarten. a story of success, for which she is applauded. this should be possible for all, it is said. a member of the Watsonville City Council insists on how this country would crumble without migrant labor, how migrants in fact hold economic power. a black man running for the Santa Cruz City Council, holding a banner with “Black and Brown together”, invokes the image of latino workers bent over in the fields picking strawberries, and talks about how that image takes him back to his ancestors in the cottonfields. crucial that we make the connections, and building a struggle together. mireya gomez, who runs for the Watsonville City Council, speaks about the need to stand up, in the city council and at protest like these, and whereever you are, for those who cannot vote, and will not be officially represented. a refrain of Â¡Si, Se Puede!, and a people’s clap to wrap it up.

the Brown Berets are a discrete presence, without their uniforms, as agreed at the meeting. so that it can be a protest of “the people”. the other discussion last thursday now seems a bit unnecessary: what role the Brown Berets would take if the people want to go to the streets and march (the permit was for a rally at the plaza only). but it is not going to happen with this (small) crowd.

at some point marÃa and i stray to the taquerÃa, hang out for a while, search for a bus home. at the bus stop marÃa sees that bone-chilling advertisement for an agency that pays bail bonds, for sure they do good business in “gang” town Watsonville… Buy your freedom. still at the bus stop, a latino man who works here. when marÃa asks him, at some point in the conversation, whether he has friends here, he shakes his head. no.

as much as Santa Cruz makes me angry, Watsonville provokes a certain tenderness. both towns are equally small (~ 50.000 inhabitants) and have a basic agricultural layer, only Santa Cruz is on top of that a beach resort, a campus town, a silicon valley dorm-suburb, a hippie hang-out place, and supposedly the west-coast dyke capital. the things that give Santa Cruz a bit of an urban character, as people say. (but i keep on insisting that they got the notion of urban wrong.) and the things that make Santa Cruz so white and liberal – paradise as many here say. (but i’m sure by now you got my take on that.) oh, i have sudden strong fantasies of moving to watsonville. marÃa gives me a big sceptical smile, and of course i know she’s right (it would take us 4 hours a day to commute to campus by public transport, and since when do i like small rural places anyway… but i actually like this one, it is different from the white xenophobic place, where one gets beaten up if you are not “from” there, that shaped my visceral dislike of small rural places…). but it sure feels a good idea to spend more time here.

stop the violence

Por el amor a nuestros hijos
Alto a la violencia!
For the Love of our Children
Stop the Violence!

in respons to more shootings and killings in the area, Barrios Unidos called for a march today. i join the arrival of march at the Louden Nelson Community Center in our street. a rally of some hours with kids and young people speaking about the issues of drugs, alcohol, gang violence and, basically, suburban boredom. social problems that are shot through with race politics, as is reflected in the communities that come to denounce the violence today: mainly latino and also native indian communities. (but none of the speakers, i notice, speak of poverty or the economic architecture of the social problems they raise.)

the dances and rituals performed by a native american group (from outside of Santa Cruz) affect me very much. i keep on trying to understand why, and i realize it’s the first time i see native american performances for an audience of a political march, and not an audience of tourists or researchers or a documentary…

(my thoughts wander back to those stories of and encounters with “indians” when i was 6 and which impressed me very much at the time. first cloud of memories. the lessons in american history at school, which in our school often included an afternoon of playing out the stories we had just been taught. i remember us playing the arrival of NiÃ±a, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. that was still fun somehow. then we played thanksgiving and “cowboys and indians”. in our class back then, 1977-78, in NY, indians were not very popular. most kids wanted to play pilgrims or cowboys. except me, i used to ask to play the indians all the time. cloud of memories number two. travel through america that summer, and getting all excited as we drive through new mexico and arizona. we would see indians, our parents told us. the reservations. the misery of it. the gaze of the little boy about our age throwing a stone at the car as we drive away. maud, do you also remember?)

the power of the performance has a grip on me. then the audience become participants as the dancers begin to draw people in and teach us the steps. there must have been a hundred of people dancing in a big circle, till one of the native american dancers breaks free from the circle. she becomes the head of a serpent of people that tries to catch up with the pounding of the drum. in the end we are running, out of breath, trying hard to hold on to the hands of those besides you. when the rhythm is finally broken, the people fall to the ground and thank the earth.

the Brown Berets are present. marÃa and i have been wanting to get in touch with them. i go to talk, and they invite me to their meetings on thursdays. i leave with the phone number of sandino, who drives every week from SC to Watsonville, and a happy plan for when i’m back in SC after the summer.

just before leaving i see a couple of elderly white women with small table and some flyers. about violence against women. we talk and i learn that Santa Cruz has an inexplicably high rate of violence against women. whether the statistics are compared to other towns of similar size, other beach resorts, or other college towns, an amount of violence consistently remains unaccounted for. the “this is a safe place” stickers and the (almost) free self-defense courses for women are starting to make sense. marÃa and me had wondered whether they were part of the progressive image Santa Cruz prides itself on, or whether there was another reason… and i think back of sahar’s impossible question if, objectivily speaking, and artificially disconnected from the rest of the world, Santa Cruz was a more liberated and more emancipated place. good to know the facts… the Commission or the Prevention of Violence Against Women just published a report on violence against women in Santa Cruz, to be checked out when i get back…

war

talking to sahar from a payphone in the mission and we decide to meet at the israeli consulate. the email from sarah in beirut yesterday. the news – hezbollah’s bold kidnap move yesterday, immediately met by the israeli collective /civilian punishment called “Operation Just Reward”, one of these nasty belligrent eufemisms meaning air strikes on Lebanon. yesterday, or perhaps it all happened earlier, this part of the world runs hopelessly behind…

on the BART i see a young guy with the imprint of a fatima hand dripping blood and “Jews for a Free Palestine” on his t-shirt. i ask him and yes, he’s going to the demo. on our way he tells me about the groups that took the initiative: Al-Awda (The Palestine Right to Return Coalition) and a Palestine Solidarity alliance in which his group participates. he also gives me the latest news: the airport in Beirut is bombed. and he mentions that there’s a pro-israel counter demo (strange how that possibility hadn’t crossed my mind…)

while the protesters denouncing israeli violence stand on the side-walk in front of the israeli consulate, people are facing the other side of the street, where israeli flags and peace signs prevail. traffic on montgomery street continues as usual – we are not many, perhaps 150, they are not many, perhaps a bit less, not enough to occupy the street. and then police makes sure both sides remain on their side-walk. so we shout at/against each other. (those who are there to denounce isreali violence have an advantage: we have a microphone.) meanwhile cars drive by and people on both sides ask them to honk for support. of course, a drive-in demo, why would you get out of your car for anything, after all this is america…

disheartening in many ways. the tiny small number of people. with a few exceptions, a striking absence of comments on the attacks on lebanon or the war-waging in gaza of the last couple of weeks. instead the same old slogans, with a dÃ©jÃ -vu feeling that didn’t give us much hope that a demo like this would change a thing. and most of all: the rhetorical monopoly on the word “peace” on their side. “Israel wants peace”, “pro-Israel pro-peace”. at some point the zionist crowd began to chant “Where are your peace signs?” accompanied by righteous attitudes and triumphant smiles. “No justice no peace” was the (amplified) response. which is very true, but it didn’t work to break the framework that a regime that causes so much violence is really about peace and security…

we were there because of this consuming urge “to do something”. but the whole spectacle made us feel even more powerless. still, there is no other option than to do something. but we’ll need all the brains and hearts and hands we can get to figure out what can be done…

for more on this and other actions over here in the bay area, see http://www.indybay.org/international/palestine

reclaim the streets… well, trying.

saturday night on Pacific Avenue means it gets crowded and restaurants are full. we put our names on the waiting list of the Thai place, and stroll down the street as we’re waiting for our table. that’s how we stroll into a Santa Cruz Reclaim the Streets March. from Pacific Avenue to the clock tower at the intersection with Mission Street, which is where it really becomes apparent how the carpeople don’t like their traffic flow to be disturbed. but wait a minute, it is actually not very much disturbed. the crowd gathers around the clock-tower, where people dance to the sound system or burn an american flag on the police car. admittingly both things can be very fun, and in this era of war burning the U.S. flag provides a nice spectacle, and then what do you do saturday night in a small town, but frankly the sense escapes me a bit. is this a reclaiming the streets action or a playing war with the cops game? sure, the small thrills of annoying the cops are a familiar and well-rehearsed part of leftie culture. but i’m not impressed, especially not in this place where i’m mostly angry at the lack of political awareness and mobilization.

so i begin dancing in the middle of what is basically Highway One intersecting with down town Santa Cruz’ main street. a bit scary, but slowly (believe me, it seemed very slowly from the middle of the intersection location…) some people join the dance. but cars are aggressive and make people very reluctant to actually occupy the intersection. i’m getting really annoyed with the honking SUV’s, don’t feel like dancing anymore, and just sit down in the middle of the intersection. this attracks a small crowd around me, taking pictures and doing interviews. and women from the Dyke March who very friendly, addressing me as “sister”, ask me to leave the intersection.

the thing is… two marches kind of bumped into each other in Pacific Avenue and decided to join hands and march together for, well, everything. sexual diversity and taking back the streets. but the Dyke March had a permit, which Reclaim the Streets didn’t seek or have. so at the moment of arriving at the clock tower, the Dyke March people needed to have the small crowd off the intersection as fast as they could, while that wasn’t really part of the RTS people’s idea, but then again their ideas weren’t well articulated in any case. (check out the indymedia audio reportage if you want a sense of how the small bunch of people came on the street to have some fun, without much of a vision.)

i ended up doing this spontaneous one woman’s action that didn’t connect well with neither RTS nor the Dyke march (and in case you’re wondering, of course i left the intersection when my sisters of the Dyke March asked me to do so.), and that i didn’t manage to explain very well cause honestly i was a bit shaky in the middle of the intersection with the angry cars around me. but for some reason it did make me feel better, ventilate a bit of the anger against this place. so then we strolled back on Pacific Avenue and had nice Thai food. so far our saturday night adventures in small town Santa Cruz.

read and listen more on indymedia bayarea.

racisme als collectieve verantwoordelijkheid

Voor diegenen onder jullie die de petitie “Racisme is onze collectieve verantwoordelijkheid” nog niet via een ander kanaal tegenkwamen: klik hier, lees de tekst, teken, en help vooral om de link te verspreiden onder vrienden en bekenden. Opdat we een collectieve visie en platform kunnen opbouwen waarin het strukturele karakter van het racisme in onze samenleving zichtbaar gemaakt en bestreden wordt. We hebben hiervoor zonder twijfel alle handen nodig – wees een hand in het web dat we moeten en zullen spinnen!
Et pour les ami-e-s francophones, la mÃªme chose! (Allez voir le site…)

spiritual activism (day two) at the white house

The appointments with “our” political representatives this morning. I chose to skip them – part of me is very tempted to do participant observartion: join other people going to talk to their Californian congressmen and women, and even intervene in the conversations if i feel like it, who knows. But another part of me finds it too much, and then the jet-lag that i forgot to schedule does try to kick in. I sleep a bit longer and spend a morning walking through “political Washington”.

I get there by bus, from Columbia Heights where Jayne’s appartment is. As we’re approaching the city, it’s strikes me that i’m the only white body on this bus, and that many of the black and latino bodies are marked by a lack of various kinds of resources. In the middle of wide avenues and imposing government buildings, and suits, ties and briefcases walking briskly and purposefully, this slow bus seems somehow out of place. The people whose posture reflects a sense of entitlement to these streets and the whole world it invokes, are not on this bus. I get myself to Capitola Hill, and do the long walk to the White House. War in my head: images of war and poverty keep flashing before my eyes. It’s infuriating. The more i look around, the more men and women in suits and ties seem to transform into small and not so small agents of this giant war machine. Am i in the headquaters now? Can’t help thinking: this place should be bombed, should be flattened with the ground.

Commotion: police cars with sirenes racing in, out of nowhere, from every direction. They surround a truck with latino road workers. It seems that the truck was taking taking a road that it shouldn’t take, in order to get to the road works. The mistake is cleared out in a couple of minutes, the truck turns around, the police cars disappear as fast as they had come. Five minutes later there’s no trace of the commotion. A sense of heavy yet rather invisible surveillance remains. This place should be bombed, but when the workers’ shift is over. (is there ever such a moment, in between janitors and the construction workers?).

LaFayette Park, opposite the White House. the pray-inn, called for by the Network for Spiritual Progressives has just started. Cindy Sheehan is speaking. Then there’s Code Pink, who were gathered in Washington after their recent Mother’s Day vigil. I recognize a old grey-haired woman whom i saw in the Greyhound Station in Oakland in the beginning of this month. As she squatted on the floor besides her backpack with a tag with a Washington, carrying a peace sign and wearing quite some pink, i remembered thinking that i could guess where she was heading. Many people speak and propose prayers, some sing. Sahar, guess who was also in the crowd, the iranian guy who spoke at the NYC demo against the war in Iraq. “Long live Venezuela. Friendship with Iran”, is the message that he carries around.

At the end of the pray-inn we march to the white house. In the midst of all the imposing buildings in this neighborhood, this white house is deceptively small. Almost a bit insignificant, as if it wants to convey the message: don’t pay too much attention to me, i’m just another rich guy’s house. It also seems deceptively accessible. But as we get closer, the “police do not cross” yellow tape all around the gates becomes visible. We march with many papers, which are spread out all over the marchers. These are the names of people who signed the petition to stop the war on the Iran before it starts. as we approach the gates, people lift their arms and hold the papers in the air. Don’t Iraq Iran, is one of the slogans.

Disappointment: we are not allowed to officially hand the petition to White House. In the end people throw the papers over the gates. Some people get angry. Others get put off by the anger. They get into discussions with each other (why do you need to get angry? etc.). I get put off by the discussions, which don’t seem to lead anywhere, and which add nothing to the discussions on different tactics within a demonstration that are familiar to me. I actually get a bit upset with those who don’t like the anger – i mean, this is one of the most peaceful marches i’ve ever been to (and i’m sure there’s a reason for that, i’m sure the police would intervene massively and quickly if someone stepped over some kind of line), and the slight bit of anger against the refusal of an official reception of the petitions does not seem out of place at all. I have respect for the radical non-violence stance of some of the marchers, for whom shouting was inacceptable, only i felt that their annoying questions (do you really need to shout?) were not only counterproductive but also reflected a lack of creativity. If they wanted a different kind of energy, this was not the way; they could have tried to sing a song or something. (Coming to think of it, one of the songs was All we are saying, is give peace a chance… equally a bit tiresome…)

I turn away from the crowd and focus a bit on the police. They must be slightly amused by the discussions among the marchers, although their masked expressions don’t show it. They are filming all of us. I’m starting to feel in the mood for a little conversation. I turn to the cop near me, whom i see very well is not the leader of the gang, and ask him very sweetly:
– Excuse me Sir, can i just ask you for some information?
He gives me a friendly nod.
– The thing is, i’m a relatively new resident of this country (okay, a little lie, but it sounds better than “i’m an alien non-resident”) and i don’t really understand the situation. Could you explain me what exactely is the problem with giving the citizen’s petition to someone who can bring it to the White House?
Very friendly he explains me that it would be better if i’d spoke to his superior, to which he leads me. I repeat the thing, adding this time:
– Cause you see, i would have thought that this would have been a civic right, in line with the first ammendment?
The superior (y’r typical ugly cop):
– Well, it’s their right to accept it or not, and they won’t accept. You see, that’s your right; if somebody comes to your house, you can choose if you receive them or not.

I’m baffled by the comparison of the White House to any private house. I think back of cop-conversations when our actions were stopped around the parliament and government buildings in Brussels. Their the argument would be that we were disturbing a “neutral” zone with “progaganda”. Here the argument is connected to the sanctity of private space?
– But Sir, surely that is not the same thing. The White House is not a private house, it has a political function.
He considers for a moment, and responds:
– Okay, yes, it’s something political [sic!]. But you know, there’s always a security issue.

Ah, the saving grace of security. From the private straight to security, pushing out the public-political.
– A security issue for papers? We just want to hand over some papers?
– Oh yes, papers can be very dangerous.

In the meantime we’re surrounded by a bunch of marchers. Frankly everybody looked rather baffled. The exchange should have been filmed – the kind police officer in front of the White House saying that papers can be dangerous was quite a powerful image. (The conversation was in fact filmed, but by the police). As we continued talking among us, i understood that i didn’t quite get the thing as it was intended. In my imaginary, it was all about non-democratic regimes declaring the written word to be dangerous. My co-marchers assured me that the cop was invoking the threat of anthrax.

The march continues to Rumsfeld’s house, but the participants to the Spiritual Activism conference are asked to convene at the All Souls Church for the rest of the afternoon and evening program. As we move in small groups, i pick up more and more conversations of people who didn’t like the energy at the march, how some people were aggressive, etc. I shut up, don’t feel like arguing, pretend i don’t know these people. Then a woman addresses me and when she finds out that i’m from Europe, she asks why the EU did nothing to stop the war in Iraq. I suddenly feel like arguing – Oh, who exactely took the initiative for this war? And where exactely were all the millions and millions of people in the street in this country, as happened in many cities all over the world? (i mean, extrapolating the number of people that got together in Rome on the 15th of Feb in 2003, that would translate in about 15 million people on the streets of NYC or Washington.) And more than that, do you think those massive marches would have happened if people couldn’t overcome the “i don’t like the atmosphere of this march” feeling and got stuck arguing about “why are you shouting?”. Plus the way in which the “punishment” of warmongers like Blair and Aznar provokes a certain kind of understanding among many people throughout europe, although they don’t agree with the tactics of the violent attacks, which destablizes or interrupts a hegemonic use of “the events” like that of 9/11 in the US, for more war. I’m all about criticizing and organizing against european goverments and policies, but what about getting a bit more active within the belly of the beast instead of hoping for someone or something “from outside” to stop the US? (oh friends, i already told you, this spiritual activism conference really doesn’t bring out the best in me…) The woman politely turns away and continued chatting with the other people, pretending not to know me.

8th of March

It was the 8th of March yesterday and for the very first time since long, there was no 8th of March gathering to go to. Unsettling. Can’t think of a greater contrast with last year, when i had to decide whether to be in Belgium or in Istanbul for the 8th, and ended up being around for the preparations of Istanbul, and flying in to do 8th of March stuff in Leuven and Antwerpen. Can’t help thinking of the Belgian Women’s Day (11th of November) two years ago when MarÃa and i decided to take a break and not go (imagine, being able to make the decision not to go, yet another possibility in places where Women’s Day means something) where we got into the dream of coming to this place, and how disconnected i feel from that dream now.

But it ended up being sweet – Berna and Feza invited us to go to the screening of Darwin’s Nightmare with film-maker Hubert Sauper in the grand Del Mar cinema theater. Hubert just got back from the Academy Awards where those stupid penguins (of course the animals are not stupid, it’s the film) won instead of the fish. An impressive film about globalization, its big structural mechanism and its little agents who most often know well what they are doing, what is happening to them, but see little alternative. The images are still running around in my head, a film to be seen and digested slowly. Maybe i’ll write something more about it later.

There was a march on the 7th, Marcha Laboral – Custodians March for Justice. It was on campus at 6.30 pm, so custodians could join and we could we could march to the residence of the Chancellor, Denise Denton, to demand that the custodians’ wages are raised at least to the level of those in neighboring colleges (Cabrillo, Monterey) now – and then later we can go on to discuss living wages. There is no excuse, the financial scandals (of excessive spending on top wages) the university got itself involved makes it quite indecent not to do so. One custodian was talking about how she works on this campus since 15 years and earns only $ 4 more than when she started. And then everybody is hit by the high PG&E bills this winter – raising the wages now would amount to nothing more than very basic dignity.

Try to imagine how such a march looks like. A dark cold forest, for that is how campus looks like after 6 pm these days. There were more of us than last time, we were perhaps 80 (and yes, there are hundreds of students living in well-hidden residences all over campus, but most of them don’t come out for a march, that is how campus looks like these days). So there we marched through a dark cold forest, holding candles to light our way. And chanting for ourselves and for the ancient forest. El pueblo unido jamÃ¡s serÃ¡ vencido never sounded more ghostly, and it so much more resembled some spiritual ritual instead of a political mobilization.

A great need to get my head around the difficulties (to think well, to write something that could make a difference, to do politics) and traps of campuses like these, and i take look at what Chris called the idiotic (and i think i agree) book of Baudrillard on America. Sadly enough his observation on the UCSC campus is not so far off:

“There is a science-fiction story in which a number of very rich people wake up one morning in their luxury villas in the mountains to find that they are encircled by a transparent and insuperable obstancle, a wall of glass that has appeared in the night. From the depths of their vitrified luxury, they can still just discern the outside world, the real universe from which they are cut off, which has suddenly become the ideal world. But it is too late. These rich people will die slowly in their aquarium like goldfish. Some of the university campuses here remind me of this.

Lost among the pine trees, the fields, and the riviers (it is an old ranch that was donated to the university), and made up of little blocks, each one out of sight of the others, like the people who live in them: this one is Santa Cruz. It’s a bit like the Bermuda Triangle (or Santa Barbara). Everything vanishes. Everthing gets sucked in. Total decentring, total community. After the ideal city of the future, the ideal cosy nook. Nothing converges on a single point, neither the traffic, nor the architecture, nor authority. But, by that very token, it also becomes impossible to hold a demonstation: where could you assembly? Demonstrations can only go round and round in the forest, where the participants alone can see them. Of all the Californian campuses, famous for their spaciousness and charm, this is the most idealized, the most naturalized. It is the epitome of all that is beautiful.”